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Former Detective Haunted by 30-Year-Old Search; At 77, Still Trying to Solve the Death of a 'Good, Decent Kid'
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By ANAHAD O'CONNOR (NYT) 1942 words
Published: November 21, 2005
WHITE PLAINS, Nov. 17 - More than 30 years have passed since Austin Avery, a detective with the White Plains Police Department, set out to find a 24-year-old aspiring journalist who had vanished from a boarding house here on a frigid winter night.
Mr. Avery, now 77, never did find the man that evening, only a blood-splattered bedroom and other signs that his life had most likely ended in a violent confrontation. The body of the victim, Oscar Nedd, has never been found; the man who Mr. Avery suspects killed him was never questioned by the local police. And for years the case was all but forgotten, left to collect dust in the department's missing-persons file by officials who said there was not enough evidence to seek an indictment.
But the case has stayed with Mr. Avery all these years, quietly haunting him.
Convinced there was no interest in it from the beginning because the victim was black and from a poor family in rural Georgia, Mr. Avery, who is white, retired in anger in 1978 and has spent most of the past three decades struggling to solve the case. He has tracked down witnesses, collected reports on physical evidence from the crime scene and vowed to find justice for the family of Mr. Nedd, whom he calls ''a good, decent kid, who didn't deserve this.''
''As a cop, this is what I've sworn to do,'' he said on a recent afternoon, as he sifted through police records at his home in New Fairfield, Conn. ''This family is down in Georgia without any money and without anyone to fight for them, so that's what I'm trying to do.''
All along, Mr. Avery, a stubborn, Bronx-raised police officer and a longtime detective, has kept a solemn, almost single-minded focus on the case.
It has not been easy. Some law enforcement officials in White Plains have described his cause as hopeless. Witnesses have either moved away or refused to cooperate. And Mr. Avery has been troubled by his own personal issues -- slowed by failing health, irritated by hurdles and gently chided by a wife who says it may be time, after all these years, to let go.
But Mr. Avery insists that his quest has only grown more urgent.
That is because the man he believes to be the killer, Joshua Fluellen, 54, a convicted felon with an extensive criminal record, is expected to be released from a federal prison in Georgia in 2011. Since 1975, records show, he has been convicted of crimes ranging from kidnapping to armed bank robbery. A report by a crime commission that reviewed his records years ago called him ''a hardened criminal,'' whose chances of rehabilitation ''are very remote.''
''I don't regret the last 30 years,'' Mr. Avery said. ''All I want is this guy convicted of murdering Oscar before it's too late for someone else's kid.''
In his long quest to solve his final case, Mr. Avery has become as familiar with the details of Mr. Nedd's life as he has with the circumstances of his disappearance.
One of seven children born in his family home in Marshallville, Ga., Oscar James Nedd stood barely 5-foot-5, but was described by relatives as a star high school athlete and an excellent student with big dreams. After graduating from high school in 1970, Mr. Nedd left his small town for White Plains, in search of a college education and a better life. One sister, Iris Rumph, said her brother often spoke of wanting to find a decent job so he could put himself through college and become a reporter.
By 24, Ms. Rumph said, her brother was working two jobs, one at a cleaning service and another at a laundry, and he had accumulated about $1,500 in savings. He was also planning his wedding to a young woman in White Plains who was deeply religious, as he was.
''He was a hardworking, churchgoing guy,'' said Ms. Rumph, 58, who still lives in Marshallville and recently retired from her job bottling soda at a factory. ''I got so much to say about him. He was just a sweet, honest brother.''
By all accounts, Mr. Nedd's life was on track. But Ms. Rumph says that trouble arrived in December 1974, when he received a call from a nephew who was in town and needed a place to stay. Reluctantly taking him in, she said, Mr. Nedd had no idea that the nephew, Mr. Fluellen, had escaped from a jail in Georgia days earlier.
Ms. Rumph said she last spoke with her brother on Jan. 1, 1975, in a tense telephone conversation about his new roommate.
''I told him that Fluellen had shot someone down here, and I said, 'You need to get him out of your apartment right now,' '' she said. ''Oscar was stunned. He was upset.
''I guess he spoke to Fluellen after that,'' she added, ''because I never heard from him again.''
When a week went by with no word from Oscar, relatives reported him missing, and Detective Avery, assigned to the case, showed up at the rented room in downtown White Plains, only a few blocks from the police headquarters. He found no sign of either man, just blood splattered across the room and a witness who claimed, in a sworn statement, that he had seen Mr. Fluellen struggling to carry a large rug that appeared to contain a body down a staircase. The witness, a neighbor, said he had seen Mr. Fluellen put the rug in a car trunk and drive off.
A month passed with no other progress. Then on Feb. 14, 1975, the White Plains Police Department received a call from the authorities in Las Cruces, N.M., saying they had arrested Mr. Fluellen in a string of armed robberies there and in Arizona. When he was arrested, documents show, Mr. Fluellen identified himself as Oscar Nedd and was driving Mr. Nedd's 1972 Dodge.
Mr. Avery said he asked for permission to travel to New Mexico but his bosses refused, saying it wasn't worth the trip because a body had not been recovered and the suspect would end up in prison on robbery charges anyway.
Stunned and frustrated, Mr. Avery said, he retired in 1978, only to begin working on the case by himself the next day.
''If this kid was white and from a prominent family, I guarantee you I would've been on the next plane to New Mexico,'' Mr. Avery said during a recent visit to White Plains. ''But this was just another black kid, a nobody who wasn't considered worth the time and resources. I know that in my heart.''
When asked about the case in a recent interview, the police commissioner at the time, John Dolce, denied Mr. Avery's allegations and said that the department's lack of progress in the case had nothing to do with the victim or his race.
''If he's saying it's because the man was black that's ridiculous,'' said Mr. Dolce, who retired in 2001. ''This case has been reviewed over and over again, and there is no reason to think that anything Austin says is true.''
He added that Detective Avery was not allowed to go to New Mexico to interrogate Mr. Fluellen in 1975 because ''there was no need.''
But the investigation into Mr. Nedd's disappearance also came at a time when the White Plains Police Department was repeatedly forced to defend itself in court against charges of racism, both from government officials and some of its own members. One successful discrimination suit against the department was filed by the federal government in 1981, three years after Mr. Avery retired.
Asked to comment on those cases, Mr. Dolce said that the department had faced accusations over the years but ''no more'' than any other police department. ''Of course we had cases,'' he said. ''A few here and there.''
Meanwhile, Mr. Avery was spending his retirement searching for Mr. Nedd's remains and desperately trying to build a case against Mr. Fluellen. At one point, in 1995, he said, he visited Mr. Fluellen in prison to tell him that he knew he had killed Mr. Nedd and wanted to know what he had done with the body.
''He never denied it,'' Mr. Avery said. ''All he said was, 'You can't prove it.' ''
Mr. Fluellen disputes that account and insists he is innocent. Reached by telephone at the Federal Correctional Institution in Jesup, Ga., where he is serving time for five armed bank robberies, Mr. Fluellen said that he and Mr. Nedd drove to California for a vacation in January 1975 and that he left Mr. Nedd there.
He said he never saw him again and has ''no idea what happened to him.'' Nor did he know why there were blood stains in Mr. Nedd's room or why a neighbor claimed to have seen him removing a body.
''I don't know anything about that,'' Mr. Fluellen said.
He also said he believed that Mr. Avery had a vendetta against him.
''I remember the case very well, and I remember him,'' he said of Mr. Avery. ''But there's no truth to what he's saying.''
Under pressure from Mr. Avery, the White Plains Police Department agreed last year to revive their investigation and put a new detective on the case.
One official who spoke on behalf of the department, Daniel Jackson, said the detective was ''pursuing all possible leads'' and believed progress was imminent, though Mr. Jackson would not elaborate or identify the detective. Mr. Jackson also declined to comment on specific details about the investigation, like whether DNA tests have been conducted on the blood samples. A positive result, Mr. Avery said, would suggest that Mr. Nedd was killed.
Hoping to underscore that point, Mr. Avery took his case to Surrogate's Court in White Plains earlier this year. There, with the Nedd family's blessing and with help from a private detective who took an interest in the case, he accomplished what he said was a small feat for Mr. Nedd: He had him declared legally dead.
Then he promised Ms. Rumph he would buy a tombstone with her brother's name inscribed on it.
''We've already picked out a spot in Willow Lake Cemetery. It's right next to my mother,'' Ms. Rumph said. ''Before she died, she always used to say to me, 'I wish I could see my baby.'
''That's all she would tell me,'' Ms. Rumph added. ''She talked about Oscar all the time.''
Photos: Austin Avery, a retired White Plains detective, is seeking justice for the family of Oscar Nedd. Iris Rumph, left, with a photograph of her brother Oscar outside her home in Georgia. (Photo by Chris Rank for The New York Times); (Photo by Suzy Allman for The New York Times)(pg. B1); Iris Rumph said her brother was a hard worker and a churchgoer. (Photo by Chris Rank for The New York Times); Austin Avery went to court to have Oscar Nedd declared dead. (Photo by Suzy Allman for The New York Times)(pg. B6)
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