DNA links 26-year-old slaying to dead inmate, police say

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Wendy Stark, a University of Maryland student, had missed her brother’s 12th birthday party in April 1982, and her mother, Marjory, was calling area hospitals, fearing the worst.

A nurse at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda said they had an unknown female patient. Marjory Stark gave a description — 20 years old, tall, blond, wearing a  Jergensen watch. The nurse paused, and put an administrator on the phone.

“You better come down here,” Marjory Stark said she was told.

Her daughter had been shot four times, once in the head and three times in the back as she had scrambled to get away from her attacker, whom police now say was Gerald Anderson Abernathy, after linking him to long-held DNA evidence.

Wendy Stark died days later when the family removed her from breathing equipment. It was clear she would never survive on her own.

For 26 years the family wondered who had been behind the bullets.

“We had in our minds that it was someone connected to the university,” Marjory Stark told The Examiner. “But it turns out this was just a random killing by a predator.”

At the time of Stark’s death, Abernathy was hiding out in Kensington, Montgomery County police said. He had escaped a Virginia jail in 1981.

On April 9, 1982, Stark was abducted from the Hillandale Shopping Center around 4 p.m. She was raped in an unknown location.

Then, around 9 p.m., Stark broke free from her assailant, jumping out of a car and running toward a home in the 11100 block of Mitscher Street in North Kensington. The porch light was on, and Stark broke through a gate that had a wood-and-wire latch, according to reports at the time.

She ran up the stairs leading to a deck, and as she struggled with the door to the split-level house, shots rang out. Moments later, she was found sprawled on the kitchen floor by resident William Penkowsky.

At the time, the technology needed to test the suspect’s DNA wasn’t available, but using a DNA sample from the rape kept over the years, Montgomery County detectives were able to pin the crime on Abernathy, who died of lung cancer in October 2007 while in a North Carolina prison, where he was serving a life sentence for kidnapping and murder, county police said.

“It’s a relief, in a way, to know he passed,” said Amy Stark, one of Wendy’s younger sisters.

“A trial may have been too much for my mom to handle,” she said, adding that she’s glad Abernathy was at least off the streets and in prison all these years.

Wendy was a protective friend and sibling, Marjory Stark said.

“I always had in the back of my mind that if we were in a dangerous situation the only one who would know what to do would be Wendy,” Marjory Stark said. “She almost got away from him that night.”

fklopott@dcexaminer.com