A 16-year-old girl who lived in the same house with her parents and younger sister went to sleep in her room and in the morning she was found dead. The police immediately realized that they were dealing with a murder, but none of her relatives heard anything that night. It took 31 years to finally solve this case, but no one was prepared for such a turn of events. Aries Cox was born on March 24, 1973 in Kansas City, Missouri.
Soon her parents had two more daughters. The family lived in a small two-story house located in a poor residential area. From early childhood, she helped her parents take care of the younger children. She regularly attended church and was fond of swimming. When I turned 16, Fawn got a part-time job at a local amusement park.
Her family lived quite poorly and the girl tried to earn at least some money in her free time from school. She spent most of the summer holidays of 1989 at work. The girl mostly stood in order and sold tickets for attractions. On Wednesday, July 26, She finished her shift at about 10 pm and her mother and younger sister picked her up by car since it would have taken a very long time to get from the park to her home by public transport.
Almost immediately after returning home, Faun went to bed since she had to go to work again the next morning. The girl slept on the second floor. She had a separate room. Her sisters usually slept next to her, but that night she was alone. Her sister, Amber, who was only a year younger, was working as a nanny for a friend’s family that night.
Another sister was getting along and I decided to sleep on the first floor since it was much cooler there. It was a very hot night and the air conditioner was only working downstairs. Their parents also slept on the first floor. The next morning, at about nine o’clock, the whole family woke up to the sound of the alarm clock in Faun’s room, but for some reason the girl didn’t turn it off.
Then her younger sister and mother went up to her room where a terrible sight awaited them. Faun was lying on the bed with no signs of life. Bruises were visible on her neck. The girl also had no pulse and the parents immediately called an ambulance, but they were no longer able to help her.
It was obvious that Faun had died several hours ago. After examining her body, medical experts determined that the cause of death was strangulation. The girl had also been subjected to violence from the very first hours. The police realized that they would have a very difficult investigation. Despite the fact that Faun was killed right in her room in a small house with very poor soundproofing, her parents and sister heard absolutely nothing.
However, this was explained. The air conditioner on the first floor was old and worked very loudly, drowning out any other noises in the house. The only odd thing that night was noticed by the sister. Their poodle was acting anxious and barking, but no one attached much importance to this.
This behavior was attributed to the fact that the dog was pregnant. After examining the crime scene, the police made several important discoveries. According to their version, the attackers or a group of criminals entered the house through a second-floor window overlooking the backyard. An old trailer was parked near the house, which made it easy to climb onto the canopy of the outbuilding located almost at the same level as the window.
The window itself was left open because there was no one on the second floor. There was no air conditioning and they had to somehow cope with the heat in Faun’s room. The experts discovered the first important clues: several short hairs, small blood stains, and traces of semen on the sheet from her bed. All of this was sent to the lab for analysis.
In addition, several things were missing from the house, including radios, a Nintendo game console, and a stereo tape recorder. Several more items were found on the ground in front of the house. It looked as if the burglar had thrown them out the window to take them with him, but for some reason, left them there.
Detectives also discovered that various objects were displayed in a closet in the next room on the second floor. They believed the criminal was hiding in that closet, waiting for all the residents of the house to fall asleep. Usually, the Faun sisters slept in this room, but not that night, for this reason, no one noticed the displayed items.
The police managed to find another strange clue: an old army cap was found in Faun’s room. All of her relatives said that they had never seen this item on the girl, so the detectives admitted that the killer could have forgotten the cap at the crime scene. Despite an impressive set of evidence, the police were unable to quickly The problem with identifying suspects is that in 1989, DNA testing was quite poorly developed and there were no common genetic bases then.
Detective Benjamin Caldwell, who was handling the case, put forward the main version of what happened. In his opinion, there really could have been several attackers and they must have known the house well. They not only knew how to get to the second floor through the backyard in pitch darkness but also must have known the layout of the rooms.
The next step for the police was to look for witnesses. They interviewed neighbors, friends, and relatives of Faun, but all this did not bring any results. The detectives had one significant problem: the area in which the house was located was very poor and criminal. Various criminal groups operated there. It was quite difficult to bring their members to justice.
A month after Faun’s murder, the case finally moved forward. The police had a witness who pointed them to three suspects. This witness knew a number of important details that the police never advertised, so his story was taken seriously. These suspects turned out to be three teenagers, one of whom studied with Faun in the same class.
They were arrested and interrogated, but The boys denied their involvement in the murder. During a search of the house of one of them, the police found things stolen from the victim’s room. This was enough to charge all three with murder, but here, too, the detectives were disappointed. Firstly, the witness suddenly retracted his words and stopped cooperating with the police.
Secondly, DNA analysis of hair, blood, and semen found at the crime scene did not show a clear match with the samples of the suspects. In those years, experts were not yet able to establish an exact match of the samples, and all tests showed controversial results. In other words, the analysis could not confirm either a complete match or a guaranteed discrepancy.
Despite this, the police managed to obtain useful information from one of the detainees. During one of the interrogations, he admitted that that night, Faun and other guys actually broke into the house and stole several things. He described how he made his way to the second floor along the canopy canopy and even revealed unknown details.
According to him, when he threw the tape recorder out of the window, the handle fell off. The guy hid it under a bush nearby, and the police really I found this object in that very place, but the young man quickly recanted his words and no longer cooperated with the investigation, which is why his confession could not be used in court.
Due to all this, the police were forced to release these people and the investigation again reached a dead end. Most likely, the witnesses were simply intimidated, but without their testimony, the case had practically no chance in court. It is only known that one of them spent eight months in prison for stealing items from Faun’s house.
Since then, the case has been on the back burner. The police reopened the investigation only in the early 2000s and the first thing they did was upload DNA samples from the crime scene to the Cadiz database. It had been created several years earlier and contained DNA samples of people convicted of serious crimes. Unfortunately, no matches with Faun’s killer were found.
The appearance of this database was the result of significant scientific progress in the field of DNA research. This also allowed the police to recollect DNA samples from the three original suspects and conduct more advanced tests. This time, experts definitively established that the family’s hair and blood did not belong to any of them.
This was very strange, considering the fact that The suspects’ belongings were found. Detectives suggested that the three guys had indeed robbed the house that night, but there was another man with them, and it was he who had raped the girl and killed her. All this raised even more questions: could four criminals have quietly entered the house, killed Faunus, and just as quietly left the crime scene? The police still had no answer to this question.
Since then, the case has frozen again. With each passing year, the family has become less and less confident that this murder will ever be solved. They continued to believe that the three suspects were in their house that night and could point to the killer, but they would never do so. The only thing that could help him know the truth is a DNA sample stored in a police lab.
In 2018, something interesting happened. Amber, Faunus’ younger sister, shared several disturbing details about this crime. She outlined her thoughts and facts unknown to the police on a popular American forum dedicated to unsolved crimes. Over the 23 years of its existence, the forum has acquired a very reliable reputation, and its members have helped the police solve several high-profile cases.
Amber passed verification and confirmed that she really is who she claims to be, so her message deserves attention. In her opinion, the criminals entered the house at the moment when Faun’s mother and her youngest daughter went to pick her up from work. Their father, who was at home at that time, was sleeping.
Then, the criminals hid in a closet in an empty room on the second floor and waited until everyone fell asleep. Amber also said that at least two of the criminals were personally acquainted. According to one of them, one of them studied with her, but the second met the girl in church a few days before the murder. Amber was present at the time of their meeting.
She was sure that the guy was interested in her sister in a romantic way. Then, she concluded that the criminals initially planned to kill Faun and the robbery was only an accompanying factor. The police, however, adhered to the version that the criminals climbed into the house for profit and saw the sleeping girl there, after which they decided to subject her to violence.
But why was Amber so sure that they were preparing in advance for the murder? She said that robbing their house was simply pointless. The family lived in poverty and they There was nothing valuable, but much more interesting was the following fact. Amber said that the criminals used her younger sister’s nightgown, which was lying in the next room, to strangle Faun.
This meant that the attackers had taken it from that room in advance and were hiding in the closet to strangle the victim. If they had not planned the murder in advance and stumbled upon Faun during the robbery, there would have been no point in taking the nightgown from the next room. Amber added that the criminals also had to know their family’s routine in order to get into the house unnoticed.
She worked as a nanny from Monday to Friday and was only home during the daytime. On weekends, the girl spent the night in the very room on the second floor through which the robbers got in, accordingly, the criminals would have been immediately noticed. In addition, they had to watch the house and wait for the moment when Faun’s mother and her younger sister would go to pick up the girl from work.
Despite all this, Amber’s story did not bring the solution to this case any closer, but it was already 2018. and science in the field of DNA research has made great strides forward, dozens, even hundreds, of long-forgotten cases were solved thanks to a new analysis tool, the relatives of the faun saw all this and were indignant why the police were in no hurry to reopen the murder investigation, they constantly communicated with detectives about this case and each time received 1 answer, an extended study of DNA samples
requires money and the police have dozens of such cases, for this reason, the relatives could only wait for their turn and funding to arrive, but they decided to take the initiative into their own hands and in 2019 launched a fundraiser, the family wanted to fully cover the costs of studying DNA samples and also offered a reward of 10 thousand dollars for any information that would lead to the capture of the criminal, due to the fact that this case was actively covered in the media and relatives gave numerous interviews,
many caring people responded to requests for help, the family quickly raised the necessary amount, but here, too, disappointment awaited them, the police department refused to initiate this study at the expense of the victim’s relatives, the lead detective explained this by the fact that in such a situation, a big problem is sure to arise if the relatives of one victim can pay for such tests and speed up the results, then the same right should be given to hundreds of other families who have been searching for
those responsible for the murder of their loved ones for years, but it is simply impossible to implement something like this in practice, since innovative DNA research is carried out by only a few laboratories in the world, and with such a simultaneous influx of those wishing to do so, their resources will simply not be enough.
The leading company in the field is Paragon Labs, which we have already mentioned repeatedly in other videos. In DNA research, they have not achieved colossal progress from searching for a person’s relatives using the smallest genetic samples to creating an approximate portrait of the owner. It was this laboratory that should have been engaged in studying the samples left in the bedroom of the faun at night and the murders.
The girl’s relatives believed that the police were in no hurry to deal with their case for another reason. They were a poor family from a bad area, and murders were not a priority for investigators there. In an interview, the faun’s sister said that if it were a matter of murdering members of a family of rich or high-ranking officials, all the necessary research would have been carried out instantly.
Unfortunately, they were never able to speed up this process, and only by the end of 2020 did the long-awaited breakthrough occur, but to such In truth, the family wasn’t ready, but with the financial support of the FBI, the police still sent samples from Faun’s room to the lab. There, they began a detailed study of the DNA and a search for possible relatives of its owner.
They mainly worked with a semen sample found at the murder scene in November 2020 and finally managed to find the person who owned this DNA; it turned out to be Faun’s cousin, Donald Fox. Of course, such news shocked the entire family. At the time of Faun’s death, Donald was twenty-one years old and no one even thought about his possible involvement.
At the same time, Donald was a rather problematic person and was constantly behind bars. He was tried for minor offenses such as theft and possession of illegal substances. Unfortunately, in those years, DNA samples were not yet taken from such criminals; otherwise, this case would have been solved much earlier.
In 2006, Donald died of an overdose, but the police investigated his death because some circumstances seemed suspicious to them. It was thanks to this investigation that a sample of his DNA was saved, but it was not included in the FBI database. They didn’t include it because the man in that case was the victim. They were the criminal.
As soon as the experts informed the police of their discovery, they compared this sample with the semen found at the murder scene and got a 100% match. Despite the gravity of this discovery, Faun’s relatives received an answer to the question that had tormented them for thirty-one years. But one very important point remained in this whole story.
A lot of evidence indicates that the three original suspects were also in Faun’s house that night. Now it became clear how the criminals knew the house and the family’s routine so precisely. Donald was a frequent guest there and knew all these nuances. However, the police closed the case and no new charges were brought against these three men.
Faun’s sister stated that they saw no point in beating a confession out of them, even though these people were present in the house that night, they may not even have witnessed the murder itself. Donald could well have stayed in house 1 and only then attacked Faun. I added that these three suspects had already paid for their actions during the entire time the case remained open.
The entire neighborhood was 100 % certain of their guilt, which led to an extremely negative attitude toward them, with all the ensuing consequences. According to Fawn’s sister, their lives were practically ruined. Moreover, after the case was closed, it turned out that the police initially learned about these suspects from the family of one of them.
Relatives noticed a Nintendo console among his belongings and remembered that exactly the same one had been stolen from Fawn’s house. This was reported in the news, and every resident of the neighborhood already knew all the details. In any case, proving their guilt is simply impossible, and the victim’s relatives finally know the name of the killer.
He lived for 17 years without facing any punishment for his actions, and all this time, as if nothing had happened, he communicated with his family. But ultimately, his addiction to illegal substances drove him to the grave, and he no longer posed a threat to anyone. Share your opinion about this story in the comments, and don’t forget to like the video if you liked it. Thanks for watching.
