The tale of Alina Fitzpatrick isn't, as they say, breaking news. When she walked off into the shadows around 10 pm on November 4th, 2011 she was 17, barely old enough to drive a car. If she was alive today she'd be 23 and might have achieved her reported dream of becoming a registered nurse.
We all know that isn't what happened though. On November 9th a woman and her adult son went to take a look at some property one, or both of them owned near the intersection of NE 50th St. and Anderson Rd. in the wilds of far eastern Oklahoma City.
What they found during their inspection was the nude remains of an unidentified girl who had been dumped in some weeds by the roadside. Her body bore what was described later as blunt force trauma and numerous scrapes, bruises, and lacerations suffered around the time of her death. She also had either some paper, or flimsy cloth stuffed into her mouth, as if she'd been gagged at some point.
It didn't take long for authorities to announce the body was that of Alina Fitzpatrick.
Since Oklahoma City isn't really that big of a town and is just racist enough, the usual media reaction to the lurid details of the murder of a pretty young white girl would have been vast and breathlessly horrified. The difference that autumn was OKC's news outlets already had a young dead white girl and the circumstances of her death were even more wildly sensational.
A little less than a month before Alina Fitzpatrick disappeared near the corner of NW 24th St. and Western Ave. authorities had discovered the dismembered body of Carina Saunders in the west side suburb of Bethany, OK. When her various parts, stuffed into a duffel bag found behind a grocery store, were uncovered it drove local news sources into a feeding frenzy which, to some extent, lasts to this day.
The names of possible witnesses, not to mention potential suspects in the Saunders' case swirled about in a blizzard of coverage. Most of this storm of speculation and innuendo was fueled by the over overzealous and ultimately incompetent Bethany Police Department who was in charge of the investigation.
The Fitzpatrick case, on the other hand, was being run by the Oklahoma City Police. The OKCPD didn't have a clue who the perpetrator, or perpetrators were and, unlike the rubes in Bethany they were honest enough to admit it. This dreary lack of progress simply couldn't compete with the seemingly daily revelations about Saunders' murder and it didn't take long for the tragedy which befell Alina Fitzpatrick to begin fading from the news.
Then came the report from Medical Examiner, Chai S. Choi. Unlike Carina Saunders, who had been decapitated among other things, he found none of Alina Fitzpatrick's wounds were serious enough, in of themselves, to be the cause of her death. However he did find enough meth in her system which, might, or might not have caused her to OD. Choi's final decision was an absurdist exercise in the obvious. He wrote, "There are apparently suspicious circumstances surrounding her death." At the same time he refused to label it a homicide.
Never ones to avoid an easy out, the Oklahoma City Police let their investigation grind to a halt. To the credit of the local daily paper they made one last stab at the story. In January, 2012 a reporter asked police spokesperson Sgt. Jennifer Wardlow about the status of the case. Her response was, "It's not considered a homicide, but we're keeping an open file on it."
Wardlow's cold blooded indifference caused one final ripple of incredulous outrage and nine days later, OKC police captain, Dexter Nelson told the same reporter, "Homicide is just a legal term. You investigate them (homicides and suspicious deaths) the same way." He went on to say the department needed help from the public to solve the case.
After the Bethany cops screwed the pooch in the Saunders' investigation they turned it over to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. Earlier this year the OSBI spent nearly a week digging up the back yard of a home on the lower west side of OKC looking for evidence. Last month they renewed the reward offered in her case. Both stories received extensive coverage by local media outlets.
In contrast and thanks in large part to a lack of media exposure and therefore pressure, Nelson's January 2012 plea for help was the last anyone in this town has heard about the murder of Alina Fitzpatrick. That's unless you count an anonymous comment posted on this blog in April last year. It read, "The police were told who did it. He was in jail on other charges and still got released."
If true, it would seem that the help from the public Captain Nelson asked for wasn't of much use and it certainly wasn't considered news worthy.
Alina Fitzpatrick was buried on November 22, 2011, the 48th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The obituary states her casket was hand made and blessed by Benedictine monks living in an Iowa monastery. Her grave site is only one of thousands located at Memorial Park Cemetery in Oklahoma City.
As far as anyone knows, her killer, or killers remain free.
sic vita est
11-8-17
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