SPRINGFIELD MA MURDER SOLVED 46 YEARS LATER..HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED
2Nearly 46 years after two people were found murdered in West Springfield, a suspect has been arrested and, on Wednesday, we learned more details about how investigators were able to crack the case.
On October 30, 71-year-old Timothy Joley was arrested at his residence in Clearwater, FL for the 1978 murders of 18-year-old Theresa Marcoux and 20-year-old Mark Harnish, both of East Longmeadow.
“Investigators concluded that Theresa and Mark had been shot while in the passenger compartment of the pickup truck and their bodies were moved to the area where their remains were later discovered. Autopsies determined that the cause of death for each victim was multiple gunshot wounds,” said Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni.
Around 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, November 19, 1978, police officers on-patrol spotted a 1967 green Dodge pickup truck parked in a roadway rest area on Route 5. The officer saw that the driver’s side window of the truck was damaged and noticed blood in and around the vehicle. The officer then discovered the remains of two individuals, one female and one male, just over a nearby guardrail.
“When investigators processed the pickup truck, they located a latent print in what appeared to be blood on the passenger-side vent window. Mark and Theresa were eliminated as a possible source of this latent print. Over the years as the investigation continued, this latent print was entered into the Massachusetts Automated Fingerprint Identification System (or AFIS), and was also manually compared to approximately 70,000 known fingerprint cards,” Gulluni explained.
This was a cold case until last month, when a call came into the District Attorney’s office with a name. Timothy Joley of Florida. It turns out Joley was living in Springfield at the time. He had purchased a gun a month before the murder and he had a fingerprint taken for a taxi cab application in Springfield back in 2000 that investigators were able to compare and match to the one found at the crime scene back in 1978.
Now, over four decades years after the pair was killed, their alleged killer, Joley, was arrested. Joley will be returned to Massachusetts from Florida in the coming weeks to appear in court on two counts of murder.