Murder On The Cape

A Woman Is Killed And Almost Everyone Could Be A Suspect

(CBS)  It was the first homicide in Truro in 30 years and it sent Williams into high gear, finding sources, working the phones. It was Sunday, Jan. 6th, 2002.

"Surprisingly, you know, I knew the guy who found the body. And next thing I know I'm calling him and talking to him about it," Williams recalls.

Williams was calling Tim Arnold, another former boyfriend of Christa's, who lived just through the woods from her house. Arnold’s story was that he had simply dropped by the house at 4:30 that afternoon to return a flashlight and instead got the shock of his life.

"He sees Christa lying on the floor in a sort of a kitchen hallway area and he sees Ava near her mother’s body," Williams explains.

Arnold later told police little Ava was trying to nurse. He said he’d scooped her up and ran outside. He then called 911.

Christa was dead, lying in a hallway off the kitchen. "She was bruised up, looked like there had been some sort of altercation that she had been in," Williams explains.

She was half naked, and stabbed once through the left lung. "The blade went through the body and into the kitchen floor beneath her body," Williams tells Spencer.

The front door was smashed - there were drag marks on the ground outside and several personal items scattered in the drive.

The disarray continued inside. Shocked EMTs carelessly grabbed a blanket from the house to cover Christa’s body. Soon, all of Truro knew what had happened.

"We got a phone call that Christa had been murdered," Tony Jackett remembers.

His reaction? Jackett says he felt just disbelief and that the crime just seemed so senseless.

With all the elements of a classic mystery, sensational reports of the murder on Cape Cod topped the news around the country, leaving Christa’s nervous neighbors with no reason to suspect that it would take police literally years to solve this crime, not that they didn’t have plenty of suspects.

"It became some sort, some kind of awful parlor game, you know, in living rooms on the outer cape. You’d sit around and once again go through it, trying to figure out, could it have been Tim? Could it have been Tony? How did it go down?" Williams remembers.

By the spring of 2005, townspeople were starting to think police never would figure out who killed Christa Worthington.

The killing left the townspeople of Truro edgy, nervous, and silently wondering if the killer might be one of them. "Who else would come down to the end of the world in January and do this?" Williams wonders. "You think, 'It's gotta be someone who is here, 'cause no one comes here in January.'"

The best potential lead to the murderer’s identity was DNA found on Christa’s body.

"It’s DNA of an unknown male that’s consistent with someone having had sexual relations and it’s that DNA we seek to match," explains District Attorney Michael O’Keefe. According to him, investigators first zeroed in on her immediate circle, especially past boyfriends.

All the while waiting for the crime lab to find a DNA match, first there was the neighbor and former boyfriend Tim Arnold. Not only had he found the body, but his semen would turn up on the blanket thrown over Christa; then again, they had lived together for a time in the house.

"Tim Arnold was one of the few men under the age of, you know, 70 or whatever, in Truro year round," says Christa's friend Steve Radlauer.

Radlauer says her relationship with Arnold, at times contentious, apparently was over. "I don’t think that she ever entertained the idea that this was going to develop into a long term relationship, that they were going to get married or anything like that."

But Radlauer acknowledges Arnold may have had that idea. "From what I understand, he was more serious about that as a long term possibility than she was."