Posted on Sun, Oct. 17, 2004
From the Charlotte Observer
Who murdered Neely Smith? Girl's 1981 slaying gripped city with fear; now, the search for her killer resumes
MELISSA MANWARE
Staff Writer
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are going through boxes from the 1981 slaying of a 5-year-old girl hoping old evidence, tested with new technology, might lead to her killer.
The department's cold-case homicide squad assigned a detective to Neely Smith's case last month after the Observer contacted police about what was one of the most publicized criminal cases in Charlotte's history.
Neely, a talkative brown-haired girl, was snatched from her east Charlotte neighborhood Feb. 18, 1981. After a two-month search, her skull, rib cage, lower jaw and hair were found 15 miles from where she lived. No one has ever been charged.
Police believe she was strangled. And they think they may know who did it.
That suspect is in prison -- but eligible for parole consideration -- in the murder of a little girl who lived in the same neighborhood as Neely.
2 killings, 1 suspect
Nineteen months before Neely was kidnapped, a 10-year-old Chantilly Elementary School student disappeared from her Eastcrest Drive home. Amanda Ray's mother told her not to go fishing with the gray-haired stranger, but the fourth-grader apparently went anyway.When her mother got home from work on July 18, 1979, she couldn't find Amanda. The next day, a family picking blackberries 19 miles away found the girl's beaten body beside a private lake near Huntersville. Autopsy results showed Amanda had been strangled or smothered.
Seven-and-a-half years later -- six years after Neely's death -- police charged Fred Coffey with murder in Amanda's killing. They linked hair and carpet fibers found on her body to Coffey's dog and his van.
At the 1987 trial, prosecutors said Coffey lured Amanda away from home with the promise of a fishing trip, then killed her when she resisted his sexual advances and threatened to tell.
Coffey, now 59, was twice sent to death row for the murder but finally won a life sentence on appeal. He is serving his sentence at Albemarle Correctional Institute.
The similarities between the deaths of Amanda and Neely are striking.
The girls lived about a block apart and disappeared within about 1 1/2 years.
They were found dead in rural areas, both near water.
Each was young and police believe sexual assault was a motive in the killings.
Amanda was strangled or smothered; police believe Neely was too.
Most telling to investigators, though, is that at the time of the killings, Fred Coffey lived in the same apartment complex as Neely.
Searching for Neely
Neely lived in the Williamsburg Apartments off Commonwealth Avenue with her mother, two brothers and stepdad. They had moved from Gaston County a few months before and her mother knew nothing about Amanda's death.
Police have determined that Neely knocked on a neighbor's door about 5 p.m. to ask a friend to play. That is the last time detectives can account for her whereabouts.
Her family started searching for her about 6 p.m. and called police just after 7 p.m. Investigators, immediately seeing parallels between Neely and Amanda, started a massive search.
They looked in empty apartments, garbage containers and washing machines, scoured wooded areas and walked along Briar Creek.
Police set up a command post in a vacant apartment, brought in Army reservists to help, and collected anything that might be evidence. They found nothing.
During those first few weeks, parents across Charlotte worried for their own children. Many kids weren't allowed to play outside and those who did were carefully supervised.
Parents waited with their children at bus stops. Teachers reminded students to beware of strangers.
Then, during an April 11 license check near the Union County line, a driver told a police officer about what looked like a human skull lying in a nearby driveway.
The officer found the skull about 20 feet from the road and called in dogs to search for more remains. The dogs led police to Neely's blue tennis shoes, her blue and white long-sleeved blouse, her blue knee socks, her underwear and other scattered bones.
Searchers found about 25 percent of Neely's remains. Medical examiners couldn't tell for sure how she died, but believe someone asphyxiated the 43-pound, 3 1/2-foot tall girl.
A solvable case
While Neely was missing, police questioned Fred Coffey, an eighth-grade dropout who'd worked as a fire department dispatcher and pest exterminator. He let authorities search his apartment, where they found nothing incriminating.Neely's mother, Kim Griffin, said she questioned Coffey before the apartment search, and he denied knowing anything about Neely's whereabouts.
It wasn't until 1986 -- when Coffey surfaced as a suspect in the death of an 8-year-old boy in Virginia -- that police in Charlotte again began to look at him in Neely's killing.
He was never charged with killing the Virginia boy -- or Neely. But police Sgt. Tom Athey, who supervises the cold case squad, said: "We'd be remiss not to consider him the prime suspect."
The Observer attempted to contact Coffey for this story. Asked Friday if he would consent to an interview, Coffey told a prison official he would not.
Athey said Neely's case is solvable.
"It's one of those cases where we have a truly innocent victim and a really bad suspect," said Detective Dave Phillips, the investigator working Neely's case. "It's the kind that really bothers me."
Phillips, a father to three girls and grandfather to one, didn't know about Neely Smith until recently when he spent an entire week reading hundreds of pages of reports and handwritten notes that had been sitting untouched in a file room for years. He hasn't done much besides study the case so far, but expects to begin spending a lot more time on it this week.
Phillips wouldn't talk specifically about the evidence in Neely's case or what he plans to do as he investigates it, but with today's technology, police can learn a lot more from fibers, hair, blood and other evidence than they could in the 1980s.
"Everything has become more valuable to us," he said. "We are going through stuff that back then may not have been beneficial but could really be now."
Phillips said police still have evidence collected in Amanda's case and could possibly use it to help identify Neely's killer.
Dr. John Butts, the state's chief medical examiner, said scientists used to type blood to determine if a suspect had the same type. Now, he said, blood, semen and other DNA evidence can be analyzed and tell police with certainty if it belongs to a particular person.
If properly collected and stored, he said, that type of evidence can be analyzed many years later.
But, he said, decomposition can damage DNA and hinder its analysis. Neely's remains and her clothes were outdoors for nearly two months. Police won't say how that affected the evidence.
Athey said most of the detectives who worked Neely's case in the beginning are retired; some are dead.
Neely disappeared from the city and her remains were found in the county at a time when Mecklenburg had two separate police departments. The Mecklenburg County Police Department, which had significantly fewer resources than city police, took over the investigation once Neely's remains were found. Years later, in 1993, that department merged with the Charlotte department to create Charlotte-Mecklenburg police.
Detectives today believe the case got lost in the shuffle.
"This is the type of case that the cold case squad ought to be working on," Athey said. "This small innocent child has been murdered and I don't see why you'd ever stop working it."
Phillips said solving Neely's case has never been more important. Amanda's murder happened before life in prison really meant life in prison.
Coffey has come up for parole 10 times -- and will again every year until he dies or is released.
Eluded death sentence twice
Two days before he was charged with killing Amanda, Coffey pleaded guilty to nine counts of taking indecent liberties with children in Caldwell County. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
During Coffey's 1987 trial in Amanda's slaying, a psychologist testified that Coffey admitted having sexual contact with about 100 children. A friend of Coffey's wife told the jury she called police two months before Amanda's death after her 3-year-old described Coffey masturbating in front of her.
The jury sent Coffey to death row, but the sentence was overturned because of faulty wording on a verdict sheet. Another jury sentenced him to death in 1991, but he again won a new hearing from the state Supreme Court.
In his third sentencing hearing, the jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of execution. Because jurors couldn't come to a unanimous decision, the judge was forced to impose a sentence of life in prison.
That sentence ran consecutively with the 50-year sentence, of which he had to serve one-eighth.
Melita Groomes, executive director of the state's Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission, said Coffey has been eligible for parole since August 1995. He's reviewed for parole annually -- and has been rejected each time.
Regardless of detectives' suspicions, Groomes said, nothing in the law requires the parole commission to keep Coffey in prison.
Unless, she said, he is convicted of another crime.
Link:
http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/redir?....charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/9941209.htm
From the Charlotte Observer
Who murdered Neely Smith? Girl's 1981 slaying gripped city with fear; now, the search for her killer resumes
MELISSA MANWARE
Staff Writer
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are going through boxes from the 1981 slaying of a 5-year-old girl hoping old evidence, tested with new technology, might lead to her killer.
The department's cold-case homicide squad assigned a detective to Neely Smith's case last month after the Observer contacted police about what was one of the most publicized criminal cases in Charlotte's history.
Neely, a talkative brown-haired girl, was snatched from her east Charlotte neighborhood Feb. 18, 1981. After a two-month search, her skull, rib cage, lower jaw and hair were found 15 miles from where she lived. No one has ever been charged.
Police believe she was strangled. And they think they may know who did it.
That suspect is in prison -- but eligible for parole consideration -- in the murder of a little girl who lived in the same neighborhood as Neely.
2 killings, 1 suspect
Nineteen months before Neely was kidnapped, a 10-year-old Chantilly Elementary School student disappeared from her Eastcrest Drive home. Amanda Ray's mother told her not to go fishing with the gray-haired stranger, but the fourth-grader apparently went anyway.When her mother got home from work on July 18, 1979, she couldn't find Amanda. The next day, a family picking blackberries 19 miles away found the girl's beaten body beside a private lake near Huntersville. Autopsy results showed Amanda had been strangled or smothered.
Seven-and-a-half years later -- six years after Neely's death -- police charged Fred Coffey with murder in Amanda's killing. They linked hair and carpet fibers found on her body to Coffey's dog and his van.
At the 1987 trial, prosecutors said Coffey lured Amanda away from home with the promise of a fishing trip, then killed her when she resisted his sexual advances and threatened to tell.
Coffey, now 59, was twice sent to death row for the murder but finally won a life sentence on appeal. He is serving his sentence at Albemarle Correctional Institute.
The similarities between the deaths of Amanda and Neely are striking.
The girls lived about a block apart and disappeared within about 1 1/2 years.
They were found dead in rural areas, both near water.
Each was young and police believe sexual assault was a motive in the killings.
Amanda was strangled or smothered; police believe Neely was too.
Most telling to investigators, though, is that at the time of the killings, Fred Coffey lived in the same apartment complex as Neely.
Searching for Neely
Neely lived in the Williamsburg Apartments off Commonwealth Avenue with her mother, two brothers and stepdad. They had moved from Gaston County a few months before and her mother knew nothing about Amanda's death.
Police have determined that Neely knocked on a neighbor's door about 5 p.m. to ask a friend to play. That is the last time detectives can account for her whereabouts.
Her family started searching for her about 6 p.m. and called police just after 7 p.m. Investigators, immediately seeing parallels between Neely and Amanda, started a massive search.
They looked in empty apartments, garbage containers and washing machines, scoured wooded areas and walked along Briar Creek.
Police set up a command post in a vacant apartment, brought in Army reservists to help, and collected anything that might be evidence. They found nothing.
During those first few weeks, parents across Charlotte worried for their own children. Many kids weren't allowed to play outside and those who did were carefully supervised.
Parents waited with their children at bus stops. Teachers reminded students to beware of strangers.
Then, during an April 11 license check near the Union County line, a driver told a police officer about what looked like a human skull lying in a nearby driveway.
The officer found the skull about 20 feet from the road and called in dogs to search for more remains. The dogs led police to Neely's blue tennis shoes, her blue and white long-sleeved blouse, her blue knee socks, her underwear and other scattered bones.
Searchers found about 25 percent of Neely's remains. Medical examiners couldn't tell for sure how she died, but believe someone asphyxiated the 43-pound, 3 1/2-foot tall girl.
A solvable case
While Neely was missing, police questioned Fred Coffey, an eighth-grade dropout who'd worked as a fire department dispatcher and pest exterminator. He let authorities search his apartment, where they found nothing incriminating.Neely's mother, Kim Griffin, said she questioned Coffey before the apartment search, and he denied knowing anything about Neely's whereabouts.
It wasn't until 1986 -- when Coffey surfaced as a suspect in the death of an 8-year-old boy in Virginia -- that police in Charlotte again began to look at him in Neely's killing.
He was never charged with killing the Virginia boy -- or Neely. But police Sgt. Tom Athey, who supervises the cold case squad, said: "We'd be remiss not to consider him the prime suspect."
The Observer attempted to contact Coffey for this story. Asked Friday if he would consent to an interview, Coffey told a prison official he would not.
Athey said Neely's case is solvable.
"It's one of those cases where we have a truly innocent victim and a really bad suspect," said Detective Dave Phillips, the investigator working Neely's case. "It's the kind that really bothers me."
Phillips, a father to three girls and grandfather to one, didn't know about Neely Smith until recently when he spent an entire week reading hundreds of pages of reports and handwritten notes that had been sitting untouched in a file room for years. He hasn't done much besides study the case so far, but expects to begin spending a lot more time on it this week.
Phillips wouldn't talk specifically about the evidence in Neely's case or what he plans to do as he investigates it, but with today's technology, police can learn a lot more from fibers, hair, blood and other evidence than they could in the 1980s.
"Everything has become more valuable to us," he said. "We are going through stuff that back then may not have been beneficial but could really be now."
Phillips said police still have evidence collected in Amanda's case and could possibly use it to help identify Neely's killer.
Dr. John Butts, the state's chief medical examiner, said scientists used to type blood to determine if a suspect had the same type. Now, he said, blood, semen and other DNA evidence can be analyzed and tell police with certainty if it belongs to a particular person.
If properly collected and stored, he said, that type of evidence can be analyzed many years later.
But, he said, decomposition can damage DNA and hinder its analysis. Neely's remains and her clothes were outdoors for nearly two months. Police won't say how that affected the evidence.
Athey said most of the detectives who worked Neely's case in the beginning are retired; some are dead.
Neely disappeared from the city and her remains were found in the county at a time when Mecklenburg had two separate police departments. The Mecklenburg County Police Department, which had significantly fewer resources than city police, took over the investigation once Neely's remains were found. Years later, in 1993, that department merged with the Charlotte department to create Charlotte-Mecklenburg police.
Detectives today believe the case got lost in the shuffle.
"This is the type of case that the cold case squad ought to be working on," Athey said. "This small innocent child has been murdered and I don't see why you'd ever stop working it."
Phillips said solving Neely's case has never been more important. Amanda's murder happened before life in prison really meant life in prison.
Coffey has come up for parole 10 times -- and will again every year until he dies or is released.
Eluded death sentence twice
Two days before he was charged with killing Amanda, Coffey pleaded guilty to nine counts of taking indecent liberties with children in Caldwell County. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
During Coffey's 1987 trial in Amanda's slaying, a psychologist testified that Coffey admitted having sexual contact with about 100 children. A friend of Coffey's wife told the jury she called police two months before Amanda's death after her 3-year-old described Coffey masturbating in front of her.
The jury sent Coffey to death row, but the sentence was overturned because of faulty wording on a verdict sheet. Another jury sentenced him to death in 1991, but he again won a new hearing from the state Supreme Court.
In his third sentencing hearing, the jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of execution. Because jurors couldn't come to a unanimous decision, the judge was forced to impose a sentence of life in prison.
That sentence ran consecutively with the 50-year sentence, of which he had to serve one-eighth.
Melita Groomes, executive director of the state's Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission, said Coffey has been eligible for parole since August 1995. He's reviewed for parole annually -- and has been rejected each time.
Regardless of detectives' suspicions, Groomes said, nothing in the law requires the parole commission to keep Coffey in prison.
Unless, she said, he is convicted of another crime.
Link:
http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/redir?....charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/9941209.htm
