CLEARWATER, Fla. (WFLA) — The suspect in a 1978 double murder case in Massachusetts was arrested in Clearwater, officials announced Wednesday.
In a news conference, Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni announced the arrest of Timothy Joley, 70, in connection to two people who were found shot to death in West Springfield, Massachusetts.
“Today, after almost 46 years, I am announcing an arrest in the homicides of 18-year-old Theresa Marcoux and 20-year-old Mark Harnish,” Massachusetts District Attorney Anthony Gulluni said.
On November 19, 1978, Marcoux and Harnish’s bodies were discovered near Harnish’s Dodge pickup truck at a rest area off Route 5 in West Springfield. The young couple were found dead with multiple gunshot wounds, and police suspected that their bodies were moved after they were killed inside the truck.
Decades later, Joley was connected to the double murder case by a partial fingerprint discovered at the crime scene. It matched a fingerprint he gave for a taxi driver license in 2000, according to the DA.
“In just the last month, my office received information from an individual who provided investigators with a name, the name of Timothy Scott Joley,” Gulluni said.
The DA’s office took another look at the case after a caller reported being told by a friend that Joley was involved in the deaths of two people off Route 5 in West Springfield in 1978. The friend had since passed away.
The DA said Joley purchased a Colt handgun one month before the pair was found dead. He was arrested in Clearwater on November 5 and remained in the Pinellas County Jail on Wednesday.
Gulluni said there was no still evidence to show the motive or how Joley knew the victims.
His landlord can’t believe he’s been arrested.
“He looked [like] very nice person, very nice and he told me he’s a veteran,” Evancelia Panoutsakos said.
She even visited him in jail, after the arrest and he told her that he is not a killer.
“He denied that. I asked him, I say, what you been charged for and he said something happened 47 years ago, and I haven’t done that,” Panoutsakos said.
