It is now about seventeen years since Linda Muegge, an animal welfare campaigner who also ran a food kitchen for disadvantaged humans and was otherwise active in her community in a positive way, was stabbed to death in her kitchen, in Fredericksburg, Central Texas, the killer attempting to burn the house down over her head to conceal the evidence. This failed for two reasons: a large amount of non-flammable plaster ceiling material fell on top of the body, preserving evidence of her wounds -and the local fire department were training nearby and were able to attend the scene several minutes earlier than would have normally been the case:
This is a link to a current Fox News article on the case:
https://www.fox7austin.com/news/fredericksburg-woman-linda-muegge-case-missing-in-texas
And this is a link to a blog article (one of several by the same author) posted many years ago by a friend of Medawar, reproducing a lot of articles and local background information not otherwise available online. If you have trouble reading the newspaper cuttings, they are posted as jpegs so you can download them and read them more easily in an image viewer that allows you to zoom in on the text:
https://vocct.blogspot.com/2010/12/muegge-murder.html
Here is the somewhat meagre but still useful article from the Texas Department of Public Safety (who, incidentally, are responsible for licensing private detectives. The State Troopers come under the DPS, too.)
https://www.dps.texas.gov/apps/coldCase/Home/Details/8
This murder has occupied the attention of both Medawar and VOCCT for oh so many years, and it is perplexing that the FBI have not yet solved this one because Agents from the San Antonio Field Office have so many friends and supporters in Fredericksburg.
Today, one word in the FBI's updated article on this murder strikes Medawar as a bit of a clue, which those agents really should have been able to follow up on. That word is "Frank" and it is the name used by an individual who Linda complained of, to police, some years before her murder. She did not feel safe with Frank on her land or in her house, and she only knew him because he had been introduced by a mutual friend. See:
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/vicap/homicides-and-sexual-assaults/linda-muegge
The method of approach to the victim is not typical of an ordinary stalker or sex-pest. It is, however, how undercover officers and private detectives tend to do it. SVR and FSB agents also prefer to be introduced to a target rather than to introduce themselves, but the agency involved might be closer to home than that.
It is unlikely that the killer himself was a private detective, because that would be unprofessional as well as illegal and setting a fire to "destroy evidence" is not a favoured technique with professionals because it tends to give investigators an unambiguous timeline which can be more dangerous than just leaving the deceased to their own devices until discovered hours or days later. But since Frank appeared at the beginning of a years-long campaign of harassment, the killer might well have been one of Frank's clients, or an associate thereof. (Well-planned killings tend to have several layers of separation.)
Now, at the time there was a licensed private investigator, based in Fair Oaks (between St Antonio and Fredericksburg) who did quite a lot of work for the great and good of both cities and most of them (and several local FBI agents, police officers and Texas Rangers) knew him as "Frank" even though that was not the name on his business card. He also claimed to be a former FBI agent and this claim was verified by senior agents in the San Antonio Field Office, although, interestingly, one State Trooper who asked FBI Headquarters to confirm this (in connection with complaints about the private investigator's license) was told, quite clearly and firmly, that the private investigator was NOT a former FBI agent.
It's almost as if the FBI as an institution is currently searching in vain for information already known to many of its former agents!
It could be very embarrassing for the killer, whoever he is, if Medawar had an image of that investigator's business card, would it not?
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