‘Are you sitting down?’ Linda O’Keefe’s sister learns of arrest in 11-year-old’s 1973 killing
Cindy Borgeson was eating a cheeseburger at In-N-Out when she got a call from Newport Beach police that she thought would never come.
It had been more than four decades since her 11-year-old sister, Linda Ann O’Keefe, had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The killer had vanished after dumping the girl’s body among the cattails in the city’s scenic Back Bay.
Borgeson, who was 18 when Linda was killed, was resigned that detectives might never find the man responsible. Her Christian faith gave her the strength to forgive the faceless perpetrator and move forward, she said.
The phone call jolted her back, to that painful time when her sister’s body was found in 1973. The detective on the other end asked if she was sitting down.
They had arrested a suspect — James Alan Neal, 72 — just before sunrise in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Borgeson had been in touch regularly with investigators over the last several months after authorities
launched a renewed effort to solve the cold case, but the news was still unexpected.
“I really in my wildest dreams never thought this would be the outcome,” she said.
The break in the case came from technology that would have baffled most in the 1970s, an era better known for Watergate and the Vietnam War than cutting-edge investigative tools.
An undated photo shows Linda Ann O'Keefe, right, sitting with her family at sister Cindy Borgeson's graduation. (Cindy Borgeson)
“I really in my wildest dreams never thought this would be the outcome,” she said.
The break in the case came from technology that would have baffled most in the 1970s, an era better known for Watergate and the Vietnam War than cutting-edge investigative tools.
Back then, DNA testing wasn’t available. Instead, investigators tested bodily fluids and blood left at crime scenes for proteins that helped provide clues or narrow a list of suspects.
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LA Times
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-linda-okeefe-cold-case-20190221-story.html
I can't even begin to imagine. To at long last have answers to some of the questions that roiled inside heart and mind.