Cold Case Murder of Washington Couple Featured on A&E

Dennis Hadaller made a promise to his parents after they were found dead in Washington state on Christmas Eve in 1985.

“At their funeral, I laid my hand on their casket and I said, ‘I will find out who did this,’ ” Hadaller later said, according to ABC News.

Nearly 30 years after his parents — Edward “Ed” and Wilhelmina “Minnie” Maurin — were killed, Hadaller got justice: In 2012, police announced the arrest of the killer, Ricky Riffe, who remains behind bars after being convicted of murder in 2013, according to The Chronicle. (Riffe’s long-suspected accomplice, his brother, died before he could be charged.)

Now the investigation and its eventual conclusion will be featured on Monday night’s episode of A&E’s Cold Case Files.

“What makes the case particularly shocking is that the key witness, who ultimately identifies the killers, is a family friend who had been harboring this secret his entire adult life,” says Ari Mark, president of the series’ production company, AMPLE.

In an exclusive clip from Monday’s episode, the Maurin family recalls the early days after Ed and Minnie vanished from their home in Chehalis, Washington, and before investigators made the gruesome discovery of their bodies.

“I thought somebody grabbed Ed and my mother and that they would hold them ransom,” Hadaller says in the clip.

Early on, police suspected the Maurins’ money had to do with their disappearance. After Riffe was arrested, police announced that he had in fact kidnapped the Maurins in 1985 and forced them to withdraw $8,500 from the bank.

The couple was killed by shotgun blasts to the back, according to the Lewis County Sirens.

They were reported missing on Dec. 19, 1985, after failing to appear at a Christmas party, according to ABC News. The next day, their car was found by police at a local mall — though the couple was nowhere in sight.

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As one case expert recalls in the Cold Case Files clip, “It [was] an icy morning. They could not see in the window and one of the detectives, instead of touching the car without having fingerprints, blew warm air onto the glass.

“Once he did that, he could see that the car was covered in blood — which will probably be burned in his brain for the rest of his life.”

As the Maurins’ grandson Mike Hadaller remembered of that period, in the clip, “Most everybody was trying to think the best but figuring that the worst was about to come.”

The Cold Case Files episode on the Maurin case airs Monday night (9 p.m. ET) on A&E.

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