By  Seamus McGraw

(Continued)

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Death on a December night

The last few weeks of 1979 had been hard on then-25-year-old Joe Foy. His father had only recently lost a long battle with cancer, and one of his closest childhood buddies, a kid five years younger whom Joe Foy had regarded as his "little brother," had died in a car wreck.

But the young steel company worker, who lived in small house on a one-way street behind a well-lit industrial building near the point where Detroit bleeds into Ferndale, Mich., was doing the best he could to get on with his life.

It was about 9:30 p.m. on Dec. 1, 1979, and Joe had settled in for a night in front of the television. His then-wife, Paula, had drifted off into a sound sleep, and Joe may well have been about to do the same, when his dog, a wolf-German shepherd cross named Duke, started barking in the backyard.

At first, Foy said, he thought little of it. "He would always bark, you know just normal dog barking." But soon, the dog became wildly agitated, and Joe Foy left his sleeping wife to investigate.

He glanced out the window, and noticed a Pontiac parked on the street outside, bathed in the bright glow of a three-story billboard across the street, a light so strong that Foy used it to illuminate his backyard volleyball games on summer nights.

From his vantage point inside the house, Foy peered into the car. "I really didn't see anybody — either somebody was sitting in it, or they already got out — so I went back and sat down."

"A couple of minutes passed and the dog started barking really violently," Foy recalled. Again Foy investigated. He could see from the downstairs window that Duke was unusually agitated. "He used to have a really large chain connected to his doghouse and he was actually rushing the fence and yanking the chain like he wanted to go over the fence," Foy told Crime Library.

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