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THE PLAIN DEALER
Niece Seeks Truth About 1982 Killing Sunday, October 09, 2005
Regina Brett Time faded everything but the smile. The white teeth glow from the old photographs taken 23 days before Betty Jane Mottinger was murdered. On the back of the snapshots someone wrote the date in pen: July 18th, 1982. Janie, as her family called her, was abducted, stabbed, wrapped in a paint-spattered dropcloth and dumped in a soybean field near Elgin, Ohio, where she had worked as a postmaster. Pat Wakefield holds these last pictures of life as tenderly as if they were Janie's last breaths. Janie is wearing a flowery blue, short-sleeved top. She has brown wavy hair. In one photo, she sits with her husband. In the other, she's linked arm in arm with her sister, Pat's mother. Pat remembers when Janie graduated from high school. She can still see her walk across the stage. For some reason Pat remembers her shoes. All the other girls wore heels except Janie. Memory is a funny thing. It sifts and sorts, and comes up with a few moments that stick to the heart. Pat, who is 60, was 13 years younger than Janie. She remembers Janie as a sweet lady, bright, happy -- and short. Janie's husband once remodeled the kitchen and lowered the counters so she could reach them. Pat remembers getting the call saying that her aunt was missing, and the agonizing weeks that followed. She remembers the funeral. The TV reporters. The anger. The body so decomposed they cremated the remains. "It's not like you could say goodbye," Pat said. "There was this little box to say goodbye to." Pat called me after reading about John Spirko, the man due to be executed in November for killing Janie. Pat wants people to know two things: She wants them to know her aunt was more than a victim. And she wants them to know she's not sure that the man on Death Row killed her aunt. "She was a sister, my aunt, a daughter," Pat said. "I want her seen as a funny, lovely lady who we miss having in our life." Pat wants someone to pay for her aunt's death, but she wants to be sure it's the right person. The more she reads, the less she's sure it's Spirko. No physical evidence links him to the crime. None of the fingerprints from the post office matched Spirko. Keys found at the scene were not linked to Spirko. The friend the state said committed the crime with Spirko was in North Carolina at the time. The integrity of the key investigator has been questioned by his own co-workers. On top of that, years ago another man came forward to say someone else killed Janie. The parole board meets on Tuesday to decide Spirko's fate. Pat comes from a private family that never talked much about the murder. Her uncle is adamant that Spirko did it because Spirko confessed. Or so the lead postal inspector said. But the inspector's co-worker said he personally witnessed "unprofessional comments and, in some instances, conduct [bordering] on criminal" by that same inspector. Pat's mom, Evelyn, was Janie's oldest sibling. Evelyn is 80 and lives with Pat. Pat doesn't talk to her about the case. "I don't think she ever got over it," Pat said. "My mom never dealt with the grief. She carried it around." Pat carries around a knot in her stomach from all the doubt. "I don't want this man executed," Pat said. "I don't want someone saying two months after the execution, 'We killed the wrong man.' "
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