The Secrets in the Suitcase

Hello, I'm Keith Morrison.

It was a baffling case for detectives.

A crime, a suspect, but not enough evidence to prove it, to solve it. Nearly three decades passed.
Heartbroken loved ones wondered if justice would ever be done. And then they learned.
The answer was in plain sight all along. They kept it in the dark, down the stairs in the basement, among the bolt cutters and the bags of white powder and the guns, the investigative leftovers of a small police department.
Why they chose a lime green suitcase for it is beyond knowing now. But he'd see it down there every time he filed a piece of evidence, tucked in all but forgotten behind a doorframe, like a silent accusation.
And there it kind of sat in that room staring at you. Yes, yes, for years.
In fact, since about the time Brad Benson got his start in the Woods Cross Police Department. I was always intrigued by this case because, you know, it was a cold case, homicide that had never been solved.
The lime green mystery. Inside that suitcase was quite possibly all the evidence required to put a murderer away for life.
If he opened it, God knows what would come slithering out, though he never guessed just how bizarre it would turn out to be. Back in the summer of 1980, it seemed frankly like one of those murders that happen all too commonly in other cities, though surely not here.
Brad Benson was a rookie, a reserve officer, in a town that only rarely seemed to need much of a police department. I was kind of shocked, quite frankly, that we had something like that in Woods Cross.
I mean, I'd only been there a couple of years, but I could never imagine that we would be investigating a homicide. Murder in Woods Cross, unheard of.
Yes, unheard of. That was our very first homicide, as a matter of fact.

Woods Cross was busily growing out from the fringe of Salt Lake City in those days.

Quiet, middle class, studded everywhere with mostly Mormon churches.

And it prided itself on being a safe place to live.

That's why people moved here.

So it was a shock that very first time Woods Cross encountered murder. It was the 6th of June, 1980, a Friday morning.
Oh my God, this is 1653 South. 1200 left, 1653 South.
What's the problem? In Woods Cross. My wife's been killed.
We just got home from work. The event stands out in the collective memory here.
Okay, I'll say. What's your name? Steve Strom! Please, Strom! Steve Strom! Please hurry! Steve Strom was an overnight shift worker at a local aerospace parts company.
So it was just before 8 a.m., he told first responders, when he came home to find his wife's body. She'd been severely beaten.
The furniture in their bedroom had been pushed around as if in a violent struggle. I was at work, and my stepmother had called me, and she says, Karen's dead.
And I just said, what? She goes, Karen's dead, and I said, she can't be.

I just talked to her.

Karenstrom's sister, Coco, rushed to the crime scene.

I knew it was a crime scene, but, oh, God,

I just wanted to hold her so bad.

And then they brought her body out,

and you're in such shock.

You're like, she can't be in there.

No, that's not my sister. She's not in there.
And then they took her away. Did you ever get a chance to hold her? No.
No. Then the whole town got to know about Coco's big sister, Karen.
How pretty she was, how full of life and potential, how young. Just 25 when someone got into her bedroom,

tore the place apart, and strangled the life out of her. What earthly reason would anyone have for killing Karen Strong? She was fun.
She was happy. She had a lot of friends.
She She was just a good soul.

But even before that awful day came to an end,

some friends of Steve and Karen Strom felt like they knew what must have happened. I received a telephone call from my husband.
What he said to me was, well, it finally happened. Steve finally killed her.
Steve killed her? My wife's been killed. We just got home from work.
Was his frantic voice on that 911 call the equivalent of crying crocodile tears? Brad Benson, remember, was a rookie back then. Didn't take part in the investigation But before long, his colleagues seemed to feel that Steve was indeed the murderer And they had their reasons Well, there were some reports of domestic violence in his past In fact, it turned out, Karen had left Steve Why was she even in the house that night? A couple of months after Karen's death, Steve was arrested and charged with his wife's murder.
What did Steve Strom do? Well, of course, he denied it. He denied being involved.
He fought the case tooth and nail. And those investigators remained convinced that their man was Steve.
Yes. But as the trial approached back at the beginning of the 1980s, none of the evidence from that chaotic bedroom murder scene could be tested for DNA.
The technology just didn't exist then. What they had instead was a circumstantial case, the testimony of friends and family, who would say that Steve was sometimes verbally and possibly physically abusive.
But Karen wanted out. There was black eyes and bruises that were witnessed by some of their co-workers and friends.
But it wasn't enough. Not much more than hearsay, according to the assigned trial judge, who dismissed the charges and released Steve Strom to go on about his life.
Strom lost his friends, his credibility. Perhaps only this friend still believed in him.
I mean, everybody was just saying, you did it, you did it, you did it, you did it, you did it, you know. And they chased him.
They followed him everywhere he went. Cops? Yep, I was with him.
And that was that.

Nobody satisfied.

Certainly not Karen's sister Coco,

who believed in her heart like so many others

that Steve had gotten away with murder.

And that decided Coco could not stand.

Her big sister had been there for her growing up,

and now Coco would do what she could to fight for justice.

27 years. 27 years and it never left your mind? How could it? It's shocking.
And it's your sister, somebody you love dearly. It's like you go and think about it and then you give up.
And then it's there again. You know, it never goes away.
Just like the lime green suitcase.

Though all that evidence felt no emotion at all

as it sat there gathering dust all those years.

But now, as he contemplated imminent retirement,

Brad Benson, now a detective sergeant,

had come to believe, or to hope at least,

that new technologies would finally give mute evidence a voice

and make

the case that couldn't be made back in 1980.

We're very confident that if there is DNA, that it'll come back to somebody that we are

familiar with.

But you know what they say about assumptions?

Because, as Benson was about to discover, just beneath that apparently obvious surface

was a very strange story indeed. It was June 2006, 26 years almost to the day since Coco's salt-giver sister Karen Strom was murdered in Woods Cross, Utah.
The crime had never been solved, though some evidence at the time seemed to point toward Karen's husband Steve Strom. And who knows why these things come about.
Coco happened to be in Utah to attend a funeral. She happened to be driving through Woods Cross and, on a whim really, decided to stop at the local police department to ask what finally happened to that case.
And I says, ma'am, where do I find some information on a homicide that's never, she goes, oh, do you mean Karen? And I says, okay, you people are freaking me out here. Within minutes, Coco was on the phone with Detective Brad Benson.
And he goes, you want to know what's funny? And I said, oh please, this is getting better and better. And he said, I took her case out six months ago and started looking at it again.
Just coincidence, of course, wasn't it? And I thought, wow. I says, maybe something's really going to happen this time.
By this time, Benson had followed a trail around a corner of the storage room from the old green suitcase to a makeshift plywood shelf, where he discovered boxes and boxes chock full of evidence. They had fingernails that they didn't know what they contained back then.
But they saved them anyway. They saved them.
Consequently, they became one of the best pieces of evidence that we had. Benson sent those preserved fingernails off to the lab, along with other testable pieces of evidence.
And then, as he and Coco waited for the results, Benson continued to dig into the murder file and into the life of Karen Strom. What happened to make her a target of somebody's murderous rage? She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, an eldest daughter, Coco's big sister.
And in this state, in some ways, she was distinctly unusual. We grew up Catholic in Utah.
My dad's side of the family was Mormon. My mom was Catholic.
So you knew what it was to be a minority. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And she was popular and pretty, a natural dancer,

who once in high school was rarely without a date on a Saturday night.

And when she got her first car, her adored yellow Camaro,

life couldn't get any better.

She loved that car. I loved that car.

We used to go riding just cruising in that car.

That car was, she was so happy when she got that. That she got married so soon, just 18 and right out of high school, seemed reasonable at the time.
At least to Coco it did. Living in Utah? That kind of happens, huh? That was nothing new.
So I just figured, well, Karen did it too, you know? She and Steve Strom were in love, after all. I didn't know Steve that well.
He didn't talk, very quiet. This is Karen's high school friend, Melody Fairborn.
She really did love him and enjoyed his company. But then it was about seven years in when the bad times started to outweigh the good.
The problem, said Melody, was Steve, who could be, she said, a mean drunk. When he would start drinking, he would start verbally degrading her.
And there had been rumors of some physical abuse. Perhaps for that reason, maybe something else, Karen decided to file for divorce, even though...
She loved him. Really? Oh, yeah.
She wanted to leave him, but she loved him? Mm-hmm. I know, I know, it's beyond me.
Yeah, I know. But she did.
She loved him. So it was complicated.
Karen seemed to move on, started seeing someone else. I was thinking that she had finally broken away.
But just over a month after she filed her divorce papers, Karen returned to the house in Woods Cross. Her puzzled friends assumed, must be temporary, a goodbye visit.
But an exultant Steve told his pal Dick Cantonwine, it was all going to work out. He was happy that she was coming back, because he loved her.
I mean, when she was gone, he was down in the dumps. Just miserable about it.
Yeah. On June 5th, 1980, the record showed, Karen and Steve spent the evening together.
They ate out, returned home. And then just after midnight, about 12.15 a.m., Steve left to go to work, the graveyard shift at an aerospace parts company.
Steve told police how Karen walked him to his car, all lovey-dovey, then said goodnight and walked back into the house. She passed her yellow Camaro parked in the driveway and closed the door behind her.
He claimed he called her later that morning to wake her up for work. No answer.
Called again, let the phone ring 20 times, still no answer. So he said he clocked out about 7.30 the morning of the 6th and drove home.
Karen's Camaro was still parked in the driveway when he arrived. Or that was his story, at least.
My wife's been killed. I just got home from work.
What's your name? Steve Strom. Please, Strom.
Steve Strom, please hurry. And now all these years later, Detective Benson read about his colleagues' frustrated attempts to mount a case against Steve Strom.
And waited with Karen's sister Coco for the results of DNA tests conducted on Karen's preserved fingernails. Waited to be able to say, finally, got him.
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Or did they? Nothing has more suspense than a Dateline mystery.

And no one wants to wait to find out what happens next.

That's why everyone needs Dateline Premium,

where listening is always ad-free.

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Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or DatelinePremium.com. Around Woods Cross, Utah, and among the suburbs and the city on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, the story of Karen Strom was ancient history now, an artifact long lost to public memory.
There was just the green suitcase, the soon-to-retire detective, and the one person for whom a burning need lived on every day for more than a quarter century, Karen's sister, Coco. How important was it for you to find out what happened? Very, because I want to know why.
Why would you take somebody so beautiful? She wasn't raped. You know, it wasn't a robbery.
They just plain killed her. It's like, why? And, of course, who? What happened behind that bedroom window in this middle-class neighborhood in the summer of 1980 is not really in doubt and wasn't from the beginning.
There was a violent struggle, that was obvious, and a woman was dead, strangled. A little checking revealed there was no forced entry to the house.
A little more checking indicated that this was a woman in the middle of marital discord. And so the answers to the questions, who did this thing and why, seem perhaps to have fairly obvious answers.
What was your assessment then as to what probably happened that night? I believe that there was some sort of a domestic dispute and that things had got out of hand, and that's what led to her death. And everything in the case file certainly seemed to back up that point of view.
Was there anything else that went to motive as far as Steve was concerned? Nothing other than the divorce that was currently going on. It sounded to me like that she may be leaving him for another man.
Ah, so jealousy comes into play as well. Yes.
Couldn't do anything about it though. Well, back then we didn't have DNA, so short a confession, there wasn't really anything they could do.
But now there were those fingernails. The chaos in the bedroom where she was murdered made it obvious that Karen had fought back against her attacker and thus probably unknowingly collected that person's DNA profile by scratching him before she died.
Benson spoke to Steve Strom to let him know he'd reopened Karen's case. Would Steve provide a comparison sample of his own DNA? I told Steve that if he came up and provided those samples that it could do just as much good, eliminating him as a suspect as it could actually point the finger at him.
He agreed, and within 48 hours drove to Utah from his home in Nevada and Freedy gave up a sample of his DNA.

But was he worried?

Oh, yes, he was, said his friend Dick Cannon-Wine.

He says they're going to try and hang me again.

They just were focused in on him from day one

and they just wouldn't let go.

And less than two weeks after Benson submitted the samples

that could finally identify a murderer,

a result, and Benson looked at the name

Thank you. And less than two weeks after Benson submitted the samples that could finally identify a murderer, a result, and Benson looked at the name and...
Well, I was a little confused at first. Confused? Once Benson absorbed the news, he picked up the phone and called Karen's sister, Coco.
He goes, are you ready for this? He said, Coco, the DNA came back, and I said, it did?

And he goes, Ed Owens.

And I said, who is Ed Owens?

And suddenly, what once seemed a case of tying up old, loose ends had been blown wide open.

Funny thing about public attitudes, how a common suspicion can harden over time into something like perceived truth. Those few who still remember the 1980 murder of Karen

Strom had two and a half decades to solidify their suspicion of husband Steve. And now DNA revealed that cells under Karen's fingernails belonged to someone else altogether, belonged to a man named Ed Owens.
I had no idea who he was. My family doesn't know him.
None of Karen's friends know him. The only association to Ed Owens is Steve.
Shocking. What is the relationship between Ed Owens and Steve? They work together.
Or at least, they both worked at the same machine at E-Systems, an aerospace parts manufacturer. Ed worked a swing shift, and Steve took over the machine on the graveyard shift.
Ed was new in town, Steve befriended him. He didn't have any friends and Steve was that kind of guy that, you know, would kind of take somebody under his wing because they had the same interests.
They liked guns and hunting and four-wheeling and things like that. Did he seem to like the guy? Yeah, he thought he was pretty good.
You know, he was... Just a guy who worked...
A little different, but, you know. A little different? Yeah.
He tried so hard to be your friend, and he just went at it the wrong way. And so they kind of thought that was a little weird, you know.
So his social skills were a little defective somehow. Yes, yes.
And you just look at him and say, wow, is he playing with a full deck? Still, something like a friendship had developed. They'd gone four-wheeling together, and once Steve and Karen took Ed and his wife Patricia on a double date, but really casual acquaintances.
So how would Ed Owens' DNA end up beneath Karen's fingernails? Good question. When Detective Benson went through the file, he discovered that, in fact, Ed Owens had drawn a mention in the original investigation.
So Benson, all these years later, tracked him down. He was listed as a person of interest or possibly a witness, and I wanted to go over his statement and make sure that we had everything correct.
They'd put him on record back then. Yes.
Back in 1980, Steve Strom told police that when he arrived at work at 12 45 a.m. June 6th, Ed Owens wasn't there, as he should have been, to turn over the machine they both worked on.
He finally did show up, said Steve, a little after four in the morning, drunk and throwing up, claiming he left work at 8 p.m. and went out to party at a local bar.
Also in the old file, statements from some of Steve's co-workers, who told police they saw scratches on Ed's hands and face in the days after Karen's murder, and the cops back then even took pictures of Ed, collected blood and hair samples. And now that some of the DNA under Karen's fingernails turned out to be a match for that sample collected from Ed Owens, Benson's belief about what happened the night of Karen's murder took a sudden U-turn.
I believe that it was more or less an opportunity with Ed that he'd gone to the bar that night from work at 8 o'clock, just like the log showed, that he probably drank more than usual and decided that he wanted to go out and get into trouble. I think he went there with the intentions of raping Karen and she fought back.
He waited until Steve had gone to work? Yes. And Ed knew exactly the time Steve went to work because their shifts overlapped.
How would he get into the house, though? There was no sign of forced entry. Well, that's a little old Woods Cross, you know, back in 1980.
A lot of people didn't lock their doors back then. There was no forced entry.
We don't know if the door was locked for sure when Steve left for work that night or not. So he would have basically barged in on her and started an assault immediately.
That's what we believe, yes. And created havoc as she fought back against him.
Yes. But why would he kill her? Well, that would be the only way that he could be assured that the fingers wasn't going to be pointed back to him.

But now, years later, the DNA pointed directly at Mr. Owens.

Soon after Detective Benson informed Owens that the case was being reopened,

Ed left town, leaving nothing but a note behind for his wife Patricia,

containing things like bank account numbers.

How do you explain behavior like that?

Guilty person.

That's the only way I can explain behavior like that.

And then, a few weeks later, another surprise.

Ed Owens showed up and turned himself in.

And in short order, he was charged with Karen's murder.

I kind of got the gut feeling that to a certain degree you may

be relieved to have this happen. As Owens awaited his day in court, an apparently relieved Steve

Strom appeared briefly on local TV. It's nice that they're looking at evidence instead of listening

to hearsay and gossip and lies. And for the first time, Coco began to believe she would finally

I'll be right back. at evidence instead of listening to hearsay and gossip and lies.
And for the first time, Coco began to believe she would finally understand what happened to her sister Karen. Will it help you to have a resolution of this case? Oh, absolutely.
And it's not how people say closing the book. You never close the book.
You never close that book. But it's an understanding.
And I know you never understand the universe and everything that happens in it, but with my sister, I just want to know why. But that last bit about not understanding everything? As we spoke, she could have no idea.

The trial date was close.

The state's case was ready.

And then, Michael Studebaker, Ed Owen's defense attorney,

was driving to work when his cell phone rang.

It was his own forensic expert.

And said, you're not going to believe what we just found under the fingernails. And I literally had to pull over because my mind was just spinning.
A true crime story never really ends. Even when a case is closed, the journey for those left behind is just beginning.
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To listen to After the Verdict, subscribe to Dateline Premium on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at DatelinePremium.com. It was the DNA.
Like a legal magic wand, it seemed, that test had changed everything in the Karen Strahm murder case. And now Ed Owens, a man who would have escaped detection forever without DNA, was about to go on trial for murder.
And then, a remarkable, or at least extremely curious, discovery. The material under Karen's fingernails was Ed Owens' DNA, all right.
There was no dispute about that. The curious thing was the type of DNA.
It was seminal fluid. What did you think when you heard that? I thought, there's a semen under his fingernails that sure doesn't show murder.
That shows consensual relations at the best. Ed must have had sex with Karen, said the defense attorney.

Naturally, Detective Benson also heard about the discovery of semen,

but his reaction was considerably different.

I didn't believe that the whole sample was semen,

based on the scratches that Mr. Owens had on his arms and hands and face.

This was not a lovey-dovey sex scene at all.

No, no, it was a knock-down, drag- out fight. And Troy Rawlings was taken by surprise too.
Rawlings is the county attorney, the prosecutor. He'd been about ready to present his case in court when the news about semen hit.
We didn't expect that, Keith. No kidding.
No kidding. That was a curveball, but instead of that curveball making us abandon our attempt to hit that pitch, we just decided, you know what, we need to learn to be better curveball hitters.
Except what happened next didn't seem so much like a hit for the prosecution, more like a strikeout. County Attorney Rawlings dropped the charges without prejudice, dismissed the case.
Ed Owens was released. It's Freezer Bird.
I took some heat over it. There's no doubt about it.
In December of 2007, Ed went home to be with his family just in time for the holidays. Relieved.
Glad it's over. And his family appeared before the cameras to say they had never doubted his innocence.
We've always stood by Eddie saying that we knew he didn't do it. Anybody that knows Eddie knows he wouldn't do it.
Steve Strom, watching all this, was horrified. Or so said his friend Dick Catenwine.
He just went to pieces again. He says, they haven't got enough on him, so they're going to come looking for me again.
He says, it's going to start all over. Oh, the prosecutor tried to assure the public he wasn't giving up on making a case against Ed Owens.
We were still confident Ed was the guy. We just didn't want to go off half-cocked, go to a jury trial, look stupid, quite frankly.
But frankly, it was, in most people's opinion, over. It was dead, as far as a lot of people were concerned.
Yep, as far as I was concerned, it absolutely was. Your man was free to go.
He was. Winter settled in then, and the snow piled up on ski runs around Salt Lake City.
The Karrenstrom murder case faded out yet again, as another season went by, and the snow melted, and the city bloomed into another summer. And her killer, whoever that might be, remained free, and the prosecutor did take some heat from people who might not have been aware of what his team was up to.
An exhaustive re-examination of all the evidence, which, sometime in the summer of 2008, produced, what was, shall we say, a tiny discovery. Two barely perceptible spots, indications of blood on Karen's underwear.
Minuscule spots, major implications. That blood matched the DNA profile of Ed Owens.
I think that Karen was fighting him off and scratching his hands. He's got her pinned down with one hand.
He's trying to sexually assault her with another hand that she's cut and scratched, and that that's how the two drops of blood get on her panties. Now, Prosecutor Rawlings was more confident he could convince a jury that far from having consensual sex with Karen, Ed tried to rape her and killed her in the process, which would explain the semen found under Karen's fingernails.
Our view is that the most consistent explanation is she's trying to prevent him from sexually assaulting her. And so in the dog days of August, eight months after he'd withdrawn the murder charges against Ed Owens, Rawlings refiled his murder case.
We need to turn Ed Owens in. I didn't figure that they would ever refile charges again, but evidently they want to try it again.
It was March of 2009. Finally, the event had arrived.
Almost 29 years after the murder of Karen Strom, it was the eve of Ed Owens' trial in Farmington, Utah. Coco was overcome with emotion.
Oh, God, don't let me fail Karen. I loved her so much that I want her to know the monster got you and now I'm facing the monster and I'm going to get him.
But who was the monster? As the trial began, the defense attorney offered his theory to the jury that Ed and Karen had been having an affair. The seaman got under her nails earlier before the night of the murder, a night when he wasn't even there.
Where was Ed the night of the murder? I'll tell you where Ed was. Ed's a drunk.
He went to the bar. He closed the bar.
But he was not at the Stom's house murdering Karen Stom.

The defense wanted the jury to believe it was an angry and jealous Steve who grabbed Karen by the neck and choked her to death.

An entirely different story than the one told by the prosecutor.

As Karen Stom was struggling for her life, what she was doing was collecting the evidence

that now testifies to you who her killer was, even after she's dead. And what that evidence tells you is that her killer is Ed.
After a seven-day trial, it was now in the hands of the jury. And the detective who brought this cold case back to life was sweating.

You just never know what a jury's going to do.

On the first night, the jury deliberated until 9.30 p.m. and then announced they were going home.

Boy, oh boy, the wheels of justice do grind slow, don't they?

They do.

My thought was, holy cow, we're going to be doing this all over again.

Could be, because when the jurors went home that night, they were deadlocked. How difficult was it to come forward and say you weren't so sure? It wasn't difficult for me, because if you're going to hand down a guilty verdict, you better be able to erase all reasonable doubt.
Here they were, responsible public servants, no idea that all their deliberation about guilt or innocence was about to be turned on its head by an unlikely public confession, a poisonous accusation, and a tale almost too wild to be believed.

And you think people will believe that?

Well, if they don't, they don't. Karen's sister Coco tossed all night.
Detective Brad Benson barely slept the night the jury went home without a verdict. I was sick.
Now it looked like it might be, what, a hung jury? Yeah, well, that was pretty much the only alternative as far as I was concerned. Oh, there was another alternative, as everyone would soon know.
But the jury on the morning of the second day was preoccupied instead by a determined holdout. What were you concerned about? I had to be able to put Ed Owens in that home, murdering her that night.
His lingering doubts were eventually dispelled, and the defense's efforts to pin the murder on Steve were rejected. I think we all agreed that, yeah, he was abusive, but the motive, I don't think we questioned whether or not he had a motive there.

And so before noon, the second day of deliberations, a verdict.

We the jury and panel to try the issues in the above entitled matter

do hereby find the defendant Edward Lewis Owens guilty.

Guilty.

The sound you hear is Ed Ow's distraught family. Outside the courtroom, they dodged reporters and then insisted later that the jury had simply gotten it wrong.
Even the family did judge by their statements unaware of one more wild, improbable, and impending twist. Almost two months after the verdict, a May morning 2009, Ed's sentencing day.
Waiting in the wings to make a pre-sentence statement, a woman who would offer evidence that Ed once raped and very nearly killed her a few years before Karen's murder. And then suddenly her statement was canceled.
The judge made an announcement. Ed Owens had something important to say.

Mr. Strom had asked me to kill his wife on several different occasions, and then he finally offered me half of her insurance money to do it.

Actually, what I did was I went over to warn her and tell her that he wanted her killed.

As it turned out, there was an argument between her and I, and I ended up strangling her and killing her. A confession.
All of Ed's denials had been a lie. But it was a confession accompanied by a poisonous accusation that Steve Strom, Karen's husband, asked Ed, offered to pay him, to kill his wife.
And as the killing was an accident, said Ed, he was guilty of manslaughter, not murder. Unlikely and outrageous as the allegations seemed, Detective Benson went right back to work.
And you have to investigate that? Yes, so the saga continues. Hello, Ed.
How are you? And meanwhile, in the visitor's room, deep in a prison in Draper, Utah, we sat down for a chat with the admitted killer and now accuser, Ed Owens. You killed her.
Yeah. Yeah.
But he's the one that wanted her dead. Okay.
I know. I don't have any proof of that, you know.
But if I'm going to go down, why not take the other person involved, you know. Whether he was actually involved or not.
If he wasn't involved, I wouldn't say this. Like I said, that's what he wanted me to do, is he wanted me to kill her for half the insurance money.
And then the story gets a little convoluted. Did he ever pay you any money? No.
I wouldn't have taken it. Wasn't the idea.
I had no plans of killing her. None.
None at all. No, it was an accident, he says.
And as he tells this story, keep in mind that killing by strangulation requires prolonged force, several minutes of force, sustained, determined, choking.

I didn't purposely strangle her, okay?

She kept slapping at me, you know, and I was trying to grab for like her shoulders, you know,

and I was just shaking her, you know, trying to, you know, telling her, will you listen to me? Listen, damn it, you know.

Just kept going on and on.

Next thing I know, she's on the floor.

But sexual assault and murder? Never, vowed Ed.

But what about that woman who claimed he'd raped her and left her for dead back in 1973,

who was all set to tell her story in court?

It was Ed's confession that prevented her testimony. Did you have any problems sexually in 1973? What are you talking about? All of a sudden, when she was going to come and testify, you had a statement you wanted to make.
The girl in 1973, all right? All right? She described the guy as six foot, six foot two.

I'm five ten.

In 1973, Ed was charged with kidnapping, robbery, rape, and assault with intent to commit murder.

According to the case file, the young woman was hitchhiking.

Ed picked her up, drove her to an isolated place, raped her, stabbed her with a screwdriver,

then tried to choke her to death.

And though the woman positively identified Ed and the car he was driving, he was acquitted. Ed was out on parole at the time of that incident, after another young woman accused him of raping her back in 1969.
What about the one when you were 18? That one, you know, you could have had that with like a date rape type thing. Yeah, I was probably guilty then.
He was charged then with rape, kidnapping, and robbery. Pleaded guilty to robbery.
The other two charges were dismissed. But that was then.
Now he was claiming that Karen's death was an accident and a murder-for-hire plot. But the more we asked for evidence to back up his claim,

the more reticent he became.

What kind of evidence can you provide that there's any truth to that story?

You know, it's an ongoing investigation,

and we're just not talking about it right now.

You mean there's more you haven't told me?

That's what you're trying to tell me?

Seriously, you got more evidence you haven't told me? I don't know. Could be.
Turns out, he didn't. Although there was an insurance policy on Karen's life, an investigation revealed that Ed's story was not credible, and Steve Strom was not involved with Karen's murder.
And Strom, burned by suspicion over the years, would not agree to do a videotaped interview. And so it was Dick Cantonwine who spoke for him, who told us about the damage from which his friend is trying to heal.
But when the suspicion was lifted from his shoulders, I mean, he must have been thrilled, wasn't he? Pretty much, but still, he just relives that over and over and over. And Detective Benson, who finally confronted the mystery of the murder at the start of his career, he retired in 2014, just a few years after the old green suitcase finally yielded up its secrets.
I think 30 years in law enforcement is probably enough. Who killed Karen Strom is no longer a mystery.

All that mattered deeply to the sister who had kept vigil all those years.

I miss you. I'll always miss you.

But I'm going to put this ugliness behind.

I love you.

We did it, sis. We did it.

Once, there was a day to ride in her yellow Camaro

and then a day to defend justice in her memory.

And both are what sisters do.