[studio VO:] This is your host, Troy Larson, and before we get started with this week’s episode, I want you to take a little field trip with me. From a nice, quiet studio like this…
[Host remote VO:] …to a place like this. Surely your ears can tell the difference. What do you hear? Traffic noises? Car doors opening and closing? Voices? Can you hear that this is a parking garage? You can hear how the sound is harsh, right? How my voice echoes off the hard flat surfaces, a little boomy… it’s a big, open place, with a lot of pillars to hide behind… at night, it would be even more frightening… if somebody wanted to do you harm, a parking garage like this would be a good place to do it.
Now, come with me right over here…
Steps away from that big open space, there’s this place… not unusual in everyday context… an elevator. But at night, as a young woman on her way to a late shift at work, this tight, cramped space would be a terrifying place to meet a menacing man alone…
But there’s usually a security guard on duty in places like this, right…?
Tales of True Crime, episode 015:
The Coldest Case Solved with Forensic Genealogy
To someone who’s not from Seattle, the best way to describe Seattle Center is, it’s the ever-evolving neighborhood where you’ll find the famous Space Needle and retrofuturistic monorail, a mixed-use destination for entertainment and dining, sports, music and business.
The district now home to Seattle Center was always a civic gathering spot, going all the way back to 1881 when a local saloonkeeper, James Osborne, put down 20-thousand dollars to build a civic hall for social gatherings on the site. Later it would play host to sports facilities, a Civic Center, an armory, and by 1962, the iconic Space Needle and monorail, built to wow visitors at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the World’s Fair, it’s because the United States largely doesn’t participate in the World’s Fair, or the “International Exposition” scene anymore, largely for the same reason the US rarely hosts the Olympics. The combination of a heavy price tag for the taxpayer, a poor track record of success post-event for the venues built with taxpayer dollars, and a few highly-publicized fairs with poor-planning and financial mismanagement, have contributed to the World’s Fair becoming an unpopular expenditure in the last 50 years.
The last World’s Fair held in America drove the final nail in the coffin. The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans went bankrupt during it’s run and had to be bailed out.
It’s unfortunate because on the surface, a world fair sounds amazing… And the 1962 Seattle Fair, also known as the Century 21 Exposition, was amazing, in the last 5 minutes of fame for the World’s Fair in the US, before the patina began to show through.
Imagine your local County Fair, but sized up and stretched out… A fair that covers 74 acres, lasts all summer and into the fall, with a focus on science, technology, and the future. Jobs are created, blight is sometimes eliminated, and entire neighborhoods can be revitalized when done right, and in Seattle, 1962, they did it right.
In the years immediately after, Seattle Center flourished. Seattle Center got it’s own repertory theater, the Seattle Opera debuted, and in 1967, the city’s brand new NBA team, the Supersonics, prepared to begin play in the neighborhood.
It was in that optimistic time that our story begins.
July, 1967.
July of 1967 was positively oppressive in Seattle, the humid climate heightened an unusually warm summer, where the cool marine breezes stayed largely off-shore and the mercury hung in the 80s or 90s most of the summer. The Summer of Love is, to this day, the warmest summer on record in Seattle depending on how you measure it or who you ask.
Susan Galvin was only 20 years old, and worked at Seattle Center, as a records clerk for the Seattle Police Department. She had been out of her parent’s house in Spokane, living on her own in Seattle, for about a year. By all reports she was a nice young woman who loved to socialize with others who worked in Seattle Center. If her photo albums are any indication–they overflowed with photos of Susan in the shadow of the Space Needle–she loved life in the neighborhood.
However, on June 9th, 1967, Susan Galvin didn’t make it to work for her Sunday shift, which started at midnight. We don’t know exactly what was said in the office that night because most of the people in this story are no longer with us. We just know Susan’s co-workers put her down as on vacation that night. You can almost imagine the conversation.
“Hey, wasn’t Sue supposed to work tonight?”
“Maybe she said she was taking a vacation day? I thought she said something about that.”
It’s the kind of conversation most of us have had at one point or another in our work life. Mixups happen, right? Without a thought, they marked down a vacation day for Susan and went on with their work day.
However, on Monday night, Susan Galvin again failed to show up for work.
“You guys, Sue is on the schedule again tonight but I haven’t seen her. Has anybody heard from her?”
Susan Galvin had not communicated with anyone. An investigation followed, but another day passed without any sign of Susan… What happened to her? Where had she gone? She’d only been working for the Seattle Police Department for less than a year, but she wasn’t known as the kind of person who would just take off without saying anything to anyone.
We know very little about what happened for the next several days except that everyone was looking for Susan Galvin. It was as if she had just vanished into thin air.
Then, on Thursday, a grim discovery. Susan’s body was found in an elevator in the parking garage at 300 Mercer Street, Seattle Center. The garage would close on Sunday night, remain closed all week until Thursday night, then reopen for the weekend. Susan Galvin had been sexually assaulted and either strangled or smothered, the record is not clear. She was left to die in the elevator on Sunday night but her body wasn’t discovered until maintenance reopened the garage on Thursday.
The Spokane Chronicle reported on July 14th, 1967. Headline: 2 Sailors Held in Girl’s Death.
Two U.S. Navy sailors were questioned today in Seattle in connection with the slaying of a 20-year-old Seattle Police Department records clerk.
The body of Susan M. Galvin formerly of Spokane was found in a locked elevator at the Seattle Center garage yesterday evening, the Associated Press reported.
The coroner said Miss Galvin had been suffocated with an unknown object. Police said she had apparently been dead since Sunday night.
The two sailors reportedly had been seen with Miss Galvin and another woman on Sunday.
Funeral services will be held in Spokane, her mother said.
The headline that the men were “held” would later prove to be not quite accurate… they were simply questioned. Law enforcement had nothing to hold them on, zero evidence. Just eyewitness reports putting Susan and her friend with the two sailors.
Soon, police had a new, prime suspect.
Punchy the Clown
The old Armory had been rebranded as the Food Circus and Susan had been seen hanging around with a man employed there as a professional clown. Punchy the Clown. A witness in Seattle Center suggested the police might want to question the man. And they did, but there was an immediate problem. The man who portrayed Punchy the Clown reportedly quit his job and left town shortly after Susan’s murder.
Every true crime follower is aware of the Killer Clown, John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who murdered dozens of young men and buried them under his house in Wisconsin. And in recent years, clowns have had a rough go of it… got something of a bad rap when a batch of videos started popping up online in 2013 with scary clowns showing up on the street in unexpected places at night. By 2016, scary clowns had been sighted in every state in the US, most of Canada, and 18 other countries. According to a survey from Chapman University, about 8 percent of Americans suffer from a fear of clowns.
So when you look at it from our modern perspective, Punchy the Clown might seem like a likely suspect in the murder of Susan Galvin. However, in 1967, stereotypes about clowns were not yet pervasive… there was no suspicion based on his choice of profession like we so commonly encounter today. The police wanted to talk to the man under the makeup because he had been recently seen in the company of Susan Galvin. It was just good investigative police work.
The investigation, though diligent, was unfortunately short and unproductive.
Although some naturally saw the clown as the prime suspect, the police were unable to come up with anything that implicated him in the murder of Susan Galvin. His departure from Seattle so soon after Susan’s murder looked suspicious, yes, but there was nothing more than suspicion. No evidence that would trigger an arrest.
And that’s how it stayed for a very long time.
A Murderer Walks Free
The man who murdered Susan Galvin got away scott-free. Nobody knew it, but he was a married man, 26 years old, with a young child in the house. By 1969, as authorities continued to search for a break in the murder of Susan Galvin, the killer and his wife had a second child. He lived in the Seattle-area, so if the story of Susan’s unsolved murder showed up in the local papers those first few years after her murder, he surely saw it. I have to be honest though, in researching this story, I was surprised by how little coverage Susan’s murder got in Seattle after a little time had passed.
In 1971, the killer and his wife divorced. That same year, he got arrested for larceny and spent 9 months behind bars. Did police miss an opportunity to make the case and keep him locked up? With today’s technology, you would certainly think so, but in 1971, what did they have? We don’t know exactly what evidence they collected at the scene, so it’s entirely possible they didn’t have anything they could use at the time… there was no DNA database that would flag an automatic match when he went to jail. We don’t know if the police had fingerprint evidence in Susan’s murder, or if the killer was even fingerprinted when he went to jail in 1971, but no fingerprint match was made, and after 9 months, the man was released from jail and police still had no idea he had murdered Susan Galvin nearly 5 years earlier.
In 1975 the killer was charged with a weapons offense. The details in the paperwork are reportedly scant, but his relatives have said there was more to it.
Years later, Detective Rolf Norton explained:
[soundclip: Detective Rolf Norton] He was in fact arrested, dressed in a security guard uniform, with a firearm making traffic stops. He was picked up for impersonating a police officer.
If you follow true crime at all, you know, this is a common phenomenon–killers who have a fascination with law enforcement and authority. John E. Douglas, the retired FBI agent who was partly the inspiration for the Netflix series Mindhunter said, “If they could pick a job, police officer always comes out as a top profession they would like.” Serial killers like Ed Kemper and David Berkowitz both expressed an interest in being a cop. Accused Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo was a cop. Ted Bundy pretended to be a cop. One of the Hillside Stranglers pretended to be a cop.
In this case, Susan Galvin’s killer was doing the same thing.
I was not able to find any records on the outcome of the killer’s weapons charge, but it does not appear he served any time for it. What we do know is, Susan Galvin’s murder receded further into the rearview mirror and the killer was not brought to justice for it.
In 1975, a scandal that caused a President to resign was still a fresh memory. Gerald Ford assumed the Presidency as the only president Americans never elected to the office. Then there was Jimmy Carter and the Iran Hostage crisis, the 1979 gas crisis. It was no longer an optimistic time. Years passed and Susan Galvin’s family found no reason to be optimistic either, because there were no answers. The suspect had been arrested, twice, for other things, and even served time, but nobody had identified him as Susan Galvin’s killer.
Years turned to decades. Star Wars. Ronald Reagan. ET. The Challenger tragedy. The 90’s. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. The world moved on, as it always does, never pausing to recognize our personal tragedies.
Susan’s mother, Helen McGrath, didn’t live long enough to see her daughter’s killer identified. She died in 2000.
Just one thing. The Seattle Police didn’t stop. They considered Susan Galvin one of their own. She worked at the Seattle PD and they had been unable to solve her murder. They took it personally. Detective Rolf Norton said:
[soundclip: Detective Rolf Norton] “She had a serial number, 2657. That really hits home.”
Susan Galvin was one of their own.
In the new millennium, law enforcement turned to DNA. The police believed they had the killer’s genetic material on Susan Galvin’s clothing, so in 2016, they tracked down the man who was once Punchy the Clown. He was living in Utah by that time. Many believed this was it… the chance they had been seeking to make the case against their number one suspect. They asked him for a sample of his DNA and he cooperated.
It was not a match for Susan Galvin’s killer. The man who had been the prime suspect for decades was off the hook.
Starting over, in 2018, Police submitted the killer’s DNA to Parabon Nanolabs, the lab which is today responsible for providing the genealogical, family-tree data to solve a bunch of high-profile cold cases.
Genealogist CeCe Moore analyzed the DNA for genealogical matches and came up with two people who were related to the killer, distant relatives who lived a very long time ago. Through sleuthing that can be difficult to understand for th e layperson, Moore was able to trace the family trees of a man born in Kentucky in 1828 and a woman born Missouri in 1837 to their descendent, a killer with their DNA in his body. He was related to both of them.
[soundclip: Detective Rolf Norton] Hits from two distant cousins, related to our offender… Those two cousins were related to each other, and with that information she was able to start work on a family tree and develop ancestral links to who our suspect was.
After more than 50 years, the police were able to use the information to identify a suspect, but then came the gut punch.
Their suspect was dead.
Seattle police got a search warrant, exhumed the man’s body and took a sample of his DNA. It matched the DNA from Susan Galvin’s clothing.
Susan Galvin was murdered by a man named Frank Wypych.
Wypych was a former military man who, other than the jail sentence for larceny in 1971 and pretending to be a cop in 1975, largely kept clear of entanglements with the law. While he was alive, he was never charged with any offenses of a sexual nature, at least as far as we know.
Wypych died of diabetes-related complications in 1987. He was 26 when he murdered Susan in 1967 which means he would have been about 46 when he died. It strikes m e that Frank Wypych would have been 78 years old in 2019 when police discovered he was Susan Galvin’s killer. The average lifespan for an American male is 78.6 years. If Wypych would have lived an average lifespan, he would have still been alive at the moment of truth.
Which would you rather have? Frank Wypych dead in 1987, at the age of 46, but never facing justice? Or alive as a free man for another 32 years, until 2019, at which point you can see him arrested to spend the rest of his days behind bars? It’s a provocative question. I think most of us are inclined to see a killer face prison. But what if Frank Wypych lived another 32 years, finally got caught in 2019, went to prison and died a year later? Would it be worth an extra 32 years of life, freedom, to see him behind bars for a single year before his death?
The question is fanciful, but irrelevant. With the rapist and murderer dead, we’re left with little satisfaction. Frank Wypych never faced justice for what he did to Susan Galvin, never saw the inside of a jail cell for her murder. We really don’t even know for certain the circumstances of Susan Galvin’s murder. How did Wypych and Susan Galvin cross paths? In 2019 KIRO 7 News in Seattle reported Wypych had been employed as a security guard and he may have worked at the Seattle Center at the time of Susan Galvin’s murder. That has yet to be confirmed, but if true, it makes for a scary scenario.
Susan Galvin, a police department employee with a healthy respect for authority meets a uniformed security guard at Seattle Center.
Did he pretend to be friendly?
Did he try to strike up a conversation with Susan so she would lower her guard?
Whatever happened, Susan found herself cornered… in the cramped confines of a parking garage elevator. There was no escape. She didn’t stand a chance.
If her fellow employees had recognized her absence on Sunday night as alarming and reported her disappearance right away, would it have made a difference? Would an eyewitness have been able to help police put two-and-two together with regard to Susan and a security guard who worked at Seattle Center? We can’t kno w, and that’s what makes crimes like this so hard… you can “what if” yourself to death but there just aren’t many answers.
The Press Conference
Despite the half-century wait, and the death of nearly everyone involved in the case, Susan Galvin’s murder was solved and Seattle Police staged a press conference to make the announcement. Chief Carmen Best credited Detective Rolf Norton with solving the case, but none of the original detectives on the case were still alive to hear the announcement. In a way, that’s heartwarming.
[Soundclip: Detective Rolf Norton] I think everyone that worked on this case thought a lot about Susan Galvin and was hopeful that we’d come to this end.
The men who originally investigated this case are no longer with us, but another generation of Seattle Detectives picked up the torch and car ried it forward to identify a murderer. How often does that happen? Too many times, when a chief investigator dies or retires, progress on the case goes with it. But not this time, and even though Frank Wypych never faced justice, these investigators deserve to be commended, because they never gave up.
[soundclip: Detective Rolf Norton] We’re not gonna be able to punish him with incarceration, but history will hold him accountable. We know he was the murderer of Susan Galvin, and that will be his defining moment. His defining characteristic.
Susan Galvin’s case is, as of this writing, the oldest, coldest case yet solved with forensic genealogy. It took 52 years to identify her killer, but many questions remain. In the Army, Frank Wypych was stationed in New York, Alaska and Germany, and authorities are now using these same tactics to investigate whether he may have been involved in murders in any of those places. Answers will come with time in this case and many others.
And the question comes to mind… how far back can we go with forensic genealogy? Susan Galvin’s murder took place in 1967 and despite some question about whether the DNA would be viable after half a century in an evidence locker, police were able to identify the killer. The first murder attributed to the Zodiac Killer took place in 1968. Is an identification of that infamous killer coming soon?
I’ve talked about that before on this podcast and you know what I think. The Zodiac Killer will be identified. And so will a slew of other killers. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised one bit to see the technology advance quickly to identifying killers from much further back, a century, maybe two. Anywhere DNA can be obtained and tested, killers will be identified.
An Odd Coincidence
On a closing note: an odd coincidence… I debated whether to even mention it since it doesn’t really apply to this story, but it was too strange to leave out.
In researching Susan Galvin’s case, I discovered there are two other women with the name Susan Galvin who encountered extreme misfortune. A different Susan Galvin, from Massachusetts, was reportedly severely beaten with a branch and a rock by a man in 1975, a portion of her ear bitten off. She recovered from her injuries but the man was charged with attempted murder. Another Susan Galvin, a therapist, also from Massachusetts, was stabbed to death with a friend, Martha Alsup, while on vacation in the Caribbean in 1988. A local 17 year old was later charged with the crime. Tragic and otherworldly.
Sometimes truth is truly stranger than fiction.
If you enjoy Tales of True Crime, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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[credits]
- Additional voices by John BC, JT Hosack of the True Crime Lab podcast, and Jen of the Our True Crime Podcast podcast.
- Image voice by Bonnie Amistadi
- Music by Kevin McLeod, Incompetech.com. Creative commons license via FilmMusic.io
- Feature photo by Zoe Pappas, courtesy Pexels.com
[music] Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com, creative commons license via FilmMusic.io
[sources]
Pelle, Findling. “New Orleans 1984”. Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions. p. 360.
“DNA, family tree help solve 52-year-old Seattle cold case” The Spokane Spokesman-Review, May 8, 2019
“DNA helps solve 52-year-old cold case” Longview Daily News, May 8, 2019
“2 Sailors Held in Girl’s Death” Spokane Chronicle, July 14th, 1967
“Police Probe Seattle Death of Spokanite” The Semi Weekly Spokesman Review, July 1, 1967
“Spokane Girl Found Slain in Seattle” The Spokesman Review, July 14th, 1967
Obituary, Helen McGrath. Spokesman Review, September 17th, 2000
Ted Bundy To Ed Kemper: Serial Killers Who Were Obsessed With Cops
Coulrophobia: What You Need to Know About Fear of Clowns
Truth from the grave: SPD and genealogy solve Seattle Center cold case murder from 1967
August 1967: Seattle’s Hottest Month on Record
52-year-old murder solved in Seattle
52-year-old Seattle murder case is the oldest ever to be solved using genealogy
Frank Wypych Identified As Susan Galvin’s Killer, 52 Years Later
A public DNA database led to a murder conviction, but innocent people may pay the price
DNA, genealogy identifies long-dead suspect in 52-year-old Seattle cold…
DNA, family tree help solve 52-year-old Seattle murder case
