Deadly Delivery: The Donald and Marsha Levine Murders
The Packages
Obviously the deliveryman wasn't a Federal Express employee. In fact, he hadn't been driving a company truck and hadn't worn a uniform. Instead, he had been clad in a dark blue suit and a tan trench coat, according to a neighbor who happened to be looking out his kitchen window when the killer escaped. Several other witnesses saw the escape as well, and one person even followed the getaway car a short distance. Unfortunately, no one obtained the license plate number.
Detectives recovered the packages the gunman had carried and opened them. As expected, they turned out to be a ruse. In one package was a hair dryer. The other contained two maps: one of an area near the Levine home and the other of Chicago with an intersection next to Midway Airport circled. It seemed that the killer had forgotten to recover the packages in the excitement of the shootings.
Criminalists scanned the maps and found fingerprints on both of them. But whose were they? In 1989 computerized fingerprint technology was still in its infancy. The modern system in which a computer yields possible matches did not exist back then. Detectives needed to have an idea of whom they were seeking to elicit a match.
Four days later, the Cincinnati post office was searched because authorities believed that a bomb might have been mailed to Mark after the shootings. It turned out to be a false lead.
Meanwhile, a distraught Mark was released from the hospital. An only child, he had been away at Yale Law School the past several years and said he had no idea who could have committed the murders. Mark went into seclusion and purchased a bulletproof vest that he took off only to shower or sleep. Police officers were assigned as bodyguards, and Mark refused to divulge his whereabouts to anyone.