He also admitted knowing the brothers were upstairs in his house with the girl as he heard her crying.
In court, he admitted grabbing Howe and passing her to the O’Briens who were waiting in a parked car. In September 2006, Walker, as part of a plea bargain, pleaded guilty to kidnapping and third degree murder and agreed to testify against the O'Brien brothers. The DNA revelation intensified the investigation, with increased presence in the area by the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police, with the latter searching the home of Eldred "Ted" Walker, who said he may have opened his home to some "really bad" people once who may have done "a disgusting thing." An early suspect, Walker and one of his vehicles had resembled those provided by the witness, but the investigation at the time stalled as his DNA did not match. O’Brien had not been a suspect earlier as investigators mistakenly believed he was in jail at the time of the attack, and neither of the brothers fit the eyewitness description. In 2002, a DNA sample taken from Oil City resident James O'Brien, who was serving a prison sentence for attempting to kidnap an Oil City woman in 1995, matched a sample of seminal DNA found on Howe's body in tests run by the FBI lab in Washington, D.C. The mystery of Howe's disappearance and murder continued for nearly ten years until the investigation had a major breakthrough. Howe's abductors had thrown her alive from a railroad trestle bridge into a dry, rocky creek bed near Coulter's Hole in Rockland, and she had died of blunt force trauma to the head and chest caused by the fall.
Despite a search of the area the day before, Howe's body was found about 200 yards from where the clothing was found the next morning. Two days later, a member of Howe's family found a piece of her gymnastic costume near an abandoned railroad bed in a rural, wooded area in the nearby township of Rockland.
A local resident, Dan Paden, however, witnessed the kidnapping, thereby providing investigators with details of the circumstances, the abductor and the getaway vehicle used. Around 8pm on October 27, Howe was walking home from a Girl Scouts Halloween party in Oil City, Pennsylvania, when she was abducted at the corner of West First Street and Reed Street, two blocks from home.
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