Idaho's longest-serving death row inmate, Thomas Eugene Creech, who has admitted to killing dozens of people and been convicted of five murders, was named a suspect in the fatal shooting of a man nearly 50 years ago in California.
The victim, Daniel Walker, was killed near Needles, in eastern Bernardino County, on Oct. 1, 1974. Walker and a passenger were resting in his van on Interstate 40 when Walker "was awakened by an unknown suspect and was shot multiple times" before the suspect fled, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said in a news release on Wednesday.
The passenger escaped and flagged down a passing driver. Walker was taken to the hospital where he died from his injuries, authorities said.
The sheriff's department investigated the murder at the time and exhausted all leads. Over the years, investigators revisited the case but were unable to develop any leads.
The attacker's identity went unknown for nearly five decades.
In November, there was a break in the case when detectives "obtained additional information related to the murder" and identified Creech, 73, as the suspect, the sheriff's department said. The agency said it worked with the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office in Idaho to "corroborate intimate details from statements Creech made regarding Daniel’s murder."
In a statement Friday, the Federal Defender Services of Idaho, which is representing Creech, addressed the new allegations and accused San Bernardino authorities of building its case off of “statements that Mr. Creech made to law enforcement officials decades ago under unclear circumstances and during a time period in which police officers from around the country were spoon-feeding Mr. Creech information to try to clear cases based on the fantasy that he committed 50 murders.”
The state sought the death penalty against Creech in 1981 after he was convicted of murdering a fellow inmate, 23-year-old David Dale Jensen, at the Idaho Department of Correction. Creech, who was serving four life sentences at the time, beat Jensen with a battery-filled sock and repeatedly stomped on his face and neck, the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office said in a news release.
Months before Jensen’s death, Creech had stabbed another inmate in hopes "of getting transferred to his preferred housing unit," according to the news release.
"When that did not work, he resorted to killing Mr. Jensen," prosecutors said.
Creech has been convicted of three killings in Idaho, one in Oregon and a separate murder in California. He has admitted to killing upward of 40 people, according to the district attorney's office.
The Federal Defender Services of Idaho filed a petition requesting to have his death sentence commuted to life without parole, saying in an October news release that he was "a changed man."
Creech apologized for the killings, saying in a statement released by his attorneys that he was "really remorseful and sorry for all of the crimes I've committed."
Last week, the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office requested that the death sentence be upheld. The Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole has not yet announced its recommendation.