Sergeant John Elliott
speaker
81 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Sergeant John Elliott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
For about a year, I did burglary investigations, a little time in our special victims unit, and then I went to our major crimes homicide unit. And then... My sergeant came to me and said we had a grant to work on cold cases. I remember opening up this closet in the office that we worked at and all these binders were stacked all over the place. So I started going through them.
I would stay after work at night and researching these cases, reading about it. I remember finding this one and seeing the evidence that was there. We still had a dress and some other items. I started chipping away at it. So in 2007 is when I started working on it. Started making phone calls.
speaking with the analysts I knew at the DNA lab and with the state police, and they started working on little by little as well.
We told him that we didn't want to give up on the case, but you also don't want to give him any type of promises. The last thing you'll do is, especially a case this long, is make a promise to something you can't fulfill. These cases are very difficult, but the Belk family was overly appreciative of us, very supportive.
I thought as much items that we had and recovered and preserved, something should have been there that we could have made an identification or got a usable DNA profile of a suspect.
One of our evidence technicians packaged the evidence that we had retained and sent it to the lab and just requested everything be tested. I believe when it got to the lab, it just sat on the shelf up there because they're so backed up. They were struggling just to get DNA processed for cases that had court dates.
And these DNA analysts that are already overworked, if they had extra time, they would start working on these cold cases.
The DNA analyst, she was the one that helped me with this case. She was the one that looked at the evidence, processed it. She was able to identify semen that was on her dress. However, she classified it as too degraded to get any type of DNA profile.
Her suggestion was to hold off until technology gets better. She just said that there's semen there. Right now, with what we can do, she classified it as degraded and that, in her opinion, years from now, the semen might have some value based on new technology.
Vicky's case occurred in August of 1979. And if you remember, the autopsy during that process recovered a projectile.
Our projectile that was recovered from Vicki Belk was later tested with another robbery case that occurred in the same area because that type of gun was found in the robbery and the shooting. But that projectile stayed with that evidence from that robbery case, and that evidence later got destroyed. So we did not have that projectile.
So our lab director, Noelle Gurman, learns about the MVAC instrument. And in reviewing our cold cases, she believed that Vicky's dress was a good piece of evidence which the MVAC could be used for. June of 2022, we outsourced it to another lab that had that instrument. They processed the dress for us, gave us the filters. The filters were later processed for DNA.
We obtained a full profile from those filters.
I'll never forget, I was on a search warrant in another county, and she called me, but I was in the middle of a search warrant. I couldn't answer the phone, so I texted her back right away, and I said, call you in a few. She texted, OMG, OMG, Belk, with exclamation points. I called her, and she's like, we got a name. And I remember it was yesterday.
That was one of the unique calls you'll never forget.
Well, the first thing I thought, she told me the name Andre Taylor, and I said, I know that name is not in the case file. And I had no idea who this guy was. Sometimes in these cold cases, it's not a surprise that whoever the perpetrator is, their name's in the case file. They get either interviewed or it's a family member or someone along those lines.
This guy was completely stranger to this case file. Never heard or seen his name anywhere.
Since Vicky's murder, he had two other murder arrests, a lot of drug-related arrests, and just been in and out of the criminal justice system up until his 50s. But the initial information I was finding in my databases, we still didn't have a correlation to Charles County.
Everything was in Washington, D.C., and then when I got all his arrest reports, he had this stolen vehicle report from May of 1979. He gives his home address in Bryan's Road, which I later determined to be four miles away from where Vicky was found. So that was our connection.
The ballistics examination back then by the experts indicated, and they gave the opinion that it was a .32 caliber revolver. However, no gun was found at the scene, nothing. We didn't know anything about that. The following March, Andreas Taylor is arrested with a .32 caliber revolver.
Showing 21–40 of 81 · page 2 of 5
← Previous
Next →