Cold Case detectives at the Boone County Sheriff’s Office recently received a tip that there may be a connection between the 2017 Delphi, Indiana murders of two girls and the 2011 killings of Bill and Peggy Stephenson of Florence.
After investigating the tip, said cold case Det. Coy Cox, it was determined there was no connection. Though the case is still unresolved, movement in other cold cases shows detectives are still hunting down leads.
“We vetted that pretty heavily,” Cox told LINK nky. “We even travelled to northern Indiana, and we do not believe there is any connection between the incidents.”
Indianapolis’ Fox 59 reported the possible connection between the Stephensons’ case and that of 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German, which has been widely reported on true crime podcasts and documentaries.
On Feb. 13, 2017, the friends went for a walk on a trail in their small, rural Indiana town. The family member who was supposed to pick them up in the afternoon couldn’t find them, which led to a frantic search that culminated in the discovery of the girls’ bodies the next day.
Bill and Peggy Stephenson were found dead in their home on May 29, 2011, according to the Boone County Sheriff’s Office. A family member discovered their bodies after William Stephenson did not show up for the Sunday church services.
Cox received several tips in the fall of 2022 suggesting a connection between the two cases, Fox 59 reported.
“The tips kept coming and then there was a moment where we got some information that particularly we thought could have a relationship to our case,” Cox told the station.
In the Stephensons’ case, he told Fox 59, the crime scene investigators found was staged, changed, moved and altered.
“We know from a post-mortem injury that the killer or killers remained on the scene or came back to the scene anywhere from at least three hours after the murders up to eight hours,” Cox explained. “They were able to change something in every room of the residence to where we actually had a scene that was not a crime scene, but it was the scene that those killers wanted us to find.”
Cox said the crime scenes in both double homicides are similar in rare ways.
“A lot of those things, the staging, multiple victims, spending time post-mortem,” Cox told Fox 59, “a lot of those things make these kinds of cases like the 1% kind of cases that you see.”
Fox 59 obtained court records in May 2022 that show the Delphi killer likely took a souvenir from the crime scene, according to the document, and it “appeared the girls’ bodies were moved and staged.”
The Stephensons were on a list of cold cases distributed at a Boone County Sheriff’s Office press conference March 8 announcing a break in the death of Carol Sue Klaber, whose body was found in Boone County in June of 1976. Klaber’s name had been taken off the list because detectives were able to identify the killer using genealogical DNA.
A post on the sheriff’s office website said an unknown DNA profile has been linked to the Stephensons’ killings and that detectives are continuing their search.
