An almost 50-year-old cold case involving the double murder of a man and woman in Massachusetts may have had a significant breakthrough.
Authorities in Clearwater, Florida, arrested Timothy Scott Joley, 71, and charged him with two counts of homicide for the slayings of Theresa Marcoux, 18, and Mark Harnish, 20, who were found shot dead in 1978 near a highway in Springfield, Mass.
Joley, who has not yet made a plea in the case, was detained Oct. 30 after an unidentified person tipped off Massachusetts’ Hampden District Attorney’s Office earlier that month about the suspect’s alleged involvement in the murders, DA Anthony Gullini said in a statement posted to Facebook Nov. 13.
Before his arrest, authorities say they matched Joley’s fingerprints, kept on state file for almost 25 years, to a latent and seemingly bloody one found on the truck’s passenger-side vent window during the initial crime scene investigation.
“Investigators obtained a fingerprint identification for Joley from the Springfield Police Department,” Gullini told reporters at a Nov. 13 press conference, “which was on file with that department because Joley was fingerprinted as an applicant for a taxi cab license in the year 2000.”