A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  Windsor, removing his wraparound sunglasses, studied the pool of blood on the concrete landing and some streaks of blood across the threshold on the apartment’s carpet. “What happened to the boy?”

  “Mom or her son dragged him inside after,” the tech said.

  Ebaugh asked Windsor to monitor the rolling of the body by the forensic examiner. “I’m going to talk to Mom,” he said, stepping over the corpse and walking through the open door, into the apartment.

  To his right, Ebaugh spotted Cynthia Mayhew sitting at a circular dining room table. The detective introduced himself, sat down, and told the victim’s mother that he would do everything he could to solve the case. But Mrs. Mayhew clearly wasn’t listening. She stared vacantly over Ebaugh’s shoulder at her dead son’s right arm, which was splayed across the apartment’s threshold.

  “You pulled the grandson inside?” Ebaugh asked.

  She nodded.

  “Is that how he was lying?” Ebaugh asked, motioning with his head toward her son’s body.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Mayhew said, her eyes still locked on the arm. “I heard my [youngest] son come out of the bathroom. Then I heard the shots—pow, pow, pow, pow—and I started screaming and running toward the door. And my son grabbed me, pulled me back. ‘Don’t go out there, Mom—be quiet,’ he told me.”

  She paused, composing herself. “We didn’t know what was going on out there. And I heard the baby crying, and I figured out what was going on.” She said her younger son “opened the door, and I reached out and snatched the baby and brought him inside.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ebaugh said.

  For the first time, Mrs. Mayhew turned her tear-soaked eyes on the detective. Her face was ravaged with overwhelming pain.

  Before Ebaugh could ask another question, Mrs. Mayhew launched into the sad tale of her family’s history. She pointed to a laminated newspaper clipping, partly hidden behind two rows of framed family photographs; it was an article about how her eldest son had died in a car crash back in 1992. She said her next oldest was in jail on a murder charge—he had, in fact, been arrested by Mike Crowell, who had cracked a cold case—and that her youngest, the nineteen-year-old who had been inside the apartment with her at the time of Nicoh’s murder, had been shot in the buttocks in May. She also talked about how Nicoh, her second youngest, had been a reluctant witness. He knew the risks but felt he didn’t have a choice. If he testified, he’d be a target for having snitched. If he didn’t, he would be charged as a co-conspirator. The dilemma had weighed on him, she said.

  “Ever since, he’s been looking over his back, knowing somebody would come do this bullshit to him,” she told Ebaugh. “Since the murders, it was just him and his girlfriend and his baby. While she worked, he watched him every day right here.”

  She pointed to a pile of toys against the wall—an Elmo doll, a small chair, a Thomas the Tank Engine table, a tricycle. “He was a wonderful father. He loved that boy.”

  Mrs. Mayhew stood and took three quick strides toward her son’s body. She could see him fully now, lying there, and she watched as a forensic investigator rummaged through his pockets. Standing over the investigator was D. J. Windsor; the detective looked up from the body and briefly made eye contact with the mother before returning his gaze to the corpse.

  Ebaugh gently cupped Mrs. Mayhew’s shoulder and directed her back to the table, putting her in a chair facing away from the door.

  “I’m really sorry about all of this,” Ebaugh said, wondering why he hadn’t moved her away from the door earlier. “I should have—”

  “It’s all right,” she interrupted. “I kissed him and told him good-bye. I told him I loved him. He knows I loved him. I kissed my boy. God will take care of this.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Ebaugh said again. Remembering what he’d read in a manual about the importance of directing relatives’ desire for retribution toward helping an investigator solve the case, he told her, “I will do my very best to ensure that these men all rot in jail for having done this. I will work very hard to catch them. I will catch them. And they will rot in jail.”

  Mrs. Mayhew wiped tears from her cheek and started to speak, but her voice cracked. Staring at her family photographs, she stiffened. “I hope they rot in hell,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp with anger. “I knew my son was dead when I kissed him. I could see his brains.”

  * * *

  IT HAS NOW been nearly two months since Nicoh Mayhew was killed, and Ebaugh is still watching and rewatching the security video. After ten more minutes of fruitless viewing, he calls it quits, deciding that he isn’t going to see anything new. Yet the video is all he really has, and time is running out—the trials of Kenan Myers and Brian Mayhew in the double homicide are scheduled to start in July. The cases were originally slated to begin today, but the prosecutors had recently won a delay, in part to give Ebaugh more time to work. Prosecutors can rarely introduce information provided by a murdered witness, but if Ebaugh can prove that Nicoh Mayhew’s killing was ordered by Kenan Myers or his nephew Brian Mayhew or both, the prosecutors might be allowed to read Nicoh Mayhew’s damning grand jury testimony into the record.

  Ebaugh is not 100 percent certain that Mayhew was slain to prevent his testimony. He was a drug dealer, after all, and not long after his murder, the detective learned that Mayhew had shot and wounded a notorious PG thug back in 2010, meaning he had a wide assortment of potential enemies. But with the trial looming, Ebaugh and his sergeant, Kerry Jernigan, have decided to focus on the witness angle. It’s the most obvious motive, and it came with a deadline.

  Ebaugh shuts down the video clip and drums his fingers on his desk. He flips through his notes, back and forth, back and forth, and finally closes the case file. He’s about to head home when he thinks back to the murder scene and Mayhew’s mother. Since that sad day in her apartment, Ebaugh has spoken to her more than a dozen times, hoping that she might pick up some information on the street and pass it along. He reopens his case file, turns to a page of phone numbers, and dials. She doesn’t answer; Ebaugh hangs up.

  Not five seconds later, the phone rings. Cynthia Mayhew is on the line.

  “How are you doing, Cynthia?” he asks.

  He keeps the conversation light, treating her as if she’s an old friend. He asks about her apartment complex, when she’ll be moving, how her youngest son is doing. After a few minutes, Ebaugh asks if she has come across anything new about the murder. “It might be completely insignificant to you,” he says, “but it might help me.”

  Mayhew’s mother says she has heard something and launches into a complicated tale about a man who owns a BMW and was seen in the neighborhood the day of the murder. The story makes little sense. Before asking her to repeat the tip so he can understand it well enough to get it down on paper, Ebaugh says, “Anything else?”

  The line goes quiet, and Ebaugh guesses that Mrs. Mayhew is either thinking hard about something or weighing whether to fully trust him. As the silence drags on, Ebaugh figures it must be the latter. He is about to let her off the hook and return to the improbable BMW story when she says, “There is something else.” Again, there is a pregnant pause, and now Ebaugh is sure she’s deciding whether to confide in him.

  Finally she speaks: “I hear that two guys did it. They are brothers.”

  Ebaugh writes down the information and gently asks again if there is anything else.

  After another pause, she says, “Their names are John and Stan.”

  The detective frowns; he has already ruled out one John who had been in jail on federal gun charges at the time of the murder. Now he has another. Or maybe it’s the same guy and the streets are just recycling old rumors, he thinks.

  “Thanks, Cynthia, I’ll run this down. That all?”

  This time she doesn’t hesitate. “I think one got locked up in some armored-car robberies.”

  Ebaugh writes that down, too. He stays in close contact with the Robbery Unit, which works right next door to ho
micide. But he hasn’t heard of any big arrests involving armored-car robberies committed by someone named John or Stan.

  After getting Mayhew’s mother to repeat her tip about the mysterious BMW and writing it down, Ebaugh hangs up, grabs his notebook, and heads down a narrow back hallway into the Robbery Unit room, which looks almost identical to homicide’s. He spots a lone detective at his desk and asks about recent arrests of a John or Stan in armored-car robberies. The investigator isn’t certain he’s heard of any but recommends that Ebaugh check back on Monday, when more detectives will be around, or call the FBI, which handles such crimes.

  Ebaugh thanks the investigator and looks at his watch. It’s nearly 5:00 p.m.—he’s got to leave if he wants to get home in time for dinner with his family. He heads out to his car. Slipping behind the wheel, he pulls away from the building and begins to let his mind wander. He does some of his best thinking during his commute; this trip is no different.

  As Ebaugh mulls over his phone conversation with Cynthia Mayhew, he isn’t sure what to make of her tip about the two guys. It could be nothing; it could be everything. Two first names. Armored-car robberies. Brothers.

  John and Stan, John and Stan. Who are you?

  12:35 a.m., Saturday, February 9

  Detective Billy Watts pulls his Impala to a stop in front of the apartment building and surveys the scene: a dozen police cars and vans parked at various angles, officers and detectives and evidence techs racing about, their shoulders tilted into a bitter wind. Watts peers into the darkness and scans each face until he finds his rookie, Detective Jonathan Hill, who is standing on a curb near the entrance to the building where a woman has been shot to death by one or more police officers.

  Hill, the lead investigator on the case, is bundled in a thick tan overcoat, its lapels flipped up to protect his ears; his hands are jammed in its pockets. As Watts watches, Hill steps toward a white police car and knocks on the driver’s window; it cracks a few inches and Hill says something, his breath creating a cloud of condensation. Inside the cruiser, illuminated by the pale yellow glow of a dome light, a female officer nods, eyes Hill, and then looks down as the window rolls shut. Watts imagines Hill offering words of reassurance while explaining to the officer that she will soon be heading to homicide for questioning.

  Watts grabs a letter-sized notepad from the passenger seat and steps from the car, his ears immediately stung by the cold. He walks across the parking lot to Hill’s side and surveys the scene once again. It is clear from the way officers and techs are scurrying around that they want to finish their work as quickly as possible, but Watts is not the sort to rush things. A perfectionist, he is methodical and relentless, and his primary job at this scene is to ensure that his rookie doesn’t screw anything up.

  “Whatcha got?” he asks Hill, who is blowing into his gloved hands.

  Hill tells Watts what he has learned in twenty minutes at the scene. They are here to investigate the fatal shooting of a woman who lived on the first floor of the squat, red-brick building over his right shoulder, one of more than a dozen such buildings located just off bustling Annapolis Road in the heart of Bladensburg. A scrappy working-class town of 9,400 residents, shaped a bit like a foot kicking the northeast edge of Washington, Bladensburg is best known as the site of a battle in the War of 1812 during which President James Madison rode onto the field. Today, like much of PG County, the town struggles with crime and difficult economic challenges. Nearly 20 percent of its residents live below the poverty line, and over the past few decades the town has witnessed the flight of its wealthier white residents to more distant suburbs.

  Hill explains that tonight’s incident started when an older female living in apartment 1 began screaming and yelling in the building’s stairwell, threatening two women living in apartment 4, on the second floor. Apparently the woman had been involved in other such incidents, but this situation was more serious. When a resident in apartment 4 looked out her peephole, she saw the woman brandishing a knife above her head and screaming, “I know what you did with the little girl!”

  After more yelling, the woman went back downstairs and returned to her apartment. Someone called 911, Bladensburg police were dispatched, and three officers and their sergeant soon arrived. They knocked on the woman’s door, and when she opened it she was holding a six-inch blade above her head. The officers identified themselves and told her to drop the knife, but she refused and lunged. Three officers opened fire, striking the woman multiple times; she died later at Prince George’s County Hospital Center. The woman—whom Hill presumes to be the apartment’s leaseholder—didn’t have any identification on her. Moreover, the detectives discovered no ID in her apartment, and no residents got a look at her before she was carried away in an ambulance.

  Hill reports that evidence techs have thus far collected ten shell casings from the stairs and landing, and he tells Watts that all four of the Bladensburg cops—including the female officer in the car and her sergeant, who did not fire his weapon—are being sent to homicide for questioning. As is typical in such cases, the three officers will likely decline to speak until they consult lawyers. Like any potential suspect, they can invoke their right to remain silent when being interviewed by homicide detectives, though later they will be compelled to speak with internal affairs investigators. The sergeant, however, has to provide a detailed account of the shooting because he is considered a witness.

  Hill and Watts are managing the criminal investigation into the death and the circumstances surrounding it. The Bladensburg Police Department, meanwhile, will conduct an administrative review to determine whether its officers acted in accordance with its rules and regulations. In that sense, the homicide detectives are likely to have an easy job of it—from what Hill has gathered, the Bladensburg police officers appear not to have broken any laws because they can show that they used lethal force to defend themselves against an armed and dangerous assailant.

  Watts doesn’t like investigating police shootings—it’s too much like being an internal affairs investigator, and he has no interest in that type of work. He also can’t abide the way officers involved in such incidents are portrayed in the media. He is already envisioning citizens and TV news reporters raising questions, second-guessing one of the most difficult decisions a police officer ever makes. Why not shoot her in the leg? Why not shoot the knife out of her hand? Why were four cops afraid of a little woman with a knife—weren’t they wearing bulletproof vests?

  Watts has heard it all before, and he has never been shy about providing the answer: Life isn’t a video game, and you can’t risk missing someone’s arm or leg in a confrontation that could lead to your own death. Besides, what if you aimed for a leg and missed and the bullet zipped through a wall and struck an innocent five-year-old? That is why police officers are trained to shoot center mass: to incapacitate, to stop the threat, to kill. As for the vests, they are great at stopping bullets, but knives go through them with relative ease. That means that an older woman with a knife can be just as dangerous as a big guy with a knife.

  Watts—a nineteen-year veteran of the force—has pulled his gun while on duty, but he has never fired it, in self-defense or otherwise. He’s met a number of officers who have pulled the trigger, though, and the vast majority are good cops who feel horrible, confused, upset, and sad about killing another person. Moreover, he has never met an officer whose own life hasn’t been wholly altered by taking another’s. After a shooting, an officer’s actions are scrutinized by grand jurors, prosecutors, internal affairs investigators, homicide detectives, and the media. The officer is placed on administrative duty, often behind a desk. He or she gets some counseling and is usually put back on the street. Yet for years, many relive a split-second decision that can never be undone.

  Watts looks up from his notes and notices that the squad car carrying the female police officer is gone; he assumes she’s on her way to homicide. Turning, he sees Hill staring into space, and he wonders if his rookie is po
ndering his own shooting. Hill’s story is so outlandish that his fellow detectives joke that it could have occurred only in PG County. One night in October 2009, Hill was off duty and in his police uniform while working as a security guard in a mall when he spotted two women stuffing clothes into a bag and then leaving a store. After they walked through the parking lot and hopped into a Chevy sedan, he confronted them. When the women refused to get out of the car, he reached through an open window and attempted to grab their bag.

  The driver raised the window, clamping Hill’s arm in place. She gunned the accelerator and the car peeled out of the lot, dragging Hill with it. Somehow Hill pulled his gun from his holster and fired five rounds, shattering the driver’s window and sending him cartwheeling across the pavement as the Chevy crashed into a parked car. Only later did he learn that the thieves—both of whom were seriously wounded by Hill’s bullets—were not women but crossdressers. Forever after, Hill was the butt of juvenile cop humor.

  Though Hill takes the jokes in stride, the memory of that traumatic day haunts him. When speaking with colleagues about the incident, he claims he has never second-guessed pulling the trigger because he was faced with a simple choice: shoot or die. But sometimes, when talking with close friends, he admits to doubts, to wondering whether and how he could have handled the situation differently. He will live with those questions for the rest of his life.

  Watts motions for Hill to follow him into the apartment building. They push through the front door, which opens with a squeak. In the vestibule, the detectives are greeted by the hunger-inducing smell of a Latin American dinner, perhaps a chicken-and-rice dish. To their right, taped to a white wall, is a poster seeking information about a difficult-to-crack December homicide that occurred in this same complex.

  Watts and Hill climb the five wooden stairs leading to the building’s first-floor landing. Ahead of them is the door to the dead woman’s apartment; it’s open, so Watts peeks inside and sees that an evidence tech is taking photographs of the interior of the place. Not wanting to disturb the tech’s work, he steps to his left and knocks on the neighbor’s door. When it opens, Watts sees a teenage girl standing in a dark hallway. Watts introduces himself, and the girl motions for him to come inside.