Murder at Cloverleaf Mall: The Unsolved Double Homicide of Charlita Singleton and Cheryl Edwards

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
In November of nineteen ninety six, two co workers are
closing up their retail store in a large mall outside
of Richmond, Virginia. Their close up routine is like clockwork,
so when they don't return to their homes, alarm bells
went off the next morning would reveal a horrific scene
inside the mall.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
How could two women be.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Brutally murdered inside a popular mall with security nearby. Nearly
thirty years later, this case still baffles authorities and police
and families are hoping for a break in the case.
I'm your host, Megan, and each week on a Simpler
Time True Crime, I cover older unsolved cases and challenge
the idea that a simpler time means a safer time.

(00:54):
This week, I'm bringing to you the unsolved murders of
Charlita Singleton in Cheryl Edwards. Before I get started today,

(01:25):
I just wanted to say if my sound seems the
slightest bit different this week, I am recording on the road,
so I don't have.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
The usual soundproofing.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
I have recording out of my closet, So thank you
for your patience and hopefully it doesn't sound like a
huge difference. November seventh, nineteen ninety six. Coworkers thirty six
year old Charlita Singleton and twenty five year old Cheryl
Edwards are working the closing shift at the All for

(01:55):
One store. The store is located at Cloverleaf Mall in Virginia.
All for One was a chain of dollar stores where
you guessed it, everything was a buck the mall, and
thus the store was open each night until nine pm.
All have a map of the layout on the podcast

(02:16):
Instagram at Simpler Time Crime Pod. Like most smaller mall stores,
it had an inside entrance, so you're walking through the
inside of the mall corridors and you.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Would access it that way. Some of the.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Bigger department stores you enter from the outside, but this
one only had an inside public entrance. However, it did
have a back door from the outside that led into
the store for employees in security. If you're familiar with
this type of setup or have worked in mall retail,
these are nondescript and typically not well labeled, and that's

(02:55):
by design. They want customers to go to the front
and they want to keep employees safe, only using that
back entrance or exit for specific reasons. Charlita and Cheryl
worked together often and they had a routine and a
checklist of closing. This included tidying up the store, doing inventory,

(03:16):
tailing receipts, and closing out the register. All in all,
it typically took about an hour, and like clockwork, Cheryl
would always either get home or get to the babysitters
by ten twenty pm. According to reporting in the Richmond
Times Dispatch. On this night, Cheryl's five year old son, Isaiah,

(03:36):
was being babysat by Cheryl's grandmother, who lived in a
retirement community, So when Cheryl didn't pull in to get
him at her usual time, her grandmother grew worried. About
an hour ticked by, and Cheryl's grandmother called her daughter.
Cheryl's mother, Robin Edwards. Robin and one of her sons

(03:57):
hopped in a car and drove over to the relief
mall to check things out and see if they could
see what was going on. By the time Robin and
her son arrived at the mall, it was a couple
of hours past closing time, so the mall area was
pretty quiet, but Robin actually felt a little bit of
a sense of relief when she spotted her daughter's car

(04:19):
and next to her car her colleague, Charlita's. She kind
of said to herself, Okay, something held them up, but
they're probably just doing inventory. There's a reasonable explanation for this.
Being a mother, though, she still wanted to make contact
with her daughter and have a plan for when she
was going to go pick up her son. So she
found the security area and knocked on the door from

(04:41):
the outside. A guard who worked for the company hired
by Cloverleaf Mall heard the mother and brother's concern and
let the pair into the mall with him, and collectively
the group all walked down to the interior entrance of
All for One. When the trio arrived to the front
of the store, they exp to see a different scene

(05:01):
than what they walked up to. Robin Edwards was puzzled.
The lights were all off and the store was quiet.
The front had the security closure gate pulled down, the
kind used at the mall that provides security but allow
an open appearance. Robin yelled into her daughter and got
no response, and you could hear a pin drop. The

(05:23):
store was dark. It just didn't make any sense. The
next couple of hours get a little confusing, because, for
whatever reason, nobody, including security, goes to that back door entrance.
I don't know if possibly security didn't have a key
to the back door, but security and the family did
not make any type of entry into the store. But

(05:45):
that was the conclusion I came up with. It's not verified,
it's just what makes sense to me. Security was hired
by the mall but didn't work for the mall itself
and didn't have keys to each individual's store. And from
what I was reading, those storefronts, security gates can only
be opened from the inside, so when employees would report
to work each day, they would have a key that

(06:07):
would let them into that back door entrance, and then
they would go to the front of the store with
their key that opened the gate and lifted up.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Trying to figure out what to do.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Over those next couple of hours, Robin assembled her large family.
Other sons went out looking in the nearby woods with
flashlights because they thought, what if the women had been abducted,
What if they were in the woods somewhere. They just
were looking everywhere, but they came up empty. As a
last ditch effort, Robin sent a son to a nearby

(06:41):
bar or nightclub, and it would have been extremely out
of the norm in character for the two women, who
were both devoted mothers, to go out without communicating it
to anybody, but Robin wanted to look for any explanation
as to where they could be. The women weren't there,
in part because then was closed. By this point, it

(07:03):
was between four and five in the morning, and Robin
and the security guard called police as the first police
officer responded. They had also made contact with the store's
general manager, who had the master key to that back door,
and at this point David Singleton had shown up. The

(07:23):
father of six had grown worried when his wife Charlita
hadn't come home the night before, and as soon as
he was able to first thing in the morning, he
had come to the mall to look for her. David
walked with the officer up to the back door, and
to everyone's surprise, it just pushed open. At this point,
the energy shifted and the officer told David to stay

(07:47):
back and said that just he would be entering the shop.
According to reporting, this next part broke my heart. Robin
told the papers that the officer entered and quickly came
back out and told her it's okay. They're not in there,
and he convinced her to go home and wait for
news there, she said, looking back on it, she believes

(08:09):
that he was trying to just keep her calm and
keep her from panicking. But to me, personally, I just
think this was cruel because in actuality, when that officer
walked into the storefront, he walked into a gruesome scene.

(08:33):
In the store is tiny ten foot by five foot
back office lay the bodies of both women the back
area of the store. In the office showed signs of
a struggle, and just as a warning, This next part
is where I'll describe the injuries to both women. Both
women had been repeatedly stabbed over ten times a piece,

(08:55):
and their wounds were so severe that at first officers
thought they had been shot. A store safe was open
and money had been taken out. Police secured the crime scene,
and by seven am, an officer showed back up to
Robin's door, telling her that her beautiful twenty five year
old daughter was dead. I can't even imagine what that

(09:19):
must have been like processing that news in general, but
especially after you were just told she was not in
the store. I want to take a moment to just
talk about the mall area and where it was located,
and about the state of the mall during this time.
The mall was located on the mid Lothian Turnpike. At

(09:40):
that time of the murder in nineteen ninety six, the
mid Lothian Turnpike in Virginia was a busy, fast growing
commercial corridor, one of those long suburban stretches where almost
everything revolved around cars. Lined with shopping centers, car dealerships,
old motels, gas stations, and a mix of aging strip

(10:00):
malls and newer developments, it carried a steady flow of
commuters moving between Richmond and the expanding neighborhoods of Chesterfield County.
When Cloverleaf Mall opened in nineteen seventy two, it felt
like the heart of a growing suburban community. Families wandered
its corridors on weekends, Teens treated it as a safe

(10:20):
place to meet up after school, and for a while
the mall thrived. Cloverleaf was part of that classic American
era where the indoor mall wasn't just a shopping center,
it was.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
A social hub.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
By the late eighties and early nineties, though the landscape
around the mall began to change, Newer shopping centers with
more modern designs were opening, and Cloverleaf Mall lost many
of its anchor stores. Once a mall starts losing those,
everything else tends to unravel. Fewer stores meant fewer shoppers,

(10:54):
and fewer shoppers made the mall feel emptier than people
were used to. At the same time time, the neighborhoods
surrounding Cloverleaf were also going through their own period of transition.
As the region grew, economic differences between different parts of
the Richmond metro area became more visible. Some of the
concerns people expressed about safety during this time had more

(11:16):
to do with perception than any major spiking crime. Small
incidents that would have barely registered during the mall's peak years,
like teen conflicts, shoplifting, people hanging around with nowhere else
to go, those suddenly carried more weight simply because the
mall felt less busy and less polished. Local officials in

(11:36):
store owners did report an increase in loitering and the
presence of groups of teens, and like many malls across
America during this time, that sometimes spark talk about trouble
or gangs, even when in reality it was just far
more ordinary. Youth gathering in malls was incredibly common nationwide,
and clover Leaf was no exception.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
But when a mall is.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Already struggling, those everyday behaviors can take on a larger
than life feel. Rumors travel quickly, and reputation can shift
long before the facts do. This mix of declining retail health,
shifting public perception, and normal adolescent behavior created a cycle
that Cloverleaf struggled to break. As more people chose to

(12:20):
shop at newer malls, the emptier corridors made the remaining
stores feel isolated. That only fed the sense that clover
Leaf was in decline, which pushed even more shoppers away.
It was the same pattern happening all over the country
as the era of the enclosed mall reached its end.
The Richmond Times Dispatch did a piece on this shortly

(12:43):
after the murder. One former shopper said, quote big groups
of mostly teenagers, real, loud and obnoxious. They'd practically knock
you down. Other shoppers talked about how they witnessed what
they believed were shoppers carrying concealed weapons. In the monthly
up to the double homicide, The security firm working for

(13:03):
the mall had people patrolling the outside and inside, both
during and after hours. Leading up to the murders, the
mall had been taken over by new ownership and a
new general manager, and they had discussed logistics of setting
up a sheriff's office in the mall, but it just
didn't happen. Instead, after the murders, there was a large

(13:24):
response to try to make both shoppers and workers feel safe.
Off duty Chesterfield police officers and detectives were hired to
patrol the mall in parking lots, and employees were offered
escorts to their vehicles at night. While I stand by
that a lot of the violence was about perception and
sometimes being reactive to just teens hanging out, there was

(13:46):
legitimate violence as well for starters. Just two years prior,
there was a double shooting in the parking lot of
Steak and Ale, just east of the mall parking lot.
A couple of years before that, a woman named Donna
Harris went missing from the parking lot of the Cloverleaf Mall.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
She had told her mother she.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Planned to go shopping there and would be back to
pick up her son later. Instead, her vehicle was found
in working order, but with the hazard lights on abandoned
in the parking lot. She was never seen again. In
her cases unsolved to this day. Recently, a woman had
been carjacked in the mall parking lot. Also, two teens
had been shot in a nearby cinema parking lot adjacent

(14:27):
to the mall. And in maybe the weirdest incident of
the mall, a mall security guard had set fire to
the mall and it did enough damage that it had
to be closed for a while. Going back to the
crime scene, there were some unique pieces to it. According
to reporting in the Richmond Times Dispatch, Lieutenant Andy Scruggs

(14:49):
said that the rear door, which has double dead bolt
locks that can only be opened and closed with a key,
was found unlocked. He said, quote, you have to have
a key to get in from the outside, or the
victims had to unlock it from the inside to let
somebody in, and the key was taken back out because
there was no key in the lock. We're not missing

(15:11):
any keys. So our investigation indicates that the killer came
in that back door, probably as the victims were leaving
end quote.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
So what I'm piecing.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Together from all of that is that detectives are imagining
that possibly the women had locked everything up inside they
were getting ready to leave, they unlocked the door to
walk out together and somebody rushed them and pushed them
back in, or possibly they knew the voice on the
other side who knocked at the door.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Outside.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
Of the money that was stolen from the safe, which
detectives estimated to be about one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars,
nothing else was taken. Now from an inventory standpoint, remember
this is a dollar store, so it's not like you're
grabbing coach handbags on your way out.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Having said that, though the women's keys, their wallets, their purses.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
And all their jewelry were still untouched in the store.
As I mentioned, the women had stab wounds all over
to their backs, their necks, abdomens, and they had defensive
wounds on their hands. Detective Scruggs said that this does
tend to indicate something personal beyond just a typical robbery.

(16:23):
He does concede, though, that it could have just been
that the person panicked and wanted to ensure they didn't
leave any witnesses. He said the knife could have been
a weapon of choice because a gun would have been
risky to use. In an environment like that where the
noise could get them caught. One peculiar piece of evidence
that investigators have never been able to put into context

(16:46):
was something they found in the hallway leading into the
back office where the bodies were found. It was a
spilled twenty eight ounce bottle of Parsons brand ammonia. None
of the stores in the mall sold it, and the
cleaning staff didn't use that. So for months, detectives searched
for information on this, including if it was used at

(17:08):
any other crime scene, but they came up empty and
it didn't appear that someone did some rigorous crime scene
cleanup with it. It was just spilled in that hallway.
I'd be curious to know what you guys think of
that clue or what it points to, so feel free
to message me or comment on the Instagram. Outside of
the crime scene, there were a few.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Odd clues as well.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
On the night of the murder, a van was stolen
from the parking lot, a nineteen ninety five Chevy Vantique
G twenty conversion van with plates Z and D eight
two five four. That vehicle was never found, and it's
unclear if the stolen vehicle had any overlap with the murder,
but with something lost, something else was found or rather left.

(17:56):
A stolen U haul truck out of Tennessee was found
in the mall parking lot. Did someone ditch the stolen
U haul and steal the conversion van? Are those two
crimes related to one another but unrelated to the double homicide?
Are all three crimes related or are none of them?
We really just don't know. As police were canvassing and

(18:20):
in search of new information, a few witnesses described a
man running across the parking lot late that night. Nearby
the back entrance of the store. A composite sketch was
drawn up, and I'll also have that on the Instagram.
Like many composite sketches, it's sort of nondescript, and I
don't think it's a real home run for identifying a suspect. Nevertheless,

(18:42):
police asked the person to come forward so that they
could interview this person as.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
A potential witness.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
And at this point, I'm sure you're not surprised when
I tell you this person never did. Now you may
be asking were there any surveillance cameras. Detectives had a
huge burst of hope when they noticed a security camera
that pointed directly into the hallway leading into the room
the bodies were found in. But if you listen to

(19:10):
true crime and especially old cases, you know a true
crime law of nature is that if you spot a
security camera, the cameras were fake, they were written over,
they were not working that night. They just never seemed
to come through. And this was no different. According to detectives.
The store was dark and that hallway was dark, and

(19:31):
the tape hadn't been changed out for a month. So
unfortunately this led nowhere, but investigators were not giving up
that easy. A reward for information grew and grew from
ten thousand to twenty thousand, and eventually over thirty. As
police worked to the case, families tried to find their

(19:52):
new normal. Ryl Edwards's son went to live with his
father in another state, but he came back for monthly
visits with Cheryl's mother, Robin Edwards. Robin recalled to the
paper how she first brought little Isaiah outside and told
him to find the brightest star in the whole sky.
She said, quote, I picked him up, and she said,

(20:15):
that is your mama looking down on you forever and ever.
And I said talk to her and he said, hi, Mama,
And I said, tell her you're going to be a
good boy and that you love her. And he did that,
and I said, whenever you feel blue, you come outside
and you find that star and talk to her.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
You understand.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
End quote. At Christmas time, the family received a black
angel figurine to put on their Christmas tree. They named
it Chu Chu, which was Cheryl's nickname because she always
liked trains, and according to Robin, she said, quote Isaiah,
your mother's always looking over you. And every night and

(20:53):
every day I had to leave that angel light on.
The boy wouldn't let me cut the light off, even
during the day. He said, Grandma, leave my mother on.
End quote. Charlita Singleton had been described as the backbone
of her family. She loved track and field in jazz music.
She was fun to be around and doated over her
six children. Her youngest was especially close to her and

(21:16):
took her death very hard. She loved to work on
house projects, and she had just refinished a brick wall
in the dining room of their home the day before
her murder.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
David Singleton told the paper, quote, the.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Toughest part still is that we all still miss her
so much, it's been hard on all of us. Detectives
interviewed anybody close to the victims to see if they
had any enemies, but they couldn't come up with one.
Detective Scruggs told the Richmond Times Dispatch that he and
his colleagues would regularly try to recreate what might have

(21:51):
happened in the store. They would sit in on the
store on certain days and nights, trying to get a
feel for what the employees did every night as they closed,
what their routine was.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
They would ask.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Themselves questions like could the killer have hidden anywhere? How
could someone have gotten in? What combination of lights were
supposed to be turned off or left on? When the
store closed. They would go out into the mall at
the time they were about to close up on similar days,
and they would just see what was going on. They'd
go out into the parking lot, they'd ride around to

(22:23):
other stores, and they would see what was going on
in the whole General mall area for hours after the
mall closed up. Despite flyers posting the reward being placed
all over businesses in the Mid Lothian Corridor and on
public transport buses for months, police did not get even
a single call. Police interviewed family members, mall personnel, store employees,

(22:48):
and anybody they received information about. They once tracked down
someone who frequently used the mall as a cut through
from his home to the turnpike and nothing. According to
Detective Steve Smith, on the one year anniversary, he shared quote,
the more information we got, the broader the spectrum became,
and we couldn't narrow it down. It's my most frustrating

(23:11):
case in twenty five years. Lieutenant Andy Scruggs said quote,
In this case, as much as we hate to say it,
we're at a point where we're asking for any help
that we can get. We're running out of gas. Detectives
and family members tried to get America's most wanted and
unsolved mysteries to pick up the case, but that didn't work,

(23:33):
and eventually, despite detectives running down Leeds, the case grew
cold and the case really did run out of gas.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
It's been discussed.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
By locals for years and it haunts the area. The
mall eventually faded into obscurity, and the decline was quickly
brought on by the murders. Some theorized that the mall
was on its way out anyways, and that this just
sped up the process. But the manager of the property
said the mall never had a chance. After that, parents
wouldn't let their kids work at stores, and it.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Was known as the Murder Mall.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
By the early two thousands, it was mostly vacant, and
the mall closed altogether in two thousand and eight, finally
being demolished in twenty eleven.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
In the early two.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Thousands, investigators gave a brief update implying that they had
new leads, but nothing ever came of that. Local chatter
often revolves around the killer being a former employee, and
if we examine that, I think it's a reasonable theory
to consider. First of all, you have the lock and
the nuances around that, knowing that the safe was there,

(24:37):
and that sometimes employees didn't even keep the safe locked.
To this day, they don't know if they were forced
to open it or if the safe was already unlocked.
There's also the fact that you could presume they were
killed because they were witnesses, and if it was just
a random passerby, why would they feel the need to
kill the women who probably couldn't identify them anyways?

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Knowing about the back.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
Entrance with the store closed on the inside of the mall,
did the women knowingly let this person in or open
the door for them, or did they get rushed. That
kind of aligns with the coworker or someone you know theory,
because that meant someone knew what their routine was. But
you do also have to consider that somebody could have
just been watching their routine for a while, and maybe

(25:22):
it wasn't actually a former employee, but just somebody who
had watched their habits and routine. Investigators aren't stuck on
anyone theory. They are open to the fact that it
might be a random stranger, something that makes it even
more difficult to solve. All immediate family members in this
case have been ruled out as suspects. So if the

(25:43):
crime was personal and that was the reason for the overkill,
who would want to kill these beautiful mothers?

Speaker 2 (25:50):
And why.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Could it have been more than one person? How else
did one person control two women? Did they have a
gun and just not you use it? The questions are endless.
I couldn't find information about DNA evidence in this case,
so it's possible that evidence exists to be retested. We
don't know because The police have always been pretty quiet

(26:13):
about that part.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
But even if.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
There is, there is always a need for people to
come forward with information, and I believe there are people
out there with it. The families in community have waited
long enough, and though time may have passed and the
mall may no longer be there, the feelings in grief
and unanswered questions remain for those who loved Charlita and Cheryl.

(26:39):
If you have any information on the clover Leaf Mall
murders in nineteen ninety six, please contact law enforcement in
Chesterfield at eight zero four seven one seven six zero
two four. This has been another episode of a Simpler
Time True Crime. If you appreciate the podcast and the

(27:00):
work I'm doing, please leave a five star review wherever
you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Instagram, where
I post weekly pictures of cases. If you wish to
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link in the bottom of the show notes, Case suggestions,
and general conversation can be sent to Simpler timecrimepod at
gmail dot com. Thank you so much for listening, and

(27:23):
tune in next week for another episode.

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Murder at Cloverleaf Mall: The Unsolved Double Homicide of Charlita Singleton and Cheryl Edwards

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