Columbus police try fresh approach to cold case murders with new training, forensics

Buy the prosecution’s theory in this year’s gang-assassination trial of three Crips who gunned down a man at Peachtree Mall, and no one ever will be charged in the last homicide on the Columbus Police Department’s list of cold murder cases.

It’s the home-invasion shooting of Christopher Twitty, on Nov. 21, 2015, at 167 Wickham Drive.

When Twitty’s girlfriend Tekoa Young, her brother Xzavaien Trevon Jones, and friend Terell Raquez McFarland were tried in the March 26, 2016 murder of Anthony Meredith, prosecutors said the trio killed Meredith to avenge Meredith’s killing Twitty, his former Hardaway High School classmate.

They said Meredith dealt drugs, and Twitty cheated him out of $3,000 worth of marijuana, so Meredith made him pay. Meredith’s girlfriend testified that upon calling Young to offer sympathy, Young replied she would not be the only one crying.

If Meredith killed Twitty, then the prime suspect in Twitty’s cold case is beyond arrest.

Still, Twitty’s name remains among 84 others on a list of unsolved murders dating back to 1973, when some of the oldtimers now retiring from the Columbus Police Department began their careers.

Now following up on those cases falls to younger officers, who are taking a fresh look in a new initiative to use forensic tools police didn’t have before and try new investigative techniques in which officers are training.

The effort includes team reviews of evidence, and a renewed effort to track down witnesses.

Back to 2003, at first

Maj. Gil Slouchick said investigators have been traveling to training conferences and traveling to find witnesses who moved away, some as far as California.

Eight investigators in the homicide unit are dividing up the unsolved cases, reviewing the evidence, and presenting each case to their colleagues with question-and-answer follow-ups, to share what they know.

The unit is sending more evidence to crime laboratories for DNA testing, as more sensitive methods now can derive a DNA profile from skin cells, or “touch DNA.”

Officers first are focusing on the cold cases accrued since 2003, Slouchick said, because officers learned in training that going back around 10 years is most manageable and likely to yield success.

“Their training said best practices would be to go back this far,” he said. The department didn’t want to so overload them that they couldn’t focus on the cases they review.

“They come together, and they have PowerPoint presentations, and they do a thorough job in reviewing the case,” Slouchick said. “That’s why we start with something manageable, and we don’t say, ‘OK, review the cases for the last 44 years.’ We come back and we go with something manageable and we expect them to take a good, hard look at it.”

And they expect it to pay off: “We’ve got some things in the works right now on some of these cold cases because of going back and doing these reviews.”

New DNA techniques

He noted the review of a March 2003 cold case led to a very different description of the suspect, thanks to DNA phenotyping, or creating an image from DNA ancestry.

The man who killed 64-year-old Iris Charlene Harless in her 4717 Northgate home on March 29, 2003, fought not only with Harless but with her grandson, who walked in on the intruder.

The grandson tried to lock the man in a room, but the killer broke a window and escaped. He left a lot of blood behind, and a lot of witnesses saw him in the area.

Some witnesses described him as white. DNA analysis showed the killer likely had a brown or light brown complexion, as his ancestry turned out to be about 24 percent Central American, 23 percent West African, and 13 percent South American. His European and North African ancestry each were around 8 percent. He should have had brown eyes and brown hair.

No matching DNA profile has turned up in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) maintained by the FBI, which compiles DNA samples from crime scenes and from people sentenced to prison. That’s why police had a lab create a computer-generated “snapshot” image of the suspect from the genetic evidence.

But DNA can do only so much.

Police held a news conference March 16 to show everyone the new suspect image, and ask for tips. It yielded nothing, and they are still where they were.

They’ve had more success tracking down witnesses to testify at trial.

Cases closed

Two weeks ago, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the 2014 conviction of Michael York Miller in the cold-case murder of Shawnita Campbell on April 11, 1999. Miller shot Campbell on Coolidge Avenue, at a place called the “Dog Pound,” before dumping her body a few blocks away, on Warehouse Avenue.

Witnesses were terrified of Miller, a neighborhood bully, and fled. In 2010, police Sgt. Randy Long found two women who testified against Miller. A jury convicted him May 23, 2014, after only an hour’s deliberation. He’s serving life in prison.

A re-examination of evidence this year cleared the 2004 cold-case murder of John Roberson, 79, shot three times in the head in his 3748 Caspian Drive home.

Sgt. Long’s investigation revealed the victim’s son, who’d changed his name to John Bernon Roberson Jr. on the claim his father wanted him to bear his name, had been using his father’s identity to commit fraud.

On July 11, Roberson entered a “best interest plea” to voluntary manslaughter, acknowledging prosecutors had sufficient evidence for a jury to find him guilty. Judge Maureen Gottfried sentenced him to 15 years in prison with 10 to serve.

The older a case gets, the harder it is to solve, as not only witnesses and undiscovered evidence disappear over the years.

So do crime scenes.

No going back

Back when Columbus hosted the Chattahoochee Valley Fair and its livestock exhibits, 74-year-old Thomas Walter Robinson was found gunned down in the poultry house, on Oct. 14, 1989.

Today there is no Chattahoochee Valley Fair, and no poultry house. The regional fair ended years ago, and the old fairgrounds were torn down for the Civic Center and the South Commons.

Also gone are some old public housing complexes: On Jan. 4, 1998, 36-year-old Laura Cheney was shot in the head at 110-H Peabody Apartments. The Housing Authority demolished Peabody to build Ashley Station.

Returning to the scene of the crime is impossible, in some cases.

The oldest cold case on the police department list is the murder of 40-year-old Billy Hicks, shot in head at 100 Sixth St. on May 3, 1973.

Slouchick, who joined the department in 1976, said he was assigned the Hicks case once, and he believes he knows who did it. The prime suspect is dead, he said.

Why 1973?

He is unsure why the list starts in 1973, as surely earlier cases went unsolved. It could be no one bothered to keep a list before that, he said:

“You know, the ’70s is when a lot of changes went on in law enforcement. In the early ’70s, we had a big push for education for law enforcement officers. The ’70s is when our profession really turned into a profession. ... Maybe that’s when they started doing a better job of record keeping.”

It also was soon after the county and city governments consolidated, merging county and city police.

Today professionalism in cold-case investigations includes keeping up with the latest technology, to know when an old piece of evidence from a long-gone crime scene may yet yield clues to a killer’s identity.

But as the Iris Harless case illustrates, police need more than DNA. They need witnesses who can name a suspect.

Sometimes they get lucky, Slouchick said: Sometimes someone in jail will decide he wants to talk about a murder that’s 10 or 15 years old.

Other times, they need any help they can get, with any case on that list of 84 names.

“We’ll take anything,” Slouchick said, of the 84 cases adding, “They’re cold, but they’re not forgotten.”

Anyone with tips may call detectives at 706-653-3400.

This story was originally published September 30, 2017 at 6:36 PM with the headline "Columbus police try fresh approach to cold case murders with new training, forensics."