NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, March 7, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Method & Madness, a true-crime podcast that focuses on victim advocacy, in partnership with Cold Case Advocacy, is releasing a four-part series on the unsolved murder of Kristin O'Connell, the 20-year-old Minnesota college student brutally slain in the summer of 1985 while visiting 19-year-old James Vermeersch, in his hometown of Ovid, New York. O'Connell's case has troubled Ovid's small, close-knit community for thirty-eight years. Despite overwhelming physical evidence, New York State Police have yet to arrest anyone in connection with the murder, and they admit to not having a lead suspect. The podcast lays out the known facts of the case, explores possible motives for her killing, and invites listeners to help actively get involved in Kristin's unsolved murder.

Kristin first met James Vermeersch in 1985 during Spring Break at the South Seas Plantation Resort on Captiva Island in Florida. Months later, Vermeersch invited Kristin to visit him in his small town in the Finger Lakes. Two days after she arrived, Kristin went missing. The following day, her rain-soaked naked body was found in an overgrown cornfield less than a quarter of a mile from where she was staying with Vermeersch, her throat slashed from ear to ear. An autopsy would confirm that O'Connell's body was free of any signs of drugs or alcohol and, despite being found naked, there were no signs of sexual assault.

Despite the case's lack of progress, Kristin O'Connell's murder remains an open homicide investigation with the New York State Police. Nationwide, most homicides are classified as "cold cases" within a few years of not being solved. However, New York State Police refuse to classify Kristin's case as cold. The Method & Madness podcast explores the O'Connell family and their advocate's desire to pass Kristin's Law, federal legislation requiring all law enforcement agencies to classify homicide investigations cold if, after three years of investigating the crime, they fail to make an arrest that leads to a conviction.

Over the years, Kristin's case has garnered much media attention, including national headlines in 2009 when the New York State Health Department blocked renowned Dutch DNA experts Richard and Selma Eikelenboom from testing physical evidence in the case. More recently, in 2021, two-time Academy Award-winning documentarian Bill Guttentag offered State Police the assistance of the Cold Case Foundation, led by the former head of the FBI's violent crimes task force and prominent profiler, Greg Cooper. Guttentag also offered a state-of-the-art forensics lab to test all the evidence in the case in exchange for documenting the collaboration. State Police rejected Guttentag's offer, and subsequent pleas to District Attorney Mark Sienkiewicz were also dismissed.

"On the day of her funeral, I promised my daughter that I would not rest until the person or people responsible for her murder are behind bars," Phyllis O'Connell, the victim's eighty-three-year-old mother, said. "I intend to keep my promise. I will continue to ask the tough, uncomfortable questions and press State Police to turn over every rock until they find out who killed Kristin. I believe there's still a lot of investigating that needs to happen. There's a lot of forensic testing that should take place. And I am certain people in Ovid know who is responsible for her murder. I implore everyone to please, be as angry as I am, and act. There's a killer free amongst us. Please, help us apply pressure on State Police, District Attorney Sienkiewicz, and Senator Thomas O’Malley. Please, we need your outrage."

"A lot of people who were with Kristin on the night she was murdered refused our invitation to participate in the podcast. " Many others close to the case admitted they were simply too scared to speak out publicly about what they know," said podcast creator and host Dawn Gandhi. "There's real fear in this small-town surrounding Kristin's murder. We need the public's help encouraging anyone and everyone with information about Kristin's murder to come forward."

The first episode in the Method of Madness series is titled 56. Murdered: Kristin O'Connell will be available on March 7, 2023, on Apple Podcast, Anchor, Breaker, Google Podcast, Spotify, and Radio Public. Additional episodes will be released weekly on March 14, 21, and 28.

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