Serial killer Thomas Creech named suspect in 1974 cold case

A serial killer who has been on death row for nearly 40 years was implicated in a decades-old cold case slaying Wednesday by California authorities as a parole board in Idaho deliberates whether he should still be executed.  

Convicted murderer Thomas Creech was fingered as a suspect Wednesday in the 1974 fatal shooting of Daniel Walker who was gunned down in his van alongside Interstate-40 in California.

The passenger with Walker, 21, was able to escape and flag down a passing car but Walker did not survive his wounds.

The crack in the cold case by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office comes after investigators struggled to “develop any workable leads” over several years when they would review the case, authorities said.

The sheriff’s cold case unit resumed its investigation last November, obtaining more intel into the murder that led them to Creech, who was sitting in an Idaho prison after he was already found guilty of five other murders, the agency said.

California detectives worked with Idaho prosecutors to corroborate “intimate” details from statements Creech made about Daniel’s murder, the sheriff’s office said.

He’s been convicted of three killings in Idaho, one in California and one in Oregon.

Creech has been imprisoned for almost 50 years and has avoided 11 scheduled executions during that time, the Idaho Statesman reported. He’s the longest serving inmate on death row in Idaho.

Prosecutors initially moved to execute Creech in 1981 after he fatally pummeled fellow inmate 23-year-old David Dale Jensen in Idaho prison. Creech was already serving four life sentences at the time of beating.

The state’s parole board held a meeting last week addressing whether Creech’s sentence should be reduced from death to life in prison as the 73-year-old seeks clemency.

“I regret everything that I’ve ever done wrong,” Creech told the parole board, the Statesman reported. “The person I am now is not the person I was then. Maybe the person I used to be didn’t deserve mercy at all. But I think I have a lot to offer to people.”

But the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office reportedly argued he was a “sociopath” and in a press release emphasized that Creech had admitted to committing close to 40 murders.

“If his sentence is commuted, he would go back into the general prison population where he would have more access to inmates, putting them at risk,” the prosecutor’s office said in the news release.

“Seeking the death penalty in a capital case is not a decision that is taken lightly by any prosecutor’s office,” the office also said.

One of Creech’s lawyers with the nonprofit Federal Defender Services of Idaho, Deborah Czuba, said to the Statesman Wednesday’s announcement doesn’t provide “any real evidence.”

“These details somehow now make Mr. Creech a new suspect in a crime that has never been tied to him,” Czuba reportedly said, “despite several efforts to link it to him as far back as 1975, when teams of federal and local law enforcement officials were determined to prove the fantasy that he committed 50 murders.”