The murder John Camp remembers most distinctly is not the most notorious of the Capital Region nor the most mysterious. It happened nearly 17 years ago and the killer, who was identified hours after the crime, is long dead now.

But it was one of Camp's first homicide cases as a State Police Major Crimes investigator and, after 12 hours in the interrogation room Daniel McDonald confessed he bludgeoned 67-year-old William Ganseman and torched his house to conceal the crime.

"I saw that Mr. Gansman was just a nice old man who was born with a disability," Camp said. "And then this guy takes advantage of him, just keeps stealing his money. And when he didn't have any more more money, then Danny McDonald just goes and kills him. And that just got me mad."

McDonald's testified in court that the confession was coerced. The jury didn't buy it. The murder weapon and victim's blood had been found in his apartment. McDonald was sentenced to 32 years to life in prison, but died a year into his term..

Camp, who retired as a State Police senior investigator this month, spent the majority of his 35-year career investigating high-profile homicides and cold cases in the Capital Region.

"I always wanted to be a detective," Camp said. "I think I felt that detectives worked on the most heinous crimes, the most serious crimes and maybe the most high profile cases. And I figured it would put my brain to work, to figure out why something happened and who did it."

Q & A

This conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

What are you thinking before going into an interrogation?

"When you know you're going into the interrogation room and you're the person that has to go in there and get this confession, and all your colleagues are waiting for the result, waiting for you to come out, you got the pressure on there. You know that you're probably going to get one chance to talk to this person and find out what really happened, so there is a lot of pressure."

Have you ever brought a suspect in for an interrogation and realized your investigation was headed in the wrong direction?

"You bring a lot of people in and you interview these people. You're trying to go in there and have them tell you the truth and then a lot of times the person who you think committed the crime, after you talk to them, interview them and interrogate them, you find out that's not the person and then they are released. Not everybody who we bring into an interrogation room has committed the crime."

How do you feel about new state rules requiring interrogations be video recorded?

"You don't have that question anymore: Was this voluntary or was this involuntary? The long and short of it is, the jury can watch the tape and they can say, 'Mmm, that was or wasn't an involuntary statement.' It takes that question out."

The results of polygraphs are typically not admissible in court but police regularly use them in investigations. Are polygraphs a reliable investigative tool?

"A polygraph is only as good as the polygraph examiner. And it's just a tool of the investigation. I was a polygraphist since 1995 and was the senior polygraph member of Troop G, so I believe in polygraphs."

After more than two decades investigating homicide, do you have any theories on why people kill?

"No. There are many reasons, many reasons. Some people are just really bad people who just want to kill. Somebody could be in a robbery and they're trying to snuff out a witness. Another thing could be a domestic. I don't know. I have my own theories on things but I don't know. I look at some cases and, for lack of a better word, I can see where a husband and a wife have a domestic and it just goes bad, he's leaving and she doesn't want him to, or vice versa, compared to somebody who just abducts a kid and sexually assaults him and murders him. There are differences there, the way I look at it."

Looking back, what other cases stand out to you?

"There are some when I go back... I'll tell you, there was one that bother me, not the victim, but the perpetrator. One was in Cohoes, it was a fire, years ago. The house was set on fire and upstairs there was a girl sleeping and she died in the fire. So you've got a homicide. We found out that the resident who lived downstairs, they had a young kid watch the house that night and he had a couple beers, got a buzz on. He was kind of a firefighter kid and he lit a fire and it just got out of control. And I remember when we picked him up at his house, he was puking it out and he couldn't wait to tell us what happened. And I felt sorry for that kid. I had to go down and grab his father and tell him what happened, and the father actually started having some chest pains, just, 'Oh my God, what is going to happen to my son in prison?' And you know what, he's out now. I think he had 20 to life, and he got out. But there's a kid that, if he hadn't had those beers. He's in a situation where he wasn't going to start a fire to burn it. He just had a couple of beers and got that little buzz on and... He wasn't a bad kid. He was a good kid actually. That kind of thing is kind of hard. You'll see people who will commit murders and they're not real bad people. They just have a bad moment, and that's hard."

Do you have any theories on Craig Frear's 2004 disappearance from Scotia?

"Some people think it's a suicide, some people think it's a missing person, some think it's a homicide. If I had to guess, I would say suicide. But I am probably in the minority on that."

What about Suzanne Lyall?

"The majority of the guys who worked on that case have since retired and I was one of the last remaining original investigators on it. It's a young college student who didn't do anything. Just a great person, a great girl, trying to go to college, working, doing everything right and somebody abducts her and in all likelihood it's a homicide."

What do you think happened to Karen Wilson, who vanished from the University at Albany in 1985?

"Karen Wilson was last seen walking on Fuller Road, which is over here off Central Avenue. We have a number of witnesses who believe that she appeared to be being followed by a male or two. That one I believe is a stranger abduction. Again, it's a case that is still being worked in major crimes and I'm hoping someday it will be closed. But obviously as time goes on it gets more difficult: People who may have information but have never provided it pass away ... or they get older and their memory (fades). The longer the case goes, the harder it is to solve it."

For the last four years, he's supervised Troop G's Major Crimes unit. That squad's caseload includes the investigations into Suzanne Lyall's 1998 disappearance at the University at Albany and slaughters of two families that rocked the Capital Region in 2014 and 2017, respectively.

Camp learned how to deal with the tragedy and depravity by telling himself the case would never be solved if he didn't hold it together. And an uncharged perpetrator could claim more victims..

"Some of the things I've seen I wouldn't wish anybody to see," Camp said. "That's what I wanted to do and agreed to do."

When Gov. Mario Cuomo created the Major Crime squads in 1994 to combat the rise in violent crime, Camp said he "knew then that's where I wanted to end up." He was already an investigator, working felony-level cases for Troop G's criminal unit, and in 2000 he transferred to Major Crimes. He later served as supervisor for Troop G's criminal unit before being named the leader of Major Crimes in 2014.

When he retired April 4, Camp was one of only four people from his 1983 Basic School session still working for the State Police. The other three: Superintendent George P. Beach II, Field Commander Colonel Stephen Smith and Trooper Michael Scheibel, who also retired this month.

Camp said the brutal slaying of the Chen family in Guilderland "will bother me until it is solved."

"Anytime you have a family murdered which includes innocent young children, maybe we work it a little bit harder. It does affect us a little bit more," he said.

Those wounds were still fresh when another family of four was killed in December 2017 inside a Troy apartment. Camp and his investigators arrested two Schenectady men and charged them with murdering Shanta Myers, her two children and her fiancée.

"You can go from the low of the Chen family homicide to the ecstatic high of (solving) the other," Camp said. "Solving that crime is so gratifying I cannot even explain it."

He declined to to comment on allegations of improper police interrogations that lead to chaos in court and the filing of new charges days after the suspects were arrested. The two men are awaiting trial.

"I know the investigation was thorough and, in the end, justice will be served," Camp said.

When Major Crimes is not working an active homicide investigation, their six investigators are reexamining the roughly 25 cold cases assigned to them.

"Missing persons cases are tough because you don't have motive — you can surmise motive but you don't really have it — and you don't have any physical evidence because you really don't have a crime scene. So you really kind of have nothing," Camp said.

Camp said he's seen key witnesses come forward decades after a crime. Perhaps they've had children of the own, found religion or recovered from substance abuse. In many cases, the perpetrator has died and they now feel safe talking to police.

"There is nothing we get that we don't act on, because that's what we're looking for. We're looking for a tip, a lead," he said.

Camp says the decision to retire was a difficult, given his cases may take many more years to crack.

"I enjoyed what I did and I enjoyed the guys I worked with," he said. "It felt like we were doing some good. Last year we had a grand year. We solved a lot of cases last year. We were busy."

Camp's final nine months were filled with constant carnage.

Since July, his squad investigated the strangulation death of a 95-year-old Fort Ann grandmother, a friendly fire shooting that left a Glenville officer wound, the drug-related fatal shooting of a Mechanicville teen, and the fatal stabbing of a mother and daughter in South Glens Falls. In October, the Major Crimes Unit and Schenectady Police Department announced they had cracked the 1995 murder of Suzanne Nauman using DNA. In December, a jury's conviction concluded their investigation of Edward "Ted" Mero, the killer of two women.

Then, after Christmas, they were assigned the Troy quadruple killing.

"As you get older, these things are harder to work," Camp said. "The long hours, getting woken up in the middle of the night and working for 24 straight hours. You're eating pizza, drinking a lot of coffee and not sleeping. You're under a lot of stress and it takes a real toll on your body. Ten years ago, it was a lot easier than it was now. So I think I'm just going to decompress."

With the knowledge that his first three grandchildren would all be born by September — one baby in Scotia and twins in the Netherlands — Camp said he knew it was time to retire. He's 59 and members of the State Police are required to retire at age 60.

"I didn't want to miss another summer," Camp said. "I'm going to golf and fish and all those things that you're supposed to do."