Vindicator police reporter reflects on unsolved homicides

The little room tucked away in the basement of the Youngstown Municipal Court Building (former City Hall Annex) on West Front Street does not seem like much from the outside.

Open the door and it is filled with shelves, and on those shelves are boxes crammed with paper bags, the kind that grocery stores used to give out.

Yet instead of a Valu King or Sparkle or Golden Dawn logo, they are covered with writing in black magic marker, number signs and case numbers.

The bags – and room – are filled with evidence from unsolved homicides and other violent crimes.

There is blood-covered clothing, guns, shell casings, wallets, cash, coins, drugs, spent bullets and more, taken from victims at crime scenes, sometimes never to see the light of day again. By law, it must all be kept, even if a case is solved.

When I first heard of and then visited the room in January, it was hard to wrap my mind around it. I had someone from the police department take me over to see it. Looking at the bags, I got a sense that in each one, the terror, heartbreak, pain, and loss inside was waiting to burst out.

I knew then I wanted to do a story on the room and what is in those bags. But it took months for my brain to finally settle on how I could do that; how I could relate the story of the homicide rate throughout the new millennium and the unsolved ones as well.

Despite a series of stories about murder, there is some good to tell.

The city’s murder rate has been declining since the horror of the 1990s, when the city saw an average of slightly more than 49 homicides per year. It was not uncommon to have at least one nonfatal shooting every day.

Part of the decline is because of the decline in population. Part of the decline is because of new crime-fighting techniques. And part of it is because a lot of people who were responsible for the violence in the ’90s and the early part of the last decade are now dead or in prison.

The number of homicides solved also has improved dramatically, especially since the last decade. Again, this is due to advances in technology, such as cellphones and the ability to track data on those phones, DNA evidence and security cameras.

There is more and more of a different type of homicide. Drug-and-gang murders are being replaced by domestic-related murders, where it is easier to get witnesses to talk and there is a suspect readily available.

And there is also the detective and the on-ground work of crime-scene investigators and officers who secure crime scenes. They all work as a team, yet it is the detective who is ultimately responsible.

As one detective who has been investigating homicides for just two years told me this summer, it is all different when they are looking at you to find the answers.

But sometimes those answers aren’t there, no matter how hard investigators work. Sometimes they need just one tip to move a case from the unsolved to solved column. It might be a witness. Or a piece of evidence.

Just. One. Tip. And those bags could be opened.

A lot of times, people in the neighborhoods know. But they do not want to talk, either because they are afraid, do not like the police, or want to take matters into their own hands.

The unsolved cases run the gamut. There was a young girl from New Castle, Pa., killed on Interstate 680 when someone fired several shots at a car in which she was a passenger. There was a woman found run over in the street by her own car.

Two men were found shot to death in a car on Glenwood Avenue with the engine still running and the driver’s foot was on the gas pedal. A former city firefighter was killed in his home. A man and woman were found shot to death in their bed on Mahoning Avenue with an infant in between them unharmed.

They had nicknames. There was “Tiny,” “Boo,” “Noodle,” “Beeze.” Some of them were drug dealers and some were innocent bystanders. All of them were loved by someone, and all of them deserve to have their cases solved.

I tried to find family members to talk to me, so readers would know the pain never goes away after the story fades from the headlines. I only found one person who wanted to talk. That is not surprising.

Once I did a story on a cold-case homicide and the father of one of the victims didn’t cancel the interview until I was on his front porch.

He couldn’t bring himself to talk.

That father is one of hundreds, probably thousands across the city, struggling with the violent, unexpected death of a loved one.

It is a testament to the city’s grim history that one room in the city courthouse building is not enough to store evidence. There are others, as well.

In January, officials were talking of ordering new shelving so they could store more evidence. There is also evidence at the police department on Boardman Street.

It seems fruitless, yet it isn’t.

I saw one of those bags opened once, and it the was the most emotional moment of my career.

It was during the trial of Bennie Adams, who went on trial in 2008 for the murder of Gina Tenney, a Youngstown State University student whose body was found Dec. 30, 1985, floating in the Mahoning River.

A witness testified the night before she died, Tenney bought a Peanuts sweatshirt at the Eastwood Mall. On the day of her autopsy New Year’s Eve, 1985, the late Detective Sgt. Joe DeMatteo, head of the department’s crime lab, attended her autopsy and bagged the shirt as evidence when it was removed from her body.

In court, in 2008, DeMatteo testified and removed the shirt from the bag, where it had been since New Year’s Eve, 1985. Jurors gasped when he held it up. It was like a relic.

There are more relics in those bags, waiting to be shown; waiting to tell their story.

They just need some help.

Joe Gorman is The Vindicator’s crime reporter who is primarily assigned to the city and Mahoning County.