Intro Homicides Aggravated Assault Stolen Guns Trauma Care Living With Crime Creating Hope Podcasts
MURDER MYSTERY: 'When does it stop?'
By Marc Perrusquia
People can know something is happening. And the police can go in there and ask them and they'll say, 'No, I don't know nothing about it.' Or I don't want to talk about it.
Friends thought gung-ho Army sergeant Calvin Wilhite might die in distant Iraq, where he bravely served for a year, or maybe in Afghanistan, where he was heading on his next mission.
Instead, he fell in a barrage of gunfire in Memphis, his hometown, outside FedExForum, a block off Beale where more than four million tourists visit a year.
"We still don't know who did it. That's an extra hurt,'' says his mother, Valerie Henderson, who can't understand why her son's killer can't be found despite a $20,000 reward and all those surveillance cameras, all those police officers keeping watch on the Downtown tourist zone.
Wilhite's murder fits neatly into a morbid algorithm that's governed violence in Memphis from its earliest days as a debauched river town to the first half of the 20th century when the city held the unwanted label of America's "Murder Capital,'' through last year's surge of violence that undermined two encouraging decades of decline in the homicide rate.
He was young, 26, and killed with a firearm after an argument — one of more than 7,000 people murdered in Memphis since 1960.
But his 2015 death also fits a largely unexplored pattern revealed in an analysis by The Commercial Appeal of more than 1,500 homicides, nearly one every other day, over the past decade. Memphis has accumulated scores of mystery murders as an especially deleterious brand of violence has taken root.
A raw, intimate portrait of gun violence and its aftermath in the Memphis community. 'Wounded City' is a six-part special investigation series of The Commercial Appeal exploring the gun violence problem in Memphis. Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal
Nearly 28 percent of last year's murders are unsolved.
"People can know something is happening. And the police can go in there and ask them and they'll say, 'No, I don't know nothing about it.' Or 'I don't want to talk about it,' '' said Eddie Brooks, who's endured a wave of shootings in his North Memphis neighborhood, including an unsolved murder a block from his house in July.
While violent crime rates that brand Memphis as one of the nation's bloodiest cities are dubious because of myriad imprecisions — everything from differences in how the data is collected to some cities not reporting all crimes — there is far less debate about murder rates. Deaths are tracked and consistently reported across the U.S.
According to 2015 FBI statistics, Memphis' rate ranked 12th among 112 cities with at least a 200,000 population, well behind St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans, but at 21 deaths per 100,000 residents far exceeding national and state averages. Even with its record, 228 homicides last year (the murder rate, still not officially calculated, is expected to exceed 29, the highest in 23 years), the city still won't top the list, but the granular details lay bare any relief Memphis can feel for having shed its once perennial label as the nation's deadliest city:
Eight of ten homicide victims over the past decade were killed with a firearm.
More than 800 shooting victims have died at the Regional Medical Center since 2006.
Victims arrive at the hospital's Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center with far more wounds than a decade ago, reflecting the availability of semiautomatic weapons.
The shooters are getting younger: on average 23 now versus 26 just eight years ago.
While Downtown, the epicenter of Memphis' $3 billion-a-year tourism business, is routinely deemed safe because of the blanket of police protection and cameras, that description is relative amid such violence: there were 14 homicides recorded in five years.
Within a two-mile radius of Graceland, a magnet for international visitors, an additional 29 died, according to the newspaper's analysis; none on Elvis Presley Boulevard or near the mansion but in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Combining MPD homicide records and census data over a five-year stretch between 2011 and 2015, the newspaper found 48 census tracts where the murder rate topped 30 per 100,000 — six times the national rate — largely the result of a toxic mix of economic decline and easy access to firearms.
Over those five years, no neighborhood recorded a higher murder rate than Klondike in North Memphis, where a devastating exodus of residents began in the 1970s as nearby industry shuttered.
In 2011, police found James Rucker, 40, and Melodie Weddle, 26, shot to death in a small, brick-veneer home at 830 N. Claybrook in the heart of Klondike. Four years later, at the same address, 32-year-old Thearchie Brown was gunned down. The homicides were three of 11 between 2011 and 2015 in a census tract measuring one-half of a square mile where the murder rate is equivalent to 140 deaths per 100,000 residents — a pace that dwarfs the U.S. rate of 4.9 per 100,000, Memphis' 2015 citywide rate of 21, even a chilling rate of 90 in Central America's murderous Honduras.
Note: Census tract populations used in the calculation of murder rates for this graphic come from the 5-year American Community Survey estimates for 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. The 2015 estimates weren't available; 2014 populations were used for 2015.
Forty-eight census tracts in Memphis tallied an average murder rate between 2011 and 2015 of 30 or more deaths per 100,000 residents, six times the national rate. The ten highest, shown here, each had rates of 56 or greater. Census Tract 112, an area roughly encompassing the Klondyke neighborhood in North Memphis, tallied a rate of 140.
Mapping Memphis using crime and census data creates a foreboding checkerboard of safe zones and neighborhoods under siege:
The southern portion of Orange Mound, its population estimated at 2,632 in 2014, saw 11 murders between 2011 and 2015, with a murder rate over those five years of 79.
The more heavily populated Riverview-Mallory Heights area of South Memphis, population 3,582, also had 11 murders, with a rate of 59.
Census Tract 217.32, a densely populated 1.2-square-mile area that includes the Hickory Ridge Mall and the neighborhoods immediately south and east, recorded 11 murders and a 33 rate.
Conversely, about 10 percent of Memphians — as many as 69,000 people — live in census tracts where no murders were recorded in those five years.
Sitting at her desk inside the tiny offices of a Frayser car lot, LaRhonda Clark leafs through a spiral notebook that serves as a scrapbook for loved ones she's lost, her narration giving life to the faceless statistics.
Another page, another tragedy.
Stephen Faulkner, a friend, murdered delivering pizza.
Great uncle, J.V. Price, shot to death in a robbery.
A 24-year-old cousin, Marcel Poscoe, murdered. No arrest.
Ten homicides in all.
The Regional Medical Center, she says, is a second home.
"When does it stop? It's hit my family hard. When does it stop?''
Friends and family of Myneishia Johnson gather for a candlelight vigil near her home. Johnson, 18, was shot and killed in Downtown Memphis. Her one-year-old son, Kylan Johnson, walked with his grandmother across the stage at Booker T. Washington High School's graduation to get his mother's diploma. "She was looking forward to graduation. Now I'm going to bury her in her cap and gown," said Myneishia's mother, Terri Johnson. Brad Vest / The Commercial Appeal
OP-ED: Crime challenge is a community challenge by Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings.
Memphis has borne a blood-soaked reputation for more than a century, reaching back to at least 1915 when an insurance company statistician first labeled it the nation's murder capital with a homicide rate double the next worst city, Charleston, South Carolina.
For much of the intervening 100 years, murder was a wholly uncomplicated crime, with MPD's solve rate a source of pride, a bragging right.
No longer.
The solve rate slid dramatically over the past decade amid a burst of gang and drug shootings, stranger crime, distrust of police and a culture of uncooperative witnesses. They are factors complicating Memphis' historical murder matrix: Death at the hands of a neighbor, an associate, a relative or a boyfriend, crimes spontaneously committed.
"Forever, that has been the way homicide got solved: There almost always was some connection, however tenuous, between the victim and the perpetrator,'' said former MPD Director Buddy Chapman, 77, now executive director of CrimeStoppers of Memphis & Shelby County, which has seen a recent increase in tipsters seeking cash for murders police can't solve.
"If it is a case where there is no connection and you don't have any physical evidence present at the scene then the police department has no place to start. And you've got to have a place to start in order to develop a case.''
The rise in unsolved murders is seen in MPD's declining clearance rate, which fell nearly 36 percent between 2004 and 2015, according to statistics maintained by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Records in MPD's Homicide Bureau indicate investigators failed to identify suspects in only 12 percent of murder cases in 2008, but that percentage has since grown steadily, more than doubling in 2015.
According to Homicide Bureau data, police did not identify a suspect in as many as 40 of 135 homicides ruled as unjustifiable, non-negligent killings in 2015 — nearly 28 percent — a trend that continued at a slightly reduced pace last year amid the record-setting surge.
Among 209 unjustifiable homicides, 58 remain unsolved — 28 percent, according to figures released by MPD spokesman Louis Brownlee on April 19.
That's more unsolved killings than there were murders in Memphis in all of 1962.
Deputy Chief Don Crowe cautioned MPD's homicide data from past years might not be updated when old cases are belatedly solved, though he conceded that "very few'' are solved months or years after the fact. Through Oct. 11, he said, seven cases from past years had been solved in 2016. He said he didn't know how many murders were unsolved over the past 10 years and didn't have the manpower to check.
Generally, homicide is becoming a much more difficult crime to solve, in large part because of uncooperative witnesses.
"Certainly, some people are very hesitant to talk now,'' he said. "Part of (that involves) the culture of no snitching. But then we have people who are legitimately concerned about retaliation.''
MPD's deteriorating solve rate is illustrated in high-profile cases, such as the 2010 murder of basketball star Lorenzen Wright, shot as many as 11 times in a remote Southeast Memphis field, his killers never found.
It's seen, too, in an array of lesser-known mystery murders like that of Timothy Dockery, 49, found shot to death in a parked car in 2015 in South Memphis, the headlights on and the engine running; Bernard Jackson, 28, shot dead in 2014 as he slept in the back seat of sedan rumbling down Interstate 240 near the airport; and Rickey Moore, 25, found on the street around midnight on a chilly night in February 2015 in Nutbush, the victim of a robbery.
Overall, the newspaper identified as many as 249 murders committed between 2007 and 2015 (2006 data was unavailable) in which detectives listed no suspect in lists the city released. That's about one in five, a pattern that mirrors declining solve rates across the country.
"Many of these big cities are in dire straits,'' said retired New York City homicide detective Vernon Geberth, who wrote a widely respected book on homicide investigation. He believes tougher legal standards along with the proliferation of guns and lawlessness glamorized in rap culture are making the ultimate crime much harder to solve, particularly in cities like New Orleans and Detroit, where as few as a third of murders were reportedly cleared in 2015.
"I'm worried about my grandchildren. I'm worried about society,'' he said. "We can't continue like this.''
Raeven Johnson walks with King Alexander after the burial ceremony at West Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery for Calvin Wilhite, King's father. Wilhite was also the father of Johnson's only child, Nevaeh Wilhite, 4. "Every night she's up thinking about her daddy," Johnson said. Wilhite, a father of three, was shot and killed in Downtown Memphis in 2015. Brad Vest / The Commercial Appeal
There's been two or three killed over drugs over here but they won't tell who done it.
Within hours on a chilly winter night in 2008 the bodies of two men — both in their 20s — were found miles apart in Memphis, killed in unrelated shootings.
When police made the grisly scene at the Highlands Meadows Apartments in Whitehaven they found 20-year-old Marcus Warren slumped inside an automobile. Less than seven hours later in Frayser, the body of Jeremy Richardson, a petty criminal with a history of drug charges, was discovered in the back of a rooming house, shot multiple times
Both murders remain unsolved.
"There's been two or three killed over drugs over here,'' said Richardson's neighbor, Marvin Peel, 78. "But they won't tell who done it.''
At the time of the January 2008 shootings, murder by an unknown suspect or a stranger appeared relatively rare in Memphis.
Homicide data shows detectives logged just 31 such cases that year — about 22 percent of the city's intentional murders.
By 2015, as many as half the murder suspects were listed as either a stranger or unknown.
"I noticed it probably three years ago, maybe four. It was creeping up,'' Chapman said. "And over the past two years it's been readily evident.''
It's evident in the case of Susan McDonald, shot in the face and left for dead in a Cordova driveway in 2015, a mystery that stymied police for two weeks until a $26,000 CrimeStoppers reward led to the arrests of two men charged with killing the 55-year-old video production firm employee in a robbery attempt.
In 1981, when Chapman left MPD to start CrimeStoppers, it was rare that a cash-seeking tipster helped solve a murder. Even as recently as seven or eight years ago, Chapman said, such a tip seldom came in a month's time.
"We've gone up from solving less than a case a month to now when we have at least one case that we solve (a month) and normally two or three,'' he said.
There are suggestions the rise of violent street gangs in Memphis could be the catalyst but neither police, nor criminologists, can support that theory with data.
"How do I prove this is gang related?'' asks Maj. Darren Goods, a 32-year MPD veteran who oversees the Multi-Agency Gang Unit, a collection of federal, state and local agencies tasked with curbing gang crime.
When it comes to violent crime, Goods is the quintessential "walking encyclopedia," having worked as a detective on MPD's robbery, homicide and organized-crime units as well the Safe Streets Task Force and Project Safe Neighborhoods. He says there are more than 9,000 documented gang members in Shelby County, many who've abandoned traditional big-name gangs like the Crips and Vice Lords for smaller "hybrids'' with names like "Stack Squad,'' "Fam Mob'' and "Concrete Cartel."
Yet, according to Homicide Bureau records, surging gang membership has very little impact on Memphis' deteriorating solve rate. Detectives listed gangs as a motive in just three murders in 2015, and only eight between 2011 and 2015.
Criminologist Richard Janikowski, who has worked with MPD for decades, believes the department's methodology traditionally under-measured the impact of gangs.
In recent years it's been counting only gang-motivated murders, such as when a gang leader orders the slaying of a rival. A more realistic measure, Janikowski said, involves counting all gang-related murders, such as simple gang affiliation of a suspect.
Indeed, the numbers zipped up last year as MPD counted both gang-motivated and gang-related murders.
As of Oct. 11, gang-motivated killings accounted for 21 of Memphis' then-174 homicides. In the category of gang-related killings, MPD counted 65 homicides in which the victim was a gang member. It counted 31 in which the suspect was a gang member. Some of these cases overlap, Crowe said, but he said it was "nearly impossible'' to sort out which ones.
Though murder is on the rise in Memphis — along with difficulties in solving it — a little perspective is in order: Last year's record follows decades of decline in the murder rate.
The South long has been considered the country's most violent region, and for years Memphis dominated the national discussion about homicide.
In 1915, Prudential Insurance Company statistician Frederick Ludwig Hoffman published a list ranking homicide in 30 American cities. Leading the roster were seven Southern cities — with Memphis at the top.
The city's staggering homicide rate — 72 deaths for every 100,000 residents — was more than double the rate in the No. 2 city, Charleston, South Carolina, and more than eight times greater than the 30-city average of 8.6, the statistician found.
Following an intense push to reduce violence that included efforts to restrict access to firearms and liquor, Memphis was consistently reporting low rates ranging between 6 and 8 in the early- to mid-1960s. By the late 60s, however, the rate began spiraling upward again.
Amid a nationwide surge in violent crime, the murder rate reached 31 deaths per 100,000 in 1990 and remained as high as 29 in 1995, ranking Memphis 13th worst among cities with a population of 200,000 or more, according to FBI statistics. (The rate in St. Louis reached 54 that year; New Orleans, 74.)
But in the intervening years, violent crime tumbled across the country.
The Memphis murder rate fell as low as 16 in 2004 and has vacillated since, jumping up to 20.2 in 2012 and 20.5 in 2015.
Though murder is viewed as one crime police simply can't predict, New York's Geberth said detectives boosted the clearance rate in the Bronx 20 years ago by improving intelligence gathering. The narcotics trade fueled numbers of retaliatory shootings and police found they could solve more murders — even prevent some — by paying attention to gunshot victims and suspects.
"The person who did the shooting would probably be killed next month.''
Memphis logged 643 murders over five years between 2011 and 2015. That doesn 't include justifiable homicides or negligent killings.
Podcast • Episode 1: Homicides
Story - Marc Perrusquia
Photography + Video - Brad Vest
Audio + Podcasts - Forrest Goodman
Design + Graphics - Jason Viera