Teenagers' killers arrested 32 years later
Source: Agencies |
March 25, 2010, Thursday
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Print Edition
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ONE night in 1978, five teenage boys disappeared without a trace in the American state of New Jersey.
Thirty-two years later, prosecutors announced the arrests of two men and disclosed the victims' gruesome fate: They were herded at gunpoint into an abandoned building in a dispute over missing drugs and burned to death.
A relative of one of the victims said that one of the men charged with the crimes, 56-year-old Lee Evans, confessed to him 18 months ago, setting investigators on the task of corroborating the confession.
"He just told me what happened," Rogers Taylor, brother of Ernest Taylor, told reporters on Tuesday.
Over the years, investigators conducted a nationwide search for the teens, chased hundreds of dead-end leads and enlisted at least two psychics. In the end, the evidence led back to a site just blocks from where the victims were last seen, in the same neighborhood where four of the teens lived.
Investigators believe that's where the boys were taken into an abandoned house. It was not known what pretense was used to get them to the house.
Acting Essex County Prosecutor Robert Laurino said the men restrained the boys and then set the house on fire. The five were believed to have died from the blaze that destroyed the house. The bodies were never found, possibly because no one thought to look for remains in an unoccupied home. The boys were not reported missing until two days later.
Arrested late on Monday were Evans, from nearby Irvington, who routinely hired teenagers to help with odd jobs; and Philander Hampton, 53, of Jersey City. They allegedly acted in retaliation for the theft of some marijuana. Both men were questioned after the boys disappeared, but neither one was charged. Evans passed a lie-detector test.
The victims - Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor, both 17, and Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson and McDowell, all 16 - were last seen on a busy street near a park where they had played basketball on August 20, 1978.
At the time, Evans told police that he dropped off the boys on a street corner near an ice cream parlor.
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