Newark 1978 murders

The Newark boys murders, also known as the case of "The Clinton Avenue Five", occurred on August 20, 1978 in Newark, New Jersey when the two suspects Lee Evans and Philander Hampton suspected five schoolboys of stealing their marijuana.^[1] The boys, Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor, both 17, and Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson and Michael McDowell, all 16, came to be known as "The Clinton Avenue Five", named after the street where they were last seen near a park where they had played basketball on the evening of August 20, 1978. The last confirmed sighting of the boys was getting into a pickup truck driven by Mr. Evans, who claimed that he later dropped them off in front of a local ice cream parlor. The case became a cold case and was labelled a disappearance as none of the boys was ever seen or heard from again.^[2] The arrests came after three decades of investigating the teens' disappearance, with detectives looking as far as Chicago after the discovery of 33 young men in the basement of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Atlanta, where another serial killer murdered more nearly 30 children in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Jonestown, where more than 900 people died in a mass suicide in 1978.^[3] The two men were arrested in March of 2010, 18 months after Lee Evans confessed that on August 20, after recruiting the boys to help him move some boxes, they took them to an abandoned house where they were restrained and then left to perish as the house was set on fire, as revenge for the stolen drugs.^[4] The case remained until it was solved the longest unsolved crime case in New Jerseys history.

The case was revived in early 2009 when Evans, who had been the prime suspect from the very beginning, confessed to one of the boys relatives about his involvement in their disappearance.

A third man also considered a suspect in the case died of natural causes in 2008, all the three suspects are cousins.^[5]

References

1. ^ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=10175958
2. ^ http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/23/charged-murder-teens-missing/
3. ^ http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-23-NJ-5-teens-killing_N.htm
4. ^ http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2010/03/five_teens_who_disappeared_in.html
5. ^ http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011414893_apusfivemissingnjteens.html