‘For the people whose lives they took’: Dauphin County heats up cold case probes with new detective

Cold cases are all about the passage of time. The battle is to make sure justice delayed doesn’t become justice denied for the victims and their families.

Dauphin County’s renewed battle to solve nearly a dozen cold cases that date back decades is about time, too.

Twenty-two years ago, county District Attorney Fran Chardo’s interest was peaked by a cold case prosecution that wasn’t even in Dauphin County. Then an assistant DA, Chardo was asked to lend his services to the York County team prosecuting accused conspirators in Lillie Belle Allen’s fatal race riot shooting from July 1969.

After arranging a deal where York County would pay for Chardo’s time and travel to assist on the case, he plunged into the work of securing justice for the young, Black woman shot down in the middle of the street.

“I was sort of fascinated by the idea of prosecuting a trial coming out of a cold case,” Chardo said of the 2002 prosecution. “I went down there for four months. They had a witness list of 200 witnesses. I said, ‘This is ridiculous. This would take us six months to try this case. So we pared that down. The trial was eight weeks long.”

During this time, the young prosecutor met a young detective named Rodney V. George. The detective was equally interested in righting legal wrongs, no matter how long ago they occurred.

“I shared an office with Rodney right behind the (York) courthouse,” Chardo recalled. “Working with him, I learned a great deal about his insight in terms of his approach to these cold cases.”

With the pair’s help, York County’s legal team secured guilty verdicts against two of the three defendants on trial for Allen’s murder. Numerous other conspirators pleaded guilty. Several others had committed suicide.

It showed Chardo that real justice was possible no matter the number of years that had passed. Now, Chardo’s teaming up with the detective he met during the Allen trial to take another stab at solving cold cases closer to home.

Mutual admiration

“When I worked with him on the Lillie Belle Allen case, he was digging up things from decades and decades before,” Chardo recalled of George.

The detective was equally impressed with the prosecutor.

“He jumped in the middle of it, and was totally invested in the case,” George said. “I really had a lot of respect for him as a prosecutor. We just hit it off.”

As Chardo rose to head the DA’s office, George went on to a distinguished career with the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, most recently fighting fentanyl’s scourge.

All the while, the pair kept in touch. When the 57-year-old George retired in 2023, Chardo invited him to lunch in Harrisburg and proposed a reunion of sorts – once again focused on cold cases.

This time, all the cold cases will be from Dauphin County.

As the first-ever county detective dedicated to working cold cases, George’s full-time job, which began in September, is to review all the files from 11 open/unsolved homicides Chardo has identified for further investigation. George’s goal is to comb through all the old interview transcripts and other evidence in search of that elusive loose thread that could unravel each case.

“It’s the challenge of getting justice where it hasn’t been achieved,” Chardo said.

For George, solving long-open homicides is personal.

“Taking somebody’s life is the worst thing you can do,” he told PennLive. “You take everything away from somebody. To think somebody did that to someone, and they are still living their life. This is for the people whose lives they took away.”

George was hooked by the opportunity to help solve cold cases in partnership with his long-time friend.

“He and I both share a passion for these cases – and solving them,” George said. “We have an opportunity to do it together again. I have been fortunate enough to have a lot of success in investigating these types of cases.”

Painstaking process

George is already deep into the cold case files. Neither George nor Chardo would talk about any details of the cases, saying they don’t want to tip off an over-confident killer.

But both outlined the painstaking process by which the newly appointed county-level detective will coordinate and assist cold case investigations across Dauphin County.

Chardo pointed out that all the identified cold cases are active, with detectives assigned to each in the jurisdictions where they occurred. Det. George isn’t coming in to step on any toes, he said.

“The key is being able to work well with the other agencies … and working well with citizens because there are people that you’re trying to get to talk about something that happened a long time ago,” said Chardo.

“We have a (county) cold case squad, but you know, it’s a sideline for people,” the DA said of the current unit consisting of officers from various jurisdictions who volunteer.

“Now you’re going to have somebody who, that’s all they do. You’re still going to have the cold case squad of people who do it as a sideline and are passionate about it,” Chardo said. “But now we’ve got somebody who is going to be coordinating them, not taking over anybody’s case.”

Above all, George will offer a fresh eye to review each case, along with a deep set of investigatory tools and experience, Chardo added.

George has been spending most of his time going through the old files. This is where it all begins – and often, where new connections are made and fresh leads emerge.

“There’s a lot of different things in cold cases that you can kind of follow up on,” George said. “There are people out there who knew something before (the crime) or something afterwards. You got to figure out what the connection is and how it came about.”

George said he repeatedly reads through the case files until he can fully visualize the crime and the crime scene. He commits many of these details to memory. This way, his unconscious mind keeps working the case long after he closes the file. His method often ferrets out a connection missed during cursory readings of case files, he said.

Cases that haunt

Chardo pointed to a cold case he’s been consumed by throughout his multi-decade career in the DA’s office: The disappearance and death of Millersburg-area teenager Tracy Kroh, who vanished without a trace in August 1989.

It wasn’t until 30 years later that a key connection was made and a suspect emerged. It turned out Tracy’s family was exceedingly close to local auto repair shop owner Mark Eugene Warfel. Back in the 1980s, Warfel often showered the Krohs’ three daughters with attention and presents. Tracy’s dad worked in his auto shop, and Tracy visited him there. But no one knew that Tracy’s mother had a secret affair with Warfel. He’s since been named by law enforcement as the biological father of Tracy’s youngest sister.

These revelations didn’t surface until 2019. Since then, Chardo’s investigation has focused on the 91-year-old Warfel, who’s never been charged in the Kroh case, but has been behind bars since the fall of 2019 on unrelated charges. Warfel’s been ruled incompetent to stand trial once, but the DA isn’t giving up. A second competency hearing is set for this month.

Chardo admitted the Kroh case has gotten under his skin. So has the May 2001 disappearance and presumed death of Harrisburg mother Diane Scott, just after the 41-year-old had dropped off one of her kids at school. In both cases, the victims’ remains were never found. Officials can’t even say how they died.

“The ones that haunt me more, and continue to haunt me, are Tracy Kroh and Diane Scott,” Chardo said. “I just can’t imagine a family having to deal with that. The uncertainty. Tracy Kroh has gotten a lot of attention because she was a teenager, but Diane Scott haunts me just as much. She was a mother.”

Killers among us

By definition, any open/unsolved homicide usually means a killer is still out there —‚ unless he’s dead or been caught for another crime.

Chardo has learned from personal experience just how close any of us can come to an un-caught killer.

The DA said he was unwittingly near a cold case killer at a wedding of all places. Unbeknownst to a roomful of law enforcement officers gathered for a detective’s nuptials, the Lancaster DJ spinning tunes at the reception turned out to be a murderer. Raymond Rowe, also known as DJ Freez, pleaded guilty in 2019 to criminal homicide and rape charges in the 1992 sexual assault and killing of Christy Mirack in Lancaster.

“I was at the wedding, and he was the DJ,” Chardo said.

All this is what the DA says drives him, compelling his decision to bring on the county’s first-ever in-house cold case detective. He fully believes the evidence is out there to find and convict each elusive killer.

“There’s always some sort of intersection between the victim and the killer,” Chardo said. “There can be random murders, but they’re rare. Usually, people do things for a reason. Not sure it was a good reason, but there’s a reason, right? That’s part of finding that sort of break (in the case).”

Sometimes such connections are made and the break comes courtesy of ever-advancing forensic science and new technologies. George said he’s current on all of them, and intends to bring his technological skills to bear in each case.

“My approach will be to utilize advances in forensic technology to retest evidence, to generate new leads by identifying the connections between individuals associated with the investigation and finding when and how circumstances have changed over the years in the lives of witnesses and possible suspects in order to discover new investigative approaches,” George said.

The DNA revolution of the past several decades has helped solve an untold number of cold cases. These days, breakthroughs in mitochondrial DNA allow smaller and smaller evidence samples to be tested and matched.

Tracing suspects through their familial DNA also is exploding. It’s fueled by a proliferation of DNA databases containing samples voluntarily given by people looking to trace their family trees on commercial genealogy sites. This has added millions more people to DNA databases who otherwise might never have been there. If a close relative of a killer is in a database, the DNA sample from a crime scene can ring up a match.

“There’s a lot more in the database now,” Chardo said.

Ticking clock

The passage of time works against the detective attempting to solve a cold case. Witnesses die. Memories fade. People move away. And time, itself, becomes confused.

“People can’t remember the (crime) timeline that well. It all gets compressed,” George said.

But in one respect, the passing years can be an advantage, he added.

“People’s circumstances change. Relationships change. Their loyalties are different now than they were 20 years ago,” the detective noted.

Such shifting circumstances are how one-time conspirators can be pitted against one another, why a former friend, lover or ex-wife might reveal secrets held for years or even decades.

George said applying investigatory pressure to the right person in the right situation can move a longtime cold case toward its conclusion.

Then there’s the matter of recidivism. Most cold case killers aren’t “one-and-done” when it comes to crime, he said.

“When you get to that point in your life when you’re killing somebody, that’s probably not the first thing in your life you did wrong,” he said.

This widening net of criminality, both before and after a cold case murder, presents another avenue for solving the homicide, George said.

Knowing a cold case killer might do it again also provides plenty of motivation for law enforcement.

“Whatever they do after that, you kind of have responsibility for that. It kind of comes back on you a little bit. That’s a real motivator to me,” George said.

No perfect crimes

For both Chardo and the detective, there’s no better feeling in law enforcement than when a cold case, long in the deep freeze, finally heats up.

That’s when suspects start sweating again – and making mistakes.

“When there’s information that comes, the activity level spikes,” said Chardo, hinting his team will be watching — and perhaps listening — when it does.

It’s also why the DA refuses to buy into the notion of a “perfect crime.”

“I don’t like that phrase,” Chardo scoffed. “I mean, if was a perfect crime, we wouldn’t know about it in the first place.”

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