COPS MAKE ARREST IN '76 MISSOURI MURDER

WANTED A DATE

DOISY

THE SEARCH has been long and agonizing. Thirty-three years to be precise. That is how long detectives in Columbia, Mo. have been searching for the elusive killer of Rebecca Doisy, who vanished on August 5, 1976. Oh, detectives eventually figured out who did it, it just took a very long time to find him. Part of the problem was that Doisy's body could not be found either.

"There were a lot of dead ends," said Chris Egbert, the Columbia police detective who pursued leads until he retired in 1993, in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

But on Monday, cops in Missouri got a call from their brother officers in Georgia. They had arrested a man named Johnny Wright, 65, who had gone to do a background check. Wright was the masher who pestered Rebecca at Ernie's Steak House where she worked and the last person to see her alive.

 "When they ran the check, they got a hit on him," Lawrenceville police Capt. Greg Vaughn told The Associated Press. "He paid $15 to get arrested."

Wright had been asking Rebecca Doisy for dates, repeatedly calling her at work because she wouldn't give him her home number, her sister Kathy Doisy said. Rebecca Doisy decided to have a drink with Wright and "politely get rid of him."
Instead, cops believed, he got rid of her.
MORE IN THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH