The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America

by Robert Schneck

  That was the month that the Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the People’s Temple, ordered his followers to commit “an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”(12) Over 900 people died in Jonestown and New Jersey police went through the lists of casualties to make sure the missing boys were not among them.

  Detectives did this whenever a number of young black men turned up murdered. They sifted through the victims of the Atlanta child killings in 1979-1981 and those of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991.

  High profile cases like these, however, were exceptional, and most of the investigation consisted of following up leads that led nowhere. The call from Washington, D.C., was one of the few real clues investigators had, and while the caller was never found, the telephone was traced to the National Visitor’s Center. This was a vast granite railroad terminal, the former Union Station, but by 1978 it was a decaying and largely deserted tourist attraction that soon closed.(13) While police and civilians kept searching, the families suffered the pain peculiar to those whose loved ones are missing.

  Time passed. By the fifth year citizens’ groups had done what they could and faded away. In 1986, detectives were following up a tip supplied by a psychic, the first of three occasions acknowledged by officials. Otherwise, the search for the boys had almost ceased to generate new clues.

  The years rolled into decades and the case remained the responsibility of Community and Youth Services, even though the “boys” would now have been around 30 years old. It remained a missing persons case as it “cannot officially be handled as a homicide probe because no bodies have been found.”(14)

  In 1991, Everett L. Hairston was the only detective working on the case full time, and it fascinated him. He made sure every lead was followed up and called the disappearances ”the most intriguing case I’ve ever worked on.

  ”It’s not often,” he added, “that you find absolutely no physical evidence regarding a disappearance.”(15) Not to mention a quintuple disappearance.

  Psychic Interlude

  Psychic phenomenon may seem out of place in law enforcement but police can be among those most likely to trust instinct and hunches. They are also pragmatists whose main interest is results, and many of them are willing to try unconventional methods to get those results (a 1993 survey showed that 37% of urban police departments have tried psychics(16)). This approach, however, is usually pursued with discretion or off the official clock because there are members of the public who strongly object to dallying with what they consider the occult. Debunkers and religious fundamentalists are among the most vocal, with the former believing that psychic powers do not exist and are therefore a waste of taxpayer’s money, and the latter crediting demons with supplying the psychic’s information (who may, in fact, be possessed), and no good can come of that. Neither group is bashful about expressing their opinions, but detectives in Newark were looking for five missing teenagers, with no clues and nothing to lose.

  Several newspaper accounts mention that a Ouija board was used, but details are lacking and the first psychic used in the case has not been named. He or she lived in Irvington and suggested that police investigate a garbage-covered lot south of Newark International Airport. In 1986, an abandoned oil tank was excavated but no traces of the boys were found, and it was ten years before police publicly pursued another extrasensory tip.

  The tip came from the best known (and certainly best liked) of all the psychic detectives who regularly worked with police, Dorothy Allison. It’s difficult to say how many cases Allison has been involved with, but she claimed thousands and was probably not exaggerating. (My mother knew a local detective who consulted her many times.) Allison’s home in suburban Nutley, New Jersey, was stuffed with hats, badges, and citations presented to her by different police departments, and detectives even went on record with some of her successes. Nutley detective Salvatore Lubertazzi was quoted in the July, 1979, issue of Law Enforcement Journal as saying that “she’s found twenty missing or deceased persons for us since 1968.”(17)

  Allison had a vision about the missing teenagers in 1979 and believed they had been murdered. The bodies were burned and what was left buried near the airport. Police did not act on this and filed it away; perhaps it was too different from theories they were working on at the time (possibly involving Lee Evans.)

  In 1994, detectives Armandina Tahaney and Angel Ramos of the Youth Aid Bureau began a two-year review of the case and presumably developed a scenario that agreed with Allison’s. We can only guess what they thought but we do know what they did.

  In the first week of May 1996, officers from the Newark Police department, the sheriff’s department, and Conrail explored a weedy area near the airport with four German Shepherds from the Ramapo Search and Rescue Dog Association. They were searching ”an overgrown lot beneath overpasses for Interstate 78 and Route 22 where the two roads run parallel north of the airport.”(18) The dogs identified several possible grave sites, and police spent the next few days digging, discovering fragments of teeth, and bones that must have belonged to an animal because no more is heard of them. Two police chaplains were on hand in case bodies were found, and their presence, along with the time and money that went into the operation, suggest some confidence in its outcome. In the end this was another false trail, but the department was grateful for Allison’s help and presented her with a plaque reading, “In appreciation for using extraordinary psychic ability to assist the Newark police in an ongoing investigation.”(19)

  A month later police would try again, this time with the help of John Monti, a Florida-based psychic who specializes in missing person cases. Monti had been interviewed on a New York City radio program in February, when host Kay Thompson, a former Newark resident, asked him about the missing boys. According to Thompson, “Retired cops and individuals who had worked on the case heard him and called up saying there was no way he could have possibly known the facts he did.”20 On June 5, 1996, two detectives escorted Monti around Newark and he identified several spots where bodies might be buried. As for the missing boys, Monti pointed to an “abandoned property” on Camden Street (which is near West Side Park, where they played basketball) and said, “There used to be a house here… All the boys were here alive that night and there was a fire. But only one of them is buried underground here.”21

  Nothing was found, however. Mere ESP was not going to solve this riddle.

  Anniversary

  The story of the boy’s relatives will probably never be written. Expressions like “lack of closure” don’t mean much when compared to a lifetime of loss, disappointed hopes, and the dreadful imaginings that haunt a sleepless night.

  When the investigation began, police kept the families informed and the mothers called them regularly, but with no news, detectives phoned less often, and eventually the families “stopped bothering them.”(22) Likewise, the five families grew close after the boys’ disappearance but eventually lost touch. One of the mothers told reporters what so many people say when a loved one vanishes, that they would rather hear bad news than not know what happened.

  By 1998, Ernest Taylor’s and Michael McDowell’s mothers had died, and the families of the other boys could not be located or preferred not to comment on the 20th anniversary of the disappearances. Only the McDowells spoke to the media: “The family decided the best way to remember today’s anniversary of Michael’s disappearance was to aggressively remind people that his case is still unsolved, hoping publicity will spark a memory.”(23)

  Helen Simmons, Michael’s aunt, spoke with a mixture of sadness and anger. She told reporters about dreams where the boys would come home and explain where they had been, and how she glanced at men on the street to see if they might be her nephew.(24) She blamed the police for not getting on the case sooner. “It’s the 20th year and we just feel like nothing has been done… These children have not come home. I don’t know if people really realize that.”(25) (Simmons has suffered her own losses. In 199
0 her daughter, McDowell’s cousin, Joanne Cobbs, was found murdered in Branch Brook Park.)

  The case file shows what has been done. It includes “42 pages of single-space type chronicling day-to-day events of the first two years of the investigation… [What Det. Hairston referred to as “the Bible” of the case.] Its accompanying box of files, pictures, handwriting samples and scribbled notes attest to thousands of man-hours devoted to the case that failed to uncover anything but theories.”(26)

  Chuck Conte retired in 1997 but never stopped thinking about the disappearances. “It wasn’t only my duty as a police officer to solve the case, it was my duty as a human being,” Conte told reporters in 1998. ”I’ve put my blood sweat and tears into this case: I want it solved.”(27)

  Detectives Tahaney and Hairston have also retired. Despite the lack of evidence and the passage of time, Hairston remained optimistic. “I know there is an answer to this mystery and one day the case will be solved.”(28)

  This was not just an empty hope. Some disappearances are explained, or possibly explained, years after they happen.

  Genette Tate

  The five boys in Newark were not the only ones to disappear on Saturday, August 19, 1978; it was a good day for vanishing. “The UK’s Longest Running Missing Persons Case”(29) began on the same date in southwestern England.

  Around 3:30 PM, 13-year-old Genette Tate was on her bicycle delivering newspapers outside the village of Aylesbeare in East Devon. Friends saw her pedaling along a country road called Within Lane, and a few minutes later, discovered her bicycle lying on the ground along with the newspapers, but Genette was not there.

  Thousands of volunteers turned out to look for her. Colin Wilson, author of numerous books on crime and the paranormal, got the psychic Robert Cracknell involved in the search, but nothing was found. It was like she had evaporated. Years passed, the officers that originally handled the case retired, but the investigation continues and there have been important new developments. A sample of Tate’s DNA was recently recovered from an article of clothing, which will make it possible to quickly identify any remains that are finally recovered. Police also suspect that a convicted serial killer named Robert Black may have been responsible.

  Black has been found guilty of murdering three girls. He is suspected of having killed a half-dozen more, and there is evidence that he was in the area when Genette disappeared. (Black, incidentally, is not unlike Cracknell’s psychic impression of the killer as a “laboring type, with a record of mental illness.”(30)) He denies any involvement, but if a plausible case is built against him—even one that does not reach the threshold required for a conviction—it shows how a missing persons case that began the same day that the boys vanished can be resolved decades later. On the other hand, British police probably suspected someone like Robert Black from the beginning: a stranger who abducted and killed Tate then successfully disposed of the body. Detectives in Newark have no idea what happened; the only thing they seem confident about is that the boys are dead.

  The Genette Tate case raises other questions. Overpowering a single 13-year-old girl who is fighting for her life is probably not easy, but it presents fewer difficulties than five teenaged boys aged 16 and 17; how do you control them? And assuming they were murdered, what happened to the remains?

  Speculation

  Two things are certain: the boys’ Social Security numbers have never been used and none of them have ever applied for driver’s licenses. Almost everything else is speculation. Consider the phone call from Washington D.C.; Everett Hairston thought this was “the most concrete lead in the case,” and Chuck Conte felt it “could be an indicator of what really happened 20 years ago.”(31)

  “’My question is, how did the caller know to say, ‘your brother’ to the person who answered the telephone?” Conte asked. The caller’s choice of words also troubled Conte as unnatural, and he wondered if it was the boys themselves spinning a tale to explain their absence.

  ”No other juvenile detention facility in the country is called a youth house, only in Essex County.”(32)

  If Detective Conte is right and the boys were putting together a cover story, why would they say they had been arrested for stealing a truck? Teenagers aren’t known for clear thinking, but what could be gained by saying they were involved in a felony? And, after receiving this news, wouldn’t the family have contacted the D.C. police to find out what had happened? In 1991, Det. Hairston said that “you would have thought one of them would have called home,”(33) which suggests he didn’t think they made the call, but if they didn’t, who did?

  Maybe one of the five knew someone in Washington D.C. and asked him or her to phone his family. That would explain where the caller got the phone number and knew what the relationship was between the missing boy and the person who took the call. It may also be that they were killed and the killer or an accomplice made the call, but why? Was it an attempt to create a distraction? If so, where did they get the personal information? Did the boys make the call and die on the way home? Was one of them forced to phone home? How old was the sibling who received the call? Did he or she remember it accurately? There’s no shortage of questions.

  Judging by newspaper accounts, the investigation never focused on Washington, D.C. It was reported that “[Newark] Police checked with officials in the area and found no record of missing youths.”(34) Of course, the boys weren’t from there, so who would notice if they were gone and file reports? This is vague, and it’s unclear what, if anything, the D.C. police did.

  Did the boys vanish on purpose? After a long hot day of moving boxes and sitting in a truck, did they decide to take their money and make a big weekend of it? (This assumes that Lee Evans paid them; no account mentions this.) Helen Simmons denies the possibility of their running away, but teenagers have been known to take off without notice; maybe they left voluntarily and met with some misadventure along the way. Lillie Williams, the mother of Melvin Pittman, mentioned another possibility: ”one popular theory has the five moving to Washington D.C. and joining an underground religious sect.”(35) She did not say she believed this.

  Det. Hairston seemed less inclined to think they had been murdered. “In this case,” he said, ”all the boys did everything together, so you know—because there was a group of them—they probably weren’t overcome.”(36) Chuck Conte, on the other hand, suggested the possibility of ”a group being responsible for the disappearance of the teenagers or killing them, but he is unsure of the motive.”(37) What group could he have been referring to? A street gang? Something more formidable, like the Mafia, Hell’s Angels, or Ku Klux Klan? Armed men could control five teenagers, but how such an encounter might have occurred is pure conjecture.

  Dorothy Allison and John Monti both believed that the boys were killed and agreed that at least some of the bodies were in or around Newark. Allison said the remains were burned (Monti, or the newspaper accounts, is more vague and just mentions a fire) but if they are right, it raises other difficulties. Burning a human being is no small task.

  A furnace is the best way to do it. Open fires, even in a pit, are difficult to hide. They attract attention, produce quantities of foul smelling smoke, flare out of control, and take hours to do a thorough job. Teeth, bone, and hair fragments survive all but the most intense incineration, and internal organs are surprisingly durable.

  In an article about spontaneous human combustion, Dr. Mark Benecke wrote: “The high temperatures of the outer parts of the burning body is not maintained internally, where fluids in the various organs and cavities help prevent their incineration…The effect is not commonly known, and even first-year medical students express surprise when shown burned corpses containing intact organs.”(38) Five cadavers quintuples the job, and if the teenagers weighed as little as 120 pounds each, that would mean 600 pounds of muscle, fat, blood, and bones would have to be destroyed. Even the most efficient modern cremation retorts (or “pathological incinerator”) would require four hours to consume
this amount.(39) There would also be five outfits, ten shoes, and personal effects to dispose of, like wallets and watches as well as zippers, eyelets, and buttons. None of these have ever been found or at least recognized as related to the disappearances.

  Most likely, the remains would have been partially burned before being buried in a hole large enough to hold five bodies, but “Burial is hard in cities, and in the country the grave is readily distinguishable by traces of disturbed soil. Shallow graves give up their dead. Deep ones take hours to dig, and neighbours think it odd.”(40) Then come the inevitable dog walkers and Boy Scouts who always seem to find the people that other people are trying to lose. If the bodies were dumped in the water, nothing has ever surfaced.

  John Monti said that one of the boys was buried under a house and private homes can make effective cemeteries. In 1915, the skeletons of six young men were discovered in shallow graves beneath the house of Eugene Butler, a North Dakota man who had died in an insane asylum two years earlier. Stella Williamson, an elderly church treasurer from Gallitizin, Pennsylvania, died in 1980, and left a letter directing police to a trunk containing the mummified bodies of five infants wrapped in newspapers. Even apartments can be turned into morgues; English necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie squirreled away six corpses in a tiny London flat, putting one under the floor, three in the cupboard, and two out in the garden. There is a lot of construction underway in Newark, and it’s possible that new evidence, even bodies, could turn up while digging new foundations.

  It’s hard to imagine a happy resolution to the disappearances but there are also less gruesome possibilities to consider. Could they have had some kind of accident? Chuck Conte discussed this in 1998: “They could have stolen a car and gone for a joy ride. Who knows, they could have cracked up on a back road, driven into a creek or lake and sank.”(41)