Cold case files

In the world of the crime reporting, July 2005 was a very long time ago. Ask most cops and court aficionados and they’ll tell you that the news then is about as good as ancient history.

During these 16 months, Christopher Porco of Bethlehem was tried and convicted of killing his father and seriously injuring his mother. Also arrested –and convicted –during this time was murderer Shawn Doyle of Hudson Falls, who bound and gagged 33-year-old Lori Leonard, then crammed her body unceremoniously in a toolbox and dumped it in the Champlain Canal. Authorities also managed to track down and elicit a confession from Raymond DiLorenzo, who admitted to unloading a rifle into his estranged wife’s face while she was parked at a convenient store in Glens Falls with their 13-year old daughter in the back seat.

But among these high profile cases, there are some that just happen to fly beneath the radar long enough to drop off the precipice of media coverage into the realm of distant recollection. Such is the situation with the missing persons and subsequent murder investigation of 19-year-old Christina White, who vanished from a rural trailer park in Milton just five days before her birthday.

By all published acounts, Christina was a quiet and attractive young woman who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. The petite community college-student was known to flee her home at the Stockade trailer park when she was distraught and was said to suffer from bi-polar disorder. Neighbors reported last seeing her walking with a group of men toward an area where adolescents are known to congregate.

Tasked with finding White during the summer of July 2005 and now her killer are the stalwart deputies of the Saratoga County Sheriff’s Department, who certainly have done their part to investigate this case: they issued a press release when the troubled girl went missing, then followed it up with another press release when her skeletal remains were found dumped in the Daketown Forest, a scant 100 feet away from the roadway.

Mind you, it took sheriff’s investigators nine months to crack a lead in the White case and the only reason they did was because a hiker walking his dog through the forest happened to stumble over her remains. They also didn’t need much help finding the cause of death –at least one stab wound to the abdomen –because the county coroner took care of that for them.

Some of Christina’s neighbors took a critical approach toward investigators, saying they hadn’t worked hard enough to find her when she first disappeared. Undersheriff Michael Woodcock fired back, insisting that detectives “worked this case hard.”

Sure they did. That is, if you consider faxing a missing person’s poster to media outlets hard work or monitoring the cell phone calls and bank records of a dead woman a quality investigation.

When White disappeared, Sheriff James Bowen –the longest tenured and possibly most recalcitrant regulator in New York –at least had the excuse that his department was short staffed and undermanned to properly police the county’s burgeoning population. That all changed in November, when the county approved the hiring of 23 additional personnel for the sheriff’s department –including three detectives and 10 deputies –at a cost of $1.2 million or an average of $52,000 per employee.

And apparently, the extra manpower hasn’t helped much.

Christina’s murderer continues to walk free and the sheriff’s department continues to not concern itself with the case. Media sources hovered around the finding of the body in mid-march, but have since ignored the case; the last article to even mention the homicide hit the streets nearly six months ago.

Frustrated with this inaction, a disgruntled relative has decided to make an appeal to the Web community for help in solving Christina's murder; any help. Hopefully, someone who knew this young woman in life and might have an inkling of how she met her untimely death will respond to this plea for information or this post.

Unlike the sheriff’s department and the fickle media, there are indeed people who remember Christina and are deeply grief stricken by her grisly death, especially seeing as though her case seems to be on the bottom of a growing pile of investigation files. What is a more stark reality is that there is at least one person –and probably many more –who remember with vivid detail her cold-blooded murder, but haven't the fortitude to come forward with information. Hopefully, these people are leading painfully tortured lives.