BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — Richard Fox, the suspect in the murders of two Buffalo women whose remains were found in 2021 off a Chautauqua County trail, was back in court Wednesday.
The 62-year-old Buffalo man was charged with first-degree murder in January for the killing of Marquita Mull.
Fox was then charged with second-degree murder in February in the killing of Cassandra Watson.
Several members of Mull's family were in court Wednesday, including her sister Wendy, who searched for her for months until she was finally found.
Wednesday's court case before Erie County Judge Suzanne Maxwell Barnes was routine, but Mull said that didn't matter to her.
“Oh, I'm coming every day Richard Fox is in court," she said, after watching him appear in court in orange jail scrubs. "It's an emotional day every time you see him. But, you know, just to see him behind bars and know that justice is coming...So yeah, I'm in court every day.”
Marquita Mull was missing for about three months before she was found, and it took authorities just a few weeks to positively identify her remains.
But it took authorities until just recently to identify Watson — and that was the key to solving the case.
Chautauqua County Sheriff's Office investigators and the Erie County District Attorney's Office turned to Othram, a forensic DNA lab in Woodlands, Texas, to try to identify the skeletal remains.
"The problem was that the technology that they were trying to employ wasn't really appropriate for building a profile that is used for this specific type of analysis," said Michael Vogen, director of case management at Othram. "So they were having a hard time doing anything with the DNA profile they had."
Othram was recently in the news for its role in identifying two other cold case murder victims, a mother and baby whose deaths have been tied to the Gilgo Beach serial killer case in Long Island. Their technology was used to identify 26-year-old Tanya Jackson and her 2-year-old daughter Tatiana Dykes.
Vogen explained how the forensic testing helps them find potential relatives of the unidentified victims.
“It's kind of like sonar radar, right?" he said. "Each match in the database is like a blip on that radar that kind of narrows your focus of where you need to go. And ultimately, the idea is that this forensic genetic genealogy is giving them a new investigative lead that they otherwise wouldn't have.”
The testing led authorities to a potential relative, a Buffalo man who had died recently. After more testing, they were able to identify the remains as those of Cassandra Watson, who was about 40 when relatives said they last saw her in about 2003 or 2004.
Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane said in February at a news conference on Fox's indictment in the case that investigators learned that Watson had been living with Fox when she was last seen.
Fox is a twice-convicted sex offender who grew up on Wolebon Road in the Town of Portland, less than half a mile from the Chautauqua Rails to Trails where the bodies were found.
“Once they made that connection between Richard Fox, obviously, this case came to a head very quickly," Keane said in February.
“All the cases that we work on are important," Vogen told 7 News. "But I personally have a bit of a soft spot for unidentified homicide victims because how do you sort out who did this to them if you don't know who they are?”
