Clues

Philadelphia police continued their search yesterday for clues in the sexual assault of two women Friday in their apartment in the 4400 block of Spruce Street. Police at the University of Pennsylvania, where the victims were students, also stepped up patrols over the weekend in response to the attacks. A Philadelphia police spokesperson said the department did not know how the attacker entered the apartment building. Once inside, he approached one of the women in the hallway about 3 p.m. and used a knife to force her back into her apartment.

In the seven days since the body of go-go dancer Toshiko Ciaccio was found wrapped in a blue tarp in a quiet Bensalem neighborhood, police have uncovered few clues and fewer answers in what has become a baffling, frustrating case. "There's no crime scene and no suspects," said Bensalem Police Capt. Jack Robinson. "We need a break in the case, but we haven't gotten diddly. " Virtually all leads have turned up nothing. A waitress said she served Ciaccio and a man in the Golden Eagle II Diner in Bristol hours before Ciaccio was killed Sept.

Allen Iverson showed up for his annual celebrity softball game wearing his customary No. 3, although the number was on the throwback Atlanta Braves jersey of Dale Murphy. Atlanta? Was there anything to be read into Iverson's choice of uniform? "I don't know," Iverson said last night, before joining rapper Nelly and a celebrity roster to play before a capacity crowd at Prince George's Stadium. "God works in mysterious ways so whatever happens, happens. " The Atlanta Hawks are among the list of teams rumored to be interested in Iverson if the 76ers elect to trade him, as are the Boston Celtics, Denver Nuggets and others.

It has been more than a month since 5-year-old Lauren Jackson disappeared from the Park Springs Apartments in East Vincent Township. It has been a month of sleepless nights for the child's distraught mother. Sitting amid her daughter's toys in the living room of a sparsely furnished apartment Wednesday afternoon, Christine O'Donnell pointed to a little scooter parked against the wall. "I gave (Lauren) that for her birthday on Sept. 26," said O'Donnell, 35, her voice cracking, "but she didn't even learn to ride it right yet. " An intensive search began about an hour after Lauren's disappearance the evening of Oct. 4, with helicopters, bloodhounds, trackers and divers, but to date, authorities say they have turned up no significant clues to the child's whereabouts.

A doughnut bag left in an abandoned getaway car may offer police clues as to the identity of two robbers - one armed with a machine gun - who held up two employees in the Hidden Valley apartment complex' rental office yesterday, police said. A manager and secretary were in the office in the 700 block of Cherry Tree Road about 3:30 p.m. when the robbers entered and demanded money. No one was injured, police said, and the robbers escaped with an undisclosed amount of cash. The pair ditched their getaway car in another part of the complex, leaving behind a bakery bag and a McDonald's cheeseburger wrapper, said Police Chief William T. Robinson.

Authorities in Burlington County exhausted their search yesterday of a municipal park and pond where a missing high-school student's car was found a day earlier with her purse and cellphone inside. More than 100 people searched for clues that could lead them to 18-year-old Sarah Townsend, who was last seen at 7 a.m. Monday leaving her Florence home for Allentown High School, in Monmouth County. Townsend's boyfriend called police shortly before 10 a.m. when he found her car in a dirt lot overlooking a pond in Green Acres Park, several miles from her home.

Autopsies of two Bethlehem teenagers whose bodies were found on the Lehigh University campus indicate that the girls were homicide victims, police said yesterday. Jennifer Grider, 17, and Mary Orlando, 15, were shot to death Thursday night at Lookout Point, a popular campus overlook in a remote and heavily wooded area. The two friends had left home about 9 p.m. in a red Camaro borrowed from Grider's mother. They stopped for takeout food, then drove to Lookout Point. One girl was found slumped inside the car; the other, a short distance away near a stone wall.

The official cause of death is still unknown in the case of a Philadelphia restaurateur whose body was found in his sailboat 110 miles off the Virgina coast Thursday. But present clues indicate that Richard J. Cellini, of Sea Isle City, N.J., died as the result of a boating accident. Edward Cellini, the victim's brother, said the information he has received from officials indicate his brother's head was wedged in the mainsheet, a line that controls the mainsail. Cellini, 44, said his brother was found wearing a life vest and that he probably was knocked unconscious because "he could have gotten out of (the mainsheet)

Police from three Camden County communities, led by County Prosecutor Samuel Asbell, stopped and questioned nearly 1,000 motorists on the White Horse Pike yesterday morning near the Magnolia Sunoco station where an attendant was shot to death a week earlier. The police were hoping someone would be able to provide clues in the slaying of Mohammed Kabiruddin, 29, an Indian immigrant who lived in Maple Shade, said George Kerns, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office. "We were trying to find anyone who had seen anything at all. " Kerns said investigators decided on yesterday's sweep because they have not been able to find a motive for the slaying.

Police stopped hundreds of motorists near the scene. A $10,000 reward emerged. Dozens of officers, detectives and cadets combed nearby woods, searched case files and other records, and interviewed colleagues and loved ones yesterday for clues in the baffling shooting death of Bucks County lawyer Eric Birnbaum. By day's end, officials had no new public insights into the slaying of the 51-year-old lawyer Wednesday morning outside his office. "We have put all resources into solving this murder," said David Zellis, Bucks County first assistant district attorney.

In this week's Greek elections, the far-right, ultranationalist Golden Dawn party, whose members perform Nazi salutes at rallies, got 7 percent of the vote and entered Parliament for the first time. Its leader told journalists to stand upon his arrival at a news conference and ejected those who did not. A sick joke, you say. What's 7 percent? But Golden Dawn's gains are a symbol of a protest vote that fed extremes in Greece and decimated centrist parties, making it impossible to form a government in a country on the edge of economic collapse.

SANFORD, FLA. - Minutes before an unarmed black teenager was shot to death last month, he told his girlfriend that he was being followed, a lawyer said yesterday as federal and state prosecutors announced investigations. " 'Oh he's right behind me; he's right behind me again,' " Trayvon Martin, 17, told his girlfriend on his cellphone, the Martin family's attorney said. The girl later heard Martin say, "Why are you following me?" Another man asked, "What are you doing around here?

Evidence is still being analyzed from the blaze that consumed 10 cottages at the historic Chester Heights Camp Meeting on Saturday, Trooper Timothy Greene, of the Pennsylvania State Police fire marshal's unit, said Monday. But Pat Smith, president of the 30-acre site in Delaware County, said she had a hunch what caused the fire. "Absolutely suspicious . . . but not necessarily intentional," she said, noting that an October fire, which leveled three cottages at the site, apparently was caused by three people gathered in the woods and acting carelessly with a lighter.

Police are searching for clues in the killing of a police officer's son Monday afternoon in the city's Overbrook section, believing the man may have been gunned down in a case of mistaken identity. About 1:40 p.m., Dennis Gore, 24, and his girlfriend were walking near 55th and Hunter Streets, after getting some takeout lunch from a store on Lansdowne Avenue, police said. The streets were crowded with children getting off school buses when a gunman rushed up to Gore, without a word, and shot him five times in the chest, striking him in the heart.

It was just before 6 p.m. and still daylight on June 27, 2009, when police descended on the Piazza at Schmidts in Northern Liberties. The newly opened apartment and shopping complex was teeming with people enjoying cocktails at the courtyard restaurants. Upstairs, on the top floor of the seven-story Navona building on North Hancock Street, residents had just discovered the bodies of a man and a woman, riddled with bullets, in the hallway. Initially, police were unsure what the victims - 34-year-old Rian Thal, a party promoter well-known in the city's nightclub scene, and Timothy Gilmore, a 41-year-old long-haul trucker from Ohio - had to do with each other.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - When Jerry Sandusky moved his aging parents here in 1987 from Washington, Pa., he found them a three-bedroom rancher on Bristol Avenue in adjoining Ferguson Township. Its setting was similar - eerily so, in retrospect - to that of the Lemont home the longtime Pennsylvania State University assistant coach had bought just three years earlier for himself and his growing family. Like his house, his parents' also backed onto a park with a playground. And there were always children on Bristol, at first passing in and out of the busy Assembly of God church at the corner and later attending the elementary school that now occupies that site.

One thing Chicken Little apparently didn't need to worry about was that he'd suffer a heart attack or stroke. New work out of the University of Pennsylvania shows that chickens and other birds do not share our vulnerability to heart disease. For humans, those diseases look like the price we pay to get a blood-clotting system that keeps us from bleeding to death every time we fumble with the kitchen knife. Chickens avoided this evolutionary trade-off by using a different blood-clotting system.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - An FBI cadaver dog reacted to the scent of a dead person inside the Kansas City home where a baby girl disappeared nearly three weeks ago, and investigators discovered soil in the backyard that had been "recently disturbed or overturned," police said in a court document released Friday. The affidavit, filed last week in support of a search warrant targeting the family's home, also stated that the girl's mother, Deborah Bradley, "made the statement she did not initially look for her baby behind the house because she 'was afraid of what she might find.' " Those details and others in the affidavit led to a daylong search Wednesday of the family's home, where the parents say then-10-month-old Lisa Irwin must have been snatched in the middle of the night as the mother and two other boys slept.

One recurring theme in reader questions, especially from creationists, is that Darwinian evolution can't explain big changes - the invention of fur or feathers, kidneys or brains. These readers don't see how such innovation could possibly come about through random spelling errors in DNA, no matter how many millions of years they had to accumulate. ". . . the concept of 'descent with modification' cannot generate more complex systems . . . the old adage that if you give 1,000 monkeys 1,000 years to randomly type we could get the works of Shakespeare is false.

Matthew Novak, 24, was looking for help with his friend's broken-down car when he waved down a motorist at the corner of Sixth and Green Streets one September evening. When a blue Chevy Impala stopped, Novak got in, after telling his friends that the three men in the car would help him find jumper cables. Within minutes, police said, Novak was shot. He was found several blocks away, at 13th Street and Fairmount Avenue, and died soon after. In the three years that have passed since Novak's killing, the circumstances have grown no less mysterious.