Dr. Clyde Snow is one of the foremost experts on forensic anthropology in the world. Many consider him the best.

In his career, Snow has examined the remains of Pres. Kennedy, Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, King Tut and victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, among many, many others.

Snow also worked the Brenda White case and maintained an interest in the Judith Elwell case.

He talked with me today. Here’s some of what he had to say:

“I was always convinced that those cases were connected in some way,” Snow said. “Even though there were only two (victims), right away you’d think of them as (being victimized by) a serial killer. … There had been cases of serial killers before, of course, but I think the police tendency was to treat most things like that as if they were independent until they had a good series going.

“One thing that struck me was not only the age of the girls and the general description and the circumstances, but they were exactly four weeks apart on Thursdays. It’s almost like someone had Thursday afternoons off. That and some of the other things just made me believe that these were connected. We’d never had cases like that before in Oklahoma City, for two young girls to go missing that close together.

“The other thing that struck me, and I think you mentioned it in the story, was that we went out there, and we collected all the bones (of White’s body), and we found this cat skeleton. And the cat, in the vertebra, it still had a shotgun pellet. It wasn’t an old wound. It had killed the cat. … That skeleton was pretty much on top of the grave. … It occurred to me that what had happened there, and again, it’s kind of a wild theory, is that someone had been keeping an eye on that grave and came back and found that animals had disturbed it. Perhaps he shot the cat and left it deliberately on top of the grave, because if anybody did come by and smell something, they’d peek in there and see a dead cat and move on. Otherwise, you’d have to assume that the cat was shot somewhere else and by coincidence managed to crawl off and die on the grave of this young girl. … I always figured that whoever it was was somehow, in one way or another, keeping an eye on that grave.”

Very soon, staff writer Jay Marks will update us on the 1985 shooting death of Alan Rehrig, a former OSU football and basketball player whose estranged wife has long been a suspect. According to The Associated Press, she has been widowed three times, has at least six aliases and is currently accused in North Carolina of stealing Social Security benefits and identity theft.

Also …

Oklahoma City police say they’ve received more than 20 tips on the Orbach and City Girls cases since they were featured on the Cold Case OKC Web site.

You’re making a difference.

Excerpts follow:

“As a Youth Bureau Detective for OCPD,” he wrote, “I was responsible for a large amount of follow up investigations pertaining to the Elwell disappearance of 7/6/1967. We received reports from all over Okla. City, Oklahoma, and from various areas of the U.S.

“We made follow up investigations on all reports that came to us, even though most of them seemed inconsistent with the facts as we knew them. I personally went to Wichita, Ks. with other local Law Enforcement Officers along with representative Jim Standard of The Oklahoman in August of 1967.

“This trip was to interview a male Nurse who had been in Okc. and had worked at the Nursing Home in the 3200 NW 10 (area) just East of where Elwell lived. He had worked there at the time of the disappearance. The suspect was interviewed at great length and voluntarily agreed to take a polygraph test administered by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. The suspect was released after passing all tests and interviews and no other evidence existed connecting him to this case.

“Lt. Jim Reading, head of the Youth Bureau, kept a file on this case in his office that was about 8-10 inches thick and was kept up to date on a daily basis. For some unknown reason this file has disappeared or been misplaced. I myself about a year ago attempted to ascertain information about this case and was advised by OCPD it could not be found.

“To my knowledge, this is the only unsolved case of a missing or abducted child in the history of the OCPD.”

(That statement has not been verified.)

“The OCPD and the Youth Bureau spent hundreds if not thousands of man hours and travel investigating this case and did all we possibly could do in solving this case as there was a lot of public sentiment and input into this case. We worked this case as if it was our very own missing child.”

Her brother, Mark Elwell, 49, said that he had an encounter of sorts with his sister’s kidnapper and that the man “cased” their house for about three weeks before Judith disappeared.

“That was real,” Mark Elwell said. “I saw the car. During this time period, this guy followed me also. He followed me on my newspaper route. I told the police about this, and when I told them this, they said I was a child with a very overactive imagination.

“But I seen the car the night of my sister’s disappearance. About 9:30 or 10 o’clock (at night) … there was a big black car with a man in it, and I could hear my sister crying. I got probably 15 or 20 feet away. I snuck up on it and then bolted and got my father and brought him back.”

By then, he said, the car was gone.

Police were slow to accept that Judith had been taken by a stranger, he said.

“We told them from the get-go that she was kidnapped,” he said. “They were looking for a missing child. They were looking for a child who ran away.”

And, he said, police seemed to focus their investigation on his parents.

“They dug up our front yard,” he said. “They dug up our back yard. They dug up underneath our house. They dug up the place where my father worked. … I couldn’t tell you how many times they took my mother or my father down there (to police headquarters) and grilled them. You don’t seem to understand. My father was a straitlaced Catholic. He never smoked. He never drank. He never cussed. My mother was a straitlaced Baptist.”

At some point, he said, a private detective investigated the case and claimed to have identified the killer — a male nurse who came to Oklahoma from Kansas City.

Elwell thinks the detective was right and that his sister was cut up and cremated in a nursing home incinerator.

But, he said, the detective never told him the nurse’s name.

The Elwell family never recovered from losing Judith, he said.

His mother died of breast cancer about six years after Judith vanished, he said. She mourned Judith until the day she died.

His father, who is also deceased, suffered, too. Elwell said his father had difficulty getting back on his feet and holding a steady job after the disappearance.

Elwell said he thinks about his sister often — even now, 40 years later. Sometimes, he said, she haunts his dreams.

About 40 years ago, Carol Alexander left her best friend behind at the corner store and never had a chance to play with her again.

Alexander, now 47 and married with a different last name, wrote to The Oklahoman in early July to remind us about Judith Elwell and Alexander’s friend, Brenda White.

She wanted to make sure we didn’t forget, because she never has.

“I realize I am not a family member,” Alexander wrote, “but I have never let go of Brenda. Not for a moment. It is eating away at me like a cancer. Hers was the first funeral I ever attended, and I didn’t even know what death was.

“I just knew Brenda would never be coming home again, and we would never play Barbie dolls again. I have never touched another Barbie doll since that morning.”

Because of Alexander’s e-mail, we had the opportunity to meet Brenda’s parents and see how their lives have changed as a result of the 1967 tragedy. We got to put the case before you again.

“There’s not a day that we don’t think about her and the life she could have had and the children she could’ve had and see her brothers and sisters going forward with their lives,” said Connie White, Brenda’s mother.

Bobby White, Brenda’s father, doesn’t dare say what he’d like to do to the person who stole his daughter and killed her. He doesn’t want to curse.

Even now, so many decades later, the lost little girls are still missed.

“I would like to make a final plea,” Alexander wrote, “to the conscience of the man who killed both girls, or the men who killed each girl, that you may find God’s forgiveness in your hearts and let the families and friends have some closure with your confession. … You have lived with these acts in your heart every day of your life, as we have lived with the losses.

“If you are already imprisoned, then what have you got to lose? Drop it from your shoulders and get it off your chest so you may find peace with your maker one day and allow the rest of us the peace we deserve, too.”

You’ve heard criminologist Shawna Cleary giving her theories about the abductor (and yes, she thinks the same person took both girls).

And you’ve also seen flickering, flitting images of a young girl in a pink bathing suit frolicking on the beach with her family. That girl is Brenda White.

The images were recorded about two months before Brenda disappeared and about five months before her body was found in a shallow grave near Harrah. Filming occurred in June 1967 during a family vacation to Pensacola, Florida.

The film clips were provided to The Oklahoman by Brenda’s parents.

There’s something about those images that bring home the loss this family suffered more powerfully than any police reports or interviews or words in a news article.

One moment, Brenda is there, an excited young girl, smiling, laughing and playing in the sand with her brother on the ocean shore. The next, she jumps out of the frame and vanishes.

For me, at least, the moment she disappears from the screen is poignant, foreshadowing what would happen mere weeks later.

Here, then gone.

And far too soon.

It’s been less than two weeks since the debut of the Web site, one of the latest ventures of The Oklahoman and NewsOK.com. Check it out at www.newsok.com/news/coldcase.

Already, police have received “a couple” of tips in the unsolved slayings of Syrl and Christine Orbach, who were beaten and stabbed to death in their northwest Oklahoma City home about 25 years ago. Their case was featured on the site.

“We checked the tips out and thought we might be on to something,” said police Capt. Steve McCool, “but they didn’t work out.”

Even so, that’s a couple tips in a case that’s a quarter of a century old. That’s a couple tips police didn’t have before. And it’s a couple more chances police had to help the Orbachs find justice.

Maybe the next tip will be the one to crack the case.

This Sunday, you’ll have a chance to review another cold case. Hopefully,  you hold the key to solving it.

About 40 years ago, Judith Elwell, 5, and Brenda White, 6, disappeared within a month of each other. The little girls didn’t know each other and lived on opposite ends of the metro, but they are eternally bound by tragedy — and they may have fallen victim to the same predator.

On Sunday, read the stories, check out documents from the actual police case file, view photographs, explore our archived coverage and follow a timeline of events. Watch a video that includes home movie footage of Brenda and commentary by veteran reporter John Greiner, who helped cover the case as it unfolded.

And if you think you can help, contact the police or e-mail us at coldcase@oklahoman.com.

– By Ken Raymond, Staff Writer

One was buried in a shallow grave. The other has never been found.

Can this cold case ever be solved?

And can you help?

Coming this Sunday.

If you have information about this case, knew the girls or helped in the search for them, please contact us at coldcase@oklahoman.com.