Andrew Wolfson

@adwolfson

Thirty-eight years ago, a 9-year-old was raped and she and her grandparents were shot to death. The crime still haunts police, prosecutors, the accused and her family. At the suggestion of a retired detective, the Courier-Journal revisited the case and found some stunning twists and turns, especially in the life of the defendant. The following account of the 1979 triple murder and its aftermath is based on court and police records, interviews, emails and accounts in the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times.

The caller was matter-of-fact, astoundingly so, given the news he was delivering to a police dispatcher.

"There are some deaths here,” reported 25-year-old David Becker. “I just got home. My family's been killed, apparently."

When Jefferson County Police Officer W.B. Manley first arrived on the scene — the isolated wood-and-glass home Becker shared with his family on a hilltop in far southeastern Jefferson County — Becker showed "no emotion whatsoever" as he disclosed the victims were his parents and his 9-year-old niece, Manley said.

Police chaplain Joseph Starrett, an Assembly of God minister who talked with Becker after the murders, later told police that he had never witnessed “such cold indifference to tragedy."

It was Monday, June 25, 1979, and one of the biggest investigations in the department's history was about to begin.

Nothing seemed to have been taken from the home at 8400 Broad Run Road on a remote wooded estate of 16 acres, so detectives immediately suspected Becker.

The quiet young man, an electrical engineer at LG&E who had a master's degree in engineering from the University of Louisville but was preparing for veterinary school, was brought downtown to the old county police headquarters for questioning at 9 p.m., about two hours after he called in the murders.

Detective Eugene Cheser said Becker told him that he was so calm because he’d been anticipating his father’s death: He said Howard I. Becker Jr., a 61-year-old senior physicist at General Electric, had gained a lot of weight since retiring six months earlier.

But that explanation didn’t seem to apply to his mother, Helen, who was 57, or to his niece, Erika Elizabeth, who was 9 and had just completed fourth grade. And Cheser said Becker also told detectives “he had often times visualized his father and other members of his family dead.”

Finally, at 1:45 a.m., after about five hours, Becker confessed to the horrible offenses, according to Sgt. William Howard and Detective Wayne “Bull” Branham.

They said he told them how he’d left the Rock Creek Riding Club late that afternoon, drove home and encountered Erika, whom he said complained that he never played with her. He said they went upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, where she suggested a game, “I’ll Show You if You Show Me.”

Howard said Becker told him he dropped his pants and was having intercourse with the girl when his mother, Helen, came in, surprising them.

The detectives said Becker told them he ran to the kitchen, got the family’s .22 caliber Remington rifle, then shot his mother in the side of her face, with the rifle braced on his hip.

When his father came running toward him in a hall, he fired three or four shots at him, Howard said Becker told him.

“He said he did not remember shooting Erika, but that he must have,” Howard later testified.

Her naked body was found in her grandparents’ bedroom, where she had tried to hide in a dresser drawer. She had been raped, evidence showed.

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It seemed like a strong case. There were no other suspects. Nothing had been stolen from the home, which overlooked Floyds Fork, far off the beaten trail, and police found no signs of breaking and entering.

Becker’s best friend offered a possible motive. He told police that Becker had had “heated discussions” with his parents over the past year about his decision to leave LG&E to go to vet school. But the friend said they were hardly violent.

And detectives had two huge problems.

Becker refused to sign a statement or allow one to be recorded.

And police had made a terrible blunder at the crime scene.

After concluding that all three victims had been fatally shot with the rifle, the next day they found that half the spent cartridges at the scene were from a .25 caliber handgun. Howard I. Becker Jr. and his granddaughter had been shot with both weapons, while his mother was shot only with the pistol.

The revelations meant that even if Becker had confessed, which he later denied, his own story didn’t match the evidence. And that in turn suggested his statement may have been coerced — that detectives may have fed him what turned out to be erroneous information he used to make it.

The use of a second firearm suggested there might have been two killers.

Police searched for days for the pistol, tearing up walls and floors in the house, draining a pond on the family’s property and canvassing 194 gun shops. They never found the handgun.

Detectives had another problem as well.

Witnesses placed Becker at the riding club near Seneca Park as late as 6:48 p.m. on the day of the murders, just 29 minutes before he called them in at 7:17 p.m. from his family house more than 14 miles away.

Arguing to lower his $200,000 full cash bond, his lawyers said there was no way he could have gotten home and committed the crimes in that narrow window.

"It was impossible for this crime to have occurred the way the commonwealth is asking you to believe,” argued Becker’s lead counsel, Gilbert Nutt, a vice president of the riding club.

Still, Judge Laurence Higgins rejected the request to lower the bond, saying the murders had “shocked the conscience of the community.”

Becker’s father, like his father before him, was a brilliant inventor for General Electric.

Howard Becker had won 30 patents for esoteric inventions including aircraft landing equipment, pressurized bearings and direction finders. Originally from GE’s headquarters town of Schenectady, New York, he had received the Coffin Award, the company’s highest honor for inventions. He was also an amateur oceanographer, and his obituary requested that contributions be made to the Cousteau Society.

Becker’s mother, born Helen E. Berg, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, was a gardening enthusiast and an animal lover. Her death notice asked that donations in her name go to Adopt-a-Pet Animal Society in Jeffersontown.

Erika, described in her obit as the “sweet little lady of Ms. Karen E. Higgins," was a member of Girl Scout Troop 179, and her family asked that contributions in her memory go to the Kentuckiana Girl Scout Council.

She weighed 70 pounds and stood only 4 feet 8 inches tall. She had been shot in the head and the heart.

From the beginning, Becker’s three sisters, Barbara, Diane and even Erika’s mother, Karen Higgins, adamantly insisted their brother was innocent.

Three months after the crime, they ran ads in the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and convictions of the “murderers,” insisting that more than one had to have perpetrated the crime.

Eventually, using their own money and the proceeds of their parents’ estate, they posted the $200,000 bond, freeing their brother two months before his trial was set to begin.

“We’re all convinced of his innocence,” Barbara said at the time. “We are all very relieved he is out and can return to his studies.”

They also poured another $200,000 in today's dollars to assemble a dream defense team that eventually consisted of three lawyers, private detectives, scuba divers, a helicopter pilot, a graphics artist, a hypnotist and several nationally noted criminologists.

And when the trial of David Howard Becker began on Feb. 27, 1980, in Jefferson Circuit Court, it was clear that the commonwealth was outmatched.

Prosecutor Steve Strepey, his voice bellowing, said he would prove that Becker killed his family after his mother found him sexually assaulting Erika.

And Strepey told the jurors — seven men and seven women, including two alternates — that he would prove Becker’s early morning confession to detectives was the truth.

The commonwealth started its case by playing Becker’s call to police, which Strepey said showed “a total lack of concern." When a police cadet asked if he was sure the victims were dead, Becker responded: “I don’t know. I could go back and check.”

Clean cut and dressed in a gray suit, Becker sat quietly at the defense table, occasionally swallowing hard and grimacing as the tape was played.

On the trial’s second day, the prosecution introduced more than 50 pieces of evidence, including blood samples, bullets and spent cartridges.

But cross-examining the commonwealth's witnesses, Nutt showed the police investigation was anything but thorough.

Detective R.L. Smith admitted police didn’t initially realize that a second gun was used.

And he acknowledged police did not collect or test the charred French fries found in the oven of the Becker’s kitchen, nor check the temperature settings on burners where green beans and peas had been cooking.

That would turn out to be a crucial omission.

And when detectives elaborated on Becker’s purported confession, Nutt surgically undercut them.

“Did it ever occur to you, as a police officer, that since David’s mother was killed with a .25 caliber weapon, instead of a .22 caliber weapon, that David’s statement was false?" Nutt asked Detective Wayne “Bull” Branham.

No, it did not, Branham replied.

“So you’ve completely disregarded that fact?” Nutt asked.

“Yes, sir,” Branham said.

The commonwealth called Kentucky's chief medical examiner, Dr. George Nichols, known as "Dr. Death," but his testimony boosted the defense.

He said Howard Becker appeared to have been in a bathroom, not the hallway, when he was fatally shot, and to be lying prone, not approaching David in the hallway. Both contradicted the statement police said Becker gave them.

And none of Strepey’s forensic evidence seemed to stick.

Blood found on Becker’s jeans in his bedroom belonged to a horse, an expert testified. A test on Becker’s hands shortly after the bodies were found detected no traces of the chemicals often found when a weapon is fired.

And when defense co-counsel Ken Sales asked a state police lab technician if she found any bloodstains that would implicate Becker, she said, “No, I did not.”

The defense hadn’t even started its case and things already were looking grim for the prosecution as it rested on the fourth day of the trial.

The defense began by calling three members of the Rock Creek Riding Club, founded in 1929 and one of the oldest continuously operating saddlebred clubs in America, to the stand. They said Becker left the club at 3114 Rock Creek Drive between 6:45 and 6:48 p.m.

One of them, Mary Horton, who stabled her horse in the same barn as Becker did, said she remembered the time so precisely because she had dropped her watch in a bucket of water and was drying it when she saw Becker drive off in his 1963 Chevy flatbed truck.

Nutt told the jury that Becker stopped on the way home at a store in the J-Town Shopping Center to buy a bottle of peanut oil, which he used to moisturize his horse’s hooves, and detectives conceded they found a 24-ounce jar of Planter’s — the only size and brand the store sold — in his truck after the murders.

Nutt also said he saw police working a traffic crash in front of the store, and a Jeffersontown patrol officer confirmed on the stand that he was at the scene from 6:58 to 7:03 p.m. The defense insisted Becker didn’t get home until two minutes before he called police.

As the trial moved into its fifth day, the defense suffered its first setback, when Judge Higgins, a former prosecutor, admonished jurors to ignore the testimony of an Indiana University forensic anthropology professor who said two people may have killed the Beckers.

Higgins said the professor wasn’t qualified to offer that theory. But could jurors really ignore it once it was put on the table?

The defense also vaguely suggested an alternative suspect: A neighbor testified she saw a jacked-up car — “maybe a Chevy” — speeding along Broad Run from the direction of the Becker’s home. But she said she didn’t know the driver.

Then the defense offered its own explanation of why Becker was so calm and unemotional when he reported to police that his family had been massacred.

The Riding Club’s president, Harold Morgeson, testified that Becker never showed emotion — that he had the same reaction whether he “wins a blue ribbon or comes in last.”

Wouldn’t the emotional state of a person be one thing if he lost a ribbon, Strepey asked, and another if he found his parents dead?

“Most people, yes,” Morgeson responded, “but in David’s case, no.”

One of his three sisters, Diane Tesler, told the jury that the Becker family didn’t believe in displays of emotion. “We are a reserved family,” she said. A second sister, Barbara Becker, insisted the family believes in “being strong at moments of crisis.

“One of his fundamental feelings was that everything should go smoothly,” she said. “There never should be any conflict.”

Offering its own forensic evidence, a defense expert testified that a man who had raped a 9-year-old would have bruising and soreness to his genitals, and a doctor who examined Becker found none. Although police found semen on Becker’s underpants, the expert testified that males frequently secrete a small amount of it without knowing it.

Then came the testimony about the charred French fries.

The owner of a testing lab told the jury that he did several tests using the Becker’s oven — and the brand of frozen French fries sold at the store where Helen Becker usually shopped — and found it took between 60 and 87 minutes to blacken them. That suggested she was killed long before her son got home, the defense argued. If not, she would have turned off the oven.

Finally, the defendant took the stand.

He conceded that he told Detective Ron Pike during his long interrogation that, “if I did it, I don’t remember any of it.” But he testified that he repeatedly told detectives he didn’t shoot anyone.

He said that at one point during the night, Detective “Bull” Branham pulled him out of his chair and shook him, saying he wanted to take Becker straight to the penitentiary. “Do you know what it’s like to have 20,000 volts going through you?" Becker said Branham asked.

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After two hours, Becker, cool and collected throughout, stepped down from the stand. He was the last witness. It was time for closing arguments.

Strepey went first, for the commonwealth.

He conceded Becker’s purported confession didn’t fit the facts of the case but said that was because he was lying — and “a liar’s story” can't be expected to make sense.

Strepey said he had no explanation for why Becker, after shooting everyone with a pistol, would have grabbed a rifle and shot them again.

The prosecutor suggested that Becker hid the pistol, which was never found, and took off his jeans, which bore traces of chemicals found in gunshot residue.

And Strepey said the French fry test proved nothing because nobody knows whether the oven was cold or preheated. As for the alibi witnesses, he said there was no reason to believe the times they said he left the club were accurate. “Ask 10 different people what time it is and you’ll get 10 different answers,” he said.

“It boils down to whom you believe,” Strepey said. “Either four police officers are lying about David’s statements ... or David Becker is a liar and a murderer.”

Becker sat impassively, in the same gray suit he wore throughout the trial; his sister Karen reached several times to hold his hand.

Nutt offered the jury a very different theory of the crime.

He said the evidence suggested there were two assailants — that one held Howard Becker down while the other shot him in the back of the head.

“We know now that every one of the facts that police say David told them is wrong,” Nutt said. “We know Mama was shot with a .25 caliber pistol” — not with a rifle, as police said Becker told them.

And most crucially, Nutt said, there was not enough time for him to have left the club at 6:45 p.m., buy the peanut oil, rape his niece, shoot her and his parents, and clean before calling police.

If not David, then who?

After six days of testimony spanning two weeks, the case went to the jury, which had been whittled down to seven women and five men.

For two days they deliberated, unable to reach a verdict. They sent out one question, asking if gunshot residue was found on Helen Becker's hands. Were they considering her as a possible suspect? They were told the tests were inconclusive.

The jury also asked to examine Erika's panties, and for a tape recorder, so they could listen again to Becker's impassive call to police.

Finally, on March 6, 1980, after two nights sequestered at the Galt House in downtown Louisville, the jury announced it had reached a verdict:

Not guilty of rape. Not guilty on all three counts of murder.

"Hot dog," Nutt rang out.

Judge Higgins ordered the defendant discharged.

Becker hugged his sister, smiled and told reporters, "I'm very pleased. It's been a long time."

In an interview later, foreman Edward Crum told reporters the jury simply didn't think Becker had time to commit the offenses. Another juror, Sylvia Miller, said the same.

Juror Ronnie Greer and Barry Snadon insisted the verdict was not an indictment of the police. Snadon said they'd done a good job.

"It was time that got him off the hook," Snadon said. "There's still somebody out there that done it."

Karen Higgins complained to reporters that detectives had suffered from tunnel vision. She said the family had drawn up a three-page list of clues they wanted to see pursued and had given it to police the previous summer. She said police refused to look at it.

A third member of Becker's defense team, Christophe Stewart, told reporters that "we have one really strong suspect," but he declined to elaborate.

Lt. John Spellman, commander of the homicide unit, said, "Our position is that we have investigated all leads that were available to us."

Becker celebrated by downing a giant strawberry sundae for lunch. Then he drove to Rock Creek Riding Club, where he climbed aboard Majestic, his American saddlebred gelding.

He said he planned to go to veterinary school and was waiting to hear back from Auburn and Ohio State.

He said the ordeal of being charged and acquitted had strengthened him. "I've grown up a bit. I've found that a person, despite the worst adverse conditions, is still the same when he comes out on the other side."

It was odd, though. Becker didn't complain once about being falsely accused or falsely prosecuted, or express anger toward anyone. And he acknowledged that in some people's minds, he would never be truly exonerated "until they find the criminals who did it."

The family home was put up for sale, and Becker said he would live in an apartment with his sister, Karen, who had been divorced from Erika's father for about 10 years.

She said she'd left Erika's things in the apartment untouched, and that a day didn't go by without her thinking about her. She recalled how Erika, at age 3, had once asked her, "If after we die and come back to life, will you still be my mother?"

She said she was counting on "karma" to hold the real killer or killers to account.

Tesler, an artist and David's older sister by 10 years, said the trial had made the surviving family members tougher. "I don't fear death anymore," she said.

She said she still felt the presence of her parents "out there."

"They taught us to be independent, to stand on our own two feet," she said. "It's one of the best things they ever gave us, because it got us through this whole thing."

The case was over. Becker, 25, was a free man. He was not guilty.

But was he innocent?

A shocking revelation in the court file

Fast forward three decades. My cell phone pinged with a text from retired Detective Larry Duncan, a topnotch investigator for the county and city departments.

I had written about some of his most dramatic cases, including one in which he had brought a serial rapist to justice and another in which he helped convict a serial bank robber and exonerate a financial adviser falsely charged in the crimes.

Now he had a suggestion for another story.

What ever happened to David Becker? Did he move from Kentucky, change his name and commit heinous crimes like the ones for which he was charged and acquitted, Duncan asked.

Or did he get his veterinary degree and live a prosperous, law-abiding life?

I’d never heard of Becker. I had started working as a reporter at the Louisville Times three days before Becker’s trial began but was assigned to write about another murder and hadn’t read a word about the case.

But I found the court file, preserved on microfilm, in the old Jefferson County Jail.

And I discovered that as in many trials, the jury hadn’t heard the whole truth. At a closed hearing a few months before the trial, there were some startling revelations,

Becker, then 25, testified that he had never had sex with a woman. He said he had once tried to have sex with the family cat. And he admitted that he had touched Erika’s vagina when she was about 6 months old and he was a teenager.

His lawyers moved to suppress that evidence at trial, calling it irrelevant and “highly prejudicial.”

“The personal sexual habits of the defendant and two isolated sexual activities of an adolescent have no bearing upon whether defendant committed crimes," they said in the motion.

Judge Higgins granted the motion. The jury would hear nothing about it.

I set out to find Becker — and his sisters, who had supported him so zealously. Did they know about his admissions? And what would he say about them?

I knew Becker would be about 62 years old. And I found a man of that age who had graduated in 1985 with a veterinary degree from Auburn, one of the nation’s best vet schools. But the last known address I could find for him was from 2008, in Floyd, Virginia, about 400 miles east of Louisville and 40 miles southwest of Roanoke.

The current occupant was listed as “Kathleen Anne Becker,” also a vet and an Auburn grad. Perhaps they had met at Auburn and married and now were divorced, I thought. Maybe she could tell me where to find him.

I was just about to call her when I decided to take another look through Jefferson County court records. And there it was, in probate court — a petition for a change of name, filed 24 years after his acquittal:

“Becker is transgendered and pursuing gender reassignment,” the petition said.

His new name: "Kathleen Anne Becker."

The discovery stunned me.

It meant nothing in itself, of course. The fact that David had changed to Kathleen Anne didn’t mean he had raped and murdered his cousin and killed his parents. But it seemed to show that Becker had struggled for years with deeply hidden secrets — some revealed in the suppression hearing.

"I know I can no longer live the life of a man," she would later write, "and would take a bullet before being handed that sentence."

I put off calling Kathleen Becker and decided to do a little more digging.

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I found that Becker married once, in 1990, to a horse trainer named Leesa Brotzge, who told me that she only talked to her new husband once about the trial. “He showed me the news clipping, maintained his innocence, and we never talked about it again,” Brotzge said.

She said he was “naïve, introverted and very bright” and never even raised his voice, and that she came to believe in his innocence as well.

They divorced after six years and she said she later heard about his gender transition.

“My mom said he just didn’t want to be David Becker anymore,” Brotzge said. “With his history, I think it was more than he wanted to be.”

Writing on a transgender website, Becker said she had “known all my life that I have been just not quite right.

“Crossdressing, imagining myself as female and ... the classic having difficultly trying to relate with women ... as a man,” Becker said she had always had an interest in sexual reassignment surgery “and not understanding why."

She went on to write that she had had a condition called “autogynephilia," a controversial term coined in 1989 meaning a man's tendency to be sexually aroused by the "thought or image of himself as a woman.”

Karen Franklin, a San Francisco-based forensic psychologist who has written about sexual identification, told me in an email that most people in the transgender community reject the diagnosis because it implies there is something deviant about being transgender.

Writing in 2003 on www.tsroadmap.com, Becker said: “Have I had feelings in the past that were consistent with autogynephilia. “The answer to that is 'yes.' BUT, having been on hormones for about a year, with testosterone now quite low and manageable, many of those specific feelings have indeed waned.”

Becker speaks again about the case

The time had come to reach out to Becker in Virginia.

Could she offer a breakthrough on the case? Insight into whether her admissions behind closed doors in the suppression hearing had any bearing on the case? Did they matter? Did they lead back to the prosecutors' theory that she committed the murders?

I decided to write her a letter.

"I have reviewed the trial testimony, as recounted in both newspapers at the time and I think the jury properly found there wasn't enough evidence to find you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," I wrote.

"But given what you admitted at the suppression hearing," I continued, "given that no alternative suspect ever emerged …wouldn't a reasonable person conclude that police were telling the truth when they said you told them that your mother had walked in when you were acting indecently with your niece and that you subsequently killed them and your father?"

She replied by email.

"I did not murder my father and mother," she said. "I did not rape and murder my niece."

And being transgendered, she said, "has no relationship to the case."

She said she was not mad at the Jefferson County police detectives who interrogated and arrested her.

"I get it — the first suspect is always the next of kin," she said. "One cannot fault them for doing as they were trained. However, it was unfortunate that, as a result of their tunnel vision and focus on me ... they simply blew the case.

"How can one be angry with persons who were tripping over themselves?" she said of their miscues in identifying the crime scene shells and weapons.

In four long emails, Becker talked about her career, her gender identity, her theory of the crime, and how it has hounded her since, despite her acquittal.

She said after winning her degree from Auburn, she practiced as a horse veterinarian in 13 Kentucky and Indiana counties, volunteered on a technical rope rescue team and assisted law enforcement searches for missing persons, human remains and weapons, including in one murder case.

After 20 years "on call" and "no time I could call free," she said she decided to "pull the plug" and move to Floyd, Virginia, where she met "someone with whom I could relate."

In the town of 425, she set up another equine practice, specialized in horse rescue, and, like her inventor father and grandfather before her, invented devices to extract horses from danger.

As a part-time, $74,000-a-year veterinary medical specialist for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, she helped rescue and treat pets after Hurricane Katrina, and she continued to volunteer as a ham radio operator and rescue people from high ledges and swift water.

"In addition to making a living from hard work, I continue to give to society," she wrote in one of her emails.

Other than a $500 fine for illegal dumping, a misdemeanor, she has an unblemished record in her new hometown, records shows. But her past in Louisville has dogged her, costing her a job last year as a communication specialist with the Virginia State Police, she said.

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In 2007, she tried to expunge the record of her arrest and indictment, which she said had cropped up in state and federal background checks.

But prosecutors objected and a judge denied the motion.

"The commonwealth's belief that the defendant is responsible for the murder and sexual assault of the victim is as strong today as it was in 1979," the commonwealth’s attorney’s office said. "To date, this case remains unsolved."

Becker's motion was denied.

Police and prosecutors today say they still think they had the right suspect, although they were not surprised by the verdict.

Spellman, the former lieutenant, who is retired, said the failure to find the handgun created a reasonable doubt about Becker's guilt. He said the only hope for a conviction expired when Higgins, the trial judge, excluded the evidence about Becker and baby Erika — a ruling criminal defense lawyers today say was the right call.

Strepey, who is in private practice, said there was "no other suspect” and if the intruder was a stranger, there would have been no reason to kill “a little girl.”

He said he is still haunted by the image of Erika, her body half hidden in the dresser drawer.

David Lewis, the co-prosecutor, said he also thinks the commonwealth had the right suspect, in part because none have turned up since.

Becker said it doesn't surprise her that no one else ever has been charged for the murders.

"To do so would force police and the commonwealth's office to admit they were wrong," she said. "They just wanted an easy conviction."

Defense attorney Ken Sales said he is still convinced there were multiple killers. “I walked into that house and immediately felt ‘In Cold Blood,’” referring to Truman Capote’s true crime novel about a pair of killers who murdered a Kansas family in 1959.

“Why do you use two guns unless there are two people?” Sales asked.

Stewart, the other defense lawyer, said in a recent interview that the “strong suspect” he hinted at after the verdict was Lester DeWayne "Wayne" Hatfield, who was found incompetent when charged the next year with rape and sodomy of a woman abducted from a shopping center; he died in 1993 in Shelby County, North Carolina.

Becker said she believes that the culprits may have been a woman seen racing past the driveway in a green Duster at a high speed — or a man, Larry Ray Rosson, now deceased, whom Becker said her father caught stealing fence posts from the property.

"Although petty theft is not murder, I don't think that the altercation can be completely dismissed," she said. "There was always some tension between my family and theirs."

Rosson died at age 38 in 1999 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Becker’s sisters said they still believe their sibling was innocent and that police rushed to judgment in charging him with the crime.

“We have no history of violence in our family,” said Tesler, an artist who lives in Kewanna, Indiana. “We all loved and got along well with our parents.”

Karen Cooper, another sister, a collaborative lawyer who lives near Montpelier, Vermont, said the conduct David admitted to in the suppression hearing was the innocent acts of a curious teenager.

Barbara Becker, another sister who now calls herself BB St. Roman and is a staff member for the New Orleans Police Department’s Homeless Assistance Unit, said David was acquitted “fair and square” and that the defense team actually proved through the timeline witnesses that he couldn’t have committed the rape and murders.

Becker said she has cooperated with efforts by cold case detectives to solve the murders, even offering her DNA, which she said would make no sense if she were the perpetrator.

The department declined to release records detailing its investigative efforts since Becker's acquittal on the grounds that the case remains open.

Becker ended our correspondence when I asked her to explain why she had improperly touched her niece when the girl was a baby.

In a Facebook post two years ago, however, she talked about how she had yet to fulfill her goals in life.

"I recall my father once saying that he didn’t think I’d amount to much," she wrote. "I've been fighting that thought all my life, trying to do my best. My only hope is I can live long enough to do some real good, helping those around me.

"I think it's good to reflect and take stock of oneself," she concluded. "In the end, we can only hope that our personal balance shows that we gave more than we took."

Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at 502-582-7189 or awolfson@courier-journal.com.