Seventeen
real girls, real-life stories
TRUE
CRIME
From the Editors of Seventeen Magazine
Copyright © 2007 by Hearst Communications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
These stories are reprinted from Seventeen magazine 2003 to 2007.
Book design by Kelly Roberts
Cover photo: AP Photo/Ric Field
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Seventeen real girls, real-life stories : true crime / from the editors of Seventeen magazine.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-58816-648-7 (alk. paper)
1. Youth—Crimes against—Case studies. 2. Violence in adolescence—Case studies. 3. Youth and violence—Case studies. 4.
Juvenile delinquency—Case studies. I. Seventeen
HV6250.4.Y68S47 2007
364.1083'5—dc22
2006025464
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Published by Hearst Books
A division of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
387 Park Avenue South, NewYork, NY 10016
Seventeen and Hearst Books are trademarks of
Hearst Communications, Inc.
www.seventeen.com
For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales Department at 800-805-5489 or [email protected].
ISBN 978-1-58816-853-5
Contents
Foreword
Virginity Murder
Fight to the Death
I Didn’t Kill Him!
School Attack
My Nanny Molested Me
She Killed Her Mom
A Tragic Night Out
Miscarriage or Murder?
Lesbian Killers
An Imperfect Crime
The Woman Who Seduced Teenage Boys
Dying to Get High
Girl Still Missing
Natural Born Killers
Josh’s Suicide
Angel of Death
Killed for Getting Pregnant
A Mom Who Loved Too Much
Contributors
Foreword
Hey!
This is a collection of the most powerful real-life stories that have ever come across our desks. Some of them have made us cry, others made us angry, many have shocked us beyond belief (and unfortunately, plenty have done all three).
The point of this book isn’t to freak you out, but rather to start a conversation so we can all learn from these stories. We learn that life is precious and that every little decision we make can change the course of our lives. And perhaps, most importantly, that no matter how badly we feel or how hard our situation is, there is someone out there who knows exactly where we’re coming from.
Just so you’re not surprised: Some of these stories are very upsetting. But as you know life isn’t always a fairy tale.
—the Editors of Seventeen
Virginity
Murder
When Jasmine, 12, told her mother that
she had lost her virginity, she didn’t realize that it
would be one of the last things she’d ever say.
At 5 P.M. on November 26, 2004, the day after Thanksgiving, Chaunetta Robinson, 16, and her mom, Tina, headed out their front door to visit some relatives. As they walked to the car, they heard their 12-year-old neighbor, Jasmine Archie, screaming from inside her house. “It was pretty loud,” says Chaunetta. “We stood there listening for a minute, but we didn’t think anything of it. Their mom was always yelling—they could have been getting a whipping.”
But when they returned four hours later, the street was swarming with police cars. Chaunetta and her mother stood on their porch, watching the commotion. “At a little after 11, they wheeled a stretcher out of the house,” says Chaunetta. “It had a white sheet draped over it. Somehow, I just knew it was Jasmine.”
UNUSUAL FAMILY
Back in February 2004, Jasmine; her 9-year-old brother, Ja’Corey; and their mother, Tunisia, moved to 1108 Huron Street, in a working-class area of Birmingham, Alabama. Jasmine’s father didn’t live with them, and her mother didn’t make enough money to always pay the bills. Once Ms. Archie even mentioned to her neighbors that all they had to eat was spoiled milk.
But even more than their financial troubles, the Archies were known for their strange behavior. “Jasmine’s mom seemed locked in her own world,” recalls Ms. Robinson, who’s lived in the neighborhood for seven years. When the family first moved in, Chaunetta tried to be friendly to Jasmine, but Ms. Archie made it hard. “She almost never let Jasmine or Ja’Corey go outside, except for school,” says Chaunetta. “I felt sorry for Jasmine. The one time I did see her and her brother on the lawn, her mom came out screaming at them to come back in. It was scary. She was acting like a crazy person.”
Jasmine didn’t have many friends at school either. At about 5 feet 9 inches, she felt self-conscious about towering over the other sixth graders and complained to some of her classmates that boys didn’t like her. Still, the girls seemed to. “She was quiet, but she giggled a lot and was nice to everybody,” says classmate Tenilya Samuels, 12.
In March, about a month after the Archies moved to town, neighbors spotted Ms. Archie in her backyard sitting in her car—while it was going up in flames— and notified the police. “I didn’t know what to think,” Chaunetta says. “Was she trying to hurt herself?!” when the cops came, Ms. Archie said that she’d been burning trash in her backyard when the car rolled into it, so she jumped in to get some of her stuff out. But the officers were suspicious enough to ask Cynthia Parham, a social worker, to investigate whether Ms. Archie might be mentally ill.
Later that day, Ms. Parham went to Councill Elementary School, which Jasmine attended, to ask her about her mom. But Jasmine just defended her. “My mom takes care of us,” she said. “She cooks and cleans and washes.” Ms. Parham had no choice but to believe her.
Still, over the next few months, Ms. Archie’s behavior grew more bizarre. In the middle of the sweltering 2004 Alabama summer, neighbors saw her standing in the sun, wrapped in a bulky winter jacket. And that same summer, they saw her sitting in her front yard in a lawn chair—getting soaked during a violent thunderstorm.
SUSPICIOUS BOYFRIEND
Near the end of that summer, neighbors saw a man going to the Archies’ house about twice a week. “He drove a nice car,” Chaunetta recalls. “It was a new Cadillac, I think. It seemed like he had money.” The man was Ms. Archie’s boyfriend—who was said to be a married trucker.
But almost as soon as he appeared, ugly rumors began floating around the neighborhood. No one seems to know exactly where or how they began. “People were saying that her mother’s boyfriend was having sex with Jasmine,” Chaunetta says. “I believed it—he was really creepy and Jasmine looked a lot older than 12. She was developed. I could see why a man might … want her.”
VIOLENT REACTION
Around 7:30 A.M. on Friday, November 26, 2004, Ms. Archie’s boyfriend, who had been coming around for a few months, stopped by with groceries. Right away he and Ms. Archie began fighting, and after a few minutes, he left. Later that afternoon, Jasmine seemed upset about something. “Mom,” she timidly said,“I need to talk to you. Can we go for a walk?” Ms. Archie said okay, and the two set off for a nearby park. On their walk, Jasmine told her mother that she’d had sex.
Ms. Archie’s lawyer, David Luker, has denied Seventeen’s request for an interview with her, and her boyfriend has disappeared, so it’s not known if Jasmine told her
mom who she’d had sex with—whether it was with the boyfriend or not. But either way, Ms. Archie began screaming at Jasmine. When they got back home, the screaming turned into physical fighting. Jasmine ran into her bedroom to try to get away from her mom, but Ms. Archie chased after her. She lunged at her daughter, tackled her, and pinned her to the ground.
“Ja’Corey!” Ms. Archie yelled to her son. “Go in the kitchen and get me the bleach and a cup!” Only 10 years old, the frightened boy did as he was told. He brought the bleach into Jasmine’s room and cowered in the corner, as his sister screamed for help. “I want you to watch,” Ms. Archie told him. “Don’t scream, don’t cry, and don’t tell anyone. If you do, I’ll do the same to you.”
Then Ms. Archie, who was sitting on top of her daughter, poured the bleach into the cup, pried open the girl’s mouth—and forced it down her throat. Jasmine’s body rejected the poison, and she began to vomit. But with her mother still straddling and crushing her, Jasmine couldn’t turn over to spit it out. Jasmine struggled, trying to throw her mom off her and gasp for air, but she couldn’t do either. For 30 minutes, Ms. Archie stayed on top of her suffocating daughter— until Jasmine stopped breathing altogether.
HORRIFYING CONFESSION
Ms. Archie climbed off her daughter and grabbed Ja’Corey. They didn’t have a car or a working phone, so they walked nearly two miles to her mother’s house. When they got there at around 7 P.M., she explained that Jasmine wasn’t breathing, so Ms. Archie’s mother, Bernice, called 911. Then Ms. Archie got into her mother’s car and drove back home. She went inside, closed Jasmine’s bedroom door, and sat down in the living room to wait for the police to arrive.
Within an hour, the house was swarming with officers. When Detective Warren Cotton, the lead investigator, walked into Jasmine’s room, he saw signs of a struggle: Her mattress was half off the bed frame—and Jasmine was lying dead on the floor next to it, with vomit on her clothes. He went back to the living room and sat down with Ms. Archie, who seemed stunned but not upset. “My boyfriend had been in the house earlier,” she said to him, almost suggesting that he’d somehow been involved in Jasmine’s death.
Three days later, on Monday, November 29, Detective Cotton called Ms. Archie and Ja’Corey into the station for more questioning. He put them in separate rooms, and then went to speak to the young boy first. Ja’Corey looked wide-eyed and frightened, but when Detective Cotton asked him what had happened that night, he knew just what he wanted to say. “My mom was on top of Jasmine,” he said with a surprising amount of composure. “She told me to go get the bleach from the kitchen, and when I got back she said I had to watch.”
As disturbing as the story was, Detective Cotton believed the little boy: “His version made much more sense, in terms of the evidence we had, than [any] of [Ms. Archie’s] stories.” With this new information, Detective Cotton strode into the other room and confronted Ms. Archie—who immediately confessed. “I wasn’t acting like myself,” she said with eerie calm. “I was upset because she’d just told me she wasn’t a virgin. I wanted to teach her a lesson, so I told Ja’Corey to get the bleach—and I made her drink it.”
LOST SOUL
After confessing, Ms. Archie was arrested and charged with capital murder. On August 22,2006, she plead guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no parole.
Back on December 4,2004, one week after Jasmine’s death, a small service was held at a nearby church. Her mom didn’t leave prison to attend it. “It’s so sad,” says her neighbor Ms. Robinson, whose heart breaks every time she looks at Jasmine’s old house. “Jasmine was secluded in her own little world. Even in the neighborhood, almost no one knew her name.” Now, as Jasmine lies in her final resting place—an unmarked grave in Birmingham—she risks being forgotten forever.
Fight to
the Death
Ali, 19, loved chilling out at her summer job at
the local pool—until the day a dangerous visitor
appeared in the doorway.
Around 5 P.M. on June 18, 2002, 17-year-old Tyler Kemp arrived at the neighborhood pool in Leawood, Kansas, to relieve his sister, Ali, from her shift as an attendant. Ali had asked him to cover for her because she wanted extra time to get ready for a date that night with her boyfriend, Phil. As Tyler pulled into the parking lot, he saw Ali’s Jeep Grand Cherokee out front. He parked, walked through the gate, and saw his sister’s keys, purse, and cell phone on a table nearby, but he didn’t see Ali. Tyler figured she’d run across the street for a snack at Subway. He grabbed the pool skimmer and began cleaning the pool, waiting for her to come back.
Fifteen minutes passed, and Ali still hadn’t shown up. This is weird, Tyler thought. He called home and told his mother. His mom told his father, and within minutes Tyler saw his dad, who lived just a few blocks away, enter the gates. “Ali’s still not here?” Roger Kemp asked, concerned. He began walking around, looking for clues that would tell him where she might have gone. He walked into the pump house, where he saw the usual clutter of equipment and pool supplies. As he reached the back, Mr. Kemp noticed a large pool tarp crumpled on the floor. He inhaled sharply. There was a leg sticking out from under the tarp.
GOLDEN GIRL
Growing up in Leawood, an affluent Kansas City suburb, Ali had everything going for her. Athletic and outgoing, with brown eyes and chestnut hair that fell to the middle of her back, she’d had the same close-knit group of 10 girlfriends throughout high school. But she was careful not to exclude others. Back in high school she often showed new students around.
“It’s hard moving to a place where everyone has grown up together,” says Ali’s friend Laurel Vine. “So she always brought the new kid to lunch. If she threw a party, she made sure her parents let it be big enough so that nobody was left out.” And she was totally in love with Phil, her high school sweetheart.
Ali was looking forward to her sophomore year at Kansas State University, which was going to be busy. Her former soccer coach had asked her to go on a trip to Russia the next year to work with poor children. And a national honor society had picked her as one of sixty students to travel with the US State Department on a learning expedition to France, China, and Australia.
With so much on her plate, Ali appreciated her laid-back summer job at the pool. Even better, she had managed to get Phil and her two brothers jobs there too. The shift was especially easy when the weather was cloudy, because the pool was practically empty except for construction crews who were working nearby. When that happened, Ali would often call her friend Lindsay Courtney. “Can you come over?” she’d ask. “I hate the workmen staring at me. It gives me the creeps.”
DEADLY STRUGGLE
Tuesday morning, June 18, had dawned gloomy and overcast. Having been out late the night before with her girlfriends, Ali slept in. Just before 2 P.M., she hopped into her Jeep to head to her shift at the pool. Phil had worked the previous shift and hung around to discuss their plans for that evening: Since Phil was leaving on a family vacation the next day, it was going to be a special dinner for just the two of them. “I love you,” he told Ali as he left. “See you later.”
According to the suspect’s confession to the police— which he later took back—here’s what happened: At about 3 p.m., Ali was inside the pump house, where she often went to get supplies to do chores around the pool. A stranger appeared in the doorway. He was big and stocky, dressed in workman’s clothes, and carried a bucket of tools. He tried hitting on Ali, but he made her nervous. When Ali asked him to let her out, he blocked the doorway and didn’t move. And then he reached out to touch her.
Cornered and frightened, Ali pushed him back, then punched him on the shoulder—and the man exploded in rage. He struck Ali again and again with his fists until she tumbled facedown on the tarp. He landed on top of her, placing his legs on both sides of her body so she couldn’t move. She thrashed around, but he began to strangle her. After a few minutes, Ali stopped struggling. The man yanked down her shorts and und
erwear and tried to rape her, but he couldn’t get an erection. So he got dressed, put the tarp over Ali’s bruised body, and left.
GRISLY DISCOVERY
At about 3:10 P.M., Laurel decided to visit Ali at the pool on her way home from a doctor’s appointment. She pulled up at 3:15 P.M., just as a heavyset man in a uniform trudged by. The two glanced at each other indifferently, then the man drove off in his pickup truck. Laurel got out of her car and called around the pool for Ali, but she wasn’t there. “I thought she was probably over at the shopping center across the street,” Laurel says, “so I went home.”
It was two hours later when Mr. Kemp found Ali’s body. Throwing back the tarp, he saw Ali lying facedown, naked except for her sports bra and T-shirt, which had been pushed up under her armpits. She was bleeding from the head. “Call 911!” he yelled to Tyler. Kneeling beside Ali, Mr. Kemp took her hand. It was cold. He felt along her forearm—it was also cold. Her back still seemed slightly warm, offering a faint hope that she was alive. Gently he rolled her over. Matted with blood, Ali’s long hair obscured her features, and her father gently parted it to look at her. Both of her eyes were swollen; her battered face was dark blue. By the time Mr. Kemp looked up, the paramedics were rushing into the pump room.
“Hold on, honey,” he whispered. While the EMTs frantically tried to revive Ali with CCPR, her father repeated softly, “Stay with us, Ali, stay with us, Ali.”
She never responded. When the ambulance reached the hospital, Ali was officially pronounced dead.
Laurel had heard about the attack through another friend, and she flew to the hospital, where she quickly tracked down a police officer and told him about the workman she’d seen at the pool. That night Laurel racked her brain to give a detailed description for a computerized portrait of the man she had passed.
SHOCKING CONFESSION
By February 2003, eight months after Ali’s murder, the police still couldn’t find the workman, their prime suspect. To help, Ali’s father had the composite sketch placed on a billboard along with a hotline number— and they got nearly 3,000 leads. Two of the tips pointed to Teddy Hoover, a man who ran a pool-cleaning service. Detectives interviewed him and asked whether he would submit a DNA sample. Hoover replied he would need to consult his attorney. That wasn’t an unusual request, detectives say, because most people, even if they are innocent, are nervous about taking a DNA test. But when they reached Hoover’s attorney a few weeks later, they learned that their suspect had slipped away. The lawyer told them that Hoover had gone to LasVegas—but he didn’t tell them that Teddy Hoover wasn’t his client’s real name.
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