Doug Walker said he had long ago given up hope that the merciless shotgun killing of his brother in the San Bernardino County desert in 1974 would be solved until he received a surprising message on his phone last week from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department cold case team.
Investigators told Walker that they had linked serial killer Thomas Creech, a 73-year-old death row inmate in Idaho, to the slaying of 21-year-old Daniel Ashton Walker.
Walker, speaking from his home near Missoula, Montana, on Wednesday, Jan. 24, said he figured the killer was either dead or in jail and would never be discovered.
“I pretty much said to myself, ‘No way,’ ” said Walker, who was 15 at the time of his brother’s death and is now 64. “I do believe that the weight of my brother’s murder accelerated my father’s demise, but as far as my sister and I, we went on with our lives.”
But he added: “Nothing shocks me after somebody shoots your brother in his sleep.”
On Oct. 1, 1974, Daniel Walker parked his Volkswagen van alongside the 40 Freeway some 60 miles west of Needles so his passenger, hitchhiker Ken Robinson, 18, could rest. Someone showed up and fired on Walker several times as he begged for his life, inflicting fatal injuries. Walker’s van keys and money were ripped from a pants pocket, but other valuable property was left behind, a sheriff’s official wrote in a letter to the family.
Robinson, who was asleep in the back of the van, escaped notice and was able to flee unharmed.
Despite Robinson’s description of the suspect and his car, investigators could not develop any leads over the years, the Sheriff’s Department said in a news release Wednesday. Cold case detectives pulled the case file in 2010 when Doug Walker came to the Inland Empire and retraced his brother’s steps, but they made no headway.
Then on Nov. 15, 2023, the cold case team resumed the investigation. The Sheriff’s Department did not say what prompted the renewed interest, other than it “obtained additional information,” but it happened about a month after Walker self-published a book on Amazon titled, “Daniel My Brother: Mystery in the Mojave.”
Walker discusses the investigation and publishes related documents on the website danielmybrother.com
Walker said he devoted two chapters in the book to his brother’s character. In their father’s last letter to Daniel, he wrote: “Everyone speaks so highly of you, always and without exception.”
Walker said he did not write anything that would have led investigators to Creech, and he was reluctant to say what the Sheriff’s Department told him about how they made the connection. They did interview Robinson two months ago, Walker said.
“They convinced me that they were not going to pin something on someone just to solve a cold case. They assured me that they had hard evidence,” Walker said.
The Sheriff’s Department said that while working with the Ada County District Attorney’s Office in Idaho, cold case detectives were “able to corroborate intimate details from statements Creech made regarding Daniel’s murder.”
Robinson and Walker had kept in touch over the years as Walker investigated the case himself. Walker said he spoke last week to Robinson, who said investigators had asked him to keep quiet about the interview until they officially named Creech as a suspect.
“He said it was a giant pressure off his shoulder that I knew (about Creech) and now he could talk to me,” Walker said.
