Updated at 5:08 p.m.
Vermont and New York state police have arrested the man who authorities say has always been the prime suspect in the 1989 stabbing deaths of his in-laws in their Danby home.
Police said they cracked the cold case using DNA testing, identifying a spot of blood found inside the suspect’s car — long believed to be inconclusive — to his murdered father-in-law.
Michael Anthony Louise, 79, was arrested at his home in Syracuse, New York, on Thursday, according to a Vermont State Police press release. Louise is being held in New York while awaiting extradition to Vermont, and is facing two counts of second-degree murder.
A 27-page affidavit submitted by Samuel Truex, a state police detective sergeant, outlines more than 30 years of evidence in the case, detailing Louise’s guilty conscience in the weeks following the murders, his horrific criminal past, and the gradual unraveling of his initial alibi.
On Sept. 17, 1989, four days after the killing, a concerned neighbor spotted George Peacock, 76, lying in a pool of blood near his front door, and quickly discovered Catherine Peacock, 73, dead upstairs inside their home on Route 7 in Danby, both stabbed multiple times.
“There were no signs of forced entry or items of significance having been removed from the house,” state police said in announcing the arrest.
Janice Arnold, Danby’s town clerk since 1980, recalled the unsettling police presence in town in the days following the murders. Soon after, she said, the Rutland County state’s attorney called an open meeting to discuss the case, assuring townspeople that the killings had not been random.
According to Arnold, there was talk at the time that “someone associated with the family” was perhaps a suspect.
Louise, who was married to one of the Peacocks’ daughters, Penny, drew authorities’ attention not long after his in-laws were found murdered. (The affidavit did not indicate whether Louise and Penny are still married.)
Less than two weeks after the bodies were discovered, Louise, fearing that police would pin the murder on him, “left his home leaving a note insinuating that he would be committing suicide and took a gun with him,” Truex wrote in the affidavit. Later, Louise provided a statement to police, writing that his “nerves are shot, can’t think, sleep a lot,” since the murder happened. He told family he planned to check himself into a hospital for psychological counseling.
Louise had told his wife he intended to drive from their home in New York to her parents’ house in Danby on the day of the murder, information both of them initially withheld from police, according to the affidavit.
Later, Louise told police that he had decided on a whim to make the nearly 400-mile round trip from Syracuse to Danby on Sept. 13, the day of the murder, in order to pick up some particle boards he’d stored there. But once he reached Saratoga Springs, Louise said, he bailed on the idea and headed back home.
Asked by police whether he might have blacked out, driven to Danby, and killed the Peacocks, Louise said he’d “thought about that,” but ultimately denied the accusation, according to the affidavit.
More than three years after the murder, police interviewed Louise’s niece, who recalled that Louise told family members he remembered driving to Vermont on the day of the murders but “drew a blank about what happened then.”
Police then told the niece that Louise served jailtime for raping a 4-year-old girl in Rhode Island in 1966, a crime he claimed to have committed without memory. As the niece recalled, Louise used the same language to describe his trip to Vermont as he had used to describe the 1966 sexual assault, according to the affidavit.
The identification of George Peacock’s blood in Louise’s car, as well as the additional circumstantial evidence, led “investigators to identify Michael Louise as the perpetrator of the double murder,” Truex wrote in the affidavit.
The blood stain had been retested in 2000 with no meaningful results, according to the affidavit. In May 2020, Truex submitted the blood for testing, and the state’s forensic laboratory produced its results that October, linking the sample to George Peacock.
If found guilty, Louise faces up to life in jail.
