Couple grieves daughter's unsolved slaying
By Mc Nelly Torres/staff writer
Lawton Constitution 2001
William "Bill" Berry and his wife, Tayuko, have lost hope.
They would like to know how their 19-year-old daughter died and who was responsible for her death, but the investigation has dragged on for more than seven years.
Barbara Jean Berry was found Nov. 26, 1994, about three miles east of Cache wrapped in a plastic bag and buried in a crate. She had been missing for 11/2 years.
Children found her decomposed skeletal remains at the bottom of a crate covered with lumber. The crate was sitting about 40 yards from a house.
Berry's case is one of 11 unsolved homicides that have fallen under the Comanche County Sheriff's Department's jurisdiction.
As with other victims found under similar circumstances in the Lawton area, the medical examiner was never able to determine the cause of Berry's death, but the manner of death was ruled a homicide.
Bill Berry was in shock when he was told his daughter's dental records matched the remains.
"I felt like a sledgehammer hit my stomach," Berry, 75, said.
Troubled teen
The father said he and his wife, 62, saw Barbara Berry for the last time March 6, 1993, when she left the house to go to Columbia Square Apartments. She never returned.
Ten days later, on March 16, 1993, the Berrys filed a missing person's report with the Lawton Police Department.
Barbara Berry had quit her job as a dancer at a local bar three months before her disappearance. She had moved in with her parents months before she disappeared, Bill Berry said.
"Nobody wanted to help us when she was missing," he said.
For days, weeks and months, the Berrys looked for the missing teen.
Barbara Berry had run away many times before, so the police didn't suspect foul play at the time.
But Bill Berry said his daughter always called or wrote to them.
In 1987, Barbara, then 13, ran away to California.
That time, Bill Berry's brother in San Francisco called him and told him she was there.
Another time, the teen slipped out at 11 p.m. and her parents didn't see her for a month.
"She would always come back home," Bill Berry said.
Dolls that belonged to their slain daughter and pictures depicting happy days dot the Berrys' living room.
There was a time when Barbara Berry was a straight-A student at Lincoln Elementary School. She even participated in sports.
But when the girl reached junior high school everything changed, Bill Berry said.
"She didn't want to go to school anymore," Tayuko Berry said.
Bill Berry tried everything, even transferring his daughter to another school in Lawton. But nothing worked.
Barbara quit school when she was 16.
The father doesn't deny that Barbara - their only child - was a little spoiled.
But the parents said they did everything they could to help their confused daughter.
The teen was everything the couple had - they have no family in Lawton and all of Tayuko Berry's relatives are in Japan.
After seven years, Tayuko Berry, originally from Yokohama, Japan, still cries. The quiet woman bears a sad expression, as if she stopped living when her daughter disappeared. Mother and daughter shared a special bond, Bill Berry said.
"They went to Japan three times. ... The last time they went was in 1991," he said.
The mother's health has worsened since her daughter's death -she is now diabetic and has lost the vision in her left eye.
Haunted by questions
Bill Berry often wakes at night, wondering why this happened to them.
"I don't know why we deserved something like this," he said.
When his daughter was missing, Bill Berry got so desperate at one point that he hired a private detective, but the investigator didn't find his daughter.
Bill Berry thought he got close when one of his daughter's acquaintances called him and made him a business proposition - for $40, the caller would tell Berry where his daughter was.
Bill Berry agreed to the terms. After all, nobody else was helping the distraught parents, he said.
The business offer turned out to be a fraud; a man met the couple in Lawton and gave them a fake address for the cash.
Bill Berry later got more calls from suspected drug addicts claiming to have information about his daughter's whereabouts.
He refused to pay them for information.
His next move was to place an ad July 15, 1993, in a local shopper. The ad offered a $1,000 reward for any information that would lead to Barbara Berry, whom Bill Berry believed was using cocaine.
World of drugs
Investigators agreed Barbara Berry was involved in the dark underworld of drugs.
Her death is one of several homicides bearing the same characteristics - the victims, who knew one another, were all involved in drugs and/or prostitution. Some of the bodies were dumped in creeks and isolated areas in Comanche County and neighboring counties.
Dr. Maurice Godwin, a criminal investigative psychologist, said decomposed bodies are a problem for investigators when they are trying to interpret psychological signature behaviors.
More important, Godwin noted that traditional investigative techniques usually don't work in cases like this.
Godwin, an assistant professor of research in the Justice Center at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, said a signature behavior is not always present in every crime.
The reasons for that include an unanticipated victim's response or because the body of the victim has decomposed before its discovery.
According to Dr. Tod Burke, assistant professor of criminal justice at Radford University in Virginia, determining manner of death is important in homicide cases, since it is difficult to locate a suspect without that knowledge.
Burke said investigators could use technology such as DNA to test hair or bring in an anthropologist to look at the skeletal remains.
"People are dug up to determine the cause of death," Burke said. Gerald "Corky" Chadwick, a sheriff's investigator, said he believes Barbara Berry died of a drug overdose, although law enforcement officials never requested a toxicology test.
"It is more likely that one drug-related death will happen, but when you have several deaths that are similar, they can't be all drug-related," Godwin said.
The Berrys heard many stories about Barbara's death, including that she was last seen leaving the apartment complex with a black man and that she had ripped off a drug dealer.
Bill Berry used to visit the courthouse and the sheriff's department every week, but he stopped going five years ago.
"He (Chadwick) didn't tell us not to come back, but he made it sound as if he didn't want us to stop there anymore," he said. "He seemed irritated and he told us that he will call us when he gets something and that was five years ago."
The father said he knows someone out there knows the truth. "She didn't put herself in that crate," he said.
Bill Berry admitted that the arrest of the person responsible for his daughter's death would not bring her back, but it would give him and his wife peace of mind.
Tayuko Berry thinks about her daughter's death all the time, wondering about the last moments of her life.
"I want to know who did it. I want to know what happened to her, how she died," she said.