Post by Scumhunter on Oct 17, 2016 1:39:28 GMT -5
(Above photo credit: Washoe County Sheriff's Office website)
March 28, 2006 was a cold, snowy Tuesday.
Joanne Kohls, now 59, hadn’t heard from her parents Albert and Joan Musalo in a couple of days. This was atypical. The family was tight knit and used to talk nearly every day.
Kohls tried phoning to invite her parents to dinner, but it kept ringing and ringing with no answer. The Musalos lived at Montreux, an upscale gated community along Mt. Rose Highway, and Kohls contacted security to go knock on their door fearing a power outage.
Security went, but there was no answer.
Finally, Kohls decided to drive over with her husband. She said she expected the power had been out or they both were in bed with the flu. She and her husband arrived and entered the house.
They called out. No answer. That’s when Kohls noticed something that made her heart drop: mud tracked in the home. Her mother always kept the house immaculate.
“That was the point when I realized something was very, very wrong,” she said. “I think the whole drive up there I must have been in some other reality of, ‘Oh, we’re going to find them and we’ll be home soon.’”
Kohls asked her husband to go down the hallway to the master bedroom. It was there her suspicions were confirmed.
The Musalos were both dead from gunshot wounds.
An old-school couple
The Musalos, both in their 70s at the time of their deaths, were an old-school couple. They both grew up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, meeting each other while working for the power company in the borough. Eventually they married, staying together for the next 53 years.
"My dad was very bright, very intelligent. Active. He skied, golfed, played tennis," Kohls said.
Mr. Musalo worked as a flight engineer for Pan American Airlines before retiring in 1988. The family often moved because of his work, including stints on both coasts and in Europe.
Mrs. Musalo stayed home to take care of the children, Joanne and her three siblings. Kohls said her mother was incredibly social and loved throwing dinner parties.
“She loved to cook,” Kohls said. “Loved to have people over for dinner. It was always a good meal. You never went over and didn’t have something to eat.”
The Musalos moved to Reno two years before their murders out of a desire to be closer to Kohls and her family, as well as to be closer to more health care services in their older age, although Kohls added they never had health problems and were incredibly active. The couple walked together every day.
He had amassed a sizable financial portfolio over the years through smart investments, but even with the money, they didn’t show a lot of flash. They owned a single, older-model Lincoln Town Car and spent most of their time with each other.
"My dad had retired in 1988, so he’d been retired for a while and they spent pretty much all of their time together," Kohls said. "They only had one car so they were together most of the time."
Even their home at Montreux, valued at $1.2 million in 2006, was modest compared with many of the other houses at the community.
“My parents grew up in the Depression so they were both very frugal people,” Kohls said. “They almost never went out to eat if it wasn’t a two-for-one."
Someone with expertise
Part of what makes the Musalos' murders so perplexing to both the family and investigators is the nature of the crime. Lt. Tom Green of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, who worked the case as a detective 10 years ago, said it appears they were targeted, but for what remains a mystery.
Nothing of significant value was taken and the perpetrator – identified as a male assailant through DNA – seemed to have intimate knowledge of the house as there were no signs of forced entry.
Even more telling, Green said, is a piece of evidence unreleased to the media until now: The Musalos’ phone lines were cut.
Green checked multiple leads, but nothing came of them. The Musalos never hired any outside help who would have knowledge of the house and Green investigated everyone from the family to workers at Montreux. Still nothing.
Rumors started swirling - they were connected to the Mafia or in witness protection - all of them unfounded, Green said.
“We found nothing secret in their life that would have indicated that they put themselves in a sort of risk category,” he said. “That’s something we often look at in homicides. Is the victim involved in risky behavior? Are they involved in drugs and other illicit activities? We were never able to find anything with the Musalos.”
Green said the Musalos last known contact with anyone was a furniture salesman on March 27 at around noon. That morning's paper was inside the house and the computer logged Internet activity up until the night, showing they'd been home and active for some time.
The mud on the floor indicated the attack happened during the overnight hours into the morning of March 28, Green said. Snow had covered the ground after that point.
Footprints led out the back of the house and over a fence that runs the perimeter of Montreux. Once the snow thawed, detectives found an impression and tracked it, but didn’t turn anything up. Green said the footprint could not be ruled out as belonging to the attacker.
The working theory is the killer cut the phone lines, entered the house and blitz-attacked the Musalos as they slept.
“Whoever did this took the time, understood the area, because the risk to the offender would have been high,” Green said. “To think that someone drove through the gate, went in to this Montreux area and did this just randomly is just too far-fetched.”
But detectives couldn't find any grudges. In fact, the couple was almost universally well-liked.
Further complicating the case is that Green can’t find a connection with other crimes in the area going back several decades.
“There’s been no similar crimes in the area since or before going back to 1960 in our homicide files,” he said. “We’ve only had one other case where phone lines were cut. Our partners in the Reno Police Department in the last 30 years have never worked a homicide where phone lines were cut. That cut phone line is significant, but what significance to this case is still a piece of the puzzle we don’t know.”
A push in the right direction
Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds of solving a 10-year-old investigation, Green said they have plenty to work with and only need steering in the right direction. While the killer showed some expertise, he left behind valuable evidence, including DNA and ballistics.
Green said the investigation just needs that last bit of information to point them to the suspect. He's hoping the 10-year anniversary will jog someone's memory about something that seemed off during that time.
"A sudden move. An unnatural interest in the case. That’s the nugget that we’re looking for," he said. "The forensic evidence will do the rest."
And in this case, Green said, somebody knows something.
“It’s rare in murder cases to have psychopathic killers, killers that just lack empathy,” he said. “There’s a good chance that in this case, the offender has said something to someone and that someone just needs to come forward and do the right thing and the evidence will guide us in the direction of whether they were involved or not.”
As for Kohls, she and her family have worked diligently over the years since, trying to do anything possible to find some way to bring the killer to justice.
“It would be a huge burden relieved,” she said. “I don’t believe in closure. How do you ever close loving somebody you lose? But it would hopefully answer some questions.”
The family erected billboards in 2008 and offered a $30,000 reward. They upped that reward to $50,000 this year. Secret Witness is offering a $2,500 reward for each victim as well.
She’s still holding out hope one day she’ll have some answers.
How to help
Anyone with information about the Musalos' murders can contact the Washoe County Sheriff's Office at 775-328-3320 or submit a tip at bit.ly/1LNIDh7. People can also submit tips to Secret Witness at 775-322-4900 or secretwitness.com.
www.rgj.com/story/news/crime/2016/03/27/unsolved-10-years-gone-musalo-murder-remains-mystery/82278524/
www.washoesheriff.com/sub.php?page=unsolved-homicides (Scroll down for Albert & Jean Musalo case)
Thoughts?
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