Saturday, February 13, 1999
Suspect described killing child in detail, police say
BY DAN HORN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The first time the little girl caught Ralph Lynch's eye, she was standing outside his apartment with a bundle of wildflowers in her arms.
Last summer, he invited the 6-year-old into his apartment. But then she started to scream.
“I wanted her to be quiet,” Mr. Lynch allegedly told detectives a few days later. “I choked her.”
In testimony Friday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, detectives said Mr. Lynch described in graphic detail how his sexual fantasies about children led him to strangle Mary Jennifer Love.
Mr. Lynch was in court for a hearing that will determine whether prosecutors will be permitted to use his statements at his murder trial in June.
"Grabbed her by the neck'
The detectives said Mr. Lynch, 48, a neighbor of the girl, eventually admitted he had killed her and agreed to lead them to the body.
Dennis Goebel, an investigator with the sheriff's department, said, “He asked if he could touch (her) ... and she began crying.
“He grabbed her by the neck, began applying pressure and strangled her.”
He said Mr. Lynch gave his confession July 3, more than a week after Mary was reported missing, on June 24.
Mr. Lynch participated in the weeklong search for the girl, at one point telling a local television station that “Mary was such a nice little girl.”
But after 15 hours of questioning on June 27 and several more hours on July 3, the detectives said Mr. Lynch blurted out the location of Mary's body.
“She's on Breezy Acres Drive,” they recalled him as saying.
One of the detectives, Patrick Dilbert, said he got into a car with Mr. Lynch and let the suspect guide him to a wooded area near the road. Mr. Dilbert said he found the girl's remains rolled in a carpet, just as Mr. Lynch had described.
A wave in the parking lot
“He said he didn't mean to do it,” Mr. Goebel testified. “He broke down and said he was glad it was over and it was out.”
In their testimony, the detectives said Mr. Lynch met Mary a year earlier when she waved to him in the parking lot and handed him some flowers.
After strangling her, investigators said, he told them he touched her, bathed her, put a bag on her head, placed her in a box and drove with the body to the wooded area.
The detectives said Mr. Lynch previously had been arrested for exposing himself to young girls, and he state he had molested girls years ago. If convicted of murdering Mary Jennifer Love, he could receive a death sentence.
Mr. Lynch's attorneys argued that his statements should not be allowed at his trial because police never told him he was a suspect.
But Prosecutor Mike Allen said detectives had read Mr. Lynch his rights on more than one occasion. “It was Mr. Lynch's choice to talk or not to talk,” Mr. Allen said.
Judge Robert Kraft, who would not release Mr. Lynch's taped statement, is expected to rule on the issue Tuesday.
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