Friday, April 21, 2000
Solving old cases causes shock, relief
BY Tom O'Neill
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Even by “cold file” standards, the investigations into the decades-old slayings of Betty Hoffmann and Gary Houck seemed frozen in time. Until now.
DNA tracking and other technological advances in po lice work have prompted the reopening of several old cases recently in Greater Cincinnati, but the cases of Mrs. Hoffmann of Greenhills and Mr. Houck of Clayton, Ga., are different. They were reopened in a simpler way: by the caller's apparent respect for the truth.
The resurfacing of those cases — which are 20 and 17 years old, respectively — typically prompt an adrenaline rush among investigators. For them, new information provides a window to closing unsolved cases they'd never even worked on before.
But for the victims' families, reopening cases entails reopening wounds. And in the Hoffmann case, learning new information that turns on its head everything the family was told about the case.
On April 7, Kentucky state police say, Michael Proffitt, 40, of London, Ky., called them and confessed to the July 7, 1980, shooting death of Mrs. Hoffmann, a Greenhills secretary who was walking her dog in Winton Woods.
“It was a shock, very much,” said Frank Casserly, 49, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Mrs. Hoffmann's son.
At the time, police theorized that perhaps she was felled by a stray hunter's bullet because she was on an abandoned thoroughfare in the park surrounded by woods.
“I had chalked it up to a stray bullet for 20 years,” he said. “This was a shock I put down to an accident and had dealt with it and moved on.”
Now, police do not believe it was an accident.
Mr. Proffitt has been charged with aggravated murder and attempted rape.
The incident came rushing back the moment Mr. Casserly got a call from his younger sister, Margaret Casserly of suburban Chicago, who had just gotten a call from police here.
She told Mr. Casserly that she'd seen the clothes their mother was wearing the night she died, and they were torn.
“I was dumbfounded,” recalled Mr. Casserly, who was 30 when Mrs. Hoffmann, 55, was killed.
She had moved back to Greenhills, where Mr. Casserly was raised, from Bay City, Texas. She liked the sense of safety here, which was strengthened by her protective Great Dane, Clinton, who accompanied her on nightly walks.
In the case of Gary Houck, police contend that Mr. Houck, 24, was involved in drug-trafficking, which his family acknowledges. Still, revelations that an associate might be responsible have shaken the family.
They had stopped thinking about the possibility of an arrest.
“I just didn't think we'd ever find out,” Mr. Houck's brother, Norman Houck, 41, said Thursday from his home in Clayton, Ga. “You dream about it, sure, often.”
But in his dreams, he said, he always asked the question for which he only recently got an apparent answer: What happened?
On Monday, a call to the Clermont County Sheriff's department led two days later to the arrest of Gerald Washburn, 53, of Georgetown, in connection with the death of Mr. Houck, whose body was found in a submerged car in the Ohio River two years after his disappearance.
“It's definitely a shock,” Mr. Houck said, “but it's also a relief. ... It's always in the back of your mind, "What happened to him?'”
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