DNA collected from Clutter family killers' skeletal remains
Medical examiners in Sarasota County, Florida are anxious to draw DNA samples from bone fragments taken from a graveyard in Leavenworth County, Kansas.
The KBI served a search warrant Tuesday that involved the exhumations of skeletal remains of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the men who were convicted and hanged in the famous "In Cold Blood" murders that took place in 1959.
About a month after Herb and Bonnie Clutter died along with their children in Holcomb a similar crime took place in the town of Osprey, Florida. Cliff and Christine Walker and their two young children died in December of 1959. Hickock and Smith are known to have fled to Florida after the Clutter murders, and they have been suspects in the Walker killings since 1960.
Detectives hope to match DNA from the skeletal remains with a sample taken from Christine Walker's underwear. Mrs. Walker had been beaten and raped.
Early Tuesday morning, officials pulled the remains from the soil in Lansing, took samples and reburied them. The public was not invited because the graves are being treated as crime scenes.
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