20
LEWISTON TRIBUNE
UNSOLVED
M O N D AY, M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 4
WIL HENDRICK
A party leads to murder
near Friendship Square in downtown Moscow with the keys left in the console. “We went through the car, and found nothing unusual,” Weaver said.
On a cold January night in 1999, a UI student went to a function but never returned. His remains were found in the woods 3½ years later By JOEL MILLS
M
OF THE TRIBUNE
OSCOW — The last time Keith Hendrick spoke with the Lewiston Tribune, it had been 10 years since his son vanished. Ten years full of unanswered questions and deadend leads. Ten years of heartache. “You always say ‘If somebody ever did anything to my kid, I’d kill ’em,’ ” he said in a 2008 interview about the murder of his son, Wil. “We’ve all said that. But when the time comes, the hurt is so great, you don’t even think about that.” Keith Hendrick will never see his son’s killer brought to justice. He died last year at the age of 75. But the case is still being actively investigated, with a new tip coming earlier this year. “But it was nothing that was fruitful,” Moscow Police Chief David Duke said. “But as time changes, people do have time to reflect and maybe have a moment where they want to see if they can make a difference.” Duke and Latah County Sheriff Wayne Rausch discuss the case frequently, and are in the process of looking at the physical evidence and maybe resubmitting it to the state crime lab for analysis with newer technology. Rausch was a detective in the sheriff ’s office when Hendrick disap-
I
peared, but was taken off the case by then-sheriff Jeff Crouch. “He wouldn’t let me get involved in it whatsoever, to the extent that he actually pass-coded the case file and I couldn’t even access my own reports,” Rausch said. “There was a long period of time when I was in patrol, before I became sheriff, that I didn’t even know where the case was at.” When he took the reins of the sheriff ’s office in 2004, Rausch said he was “absolutely stunned” at the lack of follow-up in the case. He still thinks it is solvable. “It’s not forgotten,” Rausch said. “It’s a cold case, but it is still being worked.”
W
il Hendrick was a 25-yearold University of Idaho theater student when he disappeared in January 1999. He was classified as a missing person until his skull and jawbone were found by hunters three and a half years later in eastern Latah County. Investigators developed several suspects in 1999. But without a body or a crime scene, the trail quickly went cold, former Moscow Police Chief Daniel Weaver said in 2008. “The most critical part of a case is the first 48 hours,” Weaver said while recapping the case over a cup of coffee in the police department conference room. “After that, evidence starts to deteriorate and dissipate.”
Wil Hendrick So the investigation into Hendrick’s disappearance started the way most missing persons cases do: interviews with the people who saw him last. “It was a cold morning on Jan. 10, 1999,” Weaver recalled. “I was at the station for some reason, probably to pick something up. I was just heading out the door when Jerry Schutz came in. He said, ‘Hey, my partner is missing.’ ” Hendrick had been at a party
the night before at an apartment on C Street. But Schutz said he never made it back to their home in a trailer court just north of town. Schutz was worried that Hendrick had gotten drunk, cut across some fields and fallen in a ditch, Weaver said. Schutz and some friends spent the day looking for Hendrick, along with police and sheriff ’s deputies. Hendrick’s car was found about a day later, parked
nterviews with people at the party raised some questions, but ultimately led to the first set of dead ends. “There was some activity that you could say was maybe somewhat suspicious, but not out of the ordinary at a party,” Weaver said. Hendrick had apparently gotten intoxicated and into a “heated conversation” with some people there. But interviews and polygraph tests of those people, plus searches of their homes, turned up nothing. Other people at the party remember Hendrick’s car parked out front. They also reported hearing a car, possibly Hendrick’s, leaving the party at a high rate of speed, throwing gravel in its wake. Another early suspect was the man who lived below the party. He told police he was asleep when Hendrick wandered into his apartment, “mumbling and talking tough,” Weaver said. “As strange as that would sound to many people, it’s not uncommon,” he said of drunks stumbling into the wrong home. Hendrick was tall and was known as a person who liked to fight, and was good at it. But the man told police that he simply turned Hendrick around and sent him out the front door. A search of the apartment turned up no physical evidence, and the man wasn’t pursued as a suspect. But it turned out that he was the last person interviewed by police who saw Hendrick alive. Continued on next page