A long-ago murder solved only in secret
By Mike Kelly
Candy Clothier was quiet, kind, and smart. She wrote poetry. And everybody who knew her loved her, including me back when I was 17. She had been my girlfriend for three years when, at the age of 16, she was murdered.
But that was only the beginning of the tragedy of Candy’s death. Today, more than four decades later, justice is still being denied to her and those who loved her.
The story is well known to those who lived in the Philadelphia area back then. On the cool, blustery evening of March 9, 1968, Candy had left her home in the city’s Northeast to meet me at the gas station where I worked. She never arrived.
For days, the police questioned people (including me, repeatedly) and conducted massive searches. Rumors were rampant: Candy had run away to a hippie community; Candy had been spotted getting into a car; Candy had been seen here and seen there.
More than a month later, on April 14, three fishermen found her decomposed body in Neshaminy Creek. She had been stuffed into a laundry bag.
Now the cops had a murder to investigate. But the Philadelphia police ran from the case, dropping it in the lap of officials in Bucks County, where the body was found.
Naturally, as Candy’s boyfriend, I was a suspect for a time. But the fact is that the cops in Bucks were baffled. They questioned anyone even remotely associated with Candy – including, as it turns out, the actual killers – and came up totally empty-handed.
Six months later, Candy’s father, a Philadelphia fireman, died of a heart attack in his car outside the firehouse, still not knowing who killed his daughter. Elmer Clothier had saved lives, and he lost his to what we all believed was a broken heart.
A murder can make victims of the survivors, too. Candy’s sister could certainly tell you that the family’s lives would never be the same.
For my part, Candy has never completely left me. I visit her grave to this day.
But there’s a greater injustice here, and it begins with one startling fact: Candy’s murder has been solved. Her killers have been identified. The police know who they are. But the Bucks County district attorney is refusing to reveal their names.
In 2005, a woman came forward to tell authorities she had provided the laundry bag Candy was stuffed into. That pivotal clue helped the District Attorney’s Office and Northampton police crack the case.
The authorities now believe Candy was walking to catch a trackless trolley when she accepted a ride from two men who lived in the neighborhood, one of whom she knew. They are thought to have forcibly injected her with an unknown drug that caused her death.
Panicked, they drove to a friend’s house, authorities believe, where they got the bag that they stuffed Candy’s body into, tying it closed with the yellow sweater she was wearing that night. Then they drove to the creek and threw it off a bridge.
And then they lived their lives.
They had careers. Kids of their own. Probably went to Little League practices and dance recitals. Enjoyed Christmases and Thanksgivings and Fourth of July barbecues and graduations and grandchildren.
Candy never had any of that. Neither did the rest of her family. That’s the injustice.
The killers were from upstanding families, one of the investigating officers told me in confidence. “Pillars of the community” is how he put it.
As it turns out, the killers have all died, and, if the universe makes any kind of sense, are finally facing the justice they never faced here. But who were they? If the district attorney has his way, we’ll never know.
In announcing last year that authorities had finally identified Candy’s killers, David Heckler, the Bucks D.A., said it “would be wrong to disclose their names,” which could “blacken their family’s names or impact unfairly on their relatives.” They would “never have the opportunity to defend themselves.”
Funny, Candy never had a chance to defend herself either. Neither did her father – a man who was a pillar of the community himself.
Since Heckler’s announcement, I’ve sought legal recourse and media attention without success. Now I’m afraid nobody will ever face the consequences of Candy’s murder – nobody, that is, except for Candy and her family.
For 42 years, Candy’s killers got away with murder. Now they could get away with it forever.
The killers have been, in a sense, exonerated. The absence of a guilty verdict is a lot like a not-guilty verdict. In not releasing their identities, Heckler is releasing them from earthly justice – the very justice he is sworn to uphold.
“To protect and to serve” goes the motto. To protect and serve whom? Certainly not Candy. Certainly not the law-abiding citizens who loved her. So who is being protected, and why?
An innocent 16-year-old girl with her entire life ahead of her was killed. And the district attorney, an elected official and servant of the people, knows who killed her. But he refuses to tell the people who entrusted him to hold criminals responsible.
Our trust is being broken, and that’s the greatest injustice of all.
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Mike Kelly, a Philadelphia native, lives in Sarasota, Fla. He can be reached at mdkelly2@verizon.net.
