A lot of people reading the site are asking if they can help.
You already ARE helping, just by taking the time to learn about Karen's death, and the
insanity that has taken place in Decatur--in Alabama--since March 12, 1999.
When you get killed, the law doesn't consider it a crime against you.
It's a crime against the State of Alabama. You are nothing.
There have been many times in the past four years I said "There's been a crime against
the State, and the State doesn't care." The delays in forensics testing of all kinds is an
atrocity of the highest order, and things are worse now than they were four years ago. If
someone were almost dead--a John Doe found on the side of the road--the emergency
room and the doctor are required to do anything and everything in their power to save
that life, no matter the cost, no matter the inconvenience. If a lab test might save that life,
then the lab tech comes into the hospital in the middle of the night, and the hospital eats
the cost of the testing. Otherwise, they'd be on the wrong end of a multi-million dollar
lawsuit. But if someone IS dead, and they were intentionally killed, the State of Alabama
may get around to doing the lab tests to "diagnose" the crime in a year, two years, or even
longer. In the meantime, a few lives are destroyed. And many lives are in danger. What
could be a higher priority than that?
Imagine the difference in this story if DNA testing had been done within a month of the
crime. There would have been no time for the speculation and the rumors to
begin...much less to take on a life of their own, as has happened here.
An uninformed public (much less a MISinformed one) assumes the investigators MUST
be doing something wrong if a high-profile crime is not solved within a few weeks.
Maybe everyone should remember that within a few hours of my 911 call, enough trace
evidence was collected to match the killer to the crime. And within a few weeks of the
crime, DWM half-confessed to the crime to his uncle and half-killed himself when
confronted about his involvement. At that point, all investigators could do was wait on
forensics, keep their mouth shut, and investigate and re-investigate every aspect of the
crime, always looking for more evidence. And they found a mountain of it, all pointing
directly at DWM.
I hope you'll remember what's important here: that Karen Tipton is dead, that
DWM killed her intentionally, and that he robbed her, subjected her to sadistic
sexual torture, and then killed her. He's matched to the crime through two hairs,
matched to him through DNA testing. And everything else is a side show.