(NewsNation) — The brother of a young traveler killed in 1974 hopes to learn whether an Idaho death row inmate was responsible for the unsolved crime — before it’s too late.
Dan Walker was 21 when he was fatally shot on a desert roadway in California while sitting in the front of his VW van. Thomas Creech, a drifter on the radar of police, copped to the killing in 1975, though years later, he would recant his confession.
Dan Walker’s surviving brother, Doug, said Creech’s earlier statement to police was telling, including the detail Creech slid the van window to search his brother’s pockets.
“The internet didn’t exist in 1974,” Doug Walker told “Banfield” on Friday. “How would he know of this murder in the desert if he didn’t have something to do with it? He kept on bringing it up in jail.”
Creech was serving time in Idaho for unrelated killings when he murdered a fellow inmate in 1981 and was sentenced to die. Attempts to administer a lethal injection failed in February 2024 when the execution team could not tap a vein. If the state proceeds with another try, Doug Walker could have a limited window of time to learn the truth.
He said Creech, in a brief telephone exchange, already denied killing his brother. But Doug Walker said he thinks Creech is trying to force authorities to prosecute him on the 51-year-old case in an attempt to drag things out.
“I’m sure he’s getting legal advice saying, ‘Keep denying, keep denying,’ because he wants to go to trial.”
Doug Walker said he doesn’t think a hitchhiker who witnessed his brother’s killing was connected to the slaying. He said that an individual, Ken Robinson, hid in the back of the van but later flagged down motorists for help.
He was able to track down the survivor in 2023. Robinson, he said, credited Dan Walker with saving his life by telling him to go to sleep in the back of the van.
“Ken Robinson believes if they hadn’t switched places, Ken would be dead and Dan would be alive,” the brother said. “He is very much aware that Dan saved his life and allowed him to have a family and grandkids, and he knows how easily their positions could have been switched.”
Doug Walker wrote a book, “Daniel My Brother: Mystery in the Mojave,” about his attempts to solve the case.
Nexstar Media affiliate WGN-TV and reporter Larry Potash contributed to this report.