TODAY'S TWD: CRASH IN THE EVERGLADES

I never know where my TV investigations will take me online....

I was looking for information about WNKW and its connection to the ABC series 'Invasion' - about the strange alien lights which took possession of the inhabitants of Homestead, Florida, during a hurricane. So while watching the pilot episode, Everglades Park Ranger Russell Varon told his brother-in-law Dave about a plane crash in the preserve back in 1996.

Although he was referring to a plane crash that later played into the 'Invasion' storyline, it may have been influenced by a real world tragedy, that of ValuJet Flight 592. If so, details of that case would have been just as interesting as the plotline in 'Invasion'.....

When ValuJet Flight 592, en route from Miami to Atlanta, crashed in the Florida Everglades on May 11, 1996, 109 people died. Among them was 38-year-old Delmarie Walker, mother of two teen-aged children and wife of a disabled Pennsylvania state policeman.

In February 1997, well before the ValuJet crash suits could be settled or go to trail, the College Park, Georgia, police announced that they were closing their investigation into the March 25, 1996, murder of 48-year-old Catherine Holmes. “Even though we can't charge [Delmarie Walker], we feel the evidence shows she was the suspect who committed this crime,” the lead investigator told the Journal Constitution.

Holmes had choked to death on some object, possibly a sock, which had been forced into her throat. In the course of an apparent struggle she had received more than twenty stab wounds. Hogtied with a pillowcase covering her head, Holmes died cluching tufts of her assailant’s hair.

Then Walker died in the ValuJet crash in the Everglades. Eight months later (after delays attributed to the Olympic bombing) the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab confirmed that Walker’s hair matched the hair found in Holmes’ grasp and that Walker’s fingerprints were found in Holmes’ apartment. Evidence that Holmes had previously written checks to Walker and that Holmes was known to have received $1,800 from her mother shortly before her death was apparently sufficient to convince police that Walker had murdered Holmes in a dispute over money.

However, because Walker’s body was never recovered from the Everglades, it was not possible to verify a match between Walker’s DNA and the blood spatter at the murder scene. Thus, the evidence on which the police based their conclusion that Walker was Holmes’ murderer and their consequent decision to close the investigation was largely circumstantial and arguably less than conclusive.

What if the televersion of DelMarie Walker's body became a hybrid of the creatures, as did Sheriff Tom Underlay's in that 1996 plane crash? Could they protect her from the authorities by hiding her in Homestead?

Here's the full story by Stephen Dresch......

BCnU!
Toby O'B