Episode Two: "Seeing Can Be Deceiving"

Karen begins reconstructing the moments of the murders of James Mitchell and her great uncle, Emory Smith, which leads to difficult questions. Was it really an inside job like everyone thought? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So so bad ship. But it doesn't bed how to feel.

(00:23):
This is the real, This is the new real. It
was a huge deal. It was headline news. If they
were going to dump them in the creek, why did

(00:43):
they drag him across the road. He wouldn't believe that
that he could have slipt through that it was stolen
out of his office, but he was locked inside of office,
So how did that happen? I did uncover the witness
to the merger, and he says, you know, I was there,
and I said, what Welcome back to Shattered Souls. The

(01:09):
car Barn Murders. This is episode two. This podcast may
contain graphic language and it's not suitable for children. Previously
on the Carborn Murders. On January two, employees of the
Capital Transit Company were murdered during the commission of a robbery.

(01:33):
Accountant James Mitchell was found shot three times in the
head inside of the locked money cage of the Chevy
Chase Lake Ticket office. Night watchman Emory Smith had been
shot four times in the head, and his body was
found hours later floating in Rock Creek just a mile
up the road. At the bridge. Detectives found blood shoeprints

(01:54):
and drag marks in the snow. They also found an
empty quart milk bottle inside out of a dry paper bag,
and several pieces of broken auto glass. The detective surmised
that the broken glass was from the window or windshield
of a car, and based on the blood in the snow,
along with two different sets of shoeprints, that two suspects

(02:15):
dragged Emory Smith into the water from the northwest side
of that bridge before continuing northbound on Connecticut Avenue. This
was strange since most robberies don't involve a kidnapping and
the suspects would just leave the victim in the spot
where they were killed, just like James Mitchell was left
on the floor. Why would the suspects go to the

(02:35):
trouble of kidnapping Emery Smith only to dump his body
a short distance away? And if the car was northbound,
why would they stop on the northwest corner. That means
they either crossed the road and parked against traffic, did
a U turn and went back southbound, or they dragged
Emory Smith's body all the way across Connecticut Avenue, which

(02:58):
makes no sense at all. Back at the ticket office,
the detectives inspected the money cage. The door was locked
when everyone arrived, the only door inside of the ticket
office that actually was locked. The lower half of the
door was covered with a piece of tin to keep
drafts out from the front door being opened and closed
all day long. It was pride open to get to

(03:20):
James Mitchell's body. Apparently nobody at the ticket office had
a key to that cage, and on the floor they
found four bullet casings and one unfired bullet. Both of
the bodies were transported to Pumphrey's Funeral Home for autopsies
to be completed that afternoon by doctor Linthiccom and doctor
Hawkes of the Health Department. Personal items were secured from

(03:42):
each man's body, which is standard procedure. You'd be surprised
at some of the random stuff that people keep in
their pockets, and those items can tell you a lot
about a person's life and habits. From James Mitchell, they
recovered twenty six dollars and twenty cents, one leather billfold
with a d C driver's license, a small home, two
pen knives, a handkerchief, some miscellaneous cards, one belt in

(04:04):
his eyeglasses, nothing earth shattering from Emory Smith. They took
one open faced watch, one dollar bill and another dollar
sixty six and change, eight trolley tokens, a screwdriver, a
tobacco pouch, four pencils, and one large brass key. The
description of the key is large. Didn't read like it
was to a vehicle, more like a house key or

(04:27):
to some other kind of lock. Interviews with the witnesses
at the office continued. Lynnwood Jones gave his statement. He
was the second man to arrive after Parker. Hannah. Jones
went into the ticket office with the third witness, Robert Abersold,
at around five fifteen in the morning. After getting back
from the firehouse. The door to the trainman's room was unlocked,

(04:48):
and another man named Francis Gregory was apparently asleep on
a bench. Lynwood Jones shook Gregory to wake him up
and told him that Mitchell had been murdered. Jones said
that Gregory had his coat off, his shirt was untucked
from his pants, and he believed that Gregory's shoes were off.
Lynwood Jones said that Francis Gregory became nervous, got up,

(05:09):
put his coat on and went out, came back and
said it was strange that he hadn't heard a shooting,
and he wondered why they didn't see him. Additional employees
were questioned, including Harry Gibbons, he was the daytime clerk.
He said that James Mitchell was always very diligent and
careful about keeping all of the doors and windows locked,
especially when he was alone in the office overnight. Evening

(05:33):
clerk John Stout corroborated that when he said that Mitchell
bolted the front door behind him when he left at
three forty. John Stout had a lot more to add
to the story. He was the last witness to see
James Mitchell and Emery Smith alive. The final trolley left
the barn at two oh five, and Mitchell locked the

(05:54):
front door as soon as it was gone. Stout and
Mitchell counted the money and tallied the receipts. At three o'clock,
John Stout left the money cage and he went through
the trainman's room to the back porch where the empty
money bags were kept in a closet. He got another
one and locked that back door. John Stout met with
Emory Smith in the trainman's room and they both saw

(06:16):
a man lying on a bench john Stout asked Emory
Smith who the man was, and Smith replied, I think
his name is Gregory. John Stout said that Gregory had
his shoes on and his coat was pulled over him.
Stout let Emory Smith out the front door and bolted
it shut. He went back to the money cage and
he and Mitchell continued to count the bills and the coins,

(06:38):
and the final bag was left unlocked so that Mitchell
could put the paperwork inside. When he was done, Stout
left the office at three forty to go home. Mitchell
locked the front door behind him. John Stout said that
his windshield wipers were broken and he was forced to
drive home with his head hanging out of the driver's window.

(06:58):
On his way home, which was about a half mile
south of the office, just off Connecticut Avenue, John Stout
said that he saw a dark colored sedan idling on
the east side of the road with its headlights on
facing north. He saw three people in that car and
said the driver was a white man. He made a

(07:18):
left turn onto William's Lane just past that car, and
he said he could see the tail lights illuminated. This
was around three fifty in the morning, just forty five
minutes before the gunshots heard by Charles Smallwood. Now that
James Mitchell's body was out of the office, the detectives
collected the four shell casings and unfired bullet from the floor.

(07:42):
They originated from a thirty two caliber semi automatic. There
were three bullet holes in and around the desk where
Mitchell had been working, and two projectiles were recovered. One
was found behind an ink bottle on the desk and
the other was sticking out of the wall plaster just
above the cubby holes. A third bullet had perforated the

(08:02):
right side of the desk and terminated in the wall
stud When they took a closer look at that desk,
they found James Mitchell's handgun inside of a top drawer.
It had been reported that Mitchell had been found lying
on his back with three bullet holes in his head.
All of the shots entered on the left side, two

(08:23):
of them exited on the right, the third remained inside
of his skull. No autopsy report for James Mitchell was
provided to me with the case file, but three photographs
taken at the funeral home were included. They were taken
after the autopsy was finished. James Mitchell was laid out
on this filthy steel table, stained with blood and fluids

(08:46):
from who knows how many bodies. His head rested on
a metal positioner. A glass cabinet in the background held
various bottles of embalming preparations and black boxes filled with
autopsy tools. James Mitchell's wedding ring was still on his
left finger. He was clean shaven, and there were no

(09:08):
bruises evident on his face. The photos clearly showed the
entry and exit wounds. Two entries were just above his
left ear, and the third was about four inches above
the other two near the top of his head. One
exit wound was near his right temple, the other exited
at the joint of his right mandible, about an inch

(09:28):
in front of his right ear. The investigative report said
that two of Mitchell's teeth were knocked out and found
inside his mouth. That's consistent with that shot through the
rear of his jaw. There was evidence of assured wound,
a lump just above his right temple where a bullet
may have failed to exit his head because it was
stopped by a solid surface. I couldn't be certain without

(09:51):
an accompanying report, but that would account for the third
shot without an exit. Mitchell also had some marks on
the back of his left hand, and the detectives noted
that they looked like teeth marks from either backhanding someone
in the mouth or from being bitten. The photos don't
show those details, so I can't be sure about that,

(10:11):
but there are marks that can be identified the circular
indentations left by the rubber bands that held his shirt
sleeves in place. And speaking of James Mitchell's shirt, there
aren't any notations about where it ended up in the photos.
He's wearing dark pants and a white tank top undershirt.
I don't know if his dress shirt was collected or

(10:33):
if he got lost in the shuffle without it. I
can't make any determinations about bloodstains or possible gunpowder residue,
so those questions will just remain unanswered. From what I
have been able to reconstruct using the photographs of James
Mitchell and the office, I don't believe that he was
sitting at his desk when he was shot, like everyone thought.

(10:54):
In some original newspaper clippings I received from my cousin
that were meticulously glued into an album by our great aunt,
there are photographs of the office taken on the day
of the murders. These weren't provided in the case file
and they can't be found anywhere online. They were a
treasure trove of information for me to work with, and

(11:14):
using those black and white photos, I could see blood
stains on the floor just to the left of the desk.
They were drip stains, which meant that the source of
the blood. James Mitchell's head was above that area before
he collapsed on the floor. There was also an open
upper drawer in the desk on the left side where
Mitchell kept his gun. John Stout reported that the money

(11:36):
bags were on a table toward the middle of the room,
to the left of the desk. One of those table
legs was visible in these pictures and that gave me
a basic idea of the office layout. James Mitchell was
shot twice in a close grouping on the left side
of his head. The third shot entered through the upper
left side of his head. Two of the bullets exited,

(11:58):
the third didn't. There were four casings on the floor,
meaning four shots were fired. Three went into Mitchell, the
fourth missed. There were two projectiles recovered, one behind the
ink bottle on the desk, and the other from the
wall plaster above it. The one behind the ink bottle
left a strike mark on the paper ink blotterer, showing

(12:20):
a trajectory from above and down with a slight angle
from left to right if you were facing the desk.
The one in the wall plaster was about two feet
higher and had the same left to right strike angle.
Based on the missing plaster, the third shot into the
desk went through the right side and went all the
way through into the wall stud. There's a reason that

(12:42):
the bullets by the ink bottle and in the wall
plaster didn't go any further. The projectiles lost a lot
of their kinetic energy prior to ending up there because
they traveled through an intermediate surface. First James Mitchell's head.
The shot through the right side of the desk was
a miss, which is why it had the energy to
keep going into the wall stud. If I placed James

(13:05):
Mitchell into that scene using the two gunshot wounds that
exited his head, he was likely almost standing near the
left side of that desk, closer to the table where
the money bags were, and I'll go a step further.
He might have been reaching for his gun inside of
that open top drawer. When the first shot was fired.

(13:26):
Mitchell was five ft eleven, so he was likely slightly
bent over when he was struck by two shots in
quick succession a double tap if he only had a
split second to open that drawer and reach for that gun.
I needed more information to complete this reconstruction, so I
did some research to find out the approximate height of
a nineteen thirties roll top desk so that I could

(13:49):
do a rough estimation of the maximum height of the
shots fired into the ink blotterer and into the wall
above the cubby holes. The desk would have been approximately
four ft high, add three ver nicle inches to the
strike in the wall. The desk chair was standard, the
seat was eighteen to twenty inches high. If James Mitchell
had been sitting in that chair, as alleged, his head

(14:12):
would have been approximately four inches too low for the
shot above the cubby holes to have struck him in
the head. Subtract another four inches from the top of
his head to the area by his left ear where
the two bullets entered, it would have been impossible for
him to have been seated. I placed James Mitchell into
the scene further away from the desk, toward the table

(14:33):
where the money bags were. If he leaned toward that
open drawer where his gun was, it would place both
shots directly into the left side of his head, the
first one into the ink blotder at an angle and
the second higher into the wall due to the gun recoil.
It would also account for the blood drops on the
floor directly below. The gunman would have been to Mitchell's

(14:57):
left at least two feet away, may be on the
other side of that table, which could have been used
as a physical barrier. There's something else to mention the
unfired bullet on the floor. This told me that the
suspect either didn't know that around was chambered and racked
the slide to load one, leaving that live round on
the floor, or it was an intimidation tactic to get

(15:19):
Mitchell to comply. The suspect wasn't used to carrying a
semi automatic and forgot that around was chambered, or the
gun jammed. Could that have been the opportunity that Mitchell
took to try to protect himself before the first shot
was fired. And as to the possible shored wound above
his right temple. To me, that's the final shot through

(15:41):
the top of his head as he lay on his
right side on the floor, just to make sure he
was dead. The description of his body position on his
back is unnatural. When a person is shot in the head,
they don't normally collapse into a position like that. It's
an indication that the victim has been moved post mortem.

(16:01):
The suspects had to make sure he was dead, so
one of them kicked Mitchell over onto his back before
they left. All of this information told me that Mitchell
wasn't blitz attacked. There was time involved, decisions made, movement, conversation, panic,

(16:23):
No furniture was overturned. There was no fight, no struggle.
If James Mitchell acquiesced and told the suspects to just
take the money, why did they kill him? Was he
a threat? Was it a witness elimination? Did James Mitchell
know the suspects? The detailed accounting records were included in

(16:47):
the file, along with a breakdown of the denominations of
money taken that morning. I did some quick calculations to
find out how much those money bags would have weighed,
since most of it was coins. About twenty two pounds.
One suspect would have had his hands full while the
other brandished the gun, so that placed a minimum of

(17:08):
two suspects inside that cage with James Mitchell. I had
to consider how the suspects got entry into that locked
money cage. If the front door to the ticket office
was unlocked, as Parker Hannah reported, the suspects would have
had the jump on James Mitchell as he worked alone,
and could have forced him to unlock that money cage

(17:29):
at gunpoint. Once they were inside, it was two on one.
If Mitchell reached for the gun in the desk, it
was over and they killed him. I also had to
answer why the cage door was locked when the police arrived.
It's my opinion that the cage door had a one
way spring lock that could be disengaged by turning a
latch from the inside, and it would lock automatically when

(17:51):
it's shut. You'd need a key to get back inside,
and there were no reports of keys found on James
Mitchell's body or anywhere in the office. When could explain
why a brass key was found safe and sound inside
of Emory Smith's pocket. That led me to consider the
possibility that Emery Smith could have allowed the suspect's entry

(18:12):
at gunpoint, but that scenario didn't make sense within the
known timeline. Emery Smith punched his TimeClock card at four
at the barn across the street. Ear witnessed Charles Smallwood
heard gunshots and shouting at around four thirty five, which
helped to pinpoint the time of James Mitchell's murder. Several

(18:33):
of the trolley cars headlights were on and Smith was
nearly fifty yards away from the ticket office. Regardless, that
twelve minute window was still unaccounted for, so I just
put that question on the back burner. Only one photograph
was taken of Emory Smith after his autopsy, but it
speaks volumes when it's coupled with the written report, and

(18:55):
there's a lot to unpack. The single photograph is of
the up side of his face and a white sheet
was pulled up to his neck. His autopsy took place
at three o'clock PM on January My grandfather went to
the funeral home to identify him around the same time
that this single picture was taken. Looking at that photo

(19:17):
and remaining clinical was difficult, knowing that my grandfather had
the same view under enormous stress and sorrow. Was my
grandfather brought into the room or did he identify his
uncle through glass? Did he smell the putrid, sweet pungency
of death or was he spared that in dignity? Was

(19:37):
the sheet nonchalantly tossed off my great uncle or carefully
pulled down to reveal his face. Was my grandfather granted
a moment to compose himself. Did he receive time alone
with Emory's body to say a few words, or was
he ushered out immediately after he made the identification. Did
my grandfather cry? Did he vomit? Did he drive to

(19:59):
Walker's to tell the family? Did he have to go
next door to break the news to Aunt Edith? Or
did the police visit her personally? I stuffed those thoughts
down and went back to my clinical brain. Emory's hair
was dry, his face was clean shaven. Stitches above his

(20:20):
left ear continued toward the top of his head, the
vestiges of facial reflection. When the surgeons pulled his scalp
back to reveal his skull and recover two of the bullets,
Clearly his body had been prepped for this photograph, and
his hair was fluffed over that incision, almost as if
he were to be moved directly into a casket as
soon as the flash bulb went off. The notes on

(20:42):
the report were handwritten in scrawled cursive, but thankfully the
vast majority were legible. Starting with the notes at the top,
it states that Emory Smith was five ft six inches
tall and weighed between a hundred and ninety and two
hundred pounds. He was definitely short and chunky. He wore
enters and his upper plate was gone, but a partial

(21:03):
lower plate was in place. He came in with no clothing,
so again I have no idea what happened to them
between the time he was retrieved from Rock Creek the
items were taken from his pockets, and the time he
arrived at the funeral home. He was shot four times
in the head, and each bullet wound is thoroughly documented,
including the trajectory each one took, and they tell a story.

(21:27):
Starting with the gunshot wound in his left cheek. It
has stippling around it, meaning powder burns. That means the
gun was very close to his face when it was fired.
Another entry wound was just above his left ear, and
from the photo it appears like there might have been
additional stippling around it, but I couldn't be positive because
his hair was in the way. A third entry wound

(21:50):
is just behind his left ear, and a fourth is
about four inches above it, near the top of his head.
That's familiar. It's the same wound pattern they found on
James Mitchell. The physicians noted that the bullet that entered
his left cheek traveled slightly downward and exited through the
right side of his neck, severing the cranial artery. The

(22:11):
one just above his ear didn't exit, it lodged behind
his right eye. The one behind his left ear traveled
almost parallel through his head and exited just above his
right ear. The bullet fired near the top of his
head didn't exit, and they found it at the base
of his skull. There was no question that the manner
of death was homicide by gunshot, so the autopsy didn't

(22:33):
include very many notations about the rest of Emory's body,
But one remark at the bottom of the page got
my attention because it confirmed his death prior to entering
Rock Creek. Heart normal in size, lungs normal air containing
air containing no water was found in his lungs. Four

(22:55):
gunshots in his head. Whoever killed Emory Smith had a
different motivation than a robbery getaway. This was vengeance, this
was panic, This was someone he knew. Lieutenant John Fowler,
the d C Police forensic specialist, determined that the gun

(23:17):
used to kill Mitchell was the same one used to
kill Smith, a nineteen o three Colt thirty two caliber
semi automatic, one of the most popular guns manufactured at
the time. It would hold nine rounds, eight in the magazine,
one in the chamber. At the office, there were four
casings and one unfired bullet. Add the four shots into
Emery Smith and you have a total of nine. The

(23:39):
shooter emptied the gun. Additionally, there were no mentions of
any shell casings found outside of the ticket office at
the car barn or by the bridge over Rock Creek.
Semi Automatic guns eject the casings, which is why four
of them were found on the office floor. But what
happened to the casings from Emery Smith's murder. If he

(24:00):
was killed in a car, the casings would have been
left inside of the passenger compartment rather than on the ground,
which does add credence to the information that Smith was
killed in a vehicle. And if he was killed in
a car, I believe he was. That means close quarters,
especially if there are multiple suspects and large money bags
already inside. It would also explain how the stippling got

(24:22):
on his cheek. The gunman was either sitting next to
Emory Smith or reached over the seat to shoot him,
And that led to another question, why was Emory Smith
in that car in the first place, and how did
he get inside. The detectives took notations of shoeprints in
the snow around the ticket office and the car barn,
and they made a detailed diagram. One set of shoe

(24:44):
prints exits the car barn, and they abruptly stopped at
Connecticut Avenue, just north of the barn, toward the T. W.
Perry Coal Company. I think that's the spot where they
took Emory Smith after he exited the barn, when he
heard the shouting and gunshots from the ticket office, after
they forced him in the car. This was my initial
assessment of those events, and as I worked through the leads,

(25:06):
my evaluation evolved. But I'm going to provide you with
my entire thought process. This is from December of twenty
Someone who didn't go into the ticket office was driving
the getaway driver. The gunmen, and the bagman got into
the vehicle, with the gunmen likely in the front passenger
seat and the bagman in the back so there'd be
room for the money bags. Smith was shoved into the

(25:27):
passenger side back seat at gunpoint, and after a struggle,
they stopped at the bridge and they killed him with
three shots in quick succession, breaking the glass of the window,
and the fourth final shot into the top of his
head was fired after they got his body out of
the car. The final gunshot wound wouldn't bleed really heavily
since he was already dead, which aligned with the detective's

(25:49):
notes that the only blood in the snow seemed to
be transferred from bloody clothing. The drag marks and shoeprints
told the rest of that story. Whether or not my
assessment was accurate will likely never be known, But that
was my first attempt at a reconstruction of Smith's death,
and it was the first time that I really thought
about my great uncle as a person instead of just

(26:10):
as a victim. What were his final thoughts. Did he
plead for his life, did he tell the suspects he
had children and a wife at home. Did he put
up a fight, did he curse the suspects or did
he even have a chance to say anything? Was it
quick or did he see it coming? Twenty years of

(26:31):
training have taught me how to push questions like that aside,
to treat death as a scientific premise rather than an
emotional dilemma. Goddamn, this case was becoming a real bit,
a daily battle between objectivity and sentiment, detachment and guilt.
But if I were to find the answers the truth,

(26:53):
my job was to keep my head screwed on straight
and stick to the facts. But just like many times
in the past, keeping my feelings out of this one
was really hard to do. Emory Smith's murder and the
questions about what happened opened another can of worms. The
suspects close. If Emery was killed in the close quarters

(27:15):
of a vehicle with three shots to the head, severing
an artery, and then dragged down the bank of a
creek to the water, there's no doubt in my mind
that the suspects would have been covered in blood, their
pants and their shoes would have been soaking wet. The
investigators did glean some information from the autopsy of my
uncle Emory, since one of the gun shots severed an

(27:38):
artery which would bleed really heavily, and since they were
convinced that he was killed in a car, they knew
that any car they found would certainly have blood stains
in it. This is a direct quote from Detective Bolton's
handwritten report. It was believed that Smith was shot and
killed inside of an automobile, as examination of Smith's body

(27:58):
showed that he had been shot at close range. The
bullet that entered Smith's cheek showed a downward course and
severed his vein, which would cause a great amount of
blood to spurt out. This belief is substantiated in that
the entire scene around the car Barn and Carbarn office,
and along the route taken to the bridge failed to
disclose any other blood stain other than that of Mitchell.

(28:21):
This belief is further borne out in that the whole
referred to was at such close range so as to
have excessive powder burns on Smith's cheek, as if the
gun were placed against his cheek. The blood stain referred
to before in this report, where Smith's body was dragged
through the snow, were of such a nature as would
come off of blood soaked clothing, and showed no signs

(28:42):
of excessive bleeding. Those are incredibly detailed notes, and they're
pretty spot on for detectives in nineteen thirty five with
very little experience in a murder investigation. They're extraordinary. The
gunshot into his left cheek was fired at an intermediate range,

(29:03):
not a hard contact against his skin based on the
stippling pattern, But the detectives understood that the shooter was
very close to Emery Smith when he was shot. In
my estimation, the gun was fired less than three inches
from my uncle's face. An alert for a vehicle with
broken glass, bullet holes and bloodstains was sent to the

(29:25):
surrounding jurisdictions of Washington and Baltimore. Meanwhile, District Lieutenant John
Fowler processed the broken glass pieces and milk bottle for fingerprints.
He found nothing. The detective spoke with the manager of
Embassy Dairy where that Court milk bottle originated. Based on
the stamp, they asked the manager if any of his
drivers had made a sale of a single court milk

(29:46):
bottle overnight while they ran their routes. All of the
drivers reported back that they hadn't, but the manager said
the paper bag that contained the bottle was from a
different manufacturer than his company used. It could have been
purchased at any number of drugs wars. Unfortunately, that lead
got dropped along the way and over the years all
of that evidence got destroyed. Later in the afternoon, Captain Thompson,

(30:11):
the chief of detectives in d C, contacted Montgomery County.
Captain Thompson reported that a patrolman from the second Precinct
had located a car parked in front of six forty
three O Street Northwest. The door glass was broken and
there was blood inside. Detective Frank Brass, one of the
district detectives assigned to help, told Captain Thompson that he

(30:32):
and the boys would be over right away. The DC
patrolman stood by and arrested a man when he entered
that car. When the detectives arrived, they located a thirty
two caliber revolver in the door pocket, and they held
two more men for questioning. From the police report, it
was ascertained that these men were from La Plate to
Maryland and couldn't have had any connections with this case.

(30:54):
They let all of them go. The car too. Another
car with a broken windshield was found it at an
autoglass business. The detectives rode over to that location and
they found marks in the windshield from a BB gun,
not their car either. A third car was stopped after
it was found speeding on New York Avenue. The car
had bullet holes in it and some of the glass

(31:16):
was broken. The investigation of that car found that it
belonged to a Fourteenth Street used car dealer. He said
he allowed the car to be used for demonstration purposes.
The detectives were satisfied with that explanation and they let
it go. They made a list of all of the
vehicles that had been stolen the day and night before

(31:36):
the murders. Criminals don't use their own vehicles, and back
in the thirties, just like today, they'd put a stolen
license plate on the one they did use. And here's
a fun fact. There were cases where career criminals would
have a switch under the dashboard that would flip the
license plate over to a different one from another state
when they fled a scene. That wasn't just the imaginations

(31:57):
of Hollywood. Those criminals were in a vative after the
detectives compiled a list of all of the stolen cars.
They tracked down all of them except one, a nineteen
green Buick Coach with d C license plate one three
one dash, stolen from the area of fifteen and Irving

(32:19):
Street Northwest on Sunday night around ten o'clock. By Monday,
it hadn't been located anywhere. As I was doing my
initial read through of the case, I posted a question
about the car Barn murders on a Facebook page that
focuses on Chevy Chase, Maryland history. Someone had put up
a photograph of the car barn with the trolleys inside.

(32:42):
A notification popped up from retired Montgomery County detective Jack
to me. Jack said he knew all about the car
Barn case because he'd worked on it for a number
of years back in the nineteen seventies and eighties. I
reached out to Jack and he told me a story
that left me and he located an eyewitness to the

(33:03):
robbery and murders over forty years later. The man's name
was Ernest Carter, and he was just seven years old
in nineteen thirty five. I'll let Jack tell the rest
of that story. In nineteen seventy seven. I was a
fairly new patrol when I had been on the departmen
six years by that time. And it was way the

(33:26):
end of November and we were white on the doorstep
of one of the coldest winners Washington's ever had. And
I was sitting in the parking lot of the Columbia
Country Plomb and I heard a cap on my window
and they're standing There was a man dressed in a
security guard unto Stone type and we kit chatted and

(33:46):
I said, why don't you come sit in my cards
to pull up? And he sat in the front seat.
We were talking about how things have changed over the years.
He brought up that they never did side that who
killed those ben down street. I said what meant? And
he told me the story of the car bar murderers.
And I said, I have lived here all my life

(34:08):
with him, three miles of that building, and I don't
know what you're talking about. And I said, well, this
has used to me. And he says, you know I
was there, And I said what, And he says, yes,
I was waiting for a street car some one of
his relatives that dropped him off. He was waiting for

(34:29):
the first trolley car all the morning and he's waiting
at the trance stop. At all of a sudden years gunshots,
April shouting, running, he scared. He runs somewhere and hides
behind the building and he sees a green birk making
you turn on Connecticut Avenue. The car had been parked

(34:51):
facing outbound. The car made a you turn across Connecticut
Avenue and went north on Connecticut at and that's the
last he ever saw the car. And naturally, I said, well,
what did the police say when you're talking to thinking
that they'd be all over it? And he said, Officer,

(35:14):
they didn't talk to us black people in those days.
And I said, so, you've never been interviewed and he
said never. Ernest Carter saw a green buick. If you
have information about the Car Barn murders, go to the

(35:35):
Shattered Souls Facebook page and leave me a message. Opening
music by Sam Johnson at Sam Johnson Live dot com.
Shadowed Souls the Car bar Murders is produced by Karen
Smith and Angel Hart Productions.