Man’s Confession to 1979 Slaying Solves a Puzzle but Poses a Dilemma

For years, an enlargement of a fingerprint hung on the wall of the Johnson County Crime Lab here, lifted from a Coors beer can in the bedroom where 19-year-old Tracy Fresquez was slain in October 1979. In a town where only three homicides had occurred in the previous five years, Fresquez’s killing was the sole unsolved case, and it gnawed at investigators.

Then Daniel Leroy Crocker, a 38-year-old father of two from Chantilly, Va., stepped forward out of the blue last month. The fingerprint, which had been checked periodically through crime computers, was recalled from the files, checked again, and found to match a print taken from Crocker, who was charged with first-degree murder in this Kansas City suburb.

Crocker’s Sept. 22 confession has solved a crime and created a moral dilemma, authorities here say. His decision to surrender to police, in a case in which he was not a suspect and would otherwise never have been charged, makes him deserving of some leniency, said Johnson County Dist. Atty. Paul Morrison. But given the brutality of the crime--investigators told the Fresquez family that she was sexually assaulted and strangled--a light punishment would be hard to justify, Morrison said.

“We certainly don’t want to diminish the death of Tracy Fresquez in any way,” he said. “But by the same token I don’t think there’s any question about the fact that some allowances should be given for Mr. Crocker’s act of turning himself in after 19 years. I don’t know how he could fall on the sword any [more] than what he did.”

Crocker would be sentenced under the Kansas law that was on the books in 1979. Under that statute, the only possible sentence for first-degree murder is life in prison, but with parole eligibility after 15 years. The current law provides for a minimum punishment of 25 years in prison, without parole.

Morrison did not rule out the possibility of a plea agreement with Crocker that would lead to a lighter sentence under a lesser charge.

Crocker, whose wife has said he was prompted by his religious faith to turn himself in, had no idea what kind of sentence he would be facing when he decided to confess to the killing, said his attorney, Tom Bath.

Crocker, who grew up in the Kansas City area, said nothing during a brief court proceeding recently in which a preliminary hearing was scheduled for Oct. 30. He wore a conservative blue suit and made little eye contact with his parents and other family members.

Fresquez’s family, including her father, brother, sister and aunt, were at the hearing, still waiting to find out why she was killed a little more than a year after graduating from high school.

Her family is upset that media reports have focused on Crocker’s act of conscience, rather than his alleged act of violence.

“I don’t have any compassion for him,” said Jay Fresquez, Tracy Fresquez’s younger brother. “But I feel sorry for his family. All he did was put his load of guilt on his family and on my family. I don’t want people to lose sight of why he’s here in the first place.”

Crocker has not yet entered a plea--under normal procedure, he would do that after the Oct. 30 hearing. But Bath said Crocker “came to Kansas City to take responsibility for what he did, and I would anticipate that we’ll stay on that course.” Through his attorney, Crocker declined to be interviewed.

Investigators say that on Oct. 5, 1979, a Friday night, Fresquez met her killer at a 7-Eleven near a stretch of strip malls and middle-income apartment complexes. Whether Fresquez knew her assailant or was meeting him for the first time is unclear, though Crocker apparently did not know the name of the victim when he surrendered.

Morrison said Fresquez, who worked as a keypunch operator at a Montgomery Ward service center, and her assailant went to a party, then returned to her second-floor apartment.

Police believe that the assailant left Fresquez’s apartment but returned before midnight, climbed onto her balcony and entered her apartment through an unlocked sliding glass door.

Shortly after midnight, Fresquez’s fiance, who had been at work, returned to the apartment they shared and found her nude body on the bed. When police learned the fiance was the sole beneficiary of a recent life insurance policy issued for Fresquez, he became one of the chief suspects. But after undergoing polygraph tests and intense questioning, he was never charged.

A special squad of detectives from around Kansas City produced a voluminous case file of interviews with neighbors, friends and relatives. But the leads were few, said Shawnee Police Chief Tom Hayselden.

Detectives and prosecutors picked up the case every two or three years.

Police believe that Crocker lived in Lenexa, Kan., a Kansas City suburb next to Shawnee, in 1979, and didn’t leave the area until the mid-1980s.

His wife, Nicolette, said she and Crocker moved to the Washington area from California seven years ago. She said that Crocker told her of his crime before they were married 11 years ago, and that his secret grew more troubling to both of them over the years.

In Virginia, Crocker was a warehouse manager and an active member of the Fairfax Assembly of God Church, and recently began ministering to a prison inmate. Nicolette Crocker said the prison experience heightened her husband’s feelings of guilt, and he turned to the Rev. Al Lawrence, an assistant pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church in Alexandria for help in surrendering.

Shawnee police questioned Crocker on Sept. 22 for about three hours and obtained a murder warrant the next morning.

“It’s a struggle for his family,” Lawrence said. “They hurt, not just for him but for the victim’s family. He doesn’t want to be made out a hero.”

Fresquez’s family members want her remembered as the young girl who had to handle all the cooking and household chores from a young age after her mother, Judy, was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis in the early 1970s.

The murder devastated her family. Louis Fresquez, Tracy Fresquez’s father, said the death cut years off his wife’s life. Judy Fresquez died in 1991.