Metro still hopes for break in 3-year-old killing

Keith Paul

Wednesday, July 19, 2000 | 9:55 a.m.

Duke Bunnell's killer left behind enough evidence to link him to the brutal beating and slashing slaying. Detectives just need a name.

Metro Police Sgt. Kevin Manning said now that it's been three years since the 69-year-old man was killed during a violent struggle in an office in Rob Roy's lounge someone with information may be willing to come forward.

"People mature. If there is somebody who knows something, they may have been 18 or 19 years old at the time and been involved with drugs or other things," Manning said. "They are three years older now and may have straightened their life out and want to come forward."

Manning said it's happened in the past with other cases. People just call up detectives and provide the information needed to solve old cases.

And Annie Bunnell said she needs the closure an arrest in the slaying of her husband would bring.

"I pray to God they can solve this," she said. "I know nothing will ever ease my pain because I adored him so much. But it might help to have closure, to find out why they had to do this to him."

On July 10, 1997, Duke Bunnell got up early as he always did. He went for a run and then went over to the South Maryland Parkway bar to do some bookkeeping work -- something he did just to help out the people who ran the bar.

Every morning Bunnell would call his wife. Annie Bunnell waited and waited for the call. She started getting worried because her husband of 37 years always called.

"This one morning he didn't call me. I tried everything, but I couldn't reach him," said Bunnell, who started crying as she recounted that morning.

Then she saw on television someone had been killed at the bar.

"I knew it was him," she said. "I never even got to tell him goodbye."

Police said someone entered through an unlocked door, and a violent struggle ensued. Bunnell was hit, stabbed and slashed numerous times in what Manning said was one of the most brutal killings he's encountered.

All the weapons used were things found in the kitchen area of the lounge.

"We don't know if he let someone in or the door was open and somebody just came in," Manning said.

But police have fingerprints, dollar-value coins from Rob Roy's found in the hopper of a slot machine in a nearby grocery store, and evidence from the scene of the slaying and from Bunnell's car, which was stolen after the slaying.

Robbery was the apparent motive. Bunnell each morning would make entries into the books and make the daily deposits.

"All we basically need is a name, and we can connect an individual to the homicide," Manning said.

Police already sent the fingerprints off to the FBI and a West Coast fingerprint database for comparison, but found no matches.

Annie Bunnell said she will never be over the killing of her husband but hopes the solving of the crime might bring her some solace.

"This has been the roughest three years of my life. He was the dearest man," she said.

The Bunnells moved to Las Vegas from California about six years before the slaying. Duke Bunnell was a real estate agent after years of running restaurants in California.

Two weeks after Duke Bunnell was killed, Annie Bunnell moved back to California. She said just staying in Las Vegas, in the city where her husband was killed, was just too much for her to handle.

"Once I got his car back (which was stolen after the slaying and recovered by police), I got rid of it," Bunnell said. "It just hurts so much. They didn't have to do that to him."

Anyone with information in Bunnell's slaying is asked to call Metro's homicide unit at 229-3521 or Secret Witness at 385-5555.