Cape Fear

Cape Cod after the holidays, in dreary January, is a test of whether one's a true year-rounder or not.  There are short days of light and sometimes vicious gales off the Atlantic.

Christa Worthington came back from her holiday parties in New York. She and Ava had returned to the cottage on the bluff.

During that first Sunday of the new year, virtually every TV on the Cape was tuned to a game: New England romping over Carolina on its way to the Super Bowl.

At half-time, Tim Arnold thought it would be a good opportunity to return a flashlight he'd borrowed from his old girlfriend and neighbor, Christa.

Arnold would say later that he noticed something off right away: two weekend newspapers still in their blue wrappers. Christa's back door was ajar.

He looked in and saw Christa sprawled on the floor, the baby lifting her head to look at him. It was clear, he said, there was nothing he could do for Christa at that point. He grabbed two-and-half-year-old Ava and rushed outside to his father waiting in the car.

He had to spell it, because he knew that Ava might understand the word.  He said, Christa's d-e-a-d.

Murphy: Clearly dead?
Welsh: Yeah.
Murphy: Not much doubt?
Welsh: Right.

Tim Arnold can be heard on the 911 tape.

Arnold: Please send somebody to 50 Depot Road.
911: Okay, what's the problem?
Arnold: It's Christa Worthington.  I don't know what happened. I think she fell down or something.  I'm sure she's dead.  I think she's dead.

EMTs, police and relatives who lived across the road swarmed the cottage -- roughly 18 people -- before police sealed the crime scene.

And what a gruesome sight it was.

Christa Worthington, 46, was naked from the waist down, laying on her hallway floor. Her right leg was jammed inside a bookcase.

Rob Welsh: I think anyone analyzing the crime scene would suspect a sexual assault, just based on the nature, the way the body was found.

Rob Welsh, then Barnstable County assistant district attorney, says investigators quickly found a one-inch sized hole in her upper chest. It was evidence that she'd been stabbed.

Dennis Murphy [Dateline]: The fatal wound was so thorough that the knife actually lodged in the wood beneath Christa's body?
Welsh: It didn't lodge there but it certainly passed through her body.

The murder weapon itself was nowhere to be found, but crime-scene technicians did gather useful forensic samples: strands of hair, semen and saliva on the body, blood smears and outside in her driveway, signs of a violent struggle.

Welsh: There appeared to be signs of a scuffle. There appeared to be personal items of Christa's -- a hair barrette, her eyeglasses, socks --were found outside the area. It wasn't a situation where something happened inside the home then out. It was out then in.

It was a shocking murder that became national news.

The Massachusetts state police took charge of the case and started where most investigations do -- with those who knew the victim best. The cops asked: did someone in her circle have reason to do her harm?

Dennis Murphy: Christa Worthington is murdered, and the person that has the means, the motive, the opportunity...
Jackett: Me.
Murphy: Is Tony?
Jackett: Right.

Tony Jacket, the onetime fisherman and father of Christa's baby, sensed the heat on him right away. After all, everyone seemed to know about his history with Christa.  Maybe something happened in a rage?

Dennis Murphy: The father of the baby. She's putting the squeeze on him--
Jackett: And yet ... they didn't think that initially. And they knew that we were getting along just ... splendidly.

Jackett was questioned but never arrested. Investigators had already turned their attention to someone else in her circle of boyfriends, the artist friend who'd found her body.

Dennis Murphy: She dumped him. Maybe there some motive.
Welsh: He was certainly somebody, as a former boyfriend of Christa Worthington and the person who found the body, as somebody that would be talked to.

And talk they did, but Arnold never wavered in his account. Christa was his friend, he said, he didn't kill her.

Police moved on to other men in her life, even questioning Tony Jackett's former son-in-law. He got pulled into the case, he said, when a neighbor of Christa's told the cops what he called made-up stories about him and Christa having had a casual thing. "Very tough stuff," he says. "You’ve got to understand something about the lower Cape. Innuendo, gossip and rumor are an Olympic sport down there.  People have nothing better to do, mostly, with their time."

The authorities’ rejected-lover theories were going nowhere. As Ava went to live with friends of Christa as her mother had wished, years were going by in the investigation.  No weapon, no witnesses, no idea who'd left the DNA on the victim's body.

And then, to the surprise of many and outrage of others, the police buttonholed scores of men in Truro, asking for their DNA. They wanted samples of saliva for testing.

Dennis Murphy: Was that an investigative ruse just to shake the tree and see what kind of response you got from the community?
Rob Welsh: A certain amount of it, I'm sure, could be said to be shaking the tree.

But nothing shook loose.

There was no DNA match. There was no rattled killer coming forth to confess it all.

It was three years before police caught a break, and it came from a direction few people had given much thought.

The cops said that forensic evidence told them -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- they finally had their man.

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