Officials in Groton, Connecticut, on Monday announced the arrest of a man in connection with the murder of Suzanne Wormser, 58, whose body was found dismembered and stuffed into a suitcase near a cemetery on March 19.
Donald Coffel, Wormser’s 68-year-old roommate, is charged with murder, tampering with physical evidence and disposing of a dead body in Connecticut Superior Court after police found Wormser’s body on March 19, though they believe her remains were left in the cemetery sometime in mid-March.
“Both the victim and the suspect knew each other. This was a targeted event,” Groton Police Department Chief David Burton said during a Monday press conference announcing Coffel’s arrest.
Burton added that police searched another crime scene at the Groton residence Coffel and Wormser shared on April 17 and interviewed Coffel, a person of interest at the time who later became the primary suspect.
Coffel allegedly confessed to the murder during his third interview with police, saying he beat Wormser with a baseball bat during an argument over crack-cocaine, according to an arrest warrant obtained by FOX 61. Authorities found a bat with blood and hair on it, as well as a hand saw and a woman’s clothing covered in a blood-like substance inside the residence Coffel shared with Wormser, according to the warrant.
Coffel is being held on $1 million bond. He had a hearing from a hospital on Monday, where he is being treated for cancer, FOX 61 reported.
The arrest warrant states that a passerby noticed a luggage bag placed by trash cans near the cemetery for several weeks. Inside the luggage, authorities discovered a human torso.
Coffel’s arrest is the first in a series of discoveries of 11 human remains across Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts between March and April that have prompted rumors of a serial killer online.
“During the course of the police department’s investigation, there have been many rumors and unsubstantiated fear-mongering taking place on social media, making this city and surrounding communities seem like unsafe places to live. I’m here to assure you that the City of Groton is among the safest communities in the Northeast,” Groton Mayor Keith Hedrick said during a Monday press conference. “Approximately six weeks after the discovery of human remains at Colonel Ledyard Cemetery, I am pleased to announce that an arrest has been made, and a person of interest is in custody.”
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The Connecticut State Police told Fox News Digital earlier this month that “there is no information at this time suggesting any connection to similar remains discoveries, and there is also no known threat to the public at this time,” regarding the deaths in Connecticut.
Other remains have been located in New Haven, Norwalk, Groton, Killingly and now Rocky Hill, Connecticut; Foster, Rhode Island; and Framingham, Plymouth, Springfield, and now Taunton, Massachusetts.
The New Haven Police Department recently identified a victim whose body was discovered on March 25 on Rock Creek Road as Denise Leary, 59. She had been missing since September of last year.
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“At the time, we had no indication that there was any criminal aspect to her case,” New Haven PD Public Information Officer Christian Bruckhart told Fox News Digital in a Tuesday interview. “This was not necessarily unusual behavior for her to leave. She had some mental health diagnoses that she was suffering with, and … we’ve tried to be cognizant of her family’s feelings in this time because there was a time when she was missing, they wanted her to come back, then there were remains found a short distance from their house. So I’m sure they were hoping it wasn’t her, and now they have to kind of go through all this again with sort of people online speculating about her.”
Bruckhart wants to remind the public that victims are not “just the face on the screen”
“Her family is still suffering and grieving her loss,” Bruckhart said.
A medical examiner found Leary’s cause and manner of death to be undetermined, but Bruckhard said there is no “indication that there’s any criminal involvement.”
“That doesn’t mean that we can definitively say there was not, but … in the totality of what we saw in our investigation, there was nothing to indicate that she was murdered,” the officer said.
Regarding the Wormser case in Groton, Bruckhart said police are “not seeing any links, certainly between Denise and anyone else,” and they also do not see a connection between Coffel “and the city of New Haven in general.”
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“In a case of an alleged serial killer, if there was some connection that we had or that we saw, or it was a particular area, or there was a motive or whatever, we would want to put that out because we want to protect the public,” Bruckhart said. “That’s what we do. Now, that’s not to say that we would put out everything that we know, because again, if we’re trying to catch this person. Holding some of those facts and not publicizing them might help the investigation, might help that person get caught. In the case of Denise, we don’t see any of that.”
A Facebook group making unsubstatiated connections between the cases, which was formerly called “New England Serial Killer,” has changed its name due to the social media company’s policies and now has more than 68,000 followers.