Authorities announced an arrest Wednesday in a nearly 46-year-old double murder in western Massachusetts.
Timothy Scott Joley, 71, of Clearwater, Florida, was arrested for the 1978 murders of Theresa Marcoux and Mark Harnish, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni said at a news conference.
The bodies of Marcoux, 18, of East Longmeadow, and Harnish, 20, of South Dennis, were found outside Harnish's pickup truck in a rest area off Route 5 on the morning of Nov. 19, 1978, authorities said. Both victims had apparently been shot multiple times at close range with a .38-caliber weapon. Investigators said the pair were inside the truck when they were shot and their bodies were later moved.
Investigators found a bloody fingerprint on the passenger-side window of the pickup truck, but until recently they were unable to find a match for it despite running it through the state's fingerprint database and manually checking it against 70,000 fingerprint cards.
Last month, Gulluni said the district attorney's office was contacted by someone who said a friend of theirs who had since died told them Joley was involved in the killing of two people on Route 5 in West Springfield in 1978.
Investigators learned that Joley had been fingerprinted in 2000 while applying for a taxicab license, and fingerprint experts were able to compare that fingerprint to the one found on the pickup truck back in 1978, which determined that the fingerprint came from Joley's left thumb. A check of firearms records revealed that Joley had bought a Colt handgun one month before Marcoux and Harnish were killed.
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Joley was arrested in Clearwater, Florida, on Oct. 30, and is now being charged with two counts of murder. Gulluni said he waived extradition on Nov. 5 and will be returned to Massachusetts in the coming weeks to face the murder charge.
Marcoux and Harnish's parents are no longer living, but members of their families attended Wednesday's press conference.
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"I admire and respect you for your patience, resolve and the faith that I know you've maintained over these many years," Gulluni said to the families. "I thank you for being here today."
"It's what we work here," the district attorney said of the arrest. "It's a momentary sense of satisfaction, not just for me and our team, but for so many people who care about the victims. It provides hope for all of us who continue to do this work, because there's a lot of other unresolved cases."
