It’s now been six years since the body of a young girl was found in the Cedar River in northeast Iowa and still no one has been arrested in the case.
Five-year-old Evelyn Miller was reported missing from her home in Floyd on July 1, 2005. Her body was discovered by a kayaker near Charles City a few days later.
Over the years, investigators have released little information about the case and have not revealed how Evelyn was killed. Floyd County Sheriff Rick Lynch says he remains optimistic charges will someday be filed. “We’re getting tighter and tighter in this investigation,” Lynch said.
“One analogy you can use is a spider doesn’t weave a web in a day. It takes a while and we have to do this web, in a sense, to get these charges filed and get this person into trial.”
Lynch says the case remains active and investigators are still getting new leads. He says it’s important to keep “tight lipped” so as to not “injure” the investigation or taint a future jury pool. “This isn’t a sprint. This is a marathon. A marathon takes a lot longer than a sprint and this case is going to take a lot longer than some other cases,” Lynch said.
He compared the Evelyn Miller case to this week’s acquittal of 25-year-old Casey Anthony in Florida. Authorities there are under fire – as some blame police and prosecutors for failing to convince the jury that Anthony killed her two-year-old daughter. Evelyn Miller lived in an apartment with her mother, Noel Miller, two brothers, and her mother’s boyfriend, Casey Frederiksen. Noel Miller has since moved to California after losing custody of her two sons.
Frederiksen is in prison on child pornography charges. One of the last people to see Evelyn alive, Danny Slick, was sentenced in 2007 to one year in prison for lying to FBI agents investigating the case.
By Chris Berg, KCHA, Charles City