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Amateur wrote:

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This compilation of published articles is very well done and much appreciated. It paints a chilling picture of unsolved crimes and un-apprehended suspects.

The Hantman case is perhaps the most telling. The man, who was supposedly insane but who was just a common sex killer, lived among us for 20 YEARS. He committed at least one crime, was arrested, convicted and served time, and was suspected of another crime, and yet Pacific Northwest law enforcement officials never even bothered to find out his real name. Meanwhile, Federal law enforcement officials from Washington DC finally decided that they needed to find this individual, and three weeks later they know his alias and are arresting him in Lewiston. If I was involved in law enforcement here, I'd be hanging my head in shame.

Then there are the disappearances/murders of the two young women from the Normal Hill area in Lewiston. Law enforcement states that they "know they know" who killed the women and probably a young man, but they can't do anything about it. When they interviewed this man just after the crimes, the young women were either being held somewhere or had already been killed and dumped. Either way, there would have been evidence in his home or buildings to which he had access, in his vehicle or vehicles to which he had access--SOMEWHERE! Was any of this checked?

The same suspect admitted to being with the 12-year-old girl from Asotin on the day she disappeared. The man was a suspected serial killer. He spent at least part of the afternoon with the child, who was not feeling well. He had ample motive, means and opportunity, and in some places that will at LEAST get you arrested and questioned. Not here. The suspect has since moved on to new opportunities. I wonder if people in his new killing fields have been notified that he enjoyed a killing lifestyle here, unfettered by law enforcement intervention, or is he as free to practice his craft there as he was here?

Then there is the college student who disappeared and was killed. The local law enforcement lumps in the murder of Kristin David with the other, MANY, unsolved murders in this area. Even the casual observer can see, though, that the killings were very different. If I'm not mistaken, these depraved societal predators don't usually deviate much from whatever set of habits return the sick satisfaction they seek. The Hantman person was active during the period that Ms. David was killed, and is known to have lived in or at least spent time in both Moscow and Lewiston. His own peculiar methods and habits are largely unknown because he spent 20 years of his prime free and unobserved.

A Genesee man saw a man in a brown van with OREGON license plates stop to "help" a young female bicyclist on the day Ms. David disappeared. Hantman lived in Joseph, OREGON at the time. Was the question of whether he had or had access to a brown van ever pursued? The Genesee witness offered two digits of the license plate number of the van. Did those two digits appear on any vehicle accessible to Hantman at the time? Did anyone check? I mean, this is something that could be determined from the easy chair in any law enforcement office.

The Pacific Northwest law enforcement officials interviewed in these articles have a common them: they all lament that no killer has ever been arrested for any of the dozen or so crimes that have been committed under their noses. They "hope" that the crimes will be solved "someday." Well, I have the conviction that these crimes will never be solved. The investigations were bungled, neglected, or otherwise flawed, and you can't get back the precious first hours after a crime has been committed. I also have an even more frightening conviction: that the Pacific Northwest is a wide-open practice arena for criminals who wish to elude detection while they practice their art. One of the compilers of this series of articles says, "Protect your children." I say, "Protect your children, your grandma, your cousins, your mailman, the kids' soccer coach, the guy down the street, your hairdresser..." Protect everyone. No one else is doing it.