March 29, 2022 • 32 mins
SPECIAL LOOK AT A BRAND NEW PODCAST! "Shattered Souls: The Car Barn Murders." Retired detective Karen Smith discovers that her father kept a family secret for decades. In 2002, her father revealed that Karen's great uncle, Emory Smith, was the victim of a heinous murder and that her grandfather had been held as a suspect. Karen begins her journey to solve her great uncle Emory's murder.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is veteran forensic detective Karen Smith and you're about
to hear the first episode of my new podcast, Shattered
Souls The Car Barn Murders. More episodes are available now
on the Shattered Souls podcast. Just search for Shattered Souls
The Car Barn Murders on your favorite podcast app. It's
(00:21):
not like a detective story drawing her off the path bridge.
I mean, that's just you don't do that because you're
have an argument. There is some question about whether it
was an inside job. I did uncover the witness to
the murders because some prostits. You told him that the
car could be found in a garage owned by former
(00:45):
DUC the officer named Greek. It is straight out of
a movie. I don't want a single word written about
that state, Do you understand? Welcome to Season two of
Shatter Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast contains
graphic language and is not suitable for children. There's the
(01:08):
possibility to be solved one day cover ups, secret meetings, gangsters, bootleggers,
prison snitches, murder. This season has all of the plot
points of a film noir, a fictional Hollywood screenplay, but
(01:31):
everything I'm going to tell you is factual. We're going
to go back in time this season, before the Great War,
before suburbia and picket fences and television. This was the
time of the Great Depression, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal,
when Prohibition had just ended and people were struggling to
(01:54):
make ends meet. Gangsters and rackets had taken over the
major cities, and mob boss al Capone and he was
sent from Atlanta to Alcatraz. The date of this case
was January twenty first, nineteen thirty five. Two men were
killed that morning, and both of them worked for the
(02:16):
Capital Transit Company in Chevy Chase, Maryland. James Mitchell was
an accounting clerk and had been employed there for nearly
forty years. Lawrence Emery Smith he went by Emery, worked
as a mechanic and a watchman for fifteen years. The
case quickly became known as the Carbarn murders. It's the
(02:38):
oldest cold case in Montgomery County, Maryland. Both of their
lives would end tragically on the same day, but in
separate locations, which was a conundrum for the detectives in charge.
For the better part of eighty six years, This case
file has sat on a shelf in a basement collecting dust.
There were some follow ups over the year, some new revelations,
(03:01):
but it remains unsolved. And that's where I come into
the story. This wasn't a random case that I chose
to investigate. This case came to me because Lawrence Emery
Smith was my great great uncle. Learning that your own
family member was the victim of a horrendous murder, no
(03:23):
matter how far removed that person is personally from you,
it's a punch in the gut. And you add to
that fact that the case is still unsolved and you
personally have the knowledge and experience to try to solve it, well,
it becomes compulsory. But there's a lot more to that story.
For me, this saga started over twenty years ago, right
(03:46):
after I became a cop. I was on a visit
to see my parents in Maryland, and my father and
I were talking in the garage one morning, after we
shoveled the overnight snow from the driveway. It was really
quiet and there was a lull in the conversation. Dad
walked over to the mini fridge and he popped open
a soda and he smiled at me, and I asked
him what he was thinking about. I could see the
(04:08):
gears turning with that squinty eyed look that all of
the smiths get when we think too much. Now, Dad
wasn't what I would call a practical joker, but he
did enjoy throwing a zinger out every now and then
to get a reaction. And I would consider what he
was about to tell me his crowning achievement. He sat
down and off handedly mentioned Uncle Emery and told me
(04:32):
that his own father, my grandfather, had been named as
a suspect on the same day as the murders. I
could feel the blood drained from my face and I
just stared at him. He nodded, and then he took
a sip of his doctor pepper and he told me
what he knew about it. Then he gave me a
(04:53):
little wink and a nod that maybe I should look
into the file. Every family has secrets, but this was
beyond the pale. I sat down with my coffee and
I just looked at my dad and he shook his
head and he said that all of my older relatives
knew about the case, but they never talked about it.
(05:15):
I asked him what he wanted me to do. I
was just a rookie cop. I didn't have the faintest
clue about how to go about investigating a murder let
a loan, a case from nineteen thirty five. And he shrugged,
and he said there was probably nothing to do, but
he just thought I should know the story. I laid
in bed that night and thought about my grandfather, who
(05:36):
had just passed away the year before. My grandfather a
suspect in a double murder. Now this was too much.
Of course, my grandfather didn't murder his own uncle and
another man. It's absurd. But who did and why was
this case never solved? That conversation in the garage stayed
(05:59):
in the back of my mind, and over the years
after I had a number of serious crime scenes under
my belt, my dad and I would sit at the
kitchen table and talk about it. It was my impression
from him that all of the leads garnered by the
detectives in nineteen thirty five went nowhere. I figured that
the case file would be so dust covered and scant
that anyone who might be inclined to look at it
(06:20):
wouldn't have anything to work with. Since all of the
people would be long dead and no court process would
happen anyway. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and
I read some old newspaper articles that my father had
kept in a scrap book, and I concluded that he
was likely right. A case that old would forever remain
on the cold case shelf, forgotten to the sands of time.
(06:44):
The years passed and I moved on with my career,
but I still thought about my great uncle's case from
time to time. Then in twenty sixteen, during our nightly
phone call, my mother told me that one of our
distant cousins back in Maryland had called out of the
blue to ask if we had seen a report by
NBC Washington about the car Barn murder case. Well, at
(07:07):
that point we all lived in Florida, so of course
we hadn't, and our relatives sent Mom and Dad a
link to the story. It started as a robbery, including
sixty dollars in quarters, thirty one dollars in dimes, and
a single twenty dollar bill, A meticulous list kept by
James Mitchell. It's all kept on the backshelf of the
(07:28):
County's cold case evidence room. The first and a line
of boxes filled with stories of families who never got closure.
It's not a case that we're actively investigating. We do
have to focus on our cases where we have either
victims who are still alive, victims families who are still alive,
and where the suspects might still be out there and
could be brought to justice. That was Tisha Thompson, who
(07:52):
was an investigative reporter for NBC Washington. Dad and I
talked the next day, and we were both surprised to
see the amount of information inside of that case file,
and I wanted to know more, so I contacted Tisha
Thompson directly to tell her my family's story. She was
thrilled to hear from a family member, since both she
(08:13):
and the detective had no idea that any of the
relatives of either victim were still alive. She immediately made
arrangements to fly down to Florida with a crew to
interview me and my father for a follow up piece,
which aired on NBC Washington a couple of weeks later.
They never talked about it. That's what Ralph Smith remembers
about growing up in Bethesda in the nineteen thirties. It
(08:36):
wasn't until he was a teenager that he began to
hear whispers his father had been a suspect in the
Carbarn murders, one of our region's most famous murder mysteries.
My dad was home asleep and they came in, rousing
out of bed. He said at nine he was a suspect.
He went nowhere. His uncle wives and he said, well,
he's at work. He says, his dad and his three
(08:58):
uncles continue to work for the rolley company, but as
time passed, the Smith family assumed police had given up
on finding the killer. Karen says, the fact or family
is still searching for answers shows how cold cases can
haunt families for generations. Tisha sent me a link to
the follow up story, which included even more detailed footage
(09:19):
of the papers inside that file and the evidence they
still had. I reached out to the detective directly because
I wanted a copy of that file to read it
for myself. There had to be more suspect leads in
there than just my grandfather. I called the detective's office phone,
and right off the bat, I was met with some
pushback that was surprising, But after I told him about
(09:41):
my law enforcement credentials, he was a little bit more
open to sharing some of the information, but he said
that I would need to travel to Maryland to see
what was in there. I couldn't understand the hesitation since
nobody was working the case and wasn't planning on doing so.
In the interview for NBC Washington, it was made clear
that it wasn't a priority for the department since time
(10:01):
would be much better spent on more recent cases that
could be adjudicated. But after my request for the file
to be mailed to me was turned down flat, I
just left it alone since I wasn't able to travel
to Maryland at that point. Well, the ramifications of being
unable to go to Montgomery County in twenty sixteen hit
a lot harder than I thought. I wanted to get
(10:22):
answers for my father, to give him some closure and
at least give it my best shot, but the timing
was just off, and as time went on, my dad's
health declined and I moved to California. A trip to
Maryland was out of the question. Now I was spending
my time going back to Florida to visit, and unfortunately,
two years after Tisha Thompson's interview, my dad passed away.
(10:49):
I wish that the timing had been better back then,
so that I could have made that trip to Maryland.
Maybe my dad would have had some answers before he died.
So my drive to take on this ice cold case
and follow the leads stems from wanting answers for him
to finally have some closure after eighty six years. For
my dad, my grandfather, and my other relatives who spent
(11:11):
decades wondering what happened and who killed Uncle Emery and
James Mitchell that morning, this journey is my acknowledgment and
follow through of that first conversation in the garage that
snowy morning, and that special little wink and a nod
my dad gave me over two decades ago. When I
(11:34):
first started seriously considering this investigation for season two, the
first thing I did was contact some of my relatives
who I hadn't spoken to for years, and I quickly
found out that curiosity about the murders extended down to
the next generation. My first cousins, once removed, as a
genealogist would call it. These were the kids of my
great aunts and uncles, the younger ones from my father's generation,
(11:58):
and I told them that I was going to look
into our great uncle's murder, and all of them were
over the moon to hear this. And it was right
then that I realized just how powerfully this case had
affected my entire family. For three generations, my great aunts
and uncles talked to their kids about Uncle Emory and
handed down newspaper clippings, in books and photographs of extended
(12:19):
family members I never even knew existed. They were always
haunted by it, by the fact that these murderers were
never caught and brought to justice. Was it someone they knew?
Would the names in the case file ring a bell
for one of them? While the Smith family was a
very quiet and unassuming bunch of people certainly not the
type to push the police for updates, I'm an exception
(12:42):
to that rule, and nobody ever dug too deeply. The
family rumors just sufficed, but the case never faded completely
from their minds. In June of twenty twenty, I started
the process of getting the case file, and I wasn't
going to travel across the country to see it. I
submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Montgomery
(13:03):
County Police Department, and after four long months of phone calls,
follow up emails, and letters. I finally got a thick
manilla folder in the mail. I tore open the envelope
and sorted through the copies, which were haphazard and completely disorganized.
My living room became a sea of paper, and after
I got everything cataloged, I started to dig in and
(13:25):
the first thing I wanted to find was my grandfather's name.
Like my dad said in his interview with Tisha Thompson,
my grandfather was woken up from a sound sleep and
he was hauled to the Bethesda police station for questioning.
I found out from the case file that they rounded
up everyone who worked at the Chevy Chase Lake trolleybarne
(13:45):
So my grandfather wasn't an anomaly. I knew in my
heart that he couldn't have done it. The detectives did
hold him for most of the day while they ran
down his alibi. He was in bett all night with
my grandmother, who was pregnant with my father at the time.
They finally cleared my granddad late that afternoon, but before
he could go home, my grandfather was summoned to Pumphrey's
(14:08):
funeral home. He had to identify the body of his
own uncle. To add insult to injury, Emery Smith's mother,
my grandfather's grandmother, died from pneumonia that morning, within an
hour of her own son, without ever knowing about the murder.
I suppose her not knowing is a blessing in disguise,
(14:29):
and both of their burials couldn't take place until almost
a month later because the ground was frozen and the
procession got stuck in the snow. After hearing all that,
it's no wonder why my grandfather never talked about it.
Like so many unsolved murders, the case took on a
life of its own and was given a moniker by
the press when it hit the headlines of the Washington Post.
(14:51):
For weeks, the detectives pounded the pavement for lead after lead,
arresting dozens of suspects, only to release them days. This
went on for months, then years, until eventually everyone gave
up and moved on to newer cases with fresh leads.
This isn't a new story. It happens to families all
(15:13):
the time, and it's heartbreaking. Sometimes the ball gets dropped.
Sometimes well, sometimes it's just a confluence of things that
only start to make sense when you take a ten
thousand foot view. Hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's go back to the beginning with a quick history lesson.
(15:36):
This case became known as the car Barn murders for
a very specific reason. The Capital Transit Company, where both
of the victims worked, had a monopoly on mass transportation
in and around the Washington, DC area. In the nineteen thirties,
and before buses became the norm, trolley cars ran almost
around the clock, shuttling people to downtown DC and then
(15:59):
back to the expanding suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia.
It was the Great Depression. Cars were a luxury, so
most people would pay a modest fare to ride the
trolley to their destination. For a dollar twenty five you
could get an unlimited weekly trolley pass, and if you
just wanted a single, one way ride, you dropped a
dime into the till. There were several hangars, or carbarns
(16:20):
as they were called, where the trolley cars would be
stored and maintained before they set out on their respective routes.
The main office carbarn was located at the intersection of
thirty sixth and M Streets in Georgetown. If you've ever
seen the movie The Exorcist that famous starewell at the
end of the film, HiT's right there next to the
old car barn, and it goes up to the campus
(16:40):
of Georgetown University. Another carbarn was at chevy Chase Lake.
That's where the murders happened. The chevy Chase Land Company
purchased large parcels just over the line dividing Maryland from
the District of Columbia, and they started development in eighteen ninety.
They built a street car line to connect chevy Chase
to Washington and to entice people to buy houses outside
(17:03):
the district, they built an amusement park with a merry
go Round and a banshell auditorium. Prospective buyers would ride
in on the trolleys and then they'd get the hard
cell while they enjoyed their cotton candy and lemonade. That
was the beginning of chevy Chase Maryland. The amusement park
eventually went to funct and a huge community pool was
built for the new residents. And there were two structures
(17:25):
at chevy Chase Lake that figure importantly for this case.
The trolley barn, which was a huge structure on the
east side of Connecticut Avenue and the car Barn office.
The ticket office, which sat on the west side next
to the new pool. One thing remained the same Connecticut Avenue.
In order to get to chevy Chase Lake, you had
to take Connecticut Avenue. Head north from the office, and
(17:48):
Connecticut Avenue would take you into Kensington and further into
rural Maryland. Take it south and you would go into
the District of Columbia, past the National Zoo and DuPont Circle,
and if you kept going you would eventually end up
on the west side of the White House. Now there's
the stage for this season. Let's talk a little bit
about the victims. James Mitchell was born on November twenty, sixth,
(18:11):
eighteen seventy six in rural Maryland. His father was the
overseer of a farm, and by nineteen hundred James had
gotten himself a job as a conductor for Capital Transit
on the expanding trolley system. By nineteen oh three, he
was married to Mary Lowe and they had three children. Sadly,
one child died when she was just two years old.
(18:33):
In nineteen twenty, James and Mary were living in a modest,
two story row house in southeast DC, just south of
Lincoln Park, which is a little more than a stone's
throw from where the now defunct RFK Stadium sits. By
nineteen thirty, they purchased a home just across the Potomac
River in Annacostia, Maryland. They were doing well despite the depression,
(18:55):
and James Mitchell had moved his way up from conductor
to clerk and then became the receiver and accountant for
all of the cash receipts taken during the week from
each of the twenty four trolleys at the Chevy Chase
Lake Barn. James Mitchell was a tall man, slim with
blue eyes and thick, graying hair. He liked to roll
up his shirt sleeves and hold them in place above
(19:17):
his elbows with a rubber band reminiscent of an old
bar keep. He had made a good living for his
small family, and he was a dedicated worker for Capital Transit.
His friends all said that he was responsible, diligent, and
exacting with his accounting. Lawrence Emory Smith was born on
April fourth, eighteen ninety three, and he also grew up
(19:38):
on a farm in rural Maryland. He was the youngest
of twelve children and one of his brothers was my
great grandfather. After working on the family farm during his
teen years, Emory went to work at Union Bridge, Maryland,
in the Limestone Quarry, and he married his first wife, Myrtle.
A few years later, Emory left the quarry and went
to work at Capital Transit as a full time t
(20:00):
mechanic and a part time watchman. He and Myrtle got
divorced and he married his second wife, Edith, and adopted
her two daughters, Alice and Helen. They purchased a brick
to story in Bethesda, Maryland, which was just a hop,
skip and a jump away from the Chevy Chase Lake Carbarn.
Emory was a short man. He was chunky, with gray
eyes and light brown hair. Like most men in my family,
(20:22):
he was one a few words, but he was excellent
at working with his hands in a mechanical job, and
he could fix just about anything. He had very little
formal education and the nineteen thirty census indicated that he
was illiterate. He couldn't read and write, and the childish
signature on his World War One draft card is indicative
of that. But this was a different time. It was
(20:44):
common for rural farm family members to leave school at
a young age to help tend the animals in the land.
As I mentioned, Emery's mother had been bedridden with pneumonia
for a couple of weeks. On Sunday, January twentieth, he
went to visit her, knowing that it be the last
time he ever saw his mother, and he kissed her
goodbye and told the others at her bedside that he
(21:05):
would be back the following weekend. But that never happened.
Emery was killed on Monday morning, and within an hour
of his murder, his mother died in her bed. On
that cold morning of January twenty first, nineteen thirty five,
the biggest storm in a decade had blown through the
(21:27):
eastern seaboard and blanketed the Washington d c. Suburbs with
almost a half a foot of snow. Just before sunrise.
Both men were murdered during the commission of a robbery.
James Mitchell was in the locked money cage, tallying the
weekly deposit, mostly coins, and putting the money into canvas bags.
(21:48):
A brink struck was scheduled to pick up the cash
on its weekly run. In just a few hours. The
total cash on hand was one thousand, two hundred sixty
nine dollars, which is around twenty four grand in today's money.
While Mitchell worked quietly in the office, Emory Smith, the
night watchman, was out on patrol of the grounds, and
he made his way through the snow across the street
(22:08):
to the car barn where the trolleys were parked. The
evening accounting clerk John Stout left James Mitchell in the
money cage and went home when his shift ended at
about three o'clock in the morning. John Stout said that
Mitchell bid him a good night and bolted the front
door shut behind him. Emory Smith tinkered away in the
carbarn doing last minute repairs and readied the trolleys for
(22:30):
their early morning run. He punched his TimeClock card at
four twenty three a m. Around five ten a m.
A witness named Parker Hannah arrived at the ticket office
to work the early bird shift. Hannah said that when
he arrived, he parked his car next to Emory Smith's
by the water pump and went to the front door
of the ticket office. He called out to James Mitchell
(22:52):
to let him in, believing the door was locked, like
it always was that time of the morning, and when
he got no answer, he tried the door knob. Into
his surprise, the door opened. He went across the hallway
to the cage door separating the hall from the office,
and through that metal grate he saw James Mitchell dead
on the floor in a pool of blood. At seeing
(23:15):
Mitchell's body, Hannah panicked and he ran back out the
front porch, down three steps, and across the street to
the car barn, trying to find the regular night watchman,
a man named John Baxter. Parker. Hannah didn't know that
Baxter and Emery Smith had swapped shifts at the last
minute to accommodate that final Sunday evening visit with his mother.
(23:37):
Hannah yelled out, but he got no response from anyone
at the carbarn, so he ran back across Connecticut Avenue
and he saw headlights of a car coming. He hid
behind a tree until he realized that the car belonged
to another transit worker named Lynnwood Jones. Jones arrived along
with a third employee, Robert Abersold. Parker. Hannah came out
(23:57):
from hiding, and he told Jones and Abersol about Mitchell
lying dead on the office floor. Jones ran into the
office and he tried to call the police from the
phone in the waiting room, but according to parker Hannah Lynnwood,
Jones was so overwrought that he hung up before the
operator could answer. Jones and Abersold hopped back in the
(24:18):
car and they drove about a mile down the road
to the chevy Chase Fire Department to use their telephone
to report the murder to police, and at that point
there was no sign of Emory Smith anywhere. Police officer
James mccauliffe overheard the Washington station dispatcher report and apparent
murder at chevy Chase Lake at about five to twenty
(24:39):
that morning. He was one of two officers working the
night shift for Montgomery County, and he sped to the scene.
When Jones and Abersold came back from the firehouse, Hannah
joined them and reported that all three men went back
into the office past the caged area where Mitchell lay dead,
and they went down the hallway to the trainman's room.
(25:00):
All of the doors were unlocked, which was completely against protocol.
Inside the trainman's room, all three of them found a
man asleep on a bench. This man was Francis Gregory.
According to Parker Hannah's statement, Lynnwood Jones woke Francis Gregory
up and told him that Mitchell had been murdered. Gregory
(25:20):
jumped up from the bench and ran out the rear
porch door into the deep snow in his stocking feet.
Jones ran after him and caught him a short distance
away and brought him back into the office to wait
for police. When Officer mcculliffe got to the ticket office,
he met with the three men and looked at Mitchell
from the hallway. Mccaulliffe could see that he'd been shot
(25:42):
multiple times in the head. Mccaulliffe then contacted Officer Frank Sober,
the other patrolman on duty, and when Frank Sober arrived,
he went back to the firehouse and called Detective Theodore Volton,
Sergeant Leroy Rodgers, and police Chief Garrett. All three of
them arrived within the hour. Parker Hannah finished his initial
(26:02):
statement by saying that on his way to work from Kensington,
a town about two and a half miles north of
the car Barn office, he didn't see any other cars
pass him on the road, and he said it was
really foggy. He saw no car lights either on or
off the road that morning, and he added that inside
the car barn, three or four of the trolley cars
lights were on as though they'd been readied for the routes,
(26:23):
but none of the trolleys had been pulled into the
circle out front. Now that several detectives were on the scene,
they split up to get more statements. Sergeant Rogers and
Officer mccauliffe went down the street and interviewed an ear
witness by the name of Charles Smallwood. He was the
night watchman for the Thomas W. Perry Coal Company. Mister
Smallwood reported that he went into the basement to stoke
(26:45):
the furnace at about four o'clock in the morning. A
short time later, he said that he heard shouting and
gunshots from the area across the street. He said it
was around four thirty five. He didn't call the police.
Witness Robert Abbert sold was also interviewed, and according to
his statement, he saw no other automobiles as he headed
south on Connecticut Avenue toward the carbarn, and he said
(27:08):
it was foggy. He parked his car near Hannah's and
Smith's by the water pump. He said that Lynwood. Jones
approached his car and said, don't park, Let's drive up
to the firehouse. Abersold asked Jones what happened, and Jones
said somebody got held up in there. And he asked
Jones if the man was dead, and Jones replied, yeah,
he's dead. He said that Jones got into his car
(27:28):
and they drove to the fire station. Robert Abersold said
that when he got back to the Carbarn office, he
went inside alone and saw Mitchell's body through the wire door,
and while he was standing there, another trolley motorman by
the name of Brooks came into the room and stood
with him looking at Mitchell. Abersold said that he went
down the hallway to the trainman's room, leaving Brooks standing
(27:50):
in the hallway by himself. In the trainman's room, he
turned to his right and opened the door leading to
the locker room. It was unlocked. When he came out
of the locker room, he spotted Francis Gregory sleeping on
a bench underneath the ladder, and Abersold noted that the
bench was really near the wall that separated the trainman's
room from the office where Mitchell was. Abersold said he
(28:13):
didn't pay too much attention to Francis Gregory and instead
went out the rear door of the office, which led
to a porch where the empty money bags were stored.
That door was also unlocked. He came back into the
trainman's room to find all of the others standing there.
Abersold said that Brooks yelled at Francis Gregory, saying, how
can you sleep like that? Look what happened out there.
(28:36):
Abersold said that Francis Gregory made no comment, but instead
got up, went out into the hallway, looked into the
room where Mitchell was, and came back into the trainman's
room and said, oh my gosh. Two eye witnesses gave
completely different accounts about the movements of Francis Gregory after
a horrible murder involving multiple gunshots in an adjacent room.
(28:59):
Did he run out into the snow or didn't he?
Did he really sleep through the whole crime. As the
interviews continued, Detective Theodore Volton and Sergeant Leroy Rodgers took
the lead from their initial report quote. It was found
that upon arrival, the door to the cashier's cage was
locked and on the floor on his back. Lying in
(29:20):
a large pool of blood was a man height five
foot eleven, hair, gray, no coat. No one had entered
the room since the discovery of the body. Nobody had
located Emery Smith, and there was no sign of him
anywhere at the car barn across the street. His car
was parked next to the water pump, just like everyone said.
(29:42):
The engine was cold, and Smith's forty five caliber handgun
was in the glove compartment. His overcoat and his hat
were on the seat. A missing person's search was initiated
by the chevy Chase Fire Department. They fanned out and
searched the surrounding woods for my great uncle, and for
several hours they hadn't found him, and nobody had heard
(30:03):
from him. The detectives worked the scene, gathering clues from
inside and outside the ticket office. Information was coming in
full bore, and they wrote down notes in pencil as
fast as they could in order to keep some semblance
of who said what, who saw what at what time,
and they began assembling an extended investigation. Detectives from the
(30:23):
Washington d C. And Baltimore police departments were requested by
Chief Garrett to assist since they had a lot more
resources and experience with murder investigations. The hours ticked by,
and the fireman kept looking for Emory Smith in the
woods near the carbarn. They were convinced he couldn't be
too far away, after all, there was no blood in
(30:45):
the snow outside the office and no evidence that he'd
left on his own. Since his car was still there
with his overcoat inside, it was too cold to go
very far without it. At around eight thirty that morning,
a Montgomery County school buster made his way down Connecticut
Avenue at the bridge that crossed Rock Creek, about a
mile north of the chevy Chase Lake Office. The bus
(31:08):
driver stopped when he noticed something weird in the snow.
He put the bus back in gear and continued down
the road until he saw the police cars at the
ticket office and told the detectives what he saw. Rogers,
Volton and several firefighters went to the northwest corner of
that bridge, and there in the snow, they saw blood,
(31:31):
trag marks, shoeprints, and other evidence. They looked into the
flowing water below, there was no sign of Emory Smith.
The men started a search along the banks of Rock Creek,
and a short time later About two hundred feet away
from the bridge, fireman William Piles discovered the body of
(31:52):
my uncle Emery, faced down floating in the water. He'd
been beaten and shot four times in the head. Opening
music by Sam Johnson at Sam Johnson Live dot com.
Underscore music by Kevin McLeod at incompatec dot com. Shattered
(32:14):
Souls is produced by Karen Smith and Angelhart Productions in
partnership with Red Seat Ventures.
This is veteran forensic detective Karen Smith and you're about
to hear the first episode of my new podcast, Shattered
Souls The Car Barn Murders. More episodes are available now
on the Shattered Souls podcast. Just search for Shattered Souls
The Car Barn Murders on your favorite podcast app. It's
(00:21):
not like a detective story drawing her off the path bridge.
I mean, that's just you don't do that because you're
have an argument. There is some question about whether it
was an inside job. I did uncover the witness to
the murders because some prostits. You told him that the
car could be found in a garage owned by former
(00:45):
DUC the officer named Greek. It is straight out of
a movie. I don't want a single word written about
that state, Do you understand? Welcome to Season two of
Shatter Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast contains
graphic language and is not suitable for children. There's the
(01:08):
possibility to be solved one day cover ups, secret meetings, gangsters, bootleggers,
prison snitches, murder. This season has all of the plot
points of a film noir, a fictional Hollywood screenplay, but
(01:31):
everything I'm going to tell you is factual. We're going
to go back in time this season, before the Great War,
before suburbia and picket fences and television. This was the
time of the Great Depression, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal,
when Prohibition had just ended and people were struggling to
(01:54):
make ends meet. Gangsters and rackets had taken over the
major cities, and mob boss al Capone and he was
sent from Atlanta to Alcatraz. The date of this case
was January twenty first, nineteen thirty five. Two men were
killed that morning, and both of them worked for the
(02:16):
Capital Transit Company in Chevy Chase, Maryland. James Mitchell was
an accounting clerk and had been employed there for nearly
forty years. Lawrence Emery Smith he went by Emery, worked
as a mechanic and a watchman for fifteen years. The
case quickly became known as the Carbarn murders. It's the
(02:38):
oldest cold case in Montgomery County, Maryland. Both of their
lives would end tragically on the same day, but in
separate locations, which was a conundrum for the detectives in charge.
For the better part of eighty six years, This case
file has sat on a shelf in a basement collecting dust.
There were some follow ups over the year, some new revelations,
(03:01):
but it remains unsolved. And that's where I come into
the story. This wasn't a random case that I chose
to investigate. This case came to me because Lawrence Emery
Smith was my great great uncle. Learning that your own
family member was the victim of a horrendous murder, no
(03:23):
matter how far removed that person is personally from you,
it's a punch in the gut. And you add to
that fact that the case is still unsolved and you
personally have the knowledge and experience to try to solve it, well,
it becomes compulsory. But there's a lot more to that story.
For me, this saga started over twenty years ago, right
(03:46):
after I became a cop. I was on a visit
to see my parents in Maryland, and my father and
I were talking in the garage one morning, after we
shoveled the overnight snow from the driveway. It was really
quiet and there was a lull in the conversation. Dad
walked over to the mini fridge and he popped open
a soda and he smiled at me, and I asked
him what he was thinking about. I could see the
(04:08):
gears turning with that squinty eyed look that all of
the smiths get when we think too much. Now, Dad
wasn't what I would call a practical joker, but he
did enjoy throwing a zinger out every now and then
to get a reaction. And I would consider what he
was about to tell me his crowning achievement. He sat
down and off handedly mentioned Uncle Emery and told me
(04:32):
that his own father, my grandfather, had been named as
a suspect on the same day as the murders. I
could feel the blood drained from my face and I
just stared at him. He nodded, and then he took
a sip of his doctor pepper and he told me
what he knew about it. Then he gave me a
(04:53):
little wink and a nod that maybe I should look
into the file. Every family has secrets, but this was
beyond the pale. I sat down with my coffee and
I just looked at my dad and he shook his
head and he said that all of my older relatives
knew about the case, but they never talked about it.
(05:15):
I asked him what he wanted me to do. I
was just a rookie cop. I didn't have the faintest
clue about how to go about investigating a murder let
a loan, a case from nineteen thirty five. And he shrugged,
and he said there was probably nothing to do, but
he just thought I should know the story. I laid
in bed that night and thought about my grandfather, who
(05:36):
had just passed away the year before. My grandfather a
suspect in a double murder. Now this was too much.
Of course, my grandfather didn't murder his own uncle and
another man. It's absurd. But who did and why was
this case never solved? That conversation in the garage stayed
(05:59):
in the back of my mind, and over the years
after I had a number of serious crime scenes under
my belt, my dad and I would sit at the
kitchen table and talk about it. It was my impression
from him that all of the leads garnered by the
detectives in nineteen thirty five went nowhere. I figured that
the case file would be so dust covered and scant
that anyone who might be inclined to look at it
(06:20):
wouldn't have anything to work with. Since all of the
people would be long dead and no court process would
happen anyway. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and
I read some old newspaper articles that my father had
kept in a scrap book, and I concluded that he
was likely right. A case that old would forever remain
on the cold case shelf, forgotten to the sands of time.
(06:44):
The years passed and I moved on with my career,
but I still thought about my great uncle's case from
time to time. Then in twenty sixteen, during our nightly
phone call, my mother told me that one of our
distant cousins back in Maryland had called out of the
blue to ask if we had seen a report by
NBC Washington about the car Barn murder case. Well, at
(07:07):
that point we all lived in Florida, so of course
we hadn't, and our relatives sent Mom and Dad a
link to the story. It started as a robbery, including
sixty dollars in quarters, thirty one dollars in dimes, and
a single twenty dollar bill, A meticulous list kept by
James Mitchell. It's all kept on the backshelf of the
(07:28):
County's cold case evidence room. The first and a line
of boxes filled with stories of families who never got closure.
It's not a case that we're actively investigating. We do
have to focus on our cases where we have either
victims who are still alive, victims families who are still alive,
and where the suspects might still be out there and
could be brought to justice. That was Tisha Thompson, who
(07:52):
was an investigative reporter for NBC Washington. Dad and I
talked the next day, and we were both surprised to
see the amount of information inside of that case file,
and I wanted to know more, so I contacted Tisha
Thompson directly to tell her my family's story. She was
thrilled to hear from a family member, since both she
(08:13):
and the detective had no idea that any of the
relatives of either victim were still alive. She immediately made
arrangements to fly down to Florida with a crew to
interview me and my father for a follow up piece,
which aired on NBC Washington a couple of weeks later.
They never talked about it. That's what Ralph Smith remembers
about growing up in Bethesda in the nineteen thirties. It
(08:36):
wasn't until he was a teenager that he began to
hear whispers his father had been a suspect in the
Carbarn murders, one of our region's most famous murder mysteries.
My dad was home asleep and they came in, rousing
out of bed. He said at nine he was a suspect.
He went nowhere. His uncle wives and he said, well,
he's at work. He says, his dad and his three
(08:58):
uncles continue to work for the rolley company, but as
time passed, the Smith family assumed police had given up
on finding the killer. Karen says, the fact or family
is still searching for answers shows how cold cases can
haunt families for generations. Tisha sent me a link to
the follow up story, which included even more detailed footage
(09:19):
of the papers inside that file and the evidence they
still had. I reached out to the detective directly because
I wanted a copy of that file to read it
for myself. There had to be more suspect leads in
there than just my grandfather. I called the detective's office phone,
and right off the bat, I was met with some
pushback that was surprising, But after I told him about
(09:41):
my law enforcement credentials, he was a little bit more
open to sharing some of the information, but he said
that I would need to travel to Maryland to see
what was in there. I couldn't understand the hesitation since
nobody was working the case and wasn't planning on doing so.
In the interview for NBC Washington, it was made clear
that it wasn't a priority for the department since time
(10:01):
would be much better spent on more recent cases that
could be adjudicated. But after my request for the file
to be mailed to me was turned down flat, I
just left it alone since I wasn't able to travel
to Maryland at that point. Well, the ramifications of being
unable to go to Montgomery County in twenty sixteen hit
a lot harder than I thought. I wanted to get
(10:22):
answers for my father, to give him some closure and
at least give it my best shot, but the timing
was just off, and as time went on, my dad's
health declined and I moved to California. A trip to
Maryland was out of the question. Now I was spending
my time going back to Florida to visit, and unfortunately,
two years after Tisha Thompson's interview, my dad passed away.
(10:49):
I wish that the timing had been better back then,
so that I could have made that trip to Maryland.
Maybe my dad would have had some answers before he died.
So my drive to take on this ice cold case
and follow the leads stems from wanting answers for him
to finally have some closure after eighty six years. For
my dad, my grandfather, and my other relatives who spent
(11:11):
decades wondering what happened and who killed Uncle Emery and
James Mitchell that morning, this journey is my acknowledgment and
follow through of that first conversation in the garage that
snowy morning, and that special little wink and a nod
my dad gave me over two decades ago. When I
(11:34):
first started seriously considering this investigation for season two, the
first thing I did was contact some of my relatives
who I hadn't spoken to for years, and I quickly
found out that curiosity about the murders extended down to
the next generation. My first cousins, once removed, as a
genealogist would call it. These were the kids of my
great aunts and uncles, the younger ones from my father's generation,
(11:58):
and I told them that I was going to look
into our great uncle's murder, and all of them were
over the moon to hear this. And it was right
then that I realized just how powerfully this case had
affected my entire family. For three generations, my great aunts
and uncles talked to their kids about Uncle Emory and
handed down newspaper clippings, in books and photographs of extended
(12:19):
family members I never even knew existed. They were always
haunted by it, by the fact that these murderers were
never caught and brought to justice. Was it someone they knew?
Would the names in the case file ring a bell
for one of them? While the Smith family was a
very quiet and unassuming bunch of people certainly not the
type to push the police for updates, I'm an exception
(12:42):
to that rule, and nobody ever dug too deeply. The
family rumors just sufficed, but the case never faded completely
from their minds. In June of twenty twenty, I started
the process of getting the case file, and I wasn't
going to travel across the country to see it. I
submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Montgomery
(13:03):
County Police Department, and after four long months of phone calls,
follow up emails, and letters. I finally got a thick
manilla folder in the mail. I tore open the envelope
and sorted through the copies, which were haphazard and completely disorganized.
My living room became a sea of paper, and after
I got everything cataloged, I started to dig in and
(13:25):
the first thing I wanted to find was my grandfather's name.
Like my dad said in his interview with Tisha Thompson,
my grandfather was woken up from a sound sleep and
he was hauled to the Bethesda police station for questioning.
I found out from the case file that they rounded
up everyone who worked at the Chevy Chase Lake trolleybarne
(13:45):
So my grandfather wasn't an anomaly. I knew in my
heart that he couldn't have done it. The detectives did
hold him for most of the day while they ran
down his alibi. He was in bett all night with
my grandmother, who was pregnant with my father at the time.
They finally cleared my granddad late that afternoon, but before
he could go home, my grandfather was summoned to Pumphrey's
(14:08):
funeral home. He had to identify the body of his
own uncle. To add insult to injury, Emery Smith's mother,
my grandfather's grandmother, died from pneumonia that morning, within an
hour of her own son, without ever knowing about the murder.
I suppose her not knowing is a blessing in disguise,
(14:29):
and both of their burials couldn't take place until almost
a month later because the ground was frozen and the
procession got stuck in the snow. After hearing all that,
it's no wonder why my grandfather never talked about it.
Like so many unsolved murders, the case took on a
life of its own and was given a moniker by
the press when it hit the headlines of the Washington Post.
(14:51):
For weeks, the detectives pounded the pavement for lead after lead,
arresting dozens of suspects, only to release them days. This
went on for months, then years, until eventually everyone gave
up and moved on to newer cases with fresh leads.
This isn't a new story. It happens to families all
(15:13):
the time, and it's heartbreaking. Sometimes the ball gets dropped.
Sometimes well, sometimes it's just a confluence of things that
only start to make sense when you take a ten
thousand foot view. Hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's go back to the beginning with a quick history lesson.
(15:36):
This case became known as the car Barn murders for
a very specific reason. The Capital Transit Company, where both
of the victims worked, had a monopoly on mass transportation
in and around the Washington, DC area. In the nineteen thirties,
and before buses became the norm, trolley cars ran almost
around the clock, shuttling people to downtown DC and then
(15:59):
back to the expanding suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia.
It was the Great Depression. Cars were a luxury, so
most people would pay a modest fare to ride the
trolley to their destination. For a dollar twenty five you
could get an unlimited weekly trolley pass, and if you
just wanted a single, one way ride, you dropped a
dime into the till. There were several hangars, or carbarns
(16:20):
as they were called, where the trolley cars would be
stored and maintained before they set out on their respective routes.
The main office carbarn was located at the intersection of
thirty sixth and M Streets in Georgetown. If you've ever
seen the movie The Exorcist that famous starewell at the
end of the film, HiT's right there next to the
old car barn, and it goes up to the campus
(16:40):
of Georgetown University. Another carbarn was at chevy Chase Lake.
That's where the murders happened. The chevy Chase Land Company
purchased large parcels just over the line dividing Maryland from
the District of Columbia, and they started development in eighteen ninety.
They built a street car line to connect chevy Chase
to Washington and to entice people to buy houses outside
(17:03):
the district, they built an amusement park with a merry
go Round and a banshell auditorium. Prospective buyers would ride
in on the trolleys and then they'd get the hard
cell while they enjoyed their cotton candy and lemonade. That
was the beginning of chevy Chase Maryland. The amusement park
eventually went to funct and a huge community pool was
built for the new residents. And there were two structures
(17:25):
at chevy Chase Lake that figure importantly for this case.
The trolley barn, which was a huge structure on the
east side of Connecticut Avenue and the car Barn office.
The ticket office, which sat on the west side next
to the new pool. One thing remained the same Connecticut Avenue.
In order to get to chevy Chase Lake, you had
to take Connecticut Avenue. Head north from the office, and
(17:48):
Connecticut Avenue would take you into Kensington and further into
rural Maryland. Take it south and you would go into
the District of Columbia, past the National Zoo and DuPont Circle,
and if you kept going you would eventually end up
on the west side of the White House. Now there's
the stage for this season. Let's talk a little bit
about the victims. James Mitchell was born on November twenty, sixth,
(18:11):
eighteen seventy six in rural Maryland. His father was the
overseer of a farm, and by nineteen hundred James had
gotten himself a job as a conductor for Capital Transit
on the expanding trolley system. By nineteen oh three, he
was married to Mary Lowe and they had three children. Sadly,
one child died when she was just two years old.
(18:33):
In nineteen twenty, James and Mary were living in a modest,
two story row house in southeast DC, just south of
Lincoln Park, which is a little more than a stone's
throw from where the now defunct RFK Stadium sits. By
nineteen thirty, they purchased a home just across the Potomac
River in Annacostia, Maryland. They were doing well despite the depression,
(18:55):
and James Mitchell had moved his way up from conductor
to clerk and then became the receiver and accountant for
all of the cash receipts taken during the week from
each of the twenty four trolleys at the Chevy Chase
Lake Barn. James Mitchell was a tall man, slim with
blue eyes and thick, graying hair. He liked to roll
up his shirt sleeves and hold them in place above
(19:17):
his elbows with a rubber band reminiscent of an old
bar keep. He had made a good living for his
small family, and he was a dedicated worker for Capital Transit.
His friends all said that he was responsible, diligent, and
exacting with his accounting. Lawrence Emory Smith was born on
April fourth, eighteen ninety three, and he also grew up
(19:38):
on a farm in rural Maryland. He was the youngest
of twelve children and one of his brothers was my
great grandfather. After working on the family farm during his
teen years, Emory went to work at Union Bridge, Maryland,
in the Limestone Quarry, and he married his first wife, Myrtle.
A few years later, Emory left the quarry and went
to work at Capital Transit as a full time t
(20:00):
mechanic and a part time watchman. He and Myrtle got
divorced and he married his second wife, Edith, and adopted
her two daughters, Alice and Helen. They purchased a brick
to story in Bethesda, Maryland, which was just a hop,
skip and a jump away from the Chevy Chase Lake Carbarn.
Emory was a short man. He was chunky, with gray
eyes and light brown hair. Like most men in my family,
(20:22):
he was one a few words, but he was excellent
at working with his hands in a mechanical job, and
he could fix just about anything. He had very little
formal education and the nineteen thirty census indicated that he
was illiterate. He couldn't read and write, and the childish
signature on his World War One draft card is indicative
of that. But this was a different time. It was
(20:44):
common for rural farm family members to leave school at
a young age to help tend the animals in the land.
As I mentioned, Emery's mother had been bedridden with pneumonia
for a couple of weeks. On Sunday, January twentieth, he
went to visit her, knowing that it be the last
time he ever saw his mother, and he kissed her
goodbye and told the others at her bedside that he
(21:05):
would be back the following weekend. But that never happened.
Emery was killed on Monday morning, and within an hour
of his murder, his mother died in her bed. On
that cold morning of January twenty first, nineteen thirty five,
the biggest storm in a decade had blown through the
(21:27):
eastern seaboard and blanketed the Washington d c. Suburbs with
almost a half a foot of snow. Just before sunrise.
Both men were murdered during the commission of a robbery.
James Mitchell was in the locked money cage, tallying the
weekly deposit, mostly coins, and putting the money into canvas bags.
(21:48):
A brink struck was scheduled to pick up the cash
on its weekly run. In just a few hours. The
total cash on hand was one thousand, two hundred sixty
nine dollars, which is around twenty four grand in today's money.
While Mitchell worked quietly in the office, Emory Smith, the
night watchman, was out on patrol of the grounds, and
he made his way through the snow across the street
(22:08):
to the car barn where the trolleys were parked. The
evening accounting clerk John Stout left James Mitchell in the
money cage and went home when his shift ended at
about three o'clock in the morning. John Stout said that
Mitchell bid him a good night and bolted the front
door shut behind him. Emory Smith tinkered away in the
carbarn doing last minute repairs and readied the trolleys for
(22:30):
their early morning run. He punched his TimeClock card at
four twenty three a m. Around five ten a m.
A witness named Parker Hannah arrived at the ticket office
to work the early bird shift. Hannah said that when
he arrived, he parked his car next to Emory Smith's
by the water pump and went to the front door
of the ticket office. He called out to James Mitchell
(22:52):
to let him in, believing the door was locked, like
it always was that time of the morning, and when
he got no answer, he tried the door knob. Into
his surprise, the door opened. He went across the hallway
to the cage door separating the hall from the office,
and through that metal grate he saw James Mitchell dead
on the floor in a pool of blood. At seeing
(23:15):
Mitchell's body, Hannah panicked and he ran back out the
front porch, down three steps, and across the street to
the car barn, trying to find the regular night watchman,
a man named John Baxter. Parker. Hannah didn't know that
Baxter and Emery Smith had swapped shifts at the last
minute to accommodate that final Sunday evening visit with his mother.
(23:37):
Hannah yelled out, but he got no response from anyone
at the carbarn, so he ran back across Connecticut Avenue
and he saw headlights of a car coming. He hid
behind a tree until he realized that the car belonged
to another transit worker named Lynnwood Jones. Jones arrived along
with a third employee, Robert Abersold. Parker. Hannah came out
(23:57):
from hiding, and he told Jones and Abersol about Mitchell
lying dead on the office floor. Jones ran into the
office and he tried to call the police from the
phone in the waiting room, but according to parker Hannah Lynnwood,
Jones was so overwrought that he hung up before the
operator could answer. Jones and Abersold hopped back in the
(24:18):
car and they drove about a mile down the road
to the chevy Chase Fire Department to use their telephone
to report the murder to police, and at that point
there was no sign of Emory Smith anywhere. Police officer
James mccauliffe overheard the Washington station dispatcher report and apparent
murder at chevy Chase Lake at about five to twenty
(24:39):
that morning. He was one of two officers working the
night shift for Montgomery County, and he sped to the scene.
When Jones and Abersold came back from the firehouse, Hannah
joined them and reported that all three men went back
into the office past the caged area where Mitchell lay dead,
and they went down the hallway to the trainman's room.
(25:00):
All of the doors were unlocked, which was completely against protocol.
Inside the trainman's room, all three of them found a
man asleep on a bench. This man was Francis Gregory.
According to Parker Hannah's statement, Lynnwood Jones woke Francis Gregory
up and told him that Mitchell had been murdered. Gregory
(25:20):
jumped up from the bench and ran out the rear
porch door into the deep snow in his stocking feet.
Jones ran after him and caught him a short distance
away and brought him back into the office to wait
for police. When Officer mcculliffe got to the ticket office,
he met with the three men and looked at Mitchell
from the hallway. Mccaulliffe could see that he'd been shot
(25:42):
multiple times in the head. Mccaulliffe then contacted Officer Frank Sober,
the other patrolman on duty, and when Frank Sober arrived,
he went back to the firehouse and called Detective Theodore Volton,
Sergeant Leroy Rodgers, and police Chief Garrett. All three of
them arrived within the hour. Parker Hannah finished his initial
(26:02):
statement by saying that on his way to work from Kensington,
a town about two and a half miles north of
the car Barn office, he didn't see any other cars
pass him on the road, and he said it was
really foggy. He saw no car lights either on or
off the road that morning, and he added that inside
the car barn, three or four of the trolley cars
lights were on as though they'd been readied for the routes,
(26:23):
but none of the trolleys had been pulled into the
circle out front. Now that several detectives were on the scene,
they split up to get more statements. Sergeant Rogers and
Officer mccauliffe went down the street and interviewed an ear
witness by the name of Charles Smallwood. He was the
night watchman for the Thomas W. Perry Coal Company. Mister
Smallwood reported that he went into the basement to stoke
(26:45):
the furnace at about four o'clock in the morning. A
short time later, he said that he heard shouting and
gunshots from the area across the street. He said it
was around four thirty five. He didn't call the police.
Witness Robert Abbert sold was also interviewed, and according to
his statement, he saw no other automobiles as he headed
south on Connecticut Avenue toward the carbarn, and he said
(27:08):
it was foggy. He parked his car near Hannah's and
Smith's by the water pump. He said that Lynwood. Jones
approached his car and said, don't park, Let's drive up
to the firehouse. Abersold asked Jones what happened, and Jones
said somebody got held up in there. And he asked
Jones if the man was dead, and Jones replied, yeah,
he's dead. He said that Jones got into his car
(27:28):
and they drove to the fire station. Robert Abersold said
that when he got back to the Carbarn office, he
went inside alone and saw Mitchell's body through the wire door,
and while he was standing there, another trolley motorman by
the name of Brooks came into the room and stood
with him looking at Mitchell. Abersold said that he went
down the hallway to the trainman's room, leaving Brooks standing
(27:50):
in the hallway by himself. In the trainman's room, he
turned to his right and opened the door leading to
the locker room. It was unlocked. When he came out
of the locker room, he spotted Francis Gregory sleeping on
a bench underneath the ladder, and Abersold noted that the
bench was really near the wall that separated the trainman's
room from the office where Mitchell was. Abersold said he
(28:13):
didn't pay too much attention to Francis Gregory and instead
went out the rear door of the office, which led
to a porch where the empty money bags were stored.
That door was also unlocked. He came back into the
trainman's room to find all of the others standing there.
Abersold said that Brooks yelled at Francis Gregory, saying, how
can you sleep like that? Look what happened out there.
(28:36):
Abersold said that Francis Gregory made no comment, but instead
got up, went out into the hallway, looked into the
room where Mitchell was, and came back into the trainman's
room and said, oh my gosh. Two eye witnesses gave
completely different accounts about the movements of Francis Gregory after
a horrible murder involving multiple gunshots in an adjacent room.
(28:59):
Did he run out into the snow or didn't he?
Did he really sleep through the whole crime. As the
interviews continued, Detective Theodore Volton and Sergeant Leroy Rodgers took
the lead from their initial report quote. It was found
that upon arrival, the door to the cashier's cage was
locked and on the floor on his back. Lying in
(29:20):
a large pool of blood was a man height five
foot eleven, hair, gray, no coat. No one had entered
the room since the discovery of the body. Nobody had
located Emery Smith, and there was no sign of him
anywhere at the car barn across the street. His car
was parked next to the water pump, just like everyone said.
(29:42):
The engine was cold, and Smith's forty five caliber handgun
was in the glove compartment. His overcoat and his hat
were on the seat. A missing person's search was initiated
by the chevy Chase Fire Department. They fanned out and
searched the surrounding woods for my great uncle, and for
several hours they hadn't found him, and nobody had heard
(30:03):
from him. The detectives worked the scene, gathering clues from
inside and outside the ticket office. Information was coming in
full bore, and they wrote down notes in pencil as
fast as they could in order to keep some semblance
of who said what, who saw what at what time,
and they began assembling an extended investigation. Detectives from the
(30:23):
Washington d C. And Baltimore police departments were requested by
Chief Garrett to assist since they had a lot more
resources and experience with murder investigations. The hours ticked by,
and the fireman kept looking for Emory Smith in the
woods near the carbarn. They were convinced he couldn't be
too far away, after all, there was no blood in
(30:45):
the snow outside the office and no evidence that he'd
left on his own. Since his car was still there
with his overcoat inside, it was too cold to go
very far without it. At around eight thirty that morning,
a Montgomery County school buster made his way down Connecticut
Avenue at the bridge that crossed Rock Creek, about a
mile north of the chevy Chase Lake Office. The bus
(31:08):
driver stopped when he noticed something weird in the snow.
He put the bus back in gear and continued down
the road until he saw the police cars at the
ticket office and told the detectives what he saw. Rogers,
Volton and several firefighters went to the northwest corner of
that bridge, and there in the snow, they saw blood,
(31:31):
trag marks, shoeprints, and other evidence. They looked into the
flowing water below, there was no sign of Emory Smith.
The men started a search along the banks of Rock Creek,
and a short time later About two hundred feet away
from the bridge, fireman William Piles discovered the body of
(31:52):
my uncle Emery, faced down floating in the water. He'd
been beaten and shot four times in the head. Opening
music by Sam Johnson at Sam Johnson Live dot com.
Underscore music by Kevin McLeod at incompatec dot com. Shattered
(32:14):
Souls is produced by Karen Smith and Angelhart Productions in
partnership with Red Seat Ventures.
Host
Nancy Grace
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