#RememberThem: Linette
You might not have heard of Linette, a lesser-known victim of convicted serial killer John Eric Armstrong. She lived in the Norfolk, Virginia, area in the late 1990s. She was a daughter, sister and mom, at one time a wife. She was beautiful and generous, cooking for people she barely knew, for instance. She was very precious to the sister I spoke with for my research on the case. Her murder also broke the heart of her devoted father.
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| Linette. Image courtesy of the family; see note below. |
Linette is one of the "other" confessions Armstrong made when he was arrested in Detroit in April 2000. When his words started flowing freely, he told Detroit police he actually had killed a lot of other people elsewhere around the country and world while traveling with the Navy aboard the USS Nimitz through the 1990s. Of those 10 confessions this killer made to other murders outside of Detroit, Linette's is the only one that police have been able to pair with an actual crime. Armstrong described encountering a female in Norfolk, strangling her, pushing her outside of the brand-new Jeep he had just bought that year, 1998, then backing up in this dark parking lot, then realizing he had backed over something with his Jeep. Unfortunately, he did not throw Linette far enough away from the Jeep, and her body showed the results of that horrifying fact when later examined by the coroner. The other details of Linette's case fit what Armstrong confessed. Whereas authorities in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand really didn't bother to do diligent searches of missing or murdered females to match with Armstrong's confessions, Norfolk police had successfully found his Virginia case.
But even though police were sure that Armstrong was the killer behind this unsolved crime of a couple years earlier (she was likely the last person he killed before moving to Michigan in 1999), and even though the NCIS in its own investigation listed Linette along with the five women in Detroit as Armstrong's known victims, Linette's family would get no real satisfaction. They had the knowledge that law enforcement figured her killer was Armstrong -- they had a name -- but he was never brought up on charges. When it came right down to it, Virginia knew that Michigan had him for multiple life sentences, so it probably didn't make sense to go through the process and expense of shipping him there and bringing him to trial. There was no hope for him ever to be free again, after all.
Does that help Linette's family? In a way, based on my conversations with her sister and daughter. But the pain never really goes away, no matter how much time passes, that is clear.
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| Linette and her daughter. Image courtesy of the family; see note below. |
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| “I put her to the side and I had to back out and that
is how I hit her,” Armstrong said in his Virginia
confession. The police sketch shows the bloodstains
on the parking lot where Linette’s body was
found, with the rectangle representing the building.
Hair, a bra, a barrette and a white button also were
part of the physical evidence processed from the
scene. Image: Detroit Police files / Norfolk Police files; see note below |
This post is part of a series on this blog that I am calling #RememberThem, a chance to honor the women who encountered the two Detroit serial killers I have researched, John Eric Armstrong and Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins. In this continuing series, with installments dropping every week or so, we'll first learn more about the women Armstrong was known to have killed in Detroit, plus two of his survivors, then we'll turn to the women killed by Atkins. Click on the "Honoring the Victims" label on the left to see all of the parts in the series.
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