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The Killer of Dawn Marie Birnbaum Could Be Released On a Technicality
James Robert Cruz Jr. was convicted of the slaying more than two decades ago, but there are fears he could get a new trial.
The killing of 17-year-old Dawn Marie Birnbaum in 1993 was a crime that shocked the eastern United States. A troubled teenager, she had been hitching rides with truckers to find a boyfriend with whom she had lost contact when she had the misfortune to cross paths with James Robert Cruz.
Cruz was convicted of Birnbaum’s murder and still resides at the Fayette State Correctional Institution. However, in a shocking twist to this apparently closed case, there are fears he could stand a chance of having his conviction overturned — all because of an FBI scandal linked to microscopic hair evidence.
The shocking crime
Seventeen-year-old Dawn Marie Birnbaum from Indiana was having some issues at home and, in 1993, was attending a boarding school in Bangor, Maine that her mother hoped would rein in her rebelliousness.
However, she had run away from the school before and, on March 21 1993, she decided to take to the road again. She told a friend she planned to hitch a ride to a truck stop in the hope of finding a trucker with whom she had become romantically involved some months before.
She never made it. Three days later, a motorist in Spring Township, Pennsylvania found the partially clad body of a young girl discarded in a snowdrift at the side of a road off state Route 26. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a length of rope that was still tied around her neck. Beside the body — which was sunk six inches into the snow — was a set of tyre tracks.
Dogged determination by investigators to identify the victim
At first, the victim could not even be identified. She carried no purse, and all lead investigator Rockview State Police Trooper William Madden had to go on was a time of death less than 12 hours earlier. There was also writing on her hand that could be a phone number.
