March 22, 2022 • 32 mins
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):
It's felt like a detective story, drawing her off the
(00:05):
Pasco Bridge. I mean, that's just you don't do that
because you're having an argument. There is some question about
whether it was an inside job. He does uncover the
witness to the murder because some prostitutes told him that
the car could be found in a garage owned by
(00:26):
former duc the oflicer named Greek. It is straight out
of a movie. I don't want a single words written
about that state, do you understand? Welcome to Season two
of Shattered Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast
contains graphic language and is not suitable for children. There's
(00:50):
a possibility to be sold 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
(01:13):
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
(01:36):
make ends. Meet gangsters and rackets had taken over the
major cities and mob boss Al Capone. He was sent
from Atlanta to Alcatraz. The date of this case was
January nineteen. Two men were killed that morning, and both
(01:57):
of them worked for the Capital Transit come Any 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
(02:18):
as the car Barn murders. It's the 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
(02:40):
were some follow ups over the years, some new revelations,
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
(03:02):
family member was the victim of a horrendous murder, no
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.
(03:24):
For me, this saga started over twenty years ago, right
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
(03:44):
a soda and he smiled at me, and I asked
him what he was thinking about. I could see the
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
(04:08):
down and off handedly mentioned Uncle Emery and told me
that his own father, my grandfather, had been named as
a suspect on the same day as the murders. I
could feel the blood drain from my face and I
just stared at him. He nodded, and then he took
(04:29):
a sip of his doctor pepper and he told me
what he knew about it. Then he gave me a
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,
(04:51):
and he said that all of my older relatives knew
about the case, but they never talked about it. I
asked him what he wanted me to do. I wash
just rookie cop. I didn't have the faintout clue about
how to go about investigating a murder let a loan
a case from nineteen And he shrugged and he said
there was probably nothing to do, but he just thought
(05:13):
I should know the story. I laid in bed that
night and thought about my grandfather, who 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?
(05:39):
That conversation in the garage stayed 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
(06:01):
be inclined to look at it 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,
(06:23):
forgotten to the sands of time. 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 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
(06:44):
had seen a report by NBC Washington about the car
Barn murder case. Well, at 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. Include sixty dollars in quarters, in dimes,
and a single twenty dollar bill, A meticulous list kept
(07:07):
by James Mitchell. It's all kept on the backshelf of
the 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
(07:29):
out there and could be brought to justice. That was
Tisha Thompson, who 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.
(07:52):
She was thrilled to hear from a family member, since
both she 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
(08:14):
Smith remembers about growing up in Bethesda in the nineteen thirties.
It 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 moused
me out of bed. Uh, he said that he was
(08:34):
a suspect. He went, no worries his uncle was and
he said, well, he's at work. He says, his dad
and his three uncles continue to work for the trolley company,
but as time passed, the Smith family assumed police had
given up on finding the killer. Karen says the fact
her family is still searching for answers shows how cold
cases can haunt families for generations. Tisha sent me a
(08:57):
link to the follow up story, which include it had
even more detailed footage 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,
(09:18):
I was met with some pushback that was surprising, But
after I told him about 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
NDC Washington, it was made clear that it wasn't a
(09:41):
priority for the department since time 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
hit a lot harder than I thought. I wanted to
(10:03):
get 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.
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
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
(11:16):
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,
(11:40):
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 at their kids about Uncle Emery and
handed down newspaper clippings, in books and photographs of extended
(12:01):
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? Well, 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
(12:24):
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, 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 County Police Department,
(12:47):
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 the first
(13:07):
thing I wanted to find was my grandfather's name. Like
my dad said in his interview with Titia 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 trolley barne
so my grandfather wasn't an anomaly. I knew in my
(13:32):
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 battle 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 funeral home.
He had to identify the body of his own uncle.
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To add insult to injury, Emery Smith's mother, my grandfather's mother,
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, and both
of their burials couldn't take place until almost a month
later because the ground was frozen and the procession got
(14:18):
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. For weeks,
the detectives pounded the pavement for lead after lead, arresting
(14:38):
dozens of suspects, only to release them days later. 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
the time, and it's heartbreaking. Sometimes the ball gets dropped.
(15:00):
Sometimes 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.
This case became known as the car Barn murders for
(15:21):
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, d c. Area in the
nineteen thirties, and before busses became the norm, trolley cars
ran almost around the clock, shuttling people to downtown d
C and then back to the expanding suburban areas in
(15:43):
Maryland and Virginia. It was a 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 car barns as they were called, where the
(16:03):
trolley cars would be stored and maintained before they set
out on the respective routes. The main office car barn
was located at the intersection of thirty six and M
Streets in Georgetown. If you've ever seen the movie The Exorcist,
that famous starewell at the end of the film hits
right there next to the old car barn, and it
goes up to the campus of Georgetown University. Another carbarn
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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 the district, they built
(16:46):
an amusement park with a merry go round and a
bandshell 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 at chevy Chase Lake that
(17:09):
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 Connecticut Avenue would take
(17:32):
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 eighteen seventy six in
(17:55):
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 o three, he was married to Mary Low
and they had three children. Sadly, one child died when
she was just two years old. In nineteen twenty, James
(18:16):
and Mary were living in a modest, two story row
house in southeast d C, 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 Anacostia, Maryland.
They were doing well despite the depression, and James Mitchell
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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 his elbows with a
(19:00):
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 on a farm in rural Maryland.
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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 mechanic and a part time watchman.
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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. Emery was a short man. He was unkey,
with gray eyes and light brown hair. Like most men
in my family, he was one of few words, but
(20:06):
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 common for rural farm family members to leave
(20:28):
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,
he went to visit her, knowing that it might be
the last time he ever saw his mother, and he
kissed her goodbye and told the others at her bedside
that he would be back the following weekend. But that
(20:50):
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
Eastern seaboard and blanketed the Washington, d c. Suburbs with
(21:13):
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.
A brink struck was scheduled to pick up the cash
on its weekly run in just a few hours. The
(21:35):
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, Emery Smith, the
night watchman, was out on patrol of the grounds, and
he made his way through the snow across the street
to the car barn where the trolleys were parked. The
evening accounting clerk, John Stout, left James Mitchell in the
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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. Emery Smith tinkered away in the
car barn doing last minute repairs and readied the trolleys
for their early morning run. He punched his time clock
card at four three am. Around five ten am, a
(22:21):
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 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 and to his surprise,
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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 Mitchell's body,
Hannah panicked and he ran back out the front porch,
down three steps and across the street to the car barn,
(23:04):
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. Hannah yelled out,
but he got no response from anyone at the car barn,
so he ran back across Connecticut Avenue and he saw
(23:25):
headlights of a car coming. He hid behind a tree
until he realized that the car belonged to another transit
worker named Lynwood Jones. Jones arrived along with a third employee,
Robert Abersold. Parker Hannah came out from hiding, and he
told Jones and Abbersold about Mitchell lying dead on the
office floor. Jones ran into the office and he tried
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to call the police from the phone in the waiting room,
but according to Parker Hannah, Lynwood Jones was so overwrought
that he hung up before the operator could answer. Jones
and Abbersold back in the 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,
(24:08):
and at that point there was no sign of Emory Smith. Anywhere.
Police officer James McAuliffe overheard the Washington station dispatcher report
and apparent murder at chevy Chase Lake at about five
twenty that morning. He was one of two officers working
the night shift for Montgomery County, and he sped to
the scene when Jones and Abersauld came back from the firehouse.
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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. 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
(24:52):
was Francis Gregory. According to Parker Hannah's statement. Lynwood Jones
woke Francis Gregory up and told him that Mitchell had
been murdered. Gregory 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
(25:13):
office to wait for police. When officer mccaulloffe got to
the ticket office, he met with the three men and
looked at Mitchell from the hallway. Mccauliffe could see that
he'd been shot multiple times in the head. Mccauloffe then
contacted Officer Frank Sober, the other patrolman on duty, and
when Frank Sober arrived, he went back to the firehouse
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and called Detective Theodore of Bolton, Sergeant Leroy Rodgers, and
Police Chief Garrett. All three of them arrived within the hour.
Parker Hannah finished his initial 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
(25:55):
car lights either on or off the road that morning,
and he added that inside a car barn, three or
four of the trolley cars lights were on as though
they'd been readied for the routes, 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
(26:16):
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 the furnace at
about four o'clock in the morning. A short time later,
he said that he heard shouting and gun shots from
the area across the street. He said it was around
(26:37):
four thirty five. He didn't call the police. Witness Robert
Abersold was also interviewed and according to his statement, he
saw no other automobiles as he headed south on Connecticut
Avenue toward the car barn, and he said 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.
(27:00):
Abersald 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 and they drove
to the fire station. Robert Abersold said that when he
got back to the Carborn office, he went inside alone
and saw Mitchell's body through the wire door, and while
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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 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,
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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. Abersald said he 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.
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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. Abers Old 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
(28:29):
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. 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
(28:50):
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 a large pool of
blood was a man height five foot eleven, hair, gray,
no coat. No one had entered the room since the
(29:10):
discovery of the body. Unquote, 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. The engine
was cold, and Smith's fort caliber handgun was in the
glove compartment. His overcoat and his hat were on the seat.
(29:33):
A missing persons search was initiated by the chevy Chase
Fire Department. They fanned out and searched the surrounding woods
for my great uncle, and after several hours they hadn't
found him and nobody had heard from him. The detectives
worked the scene, gathering clues from inside and outside the
ticket office. Information was coming in full bore, and they
(29:53):
wrote down notes and pencil as fast as they could
in order to keep some semblance of who said what,
who all what at what time, and they began assembling
an extended investigation. Detectives from the Washington d C. And
Baltimore police departments were requested by Chief Garrett to assist
since they had a lot more resources and experience with
(30:14):
murder investigations. The hours ticked by, and the fireman kept
looking for Emery Smith in the woods near the car barn.
They were convinced he couldn't be too far away, after all,
there was no blood in the snow outside the office
and no evidence that he had left on his own.
Since his car was still there with his overcoat inside,
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it was too cold to go very far without it.
At around eight thirty that morning, a Montgomery County school
bus driver 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 driver stopped when
he noticed something weird in the snow. He put the
bus back in gear and continued down the road until
(30:58):
he saw the police car set the ticket office and
told the detectives what he saw. Rogers Bolton and several
firefighters went to the northwest corner of that bridge, and
they're in the snow. They saw blood, drag marks, shoeprints,
and other evidence. They looked into the flowing water below.
(31:20):
There was no sign of Emery 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 my uncle Emery,
face down, floating in the water. He had been beaten
and shot four times in the head. Opening music by
(31:48):
Sam Johnson at Sam Johnson Live dot com. Underscore music
by Kevin McLeod at Incompatech dot com. Shattered Souls is
produced by Karen Smith and Angel Heart Productions in partnership
with Red Seat Ventures.
It's felt like a detective story, drawing her off the
(00:05):
Pasco Bridge. I mean, that's just you don't do that
because you're having an argument. There is some question about
whether it was an inside job. He does uncover the
witness to the murder because some prostitutes told him that
the car could be found in a garage owned by
(00:26):
former duc the oflicer named Greek. It is straight out
of a movie. I don't want a single words written
about that state, do you understand? Welcome to Season two
of Shattered Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast
contains graphic language and is not suitable for children. There's
(00:50):
a possibility to be sold 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
(01:13):
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
(01:36):
make ends. Meet gangsters and rackets had taken over the
major cities and mob boss Al Capone. He was sent
from Atlanta to Alcatraz. The date of this case was
January nineteen. Two men were killed that morning, and both
(01:57):
of them worked for the Capital Transit come Any 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
(02:18):
as the car Barn murders. It's the 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
(02:40):
were some follow ups over the years, some new revelations,
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
(03:02):
family member was the victim of a horrendous murder, no
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.
(03:24):
For me, this saga started over twenty years ago, right
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
(03:44):
a soda and he smiled at me, and I asked
him what he was thinking about. I could see the
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
(04:08):
down and off handedly mentioned Uncle Emery and told me
that his own father, my grandfather, had been named as
a suspect on the same day as the murders. I
could feel the blood drain from my face and I
just stared at him. He nodded, and then he took
(04:29):
a sip of his doctor pepper and he told me
what he knew about it. Then he gave me a
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,
(04:51):
and he said that all of my older relatives knew
about the case, but they never talked about it. I
asked him what he wanted me to do. I wash
just rookie cop. I didn't have the faintout clue about
how to go about investigating a murder let a loan
a case from nineteen And he shrugged and he said
there was probably nothing to do, but he just thought
(05:13):
I should know the story. I laid in bed that
night and thought about my grandfather, who 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?
(05:39):
That conversation in the garage stayed 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
(06:01):
be inclined to look at it 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,
(06:23):
forgotten to the sands of time. 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 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
(06:44):
had seen a report by NBC Washington about the car
Barn murder case. Well, at 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. Include sixty dollars in quarters, in dimes,
and a single twenty dollar bill, A meticulous list kept
(07:07):
by James Mitchell. It's all kept on the backshelf of
the 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
(07:29):
out there and could be brought to justice. That was
Tisha Thompson, who 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.
(07:52):
She was thrilled to hear from a family member, since
both she 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
(08:14):
Smith remembers about growing up in Bethesda in the nineteen thirties.
It 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 moused
me out of bed. Uh, he said that he was
(08:34):
a suspect. He went, no worries his uncle was and
he said, well, he's at work. He says, his dad
and his three uncles continue to work for the trolley company,
but as time passed, the Smith family assumed police had
given up on finding the killer. Karen says the fact
her family is still searching for answers shows how cold
cases can haunt families for generations. Tisha sent me a
(08:57):
link to the follow up story, which include it had
even more detailed footage 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,
(09:18):
I was met with some pushback that was surprising, But
after I told him about 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
NDC Washington, it was made clear that it wasn't a
(09:41):
priority for the department since time 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
hit a lot harder than I thought. I wanted to
(10:03):
get 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.
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
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
(11:16):
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,
(11:40):
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 at their kids about Uncle Emery and
handed down newspaper clippings, in books and photographs of extended
(12:01):
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? Well, 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
(12:24):
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, 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 County Police Department,
(12:47):
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 the first
(13:07):
thing I wanted to find was my grandfather's name. Like
my dad said in his interview with Titia 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 trolley barne
so my grandfather wasn't an anomaly. I knew in my
(13:32):
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 battle 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 funeral home.
He had to identify the body of his own uncle.
(13:55):
To add insult to injury, Emery Smith's mother, my grandfather's mother,
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, and both
of their burials couldn't take place until almost a month
later because the ground was frozen and the procession got
(14:18):
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. For weeks,
the detectives pounded the pavement for lead after lead, arresting
(14:38):
dozens of suspects, only to release them days later. 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
the time, and it's heartbreaking. Sometimes the ball gets dropped.
(15:00):
Sometimes 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.
This case became known as the car Barn murders for
(15:21):
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, d c. Area in the
nineteen thirties, and before busses became the norm, trolley cars
ran almost around the clock, shuttling people to downtown d
C and then back to the expanding suburban areas in
(15:43):
Maryland and Virginia. It was a 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 car barns as they were called, where the
(16:03):
trolley cars would be stored and maintained before they set
out on the respective routes. The main office car barn
was located at the intersection of thirty six and M
Streets in Georgetown. If you've ever seen the movie The Exorcist,
that famous starewell at the end of the film hits
right there next to the old car barn, and it
goes up to the campus of Georgetown University. Another carbarn
(16:25):
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 the district, they built
(16:46):
an amusement park with a merry go round and a
bandshell 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 at chevy Chase Lake that
(17:09):
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 Connecticut Avenue would take
(17:32):
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 eighteen seventy six in
(17:55):
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 o three, he was married to Mary Low
and they had three children. Sadly, one child died when
she was just two years old. In nineteen twenty, James
(18:16):
and Mary were living in a modest, two story row
house in southeast d C, 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 Anacostia, Maryland.
They were doing well despite the depression, and James Mitchell
(18:38):
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 his elbows with a
(19:00):
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 on a farm in rural Maryland.
(19:22):
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 mechanic and a part time watchman.
(19:44):
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. Emery was a short man. He was unkey,
with gray eyes and light brown hair. Like most men
in my family, he was one of few words, but
(20:06):
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 common for rural farm family members to leave
(20:28):
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,
he went to visit her, knowing that it might be
the last time he ever saw his mother, and he
kissed her goodbye and told the others at her bedside
that he would be back the following weekend. But that
(20:50):
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
Eastern seaboard and blanketed the Washington, d c. Suburbs with
(21:13):
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.
A brink struck was scheduled to pick up the cash
on its weekly run in just a few hours. The
(21:35):
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, Emery Smith, the
night watchman, was out on patrol of the grounds, and
he made his way through the snow across the street
to the car barn where the trolleys were parked. The
evening accounting clerk, John Stout, left James Mitchell in the
(21:57):
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. Emery Smith tinkered away in the
car barn doing last minute repairs and readied the trolleys
for their early morning run. He punched his time clock
card at four three am. Around five ten am, a
(22:21):
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 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 and to his surprise,
(22:43):
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 Mitchell's body,
Hannah panicked and he ran back out the front porch,
down three steps and across the street to the car barn,
(23:04):
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. Hannah yelled out,
but he got no response from anyone at the car barn,
so he ran back across Connecticut Avenue and he saw
(23:25):
headlights of a car coming. He hid behind a tree
until he realized that the car belonged to another transit
worker named Lynwood Jones. Jones arrived along with a third employee,
Robert Abersold. Parker Hannah came out from hiding, and he
told Jones and Abbersold about Mitchell lying dead on the
office floor. Jones ran into the office and he tried
(23:47):
to call the police from the phone in the waiting room,
but according to Parker Hannah, Lynwood Jones was so overwrought
that he hung up before the operator could answer. Jones
and Abbersold back in the 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,
(24:08):
and at that point there was no sign of Emory Smith. Anywhere.
Police officer James McAuliffe overheard the Washington station dispatcher report
and apparent murder at chevy Chase Lake at about five
twenty that morning. He was one of two officers working
the night shift for Montgomery County, and he sped to
the scene when Jones and Abersauld came back from the firehouse.
(24:31):
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. 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
(24:52):
was Francis Gregory. According to Parker Hannah's statement. Lynwood Jones
woke Francis Gregory up and told him that Mitchell had
been murdered. Gregory 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
(25:13):
office to wait for police. When officer mccaulloffe got to
the ticket office, he met with the three men and
looked at Mitchell from the hallway. Mccauliffe could see that
he'd been shot multiple times in the head. Mccauloffe then
contacted Officer Frank Sober, the other patrolman on duty, and
when Frank Sober arrived, he went back to the firehouse
(25:34):
and called Detective Theodore of Bolton, Sergeant Leroy Rodgers, and
Police Chief Garrett. All three of them arrived within the hour.
Parker Hannah finished his initial 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
(25:55):
car lights either on or off the road that morning,
and he added that inside a car barn, three or
four of the trolley cars lights were on as though
they'd been readied for the routes, 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
(26:16):
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 the furnace at
about four o'clock in the morning. A short time later,
he said that he heard shouting and gun shots from
the area across the street. He said it was around
(26:37):
four thirty five. He didn't call the police. Witness Robert
Abersold was also interviewed and according to his statement, he
saw no other automobiles as he headed south on Connecticut
Avenue toward the car barn, and he said 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.
(27:00):
Abersald 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 and they drove
to the fire station. Robert Abersold said that when he
got back to the Carborn office, he went inside alone
and saw Mitchell's body through the wire door, and while
(27:20):
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 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,
(27:43):
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. Abersald said he 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.
(28:06):
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. Abers Old 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
(28:29):
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. 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
(28:50):
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 a large pool of
blood was a man height five foot eleven, hair, gray,
no coat. No one had entered the room since the
(29:10):
discovery of the body. Unquote, 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. The engine
was cold, and Smith's fort caliber handgun was in the
glove compartment. His overcoat and his hat were on the seat.
(29:33):
A missing persons search was initiated by the chevy Chase
Fire Department. They fanned out and searched the surrounding woods
for my great uncle, and after several hours they hadn't
found him and nobody had heard from him. The detectives
worked the scene, gathering clues from inside and outside the
ticket office. Information was coming in full bore, and they
(29:53):
wrote down notes and pencil as fast as they could
in order to keep some semblance of who said what,
who all what at what time, and they began assembling
an extended investigation. Detectives from the Washington d C. And
Baltimore police departments were requested by Chief Garrett to assist
since they had a lot more resources and experience with
(30:14):
murder investigations. The hours ticked by, and the fireman kept
looking for Emery Smith in the woods near the car barn.
They were convinced he couldn't be too far away, after all,
there was no blood in the snow outside the office
and no evidence that he had left on his own.
Since his car was still there with his overcoat inside,
(30:35):
it was too cold to go very far without it.
At around eight thirty that morning, a Montgomery County school
bus driver 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 driver stopped when
he noticed something weird in the snow. He put the
bus back in gear and continued down the road until
(30:58):
he saw the police car set the ticket office and
told the detectives what he saw. Rogers Bolton and several
firefighters went to the northwest corner of that bridge, and
they're in the snow. They saw blood, drag marks, shoeprints,
and other evidence. They looked into the flowing water below.
(31:20):
There was no sign of Emery 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 my uncle Emery,
face down, floating in the water. He had been beaten
and shot four times in the head. Opening music by
(31:48):
Sam Johnson at Sam Johnson Live dot com. Underscore music
by Kevin McLeod at Incompatech dot com. Shattered Souls is
produced by Karen Smith and Angel Heart Productions in partnership
with Red Seat Ventures.
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