Indiana
Man gets 55 years for killing man found in tub
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — An Indianapolis man has been sentenced to 55 years in prison for the 2018 fatal shooting of a man whose body was found in a bathtub at the gunman’s home.
Dwight Shotts was sentenced Thursday for the killing of Anthony Cline. A Marion County jury had convicted him of murder last month in Cline’s death.
Cline’s body was discovered in a bathtub inside Shotts’ house on April 30, 2018 after police received two 911 calls. The first caller said Shotts claimed to be suicidal, had a gun and there was a body in his home.
Shotts placed the second 911 and told a dispatcher”there’s a guy dead in my house,” according to the county prosecutor’s office. He said during the call that he had shot a man in his bathroom a week before and told the dispatcher that he was armed and suicidal.
When officers arrived at Shotts’ residence he exited his garage and surrendered without incident. A loaded revolver was found in Shotts’ garage, prosecutors said.
Cline was reported missing on April 24, 2018, and was last seen in the area near Shotts’ home.
California
Man ID’d through DNA charged in 1978 killing of teen girl
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A man arrested in Colorado on suspicion of killing a teenage girl in San Francisco more than four decades ago has been charged with murder in her death, prosecutors said.
Mark Stanley Personette, 76, was arrested in suburban Denver in December following a joint operation by San Francisco police, the FBI and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office. He was booked for investigation of homicide in connection with the 1978 death of 15-year-old Marissa Harvey.
Personette was arraigned in a San Francisco court Thursday. His attorney, Adam Gasner, did not immediately return a message from The Associated Press seeking comment.
The case sat cold for 43 years until a DNA hit in a genealogy database linked DNA taken from the crime scene to Personette, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said in a statement.
“We will work to ensure that Mr. Personette is held accountable for the brutal and heinous acts that took Marissa’s life and to bring closure to her family, which has never stopped advocating for justice,” Boudin said.
Harvey, of New York, was visiting her sister in San Francisco when she didn’t return from a day trip to Golden Gate Park, where she planned to do some horse riding. Her body was found a day later in nearby Sutro Heights Park.
The San Francisco Police Department said after Personnete’s arrest that investigators used the best available technology at the time and exhausted every lead, but the case went cold. In October 2020, they reopened the investigation and determined Personette to be a suspect using “advanced investigative methods.”
The case was solved after investigators used a third-party DNA database and found genetic information from a relative, which led to Mr. Personnette’s identification and arrest, Boudin said.
Authorities urged law enforcement agencies nationwide to review their unsolved sexual assault-related homicides involving young women to determine if there is a connection to Personette, who was previously arrested several times, including on charges of assault in 1979 in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
