NORWALK, CT — In the end, after more than 30 years, it came down to a small amount of scrapings under a fingernail. Marc Karun, the former Norwalk man who police say sexually assaulted and strangled 11-year-old Kathleen Flynn to death in 1986, gave police hair and DNA samples two years after the crime. But it took years and advances in forensics testing for his DNA to finally be linked to Flynn’s murder, and for Karun to be arrested more than 30 years after the crime.
How it came to that is a study in painstakingly detailed police work, persistence, dedication and the passion of one Norwalk police lieutenant and other members of the department — including one deceased former police chief and another former chief who is now the current mayor of the city — to see that justice was served.
“We don’t give up,” said Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling, the former police chief who was a lieutenant in the department when Flynn was murdered, during a news conference Tuesday.
Kathleen Flynn was walking home from Ponus Ridge Middle School on the afternoon of Sept. 23, 1986, when she was abducted along her usual route on Hunters Lane, according to the Karun’s arrest warrant. When she didn’t get home at the usual time, her mother reported her missing. The next day in the woods near the school, about 158 feet from the walking path, her partially clothed body was discovered.
The shocking crime shook the community “to its core,” according to Rilling, and touched off an investigation that at various times consumed the entire police department under former Chief Carl LaBianca. Solving the murder became a passion of LaBianca’s, Rilling said, part of the bittersweet legacy of the case because LaBianca did not get to see the investigation end; he died in late 2013.
Flynn was strangled with some sort of rope or cord and her wrists were been bound. Whatever was used was removed from her body and the scene, but ligature marks were still visible. The medical examiner listed her cause of death “asphyxia due to ligature strangulation.”
Over the years, Norwalk police collected mounds of evidence in the case, generated reams of reports, conducted countless interviews, called for a myriad of tests to be run, and studied a host of other information. But it turned out that one of the first suspects in the case ended up being the man eventually accused.
Karun became a suspect early on in the investigation because of a sexual assault he was accused of earlier that year that involved similar characteristics.
Soon after news reports of Flynn’s body being found, Norwalk police received “a plethora of calls” from people who wanted to report seeing “suspicious persons and suspicious vehicles” near the school on or prior to Sept. 23, 1986.
One person reported her vehicle was nearly struck by another driver who sped out of the woods on the day Flynn disappeared. The vehicle was “an early 1970s, medium-green vehicle.” The woman recalled seeing three white males in the vehicle, which turned out to be one of the early clues potentially linking Karun to the crime because he drove a “light green-silver metallic color car.”
The vehicles turned out to be different, but Karun cropped up on the Norwalk police radar because of a sexual assault he was accused of committing in the city in January of that year.
In that crime, he was accused of threatening an 18-year-old woman at knifepoint and sexually assaulting her. During the attack, he bound her wrists with electrical wire. After releasing her, she reported the incident to police and he was charged with first-degree sexual assault and first-degree kidnapping.
The charges eventually were reduced to fourth-degree sexual assault, in part because the woman later dated Karun, police said. Karun received a six-month executed sentence and two years probation.
Norwalk police questioned Karun soon after the murder. He told investigators he visited the school a few days before the crime to see some teachers and a librarian, and he even walked along the same path that Flynn traveled. Karun attended the school as a child and was a graduate of Norwalk’s Brien McMahon High School.
But as for the 23rd, Karun said he was walking on Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk, half-heartedly looking for work because his parents had told him to find a job.
He also told police that he did not know Flynn and did not commit the crime, but one of the detectives who interviewed him noted that while he was cooperative while speaking with them, he appeared “very nervous and apprehensive and smoked three cigarettes during the interview.” He also could not account for his whereabouts on the afternoon Flynn disappeared.
Though some Ponus Ridge Middle School teachers at the time remembered Karun as a student with “many serious problems,” none of the staff saw him on Sept. 19, 1986, the day that he said he was there.
Investigators collected hair samples from Karun from his arrest in January 1986 incident and compared them to evidence found on Flynn. While some of the evidence appeared to be from a Caucasian male, which Karun is, his hair did not directly match the evidence, in part because those types of tests had not yet reached the level of sophistication that tests are today.
In the two years that followed, hair samples from other potential suspects were tested and came up negative.
Then in June of 1988, Karun was accused of attacking a 41-year-old woman at knifepoint as she was out walking on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan. He surprised her as she walked by and asked her what road he was on, police said. After a brief exchange, he pulled out a knife, grabbed her and tried to drag her back to the car he borrowed, police said.
As she screamed and tried to fight him off, a couple out walking saw the commotion and rushed toward them, according to police, and Karun got into the car and drove off. The victim and witnesses gave a description of the attacker and car, and Karun was picked up by police. He borrowed the car from his then-girlfriend.
Karun was charged in that attack. That same year, he was accused by state police and Derby police of committing other attacks, with the one in Derby involving a sexual assault and kidnapping.
During the same period, Norwalk police continued to submit hair samples for testing from Karun and other people of interest in the Flynn murder. All of them came up negative.
Then in May of 1989, two women were kidnapped and sexually assaulted in Norwalk’s Cranbury Park. They were both handcuffed and secured by a rope placed around their necks. The victims had been attacked by a man named Michael Franzese, who was arrested and charged.
Franzese became a suspect in the Flynn murder, and initially some hair samples taken from him appeared to show similar characteristics with samples taken from Flynn. But ultimately, he was dismissed as a suspect because he was found to have been out of state at the time of the murder and his forensic profile did not match up.
By then it was 1990, and some potential DNA evidence was discounted because it was stained.
Years passed, and beginning in 1999, evidence was re-examined using newer forensic technologies, a slow and painstaking process that was done at a lab in Pennsylvania.
Essentially, smaller and older pieces of evidence, and samples from victims and suspects, could be tested. So earlier suspects were able to be ruled out during the re-testing process, known as Mitochondrial DNA analysis.
In 2002, the Flynn case was transferred from the Norwalk Police Detective Bureau to the department’s Cold Case Unit where it was picked up by Lt. Art Weisgerber, the investigator who eventually shepherded the case to last week’s arrest.
By this time, Karun was a registered sex offender who served years in prison. Weisgerber began looking at him again as a suspect and obtained warrants for the re-examination of hair samples.
Forensic testing continued to improve and slowly various items of Flynn’s clothing was re-examined, and by 2010 the clothing and fingernail scrapings were tested for “touch” DNA.
More suspects were ruled out, but Karun, while not being ruled in as the sole suspect, was not being ruled out. So Weisgerber began re-interviewing school staff, many of whom were retired and no longer residing in the area.
By 2017, Karun was living in Maine. Norwalk police discovered that all of the old evidence and samples had been tested and re-tested, and a fresh sample from Karun was needed for new examination.
A new warrant was obtained in Maine and DNA swabs were collected from Karun, and in new tests based on 31-year-old fingernail scrapings from Flynn, he “could not be eliminated as the source of the DNA.”
That evidence, combined with the “geographical profile, modus operandi and rituals” of the Flynn attack and others Karun was been accused of — and convicted of — committing led to his eventual arrest last week.
The Norwalk Police Department has two detectives dedicated to cold cases, and in the past two years they have closed four such homicide cases with arrests, including the Flynn case, making the department one of Connecticut’s best at resolving such cases.
“Our department has a passion to solve such cases,” said Norwalk Police Chief Thomas Kulhawik. “You have to be committed to the task, and we are.”
Marc Karun remains in police custody on a $5 million bond. His next scheduled court appearance is July 10 in Stamford Superior Court.
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