When a beautiful co-ed is brutally murdered on a popular hiking trail in Prescott National Forest in the summer of 1987, authorities are stumped on who the killer could be. The investigation drags on for decades until finally advances in DNA technology link a serial predator to multiple cases of sexual assault and murder. This is the second of two episodes covering the murder of Cathy Sposito and the identification of Bryan Scott Bennett.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-afterlife-part-2 Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck
Chapter 1: What happened to Kathy Sposito in June 1987?
Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and this is the second of two episodes covering the murder of Kathy Sposito in Prescott National Forest in June 1987. If you haven't listened to part one, I recommend you press pause and jump back.
Otherwise, you'll be thoroughly confused, and I promise you the small details of this decades-long investigation are important to understanding the entire picture. So I don't want you to miss a beat. In part two, I'm going to be going back in time myself because there's a timeline to this case that is vitally important to follow.
To quickly refresh your memory, Kathy was killed while hiking on Thumb Butte Trail on the morning of Saturday, June 13, 1987. She'd been beaten, cut with a sharp object, and shot in the left eye. Several people on the same trail she was walking heard her scream for help but didn't get to her in time.
At the crime scene, authorities found two rocks with hair and blood on them, a .22 caliber cartridge case near her body, and a long trail of blood leaning from her final resting place about 130 feet up the trailhead, near where a female hiker discovered a metal ratchet wrench laying on the ground.
Chapter 2: What evidence was found at the crime scene?
so so
At 7.20 in the morning on Sunday, April 22nd, 1990, a 33-year-old woman was hiking alone down Thumb Butte Trail in Prescott National Forest when she heard what sounded like a person running up behind her. Initially, she assumed it was someone jogging the trail, so she stepped aside to let them pass her. But as soon as she did, she felt the person shove her forward and push her to the ground.
During the fall, she cut her left knee open, but that was the least of her worries in the moment. The person who'd pushed her was a young white man with blonde hair and buck teeth, who she didn't recognize. She struggled, but the stranger made her stay down and told her to lie still and be quiet.
He then picked up a jagged rock that was roughly the size of a softball and held it up as if he was going to strike her with it, but he didn't. He then sexually assaulted her and afterwards ran off in the same direction he'd come from, which was further up the trail.
It took the victim about five minutes before she made it down to the Thumb Butte Campground parking lot area and flagged down a woman who operated the facility. She told the staffer what had happened to her, and immediately the woman realized the victim was injured and needed help.
According to police reports, the victim had been camping with her boyfriend and a larger group of friends at a nearby program center, but she decided to take a morning walk by herself to find a restroom. Within minutes of getting help, the victim was on her way to Yavapai Regional Medical Center to be evaluated. And by 8.10 a.m., she reported her assault to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office.
About 20 minutes later, deputies arrived at the hospital to interview the woman and start their investigation. The first thing they wanted to know was what her attacker looked like. She told them he was a young white male who was probably between 15 and 19 years old with thin blonde hair. He was either 5'5 or 5'6 with a wavy haircut that was short in the front and longer in the back.
She'd also noticed some other unique details about him, like his slight buck teeth, a gold cross earring in his left ear and a tattoo on his upper right arm. She remembered he'd been wearing what looked like dark jeans, a blue scoop neck sleeveless t-shirt and white tennis shoes. He'd also set down a pack of Marlboro cigarettes on the ground next to her head during the attack.
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Chapter 3: What were the details of the April 1990 assault?
She'd gotten a pretty good look at that tobacco box and noticed it was white and gold and had a piece of paper with a telephone number on it tucked inside the cellophane wrapper. But unfortunately, she couldn't remember all the digits. Before the victim left the hospital, she allowed doctors and law enforcement to collect a sexual assault kit and keep all of her clothing as evidence.
Hospital staff also retrieved biological samples from her boyfriend because she said the two of them had been sexually active the previous night and authorities wanted a comparison for elimination purposes.
I want to be sensitive here and not go into unnecessary details, but it's important to note that the type of sexual assault the victim endured may not have resulted in the suspect depositing semen. At least that's what I gathered from reading the detailed police reports for the case and the victim's own statements.
However, there was one report that said a semen stain was found on her sweatpants, but the victim clarified that may have belonged to her boyfriend. A few days into the investigation, detectives spoke with the victim again and showed her several photos of men that they thought might be potential suspects, but she didn't identify any of them as the person who'd attacked her.
Authorities also had her look through a Prescott High School yearbook, but she didn't pick out anyone that looked like the young man who'd assaulted her. After that, the investigation stalled. Months went by with no new leads, and detectives re-interviewed the victim again in August of 1990, but unfortunately, nothing new surfaced.
The victim was certain, though, that if she ever saw her attacker again, she'd be able to identify him. The April 1990 sexual assault happened almost three years after Kathy Sposito's murder. The victim in that case has never been publicly identified, nor should she ever be. So I'm just gonna refer to her as victim number two.
The fact that her assault and Kathy's murder happened just a few years apart, though, on the same trail, certainly stuck out to authorities. But from reading the source material and police reports, it doesn't seem like an official connection was ever documented on paper.
It wasn't until around 2015 or 2016 when a new cold case detective from Yavapai County Sheriff's Office named Dan Pritchard took over Kathy's case that potential dots started to get connected. According to Dan, the Sheriff's Office had only been looking at the murder case one way for a long time, and he felt like the department needed to explore other ways to try and solve it.
This, of course, included retesting old evidence with new technology, as well as taking a look at other violent crimes that had happened around Prescott in roughly the same time frame Kathy was killed. And that's when his team rediscovered victim number two's case.
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Chapter 4: How did the investigation stall after the assaults?
But in 2018, the only fruitful results they'd gotten showed unknown male DNA that had been found beneath her fingernails and was part of a mixture on one of the rocks used to bludgeon her. DNA results for the bike helmet and ratchet wrench had come back as inconclusive due to insufficient DNA. But times were changing, and the sheriff's office remained hopeful.
Throughout this whole process, a detective working the case visited victim number two and got samples of her and her husband's DNA. Because turns out, the guy who was her boyfriend back in April of 1990 ended up becoming her husband. The state lab needed more recent DNA samples from both of them for elimination purposes. And the couple had no issue letting investigators collect buckle swabs.
A few months later, the results came in and confirmed that most of the DNA from the 1990 sexual assault evidence belonged to victim number two and her partner. But the semen stain on the sweatpants contained an unknown male's DNA. Investigators uploaded that profile into CODIS, but there wasn't a hit. Ed Gumm was formally cleared at that point because his DNA wasn't a match to the profile either.
Now, I imagine that must have felt like a huge blow to investigators, but the sheriff's office persisted. Their next move was to see if the unknown DNA from victim number two's case was good enough to sequence for familial DNA matches. Turns out, it was.
The state lab successfully compared that profile to men who were already in Arizona's convicted offender database, you know, to see if any of them were a brother or father or son of the perp, but the results were negative. Detectives then sent the DNA profile to a private forensics lab to conduct genetic genealogical analysis.
In April of 2020, the lab developed a DNA snapshot that showed investigators the approximate eye color, hair color, skin color, and genomic ancestry of the 1990 sexual assault suspect.
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Chapter 5: What new leads emerged in the case in 2015?
A few months later, in November 2020, genealogical analysis of the DNA samples matches was conducted and led to a tentative identification that was one of two brothers, both of whom had lived in Prescott in the late 80s and early 1990s. The two men were originally from Kentucky, but had moved to central Arizona during their youth.
In 2020, by the time investigators learned about them, one was still alive, but the other had died way back in 1994. Before his death, though, he had a daughter with his ex-wife, so the sheriff's office got in contact with the daughter to see if she'd be willing to provide a sample of her DNA, which she did. Her father's name? Brian Scott Bennett.
Brian's living brother wasn't quite as helpful as Brian's daughter had been. He refused to give investigators his DNA. However, eventually, thanks to some help from the Kentucky State Police, the sheriff's office got it by collecting some of his trash.
In May 2021, the private forensics lab that had done all the testing in victim number two's case compared Brian's daughter's DNA to the unknown male DNA profile from the semen stain and confirmed that the assailant in that case was a paternal relative of Brian Bennett's daughter. a.k.a. most likely Brian.
Chapter 6: Who is Ed Gumm and what role did he play in the investigation?
But until the lab could do a direct comparison with a fresh sample of Brian's DNA, things were still a bit uncertain. Around the same time this was all happening, the sheriff's office received additional information from the DPS crime lab that really made everyone stop and take a beat.
It had taken a few years, but staff had successfully compared the unknown male DNA profile from victim number two's case that was now looking like it belonged to Brian Scott Bennett to the unknown DNA profile in Kathy's case. If you remember, lab techs had been able to isolate a male profile from blood found in her mouth and from one of the rocks used to beat her.
According to police reports, every single genetic loci on those two DNA profiles matched. meaning the same person had likely committed both crimes. This was a huge break for detectives. It officially linked the two cases, but they still needed to be absolutely certain that Brian Bennett was the man they should be looking at for both crimes.
He was definitely the prime suspect in victim number two's assault. There was no question there. But with the newest development, he'd shot straight to the top of the suspect list in Kathy's case too. Detectives were more determined than ever to get a fresh sample of his DNA to do a direct comparison. Just using his daughter's DNA wasn't going to cut it.
But like I said earlier, Brian had died in 1994, so it was gonna be tricky. Brian's brother had been ruled out forensically of any involvement, but detectives still wanted to speak with him. So in September 2022, they drove to where he and his mother lived in Kentucky and interviewed him.
He told investigators that he and his brother had lived in Prescott back in the day, but they moved to North Carolina and then eventually Kentucky. He said he didn't know anything about Kathy's murder or victim number two sexual assault in Thumb Butte.
After interviewing him, detectives spoke with his mother, and she told investigators that in 1987, her son Brian was 16 years old and attending Prescott High School. At the time, he had a girlfriend who he later married and shared a daughter with. After dropping out of high school in 1988, he'd bounced around Prescott for a few years before joining the Army and eventually moving to North Carolina.
A year or so into his military career, though, he decided to abandon his post and go AWOL. During that time, he'd separated from his wife, who moved to California with their daughter. In early 1990, Brian had returned to central Arizona and gotten arrested by the Prescott Police Department for forging checks.
Almost two months after that, Chino Valley police officers arrested him for attempting to sexually assault a woman at a Fourth of July party. In that case, the victim claimed that after she'd started to feel unwell, she went to lay down in a room. Shortly after she sat down, Brian followed her inside and locked the door. He then tried to sexually assault her and threatened to harm her.
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Chapter 7: How did DNA technology help identify the suspect?
This is a tragedy. It's a horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy. But I have met some awesome people. I've met the Sposito. Well, not met them, but I've spoke to them on the phone over and over. I've been in touch with another victim, the one before me, the one that the sheriff described. I ask that everybody in the community pray. Pray for these victims.
Pray for all these people that have suffered a crime like this. Pray for those people who never had a voice, who were never given an opportunity. I got to kind of know Kathy from her brother, Sal. Love you, Sal. They were very, very close. He told me so much about her, about their family, things they've done together. And he never gave up. He never, ever gave up, never wavered.
And today, she's free. Kathy, you're free.
During the 2023 press conference, the sheriff's office said that in the four cases they'd been able to link Brian to, they believed he'd acted alone. There was no indication anyone had helped him. If Kathy was his first victim, he'd been just 16 years old at the time.
What's particularly eerie is that when the sheriff's office released their findings, they tracked down a Prescott High School yearbook photo of Brian from the mid-1980s. And his picture is a dead ringer for the young man that victim number two had described to authorities after her assault in April 1990.
Now, I know I said earlier that investigators showed that woman a high school yearbook a few months after the crime and she didn't identify anyone. But I have to wonder if maybe detectives just didn't go far enough back and show her a yearbook that Brian would have been in.
We know from the Sheriff's Office's findings that he dropped out of high school in January 1988, so he wouldn't have been in yearbooks published after that year, and there's a good chance he wasn't even in that one. Another circumstantial connection linking Brian to Kathy's murder was that she was shot with a .22 caliber firearm, which was never found after the crime.
In 1994, Brian died by suicide with the same caliber gun. According to the sheriff's office, the firearm from his suicide and the bullet evidence recovered in Kathy's case has never been compared. And I think that's because the sheriff indicated Brian's firearm was too old to be compared or something, or maybe the ballistic evidence was too degraded.
I don't know the details on that for sure because the sheriff's comments were a little vague, but I think the assumption is that Brian's gun being the same caliber as the gun that was used to kill Kathy is just one more puzzle piece that circumstantially links him to her murder.
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Chapter 8: What was the outcome of the investigation into Brian Scott Bennett?
But the Emmy who did Kathy's autopsy didn't find any signs of sexual assault, so I don't know if that really was his motive in her case. The sheriff told the press that Kathy's murder had all the telltale signs of extreme overkill. And I have to agree. At the conclusion of the press conference, the sheriff's office said that they suspected Brian might be responsible for other crimes.
They wanted the public to be aware that he was known to sometimes go by the name Scott Bennett instead of Brian Scott Bennett. And before his death in 1994, he'd spent time in Arizona, North Carolina, California, Kansas, and Kentucky during his short stint in the Army.
The sheriff emphasized that due to the nature of Brian's known crimes, it was highly unlikely the four cases Yavapai County had identified were the only ones. According to Bianca Bono's reporting for 12 News, Brian's DNA is now in a nationwide database for other agencies to check their unsolved cases against.
In his comments, Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes categorized Brian as a serial predator, someone who lives among residents for a long period of time and can go completely undetected, someone who hunts in the areas they know and commits crimes that change the course of many people's lives.
Sal Sposito, Kathy's brother, told 12 News after the press conference that finally having an answer to the mystery of who killed his sister was comforting. He said, quote, I thought I would just go on not knowing, and to get an answer like this was a big relief, end quote.
A big relief indeed for those of us still here and for people like Kathy, who I like to imagine are somewhere at peace hiking the amazing hilltops of the afterlife. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? No.
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