Unsolved central Ill. slayings leave area on edge
BEASON -- As she drives toward Beason from work each night, Diana Baker's stomach tightens. It's like there's a cloud above the town since five family members were found heinously slain in their home a week ago.
"I get up in the morning, go to work and go through the motions," said Baker, 51, a Beason resident for more than half her life. "I get home and I couldn't tell you what I did at work. I can't wait to get home and talk to people who are going through the same thing."
A week after the deaths of Raymond "Rick" Gee, 46, his wife, Ruth, 39, and three of their children, there are no answers for Baker and her neighbors. As friends and family mourned the five at services Monday, police offered no sign that they have suspects or even a clear theory of the crime.
But that doesn't mean investigators aren't making progress that eventually could lead to arrests, former prosecutors and detectives say.
In some ways -- particularly if there were no obvious suspects at the outset -- the investigation couldn't truly begin until police finished searching the scene. Logan County Sheriff Steven Nichols said detectives completed that task late Wednesday and took more than 100 items -- photographs, blood samples, fingerprints and DNA.
With that kind of evidence, the trail might just be warming up.
"It still may be hot -- sizzling hot," said Tim Williams, a private investigator who spent more than 25 years as a Los Angeles police homicide detective.
Investigators start with family, friends and associates to see if they know anything that might be significant. If nothing pops from those early queries, detectives move further outward, said Michael Fleming, a private detective and retired Chicago police homicide investigator.
"We used to say you tie a piece of string to the toe of the corpse and you slowly let the string out and keep going in circles," Fleming said, "and eventually you're going to solve the murder."
The work, said former U.S. attorney and county prosecutor J. William Roberts, is a "methodical, fundamental, not-particularly-glamorous process." Each body must be evaluated as an individual slaying, with unique injuries and evidence, Williams said. Even under the best circumstances, a crime lab needs weeks to analyze DNA.
Area residents, however on edge, understand.
"Everybody watches TV and you think it can be solved in 30 minutes. It's not going to be solved that fast, but I think they will," Judith Cavestani, a Gee family friend from Mount Pulaski, said Monday. "I think they have leads. I think they know more than they're telling us."
About 500 people attended services Monday for the Gees and their children -- Justina Constant, 16, Dillen Constant, 14, and Austin Gee, 11. Pictures around the Mount Pulaski church hall and on a large video screen showed family members fishing or preparing for Thanksgiving dinner or gathering in the hospital for the birth of a new sister. Tabitha, now 3, was seriously injured but survived the attack.
Relatives described the family as simple people with warm hearts who made other people feel welcome in their lives.
"Let us live in such a way that we will bring honor to this family," said the Rev. Dayle Badman, pastor of the United Methodist Church in Beason.
Police are routinely tightlipped about such crimes because they don't want the public knowing things only the killer knows. People confess to crimes they didn't commit and if reward money is involved, they want to make sure the information they get is from reliable sources, Williams said.
And even when police think they have something, the state's attorney might not agree, Roberts said. There might be probable cause to arrest someone, but is there enough evidence to find that person guilty?
"It does society no good to acquit someone who is likely a murderer," Roberts said, "or to charge someone with a death penalty case who didn't do it."