NEW YORK — Thirty years ago, five teenage boys vanished after playing basketball in Newark, N.J. They were never heard from again.
Their remains were never found, Social Security numbers never used — and no arrests have ever been made. But the community has never forgotten its tragic loss.
Melvin Pittman, 17, Randy Johnson, 16, Ernest Taylor, 17, Alvin Turner, 16, and Michael McDowell, 16, who have become known as “The Clinton Avenue Five,” vanished Aug. 20, 1978. Wednesday marks the 30th anniversary of their disapperance.
The case, which is New Jersey’s oldest cold case, remains open. But after 30 years without any solid leads, it’s unclear what, if anything, is left to find.
And although most of the boys’ family members are dead, the community remembers.
An annual memorial service is held at Clinton Avenue Presbyterian Church. On Sunday, the Rev. Alfred Johnson led an 11 a.m. service at the church on 16th Street.
News 4 New York talked to family members of Michael McDowell, one of the missing boys.
“You can’t make five people disappear by yourself,” said Michael’s aunt Helen Simmons. “So there are other people involved and when there are other people involved … somebody would talk …but nobody has.”
Facts Of The Case
The teens were last seen entering the pickup truck of a man who reportedly offered them summer part-time work — and they were never seen again. Police questioned the contractor, Lee Anthony Evans, and cleared him of suspicion after he passed polygraph tests.
“He had a conversation with my mom, and I came back outside and saw my brother get in a truck with Lee Evans — a green pick up truck — and drive off,” said Terry Lawson, Michael’s sister. “We never saw him again.”
Several days after the boys disappeared, one of their mothers got a phone call from a man who said he would tell her where the boys were for $750. Police traced the call to a payphone at Union Station in Washington, D.C., but by the time they arrived, whoever had made the call apparently had fled.
The investigation has taken detectives all over the country.
Detectives checked military records, religious cults, the bodies from Jim Jones’ 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, according to Reuters, and the victims of Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was executed for the rape and murder of 33 boys and men — to no avail.
In 1996, police followed a lead from a psychic who had previously helped detectives find the body of a missing boy in a drainpipe. The psychic had a vision the boys’ burned remains were buried in a five-acre field near Newark International Airport. Searchers came up empty-handed.
The boys’ Social Security numbers were never used. Only one of the five had dental records; none had fingerprints, Reuters reported.
“You have to wonder what transpired,” Sgt. Derek Glenn, a spokesman for the Newark Police Department, told Reuters on the week of the 20th anniversary of the disappearance. “Even one of them alive, having made contact in some fashion or form, even through a third person, hasn’t happened.”
Police initially believed the boys had run away, but the family said they weren’t the type to do that. Just one of the boys, McDowell, of East Orange, got into trouble once for a fistfight, but the others — sophomores and juniors at Weequahic High School — never got into trouble at all, according to The New York Times.
“For sure we know they haven’t run away,” said Lawson. “Something happened to them, and 30 years later we know it’s not good … else we would know something.”
But despite the disturbing, painful facts of their disappearance, there was precious little media coverage at the time. It was 1978 — a decade after the Newark riots — and many speculated that the reason local papers — even The Star-Ledger — and media outlets failed to cover the story at the time was because it was about five black boys.
On the 25th anniversary of the disappearance, a New York Times article read, “The five black youths never entered the public consciousness the way some white, middle-class missing children do.”
The advent of the Internet might have made it a different story today, but there was no World Wide Web when the boys disappeared. Today, Web surfers would be hard-pressed to find any information apart from one or two articles marking the 20th and 25th anniversaries of the boys’ disappearance.
“They just weren’t considered important enough to go after,” said Simmons. “I just want to know what happened.”
Only two of the original detectives who worked on the missing persons case remain involved. One died and one retired to Florida. A new detective, Rasheed Sabur, is involved.
No arrests have ever been made in the decades-old case, which some investigators call one of the most baffling missing persons cases in history.
Case: Somebody knows exactly what happened to those five young men. Clinton Ave and Fayban Place were busy areas back in that time period, so someone saw something and if that or those someones are alive, they need to come forward with what they know. Two mothers have died without knowing what happened to their sons and the other mothers still alive, need answers because their lives will always be in limbo until they know what happened to their sons.
caseclosed2