Horses, love and death begun a new race-track murder mystery and then abandoned it as hopeless after one chapter. But the case is sadly real. About the strange death of Dr. Janice Runkle—a racehorse veterinarian who ministered to Pleasant Colony, the winner of this year's Kentucky Derby and Preakness—hardly more than one fact is totally clear: her body was discovered on a bleak stretch of Lake Michigan shore line in Illinois. The rest is a troubling bundle of loose ends. There are unrequited loves and an assumed name, a quest for comfort and sudden flight, enigmatic letters and a lethal dose of drugs. There is a quixotic gumshoe with a black eyepatch and beard. He was hired by the victim's uncomprehending family and insists Janice Runkle was murdered. Says her sister Christine Runkle Casselman: "We feel that she might have found out something she wasn't supposed to know."
The evidence points much more to suicide than to foul play. It suggests that the earnest young horse doctor was distraught over an affair and went off alone to die. The Lake County, Ill., coroner found that Runkle, 28, died from an overdose of pentobarbital, a drug used in veterinary medicine as a sedative, probably swallowed in liquid form. There were no signs that it was administered forcibly. Says Lake County Chief of Detectives Frank Winans: "She voluntarily took either an accidental or deliberate overdose."
Raised in suburban Detroit, Runkle never abandoned the standard schoolgirl passion for horses. She took her veterinary degree at Michigan State University in 1976, and found a job with Dr. Mark Gerard, a noted racehorse vet in New York.
When Gerard was convicted of substituting a champion horse for a nag in a 1977 race, Runkle was untainted, and picked up some of his erstwhile clients. She worked long hours and built a respectable practice, caring for the horses of prominent trainers.
Runkle also dated a couple of her clients. Her most serious friendship apparently had been with Johnny ("Fat Man") Campo, Pleasant Colony's trainer since March. They were vivid proof that opposites attract. Campo, 43, is a bombastic, street-wise man who rose to prominence by turning cheap horses into winners. Runkle was a slight, shy, sweetly bookish young woman given to quoting Her mann Hesse and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Just before her death, Runkle described their relationship in as a letter she sent to Newsweek Columnist Pete Axthelm: "Johnny and I do love each other in our own, twisted ways." But Campo, married and the father of two sons, denies any intimacy. "We were close, sure," he told a reporter. "But I never touched her. Our relationship was one of employer and employee. I made her what she was. She would have been nothing without me."