Suspect in 1986 slaying of child waives extradition
Man accused of raping and killing 11-year-old to return to Connecticut
Marc Karun, who police say raped and killed 11year-old Kathleen Flynn in 1986 in Norwalk, waived extradition during a court hearing in Bangor, Maine Friday and is headed back to Connecticut.
Karun, 53, is expected to be presented Monday in Superior Court in Norwalk to face charges of firstdegree sexual assault and murder with special circumstances. His bail on the Connecticut warrant is set at $5 million.
Norwalk police worked with Maine State Police and Penobscot County sheriffs deputies to take Karun into custody at his Stetson, Maine, home on Wednesday. During a search of Karun’s house, multiple rifles and handguns were seized. Maine authorities charged him
with 10 counts of possession of firearms by a felon, but dropped those charges so as not to delay his return to Connecticut, Penobscot County District Attorney Marianne Lynch said Friday.
Karun, a Norwalk native who has convictions for violent sexual assaults against at least four women, was a suspect less than three weeks into the 33-year investigation into Kathleen’s death. He lied to police, according to the warrant for his arrest, but admitted to associates he was on the grounds of Ponus Ridge Middle School in Norwalk the day Kathleen disappeared. She vanished as she walked the half-mile from the school to her home.
Her mother, Esther Flynn, reported Kathleen missing at 5:12 p.m. Sept. 23. Her battered body was found at 3:35 a.m. the next day, under a pile of dead foliage. A large rock had been placed on her chest. She’d been strangled and there had been ligatures on her wrists.
Karun, then 21, had been charged with raping a woman the previous January in Norwalk and police sought him out for questioning. He’d used ligatures during the rape and lived two miles from the school. Karun told detectives he’d been at the school four days before the killing to see some teachers and had talked to the school librarian. He also said he had walked along the wooded path Kathleen was walking on when she vanished, according to the warrant.
Subsequent interviews with teachers and the school’s librarians revealed Karun was lying. None had seen him in the school.
Throughout their 33-year investigation, multiple generations of Norwalk detectives, sometimes with the assistance of state cold case investigators, looked at different suspects. But the evidence always led back to Karun.
DNA technology at the time of Kathleen’s killing was in its infancy and the technology did not exist to compare the evidence recovered from Kathleen to potential suspects. In 1990, Norwalk police took evidence recovered from Kathleen to famed criminologist Henry Lee at the state forensic lab, but he determined the evidence could not be tested for DNA. A few years later the lab disposed of the evidence.
In 1992 police talked to Karun’s first rape victim — who subsequently dated him because she felt sorry for him — and learned he had told her he’d been at the middle school the day Kathleen disappeared, but he said he did not kill her. The woman told police “Karun would act like his mind snapped and his attitude would change from good to crazy and vicious.”
In June 2003, DNA technology advanced enough to begin to assist police. Mitochondrial DNA testing determined Karun was part of the 3 percent of the population that could not be excluded as the source of pubic hair recovered from Kathleen’s body. Another break came in 2012 when a fingernail scraping from Kathleen was tested and the lab found Karun could not be eliminated as the source of the DNA.
Police continued to chase down leads and re-interview people they had talked to before.
On Oct. 3, 2017 Norwalk police Lt. Art Wesgerber, who was assigned to the case in 2002 when he was a detective, and Norwalk police Sgt. Alex Tolnay went to Maine with a search warrant to obtain a fresh DNA sample from their suspect. Karun, who is on Maine’s sex offender registry for his Connecticut crimes, thought he was meeting with a detective from the Penobscot County sheriff ’s office who oversaw people on the registry. Karun’s inner cheek was swabbed and the detectives turned the swabs over to the state forensic lab.
Wesgerber and Tonay asked Karun to talk with them, but he refused. On his way out, Karun said: “My life just keeps getting better.”
The detectives were back in Maine Wednesday to watch Maine authorities take him into custody. They drove him back to Connecticut Friday afternoon.