New book is on Parkway murders

Author researches 1969 case, including Ted Bundy angle, says case could be solved

By ERIC AVEDISSIAN/Sentinel staff

OCEAN CITY — Christian Barth remembered the first time he heard about the two coeds found murdered in the woods along the Garden State Parkway.

He was 12 or 13 vacationing with his parents at the Jersey shore when they drove past mile marker 31.9 on the parkway.

“Did they ever find out who killed those girls?” his mother asked his father. 

For Barth, an attorney originally from Cherry Hill and who currently resides in Connecticut, that small question opened up an interest in a cold case and led him to write a book about it. 

“It stuck in my mind and I was fascinated by that,” Barth said. 

In 1993, he read a Philadelphia Inquirer article by columnist Larry Lewis about Ted Bundy’s confession to a prison psychologist that he murdered the two young women. 

“That’s what started me into doing an investigation into it,” Barth said.

Barth’s book, “The Garden State Parkway Murders: A Cold Case Mystery” published by WildBlue Press, tells the story about the 1969 murders that made national news. 

Susan Davis of Camp Hill, Pa. and Elizabeth Perry of Excelsior, Minn., both 19-year-old students at Monticello Junior College in Godfrey, Ill., visited Ocean City on Memorial Day weekend in 1969. 

The two had left Syben House, their rooming house on Ninth Street in Ocean City, on May 30 early to travel to Davis’ parents’ home and meet them for a trip to Duke University in North Carolina for her brother’s graduation. 

They stopped at the Somers Point Diner, where they shared a booth with three college men. Both women left the diner unaccompanied.

They never made it to their destination.

Hours later, a State Police trooper found Davis’ car, a 1965 light blue Chevrolet convertible, abandoned on the northbound shoulder near mile marker 31.9 of the Garden State Parkway.

The next day, Davis’ parents reported them missing.

On Monday morning, June 2, the families were alerted that the car discovered matched the description from the missing person bulletin. 

Authorities searched the area where the automobile was discovered.  

Four days after they disappeared, the bodies of Davis and Perry were found in thick, secluded woods. Susan’s body was facedown and nude, with stab wounds to her chest and throat, while her clothes were folded neatly beside her. Elizabeth’s body was fully clothed. The bodies were blanketed under leaves and twigs. 

A manhunt began for the person or persons responsible, but the case still remains unsolved more than 50 years later. 

“Once that seed was planted I just took it from there and found out more information. It was a combination of stumbling upon information that was there and then getting on the phone and talking to the people who worked on the case. Sadly, a lot of them have died in the past 10 years,” Barth said.

Wealth of research

Barth spent nine years researching the book. He dug into newspaper archives, interviewed retired New Jersey State Police detectives, law enforcement officials from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, federal agents, witnesses and the victims’ family members. 

Before embarking on nonfiction, he wrote a fictional account of the case, “The Origins of Infamy,” which was published in 2009. 

“I had gathered all of this research. I figured I might as well tell the real story now and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past nine years,” Barth said.

He mined Temple University’s newspaper archives for information and found clippings from daily and local newspapers about the murders.  

While researching the archives, Barth discovered the name of a suspect and called the retired State Police officers who originally worked the case.

“The more you talk about it you can really immerse yourself in it to get the names of certain people. For example, I talked to one friend who said, ‘Talk to my uncle. He’s a retired trooper,’ and he put me in touch with a guy named Jack Kreps, a retired New Jersey State Trooper who was one of the two guys who was assigned to the case for the first few weeks. He was alive in 2012 when I interviewed him. He told me everything, all the stuff the newspapers didn’t publish.”

Barth’s book begins with Davis and Perry leaving Ocean City and stopping at the diner. Barth uses narrative nonfiction in describing their final morning, weaving a narrative both suspenseful and filled with details. 

“I tried to get in the mind of Truman Capote ‘In Cold Blood’ within the confines of how it would have occurred,” Barth said.

He interviewed the family of the rooming house’s owner and even the waitresses at the Somers Point Diner who worked there and remembered Davis and Perry. 

He noted that a waitress recalled their conversation, noting that Perry told her about going to the ocean.  

“It was very crowded when they were leaving on the morning they were murdered but one of the waitresses did say they were seated by a window table,” Barth said.

Besides the diner, Barth also visited the spot in the woods where the girls were found. 

“When I first visited it years ago I was under the impression that it was the site where it happened. It wasn’t until about four years ago when the owner directed me to the exact location where it was,” Barth said. “You got a feel for what happened.”

Suspects examined

The book examines likely suspects the authorities questioned.

“As much as I’d come across a suspect, as much as there was this compelling circumstantial evidence against him, there was always this evidence that would glaringly show it wasn’t him,” Barth said.

The first suspect was 18-year-old Mark Thomas of Norristown, Pa., who bragged to a store clerk in Philadelphia that he’d known the two girls and met them on the Ocean City Boardwalk. 

According to Barth, the New Jersey State Police interrogated him and gave him a polygraph test. 

“He (Thomas) did not give good answers on the lie detector test,” Barth said.

Thomas was questioned for 34 hours before being released to his attorney and was no longer a suspect. 

Barth said Thomas later became a member of the Aryan Republican Army, a group of white supremacists who robbed banks in the 1990s. 

“I just want to go on record and say I don’t believe he (Thomas) did it. I make that apparent in the book. As certain as I am that he didn’t do it, I am not as certain that he didn’t know anything,” Barth said, adding Thomas was the first person whom the authorities were interested in as a possible suspect. 

Ronnie Walden, another suspect, was a conman from Georgia who passed the polygraph test. Walden was known to steal valuables from women he befriended, but Perry’s expensive jewelry was found on her at the murder scene. 

Barth said Gerald Stano, a serial killer from Florida, confessed to the murders 13 years later. Stano also confessed to killing 31 women in Florida and six in Pennsylvania. However, police said he didn’t get the details “close to what happened” in New Jersey, Barth noted. 

Barth said his research uncovered certain connections between the possible suspects. 

According to police in Whitpain Township, Pa., Mark Thomas and Gerald Stano knew each other, Barth said. 

Police confirmed that Stano’s younger brother Roger Stano was friends with Thomas and that the New Jersey State Police investigated Roger in 1969, according to Barth.

“Gerald Stano lived next to Ted Bundy on death row and they knew one another. The coincidences are bizarre,” Barth said.

Ted Bundy connection

Bundy was one of America’s most notorious serial killers who kidnapped, raped and murdered young women in multiple states during the 1970s. He confessed to 30 homicides between 1974 and 1978 but the total number of murders is unconfirmed and may be higher. Bundy was executed in 1989 at Florida State Prison in Raiford, Fla. 

Although Barth’s novel concludes that Bundy murdered Davis and Perry, the nonfiction account includes tantalizing information he learned from his investigation. 

Barth interviewed one of Bundy’s aunts in Philadelphia and learned that Bundy’s family had a connection to Ocean City.

Barth said he got “lucky” and called her at the right time. She spoke to him for two hours and provided information about Bundy’s upbringing that was inconsistent with the common narrative in the media.

Barth said Bundy’s aunt told him details about the family that were previously published about Bundy and the family were not true. 

Barth said he also communicated with Bundy’s cousin, who also told him details of Bundy’s early family life of abuse were “complete nonsense”

“It was a narrative they’re (the media) spinning to find a reason,” for Bundy’s behavior, Barth said.

“You have this stereotypical image of what probably based on what you’ve seen on TV of what kind of family a serial killer comes from,” Barth said. “She (Bundy’s aunt) was completely nice and you felt a lot of compassion. Understandably we focus on the victim and the victim’s families but the killer’s family themselves have a very big cross to bear when it comes to this. Imagine the guilt that they feel that one of their family members had murdered these people.”

Barth said Bundy’s aunt denied that Bundy was involved in the murders of Davis and Perry.

According to Barth, she said the FBI contacted her long before Bundy was executed and asked her about the 1969 Garden State Parkway case. 

“That was another thing that I didn’t know had occurred, that the FBI had interviewed her. It made me plumb even further to see when did the State Police have Bundy as a person of interest in this case?” Barth said. 

Barth said when Bundy was arrested in Utah in 1975, the FBI checked with other agencies nationwide to detect any similarities in other cold cases and the Garden State Parkway murders was one of them. 

Barth writes that Dr. Arthur Norman, a clinical forensic psychologist and member of Bundy’s defense team, interviewed Bundy in 1986 on death row. Out of nowhere, Bundy started talking about Ocean City. 

Bundy told Norman that while he was living in Philadelphia in 1969, he traveled to New York City by train and viewed violent pornography in Times Square. He then said that he drove to the Jersey shore and watched young women on the beach. 

According to Barth, Bundy talked in the third person when he told Norman, “You know, it’s like an overwhelming kind of vision, eventually found himself tearing around that place for a couple of days. And eventually, without really planning anything, he picked up a couple of young girls. And ended up with the first time he had ever done it. So when he left the coast, it was not just getting away, it was more like an escape.”

Barth said Norman was certain Bundy alluded to the Garden State Parkway murders. 

Following Bundy’s execution in 1989, Norman told then-Atlantic City Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz about Bundy’s possible connection to the Garden State Parkway murders. Blitz concluded it was hearsay evidence and could not be used. 

“He (Bundy) emphasized that he didn’t kill anyone then, he only tried to abduct a woman. If a woman had been abducted by Ted Bundy you’d remember being abducted or someone trying to be abducted for the rest of your life,” Barth said. “How did that never come out? Either he made it up or sadly maybe he was cryptically referencing that he had in fact killed Susan and Elizabeth.”

Barth said the Pennsylvania and New Jersey State Police remain silent about the investigation and declined comment. Many of the homicide detectives in Pennsylvania who worked on the case are deceased now, Barth said.

In 1989, right before his execution, Bundy sat with noted psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis for a final interview, “to establish his own legacy on his own terms and in his own words,” Barth wrote. 

During the interview, Bundy talked about visiting Ocean City in 1969.

“In the spring, I went to Ocean City. Ocean City, New Jersey,” Bundy told Lewis. “OK, so I was just stalking around the downtown area of this small resort community and I saw a young woman walking along. … I didn’t actually kill someone this time, but I really for the first time approached a victim, spoke to her, tried to abduct her and she escaped. But that was frightening in its own way. But that was the first — the kind of step that you just — that you don’t — that I couldn’t ever return from.”  

Barth said Bundy mentioned those two occasions but did not reference he had been to Ocean City when he was younger. 

“The thing that struck me was that he had been there several times over the years and that had never been disclosed before until I found it out and that he makes these two unsolicited references in 1986 and 1989. No one pulled it out of him. He said it himself. I just thought it was fascinating, getting into his mind like that, why he would choose to discuss Ocean City right before he died as opposed to anything else,” Barth said.

“She had said they had been to Ocean City several times over the years,” Barth said. “In the extent that serial killers operate within the certain confines certainly lends itself to the fact that he had ample time to scope out the territory if that’s what he wanted to do.”

Bundy’s aunt told Barth the family had a house on 26th Street in Ocean City, but research turned up no solid leads. 

‘It was very crowded when they were leaving on the morning they were murdered, but one of the waitresses did say they were seated at a window table.’

–Author Christian Barth on the victims who left Ocean City and stopped in  Somers Point for breakfast

Conclusions 

In the book, Barth sets forth plausible scenarios as to what could have happened to the two coeds in addition to referencing the suspects.

“I put in there a whole serial profile analysis to the extent that I’m capable of doing, that as an amateur profiler using the data and the most recent criteria the FBI uses to come up with a profile to who it could have been as well in addition to these other guys,” Barth said.

He notes the early morning hour of the murder raises a host of questions. 

“It happened in broad daylight, the first thing in the morning on a busy weekend. Any person who did that obviously they were mentally ill, it was a sex crime even though no rape was involved, but what had always struck me as fascinating as to the time it happened,” Barth said.

He surmised the suspect could have frequented one of the area’s all-night bars. The area had many such nightclubs, he said, such as Tony Mart’s, the Dunes and Bay Shores Café. 

“Whoever did this was up all night drinking, and had an episode. Whether that trigger was a drug that triggered the need to do this,” Barth said. “I think all of those circumstances led themselves to what had happened.”

Barth said he wants readers to start asking questions about the murders and reinvigorate attention back to the cold case. 

“I want this to be solved. I think it’s an absolute tragedy what happened to these poor young women,” Barth said. “I know there are a lot of cold cases out there and that the State Police have limited resources. However, I’ve given stuff in this book that frankly don’t know they have knowledge of.” 

While many of the detectives who worked the case are gone, the evidence is not, Barth said, adding that new forensic technology could help find out who killed those two coeds along the Garden State Parkway more than 50 years ago.

The book is available at Sun Rose Words & Music on Asbury Avenue, Ocean City, and as an E-book on Amazon Kindle.