Cold Case Breakthrough: The Moment They Caught Him

“When a murder is discovered, it was a female who had her head and her hands removed, and she had been found in what could be described as like a duffel bag, and she had her her wrist and her ankles bound. It doesn’t just destroy one life. I truly thought, okay, this cannot happen, this entire family—you’re talking grandmother, mother, kids, three generations. It tears communities apart. In this job, you see so much death, and people hurt each other, and just death and destruction and pain, you just get numb to it. It’s up to the police to not only solve the mystery… He was a violent man, and he was abusive to women, and he was a loose cannon… and track down the killer, but bring them to justice. There’s two bodies found. Your first thought is, ‘Oh my goodness me, is there a serial killer?’”

“In this episode, a cold murder case suddenly reignites. We began interviewing everyone, and that’s when we unfolded the secret of one individual who had a penchant for violence for women and children. Meet the murder detectives. The group of victims continued to get bigger and bigger and bigger. It was a very emotional time for all of these witnesses… who reveal how they caught the killer. This man appeared to be a monster, and no one knew it.”

In 2007, the Kent Metro cold case team in Grand Rapids, Michigan reopened the investigation into the unsolved murder of a young woman. Kathy’s homicide occurred March 19th, 1976. This is the location of where Kathy Darling was murdered. The Grand Rapids Police Department is called to the location of Kathy Darling’s home, in which the caller indicates that he found his female friend deceased inside the home. So when the police arrived, they went upstairs to her apartment and found her naked on the bed. She had been strangled, beaten, and sodomized at that home. And inside the home was her 14-month-old child in the next room.

“I do remember when we opened up that case, it was heartbreaking that this young 17-year-old mother of one, who was pregnant, had been so violated, and her family has had no answers.”

The cold case team was set up in 2006 with the specific aim of re-examining a number of unsolved historical cases.

“The Kent Metro cold case team was a multi-jurisdictional team comprised of three different agencies: state, local, and county. It was set up because the Kent County Sheriff decided that we needed an unconventional approach to solving these cold cases that plague all of us in law enforcement here. There was approximately 180 unsolved murders back in 2006 when this team was formed. The expectation was we would work it for a little bit and it would fold. No one had any idea the success that this team would have.”

One of the unsolved cases handed to the team was the murder of Kathy Darling from 1976. 31 years later, while revisiting her case, Sally and her colleagues made a visit to Kathy’s family.

“Kathy Darling’s family was elated that the cold case had remembered their loved one and was going to try to find some answers for him. I remember sitting in their home with the brothers and Kathy’s mother, and you could see the tears in their eyes when we said that we were going to do our best to try to solve this case.”

The team thought her case may be related to other murders of the time.

“In 1976, there were some real major issues in this area. The Heritage Hill Murders, as Grand Rapids Police Department would call it, was a series of homicides that were occurring for young women about Kathy’s age and older that were coming up missing and dumped on the side of the road, or killed inside their home.”

The team began their investigation by looking at events leading up to the discovery of Kathy’s body. Kathy Darling was a 17-year-old mother of a 14-month-old and pregnant with her second child. She lived alone here. She had a loving family that cared a lot about her. Kathy was struggling financially because her husband was in prison. His brother had heard that Kathy had been cheating on him while he was in prison, so he gathered a group of a few friends and went over to the apartment to confront her about this.

“I think she was a lonely young lady, and she had a male friend, and she began seeing him on the side—at least she thought it was on the side.”

On March 19th, 1976, Kathy’s brother-in-law and four of his friends arrived at her apartment. Five individuals come up those stairs to the back of the apartment where Kathy lived, and they pounded on the door. Her boyfriend is inside that home. They smacked him around a little bit. He ended up escaping, and they chased after him. He ran into a local restaurant in the area and had them call for the police to come. Grand Rapids police were called to the restaurant, and an officer showed up and took a police report and talked to the group, and basically told them to settle down and told them all to go home. The following day, the boyfriend returned to Kathy’s flat to check on her and made an horrific discovery.

“The leads back in 1976 when this happened were the boyfriend and the group of people that were the last ones to be at her apartment the night before. They did as much as they could back in 1976 to interview, to give polygraphs. They did submit some of the physical evidence to the state police crime lab back in the 1970s. There was blood typing that was done, things of that nature, but it just wasn’t a real exact science yet. They relied more on confessions, eyewitnesses, that type of information to help solve cases.”

So the cold case team re-examined the evidence.

“The evidence that was recovered from Kathy Darling’s bedroom were a number of items that were clothing, bedding, the sheets that she lay on, objects that were used to sexually assault her. All those items were taken to our crime lab and were sent for forensic testing, hoping that we might be able to get something that would jump-start this case. So the ideal situation is that the item, when it was originally examined, has been processed in a way which is utterly clear that the records, the contemporaneous records, are still available so that we can see what happened to it. The absolute gold standard of evidence is that we have the original item itself that’s been retained through the course of the of the intervening period. Now if we’ve got the original item and we’ve got the original records, then it’s very easy for us to sort of look at it and re-evaluate it using today’s forensic technologies. It was a collective effort in trying to determine who caused the death and what caused the death of Kathy Darling, and so we utilized everything that was available to us, and unfortunately we came up empty-handed as well. But that didn’t deter us. When we opened up this investigation, we opened up a series of investigations, specifically the Heritage Hill murders. The beauty of working cold cases from a multi-jurisdictional team is we can have up to 20 cases open at a time.”

The team had discovered similarities between Kathy’s murder and another cold case in their database—a murder that occurred on August 25th, 1979. A City of Grand Rapids trash collection crew was helping police search for a woman missing since Friday night…

“…they changed their mind and didn’t want to testify against this monster, but all of them did. And so they testified about the brutal rapes that they endured during the hearing.”

The prosecution also showed key pieces of evidence to the witnesses, among them the rope that was used to kill Diane Holloway.

“We tried to identify where that cord came from, knowing that that was the murder weapon, and we had great difficulty. We sent that to the FBI crime lab, who did an analysis. There was no physical evidence on that cord, and there was nothing to determine where it came from—only the type of material it was made of.”

Little did they know that when Russell Bain’s ex-partner Claudia took the stand, things would take a dramatic turn.

“You can only imagine our surprise when she is at the preliminary hearing and our prosecutor holds up that rope and shows it to Claudia, just in an attempt to see if it would trigger any memory.”

Claudia got up and ran out of the courtroom.

“I ran out into the hallway to try to find Claudia, and she was in a panic, and so I ended up taking her into a back room, and I said, ‘Claudia, what’s going on?’”

And she explained that that rope was hers, that she worked at a factory where they would stack tires, and in order to secure the tires in an upright position, they secured it with these binders of ropes. She said at the time she was pregnant, she didn’t have maternity clothes, and so she had to wear pants with the zipper and the button undone and open, and her pants would fall down. So one day she decided to cut that rope and use it as a belt. And it wasn’t until our prosecutor pulled that rope up in the preliminary hearing that she recalled where that was from, and knew if that is what was used to strangle Diane Holloway, Russell Bain took that from their home. Once Russell Bain heard the testimony of Claudia, who identified the ligature that was used to kill Diane Holloway, I think Russell Bain knew that the police knew his involvement and that a jury would find him guilty as well. And so he opted to take a plea and not go further with any criminal trial.

Bain decided to take a deal where he pleaded guilty to the 1976 murder of 17-year-old Kathy Darling and the 1979 murder of 21-year-old Diane Holloway in exchange for dropping the sexual assault charges. He sentenced Russell Bain to life in prison for the murder of Diane Holloway and 35 to 90 years for Kathy Darling.

“That’s a life sentence for Russell Bain, and that will ensure that he’ll never get out of prison. The sexual assault charges were dropped, and we asked the assault victims if they were okay with that, and they all were. As we see with many of these types of murders, there was domestic violence in the background of Bain, and many of the victims that have come forward since those murders were committed in the ’70s have said how violent he was. So the fact that there’s not more murder victims is just probably by luck because he very nearly killed many women.”

“I’ll always remember the fact that these people were able to be brave enough to get up on the stand in a courtroom and testify against him to ensure that he wouldn’t be allowed to be out for the rest of his life. That made me feel better, that my mother had also more closure. That was good, it really was. Even after 30 years, it made her feel better and made me feel better, and that’s… it was a win-win for us.”

When Bain was convicted and sentenced, it is what every detective waits for. All your hard work, all the emotions put into it, all is a result of that. And this is what we look for. It’s the greatest reward you can give us.