3 Amateur Sleuths Who Cracked Major Cases
3. Judy Weaver
June 27, 2005 was a rainy night in Orlando, Florida. Late that evening 34 year-old Ronald Johnson left his mother's home on his bike to go to a nearby store. A short time later Johnson hadn't returned home, and then his mother
Judy Weaver received the call that no parent ever wants to receive. Her son was unconscious, and he was being rushed to the hospital. Weaver got to the hospital in time to see her son being wheeled into the emergency room on a gurney. One other thing that she noticed was that the pockets of his pants had been turned inside-out. The Orange County Sheriff's Department had been called and a deputy interviewed witnesses. The witnesses said that Johnson was trying to do tricks on his bike, but he slipped and he hit his head on the curb.
The Sheriff's Department considered it an accident, and they closed the case. Weaver said that the Sheriff's Department's decision didn't sit well with her. Her son was 34 years old and she highly doubted that he would have been trying to do stunts on his bike late on a rainy night. Weaver collected his bike and she noticed that it wasn't scratched or dented. Weaver also went to the site where her son was apparently in the accident and she noticed that there were no cement curbs. So how did he hit his head on the curb if there wasn't a curb? She also thought that since he came into the hospital with his pockets turned inside out that it was possible that he was robbed.
In the days after his apparent accident Johnson still hadn't come out of his coma so Weaver hatched a plan. She decided to tell people that he was awake and talking. She thought that this would entice people to talk. She thought that if people knew he was in a coma and may never wake up then they would be less likely to talk because then the attack on her son would have been attempted murder or murder. But if people thought a less serious crime was committed, like an assault, then they may be more likely to talk. Also his attacker ,if there was one, had no idea what Johnson might be saying.
Amazingly Weaver's ploy worked. A few days after Johnson was knocked into a coma a man named Jason Gailey came to visit Weaver. Gailey said he punched her son but he swore it was an accident. Sadly, nine days after he went into a coma, Johnson passed away. Weaver went to the Sheriff's Department, and she tried to get them to investigate her son's death as a homicide. But the lead detective on the case ,Paul Hopkins, who went by the nickname Spike, didn't even meet with her. He had determined it was an accident so the case was closed. When the Sheriff's Department didn't listen to her, Weaver, with the help of her daughter, created a file regarding her son's death.
The file included all the eyewitnesses' information. 8 long years went by and then one night in early 2013
Judy Weaver was working her shift at Chick-fil-A in Orlando. Just like the night that her son went into a coma, it was raining. The restaurant was quiet that night. One of the customers was a lieutenant with the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Weaver asked him how his evening was going and he said it was slow; he said it was usually slow on rainy nights. Weaver sat at his table and she started talking about her son's case. She told him that his bike wasn't damaged and there was no curb where he could have hit his head. She also talked about her frustration with the Sheriff's Department.
Specifically she ranted about the deputy in charge of the case, Paul "Spike" Hopkins. She talked to the lieutenant for 45 minutes, and he took notes while she talked. At the end of their conversation he got up from the table, and he introduced himself. He said his name was Paul "Spike" Hopkins. Weaver thought that she was going to get fired for bad-mouthing a customer to his face. Instead Hopkins took Weaver's file and started to re-interview the witnesses.
This time several of the witnesses had a different story as to what happened on that rainy night eight years earlier. They said that Jason Gailey was pistol whipping another man when Ronald Johnson rode up on his bike. Johnson tried to stop the assault and Gailey hit him in the head with his gun which caused him to fall and he hit his head on the street. In September of 2013, about nine months after Judy Weaver happened to sit at the same table as the man who investigated her son's death, her son's killer Jason Gailey was arrested and he was charged with second-degree murder.
2. Gary and Collene Campbell
Collene Thompson was born in 1932 in Alhambra, California. She had one sibling ,an older brother named Marion, but he went by the name Mickey. Their father worked as a police officer with the Alhambra police force. Collene met the man who would become her husband,
Gary Campbell, in the second grade. They started going steady when they were 15, and they got married when they were 18 years old. They had two children, Scott and Shelly. Collene's brother Mickey had always been fascinated by cars. Mickey rose to international fame in 1960 when he became the first American to drive over 400 miles per hour in a modified Pontiac Challenger 1. He reached a top speed of 406.60 miles per hour.
Later that same year Mickey was in a high speed boat accident. He was paralyzed from the waist down and the doctor said that he would never walk again. Through hard work and determination Mickey not only walked again, he returned to high speed driving. Besides being a driver, Mickey went on to become a successful race promoter and car builder. Collene eventually started working for Mickey doing Public Relation and promotion work. When Mickey was on a ski trip in early 1970 he met Trudy Feller. They were married in 1971. Gary and Collene were close with Mickey and Trudy.
Gary was the Best Man at Mickey's wedding. Both Mickey and Collene seemed to have everything. Mickey's work made him a millionaire while Collene and Gary were well-to-do themselves. But most importantly their families were happy. Then their luck took a turn towards the tragic It all started on July 21, 1976 when a dead body was found in the trunk of a car in Long Beach, California.
The body was identified as Aubrey James Wicks who was the owner of the car. Wicks, who was a member of a motorcycle gang in Los Angeles, had been shot to death and he had been dead at least a week. Five days after the body was found Scott Campbell Gary and Collene"s son turned himself in and confessed to killing Wicks. Scott said that he and Wicks were acquaintances and Wicks showed up at his family's home while he was high on drugs. Scott said that Wicks attacked him with a knife so he shot him. He said he hid the body because he was worried that Wicks' gang was going to kill him in an act of retaliation.
At his trial the medical examiner's report was entered into evidence. It revealed that Wicks was indeed high on the night that he died. Collene testified on her son's behalf, and she said she was home on the night of the shooting. She said that her son shot Wicks in self-defense. Scott was found guilty of manslaughter, and he was sentenced to a year in prison. He served a sentence in the prison camp and he was released. On April 20, 1982, about five years after Scott was released, Gary and Collene became concerned when Scott didn't show up for a meeting that they had planned. This was very out of character for Scott. He usually kept in constant contact with his parents. They reported him missing, but the police didn't take the disappearance seriously.
The police thought that Scott had just skipped town, and he would get in contact with his family at anytime. Collene and Gary weren't so sure. They last spoke to him on April 17th, which was three days before they noticed that he was missing. On that morning his parents knew he was supposed to fly to North Dakota. So Gary decided to drive around the parking lots of local airports. On May 2nd he found Scott's car at the airport in Fullerton, California. It was parked in a strange place. It wasn't in the parking lot. Instead iIt was parked closer to the runway. On the same day that he found Scott's car Gary got in touch with a man named Lawrence Cowell, who was an old friend of Scott's from school.
Gary and Collene were also very close friends with Cowell's parents. Gary asked Cowell if he had seen or talked to Scott lately. Specifically Gary asked him if he talked to Scott on April 17th, which was the last day that he was seen. Cowell said that he had not heard from Scott in a while. He was positive that he did not talk to or see him on April 17th. Gary then asked Cowell what he was doing on April 17th. Cowell said that he had a pilot's license and that day he had rented a plane. He said that he took off from the airport in Fullerton, flew to Palomar, California, and then returned to the airport in Fullerton. Gary was immediately suspicious because the Fullerton airport is where he found Scott's car.
Gary went back to the airport, and he asked to check the plane that Cowell had rented that day. He searched the plane and on one of the curtains inside the plane he found a blood-stain. Gary also went to Scott's apartment on several occasions. While there he noticed that Scott had several messages on his answering machine. There were a few messages left by a man who called himself Fox. He wanted to know where Scott was and he wanted to know why he didn't show up for their meeting. Gary and Collene called Fox by the Fargo, North Dakota area code. Fox told Gary and Collene that he didn't know who Scott Campbell was.
After weeks of demanding action from the police and not getting any, Gary and Collene told the police about the mysterious man named Fox, the fact that Cowell just happened to be at the airport where their son's car was found and the fact that Gary found blood in the plane that Cowell had rented. The police then started to think that maybe something sinister did happen to Scott Campbell. The focus of their investigation quickly became Lawrence Cowell. At the time, Cowell was on parole for manslaughter. Nearly two years earlier, on July 31, 1980, Cowell was drunk, and he was driving a car. He crashed into a pole and his passenger Robert Ferguson was killed nearly instantly. Cowell was on furlough from prison when Scott disappeared.
That meant he could leave prison during the day, but he had to spend his nights incarcerated. Before the police questioned Cowell they got in touch with the man who called himself Fox. The man told the police that his name was Greg Fox, and he was supposed to meet with Scott on the morning that he disappeared. Fox said that they were meeting because Scott was going to sell him thirty thousand dollars worth of cocaine. Fox admitted this to the police because he worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and he was going to arrest Scott, but he never showed up for their meeting. It turned out that months before he disappeared Scott found himself in hard financial times.
Looking to make some fast cash, Scott got in contact with a friend who was a cocaine distributor. Scott met Fox through a friend who had recently moved to North Dakota. Next, the police started to look at Lawrence Cowell's phone records. Cowell told Gary that he had not talked to or seen Scott in the days leading up to his disappearance. But his phone records proved that wasn't true. Cowell and Scott had been in contact over the phone several times in the days before and the day of Scott's disappearance. Also Greg Fox said that Scott said that he planned on flying to Fargo with Cowell.
The police assumed that Scott probably asked Cowell to fly to North Dakota so that he didn't have to take the cocaine on a commercial flight. The police's theory as to what happened was that while on the plane Cowell killed Scott so that he could steal the drugs and some money that Scott was carrying. The problem was it was only a theory and they didn't have enough evidence to arrest Cowell. That's when Gary and Collene Campbell got involved in the police investigation again. They personally paid for Greg Fox to fly out and stay in California on two separate occasions. When he was in California, Fox got in contact with Cowell and told him that he was Scott's drug connection, and he wanted to know who killed Scott.
While wearing a wire Fox eventually got Cowell to confess to what happened on the morning that Scott went missing. Cowell said that he was waiting at the airport in Fullerton and Scott met him there. They flew to the Almonte airport and picked up another man named, Donald DiMascio. DiMascio had several convictions for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Cowell said that they flew out to the Santa Catalina Island and once there DiMascio attacked Scott. He broke Scott's neck and while the plane flew at an elevation of 2,000 feet he dropped his lifeless body out of the plane and into the ocean.
After hearing him confess, Fox then convinced Cowell to let him talk to DiMascio. When Fox talked to DiMascio, again while wearing a wire, DiMascio told him the same story that Cowell had told him. Both Cowell and DiMascio were arrested and they were charged with first-degree murder. The police and the District Attorney said that without the tireless efforts of Gary and Collene Campbell the two men may have never been arrested. Both men were convicted and in early 1986 Cowell was sentenced to two 25-year sentences plus six years and DiMascio was sentenced to life without the chance of parole.
Unfortunately for the Campbell family tragedy was not done stalking them. On the morning of March 16, 1988 Collene's brother Mickey and his wife Trudy were shot to death outside of their home. According to their neighbors and evidence left at the crime scene it's believed that the shooters were waiting outside of the couple's home as they prepared to leave for work for the day. Mickey opened the garage door and then Trudy backed her van out. Mickey went to get in his own car and he was shot so that he would be wounded but not killed. Mickey was then dragged into the driveway and Trudy was pulled out of her van.
A neighbor heard Mickey beg the gunman not to hurt his wife. The gunman didn't listen to his pleas. As Trudy laid on the ground one of the gunman grabbed her by the hair and shot her in the head while Mickey watched. Then Mickey was executed. The two men then jumped on a pair of bicycles and rode off. In the months after the shooting no arrests were made. About six months after the murders the Campbells were dealt another blow. Two years into his sentence Lawrence Cowell's conviction was overturned because it was ruled that his confession was inadmissible. He was released as he awaited his new trial. At the foot of Mickey's grave Collene and Gary decided that they needed to do more to help the victims of crime.
They founded a group called Memories of Victims Everywhere which is known by its acronym M.O.V.E. M.O.V.E. is a victims' rights group that looks to limit the rights of inmates along with backing politicians that want stiffer punishments for criminals and are pro capital punishment. They also fought to make the courts in California run more like they do at the federal level so that trials could be performed in a much timelier rate.
In the summer of 1989 Lawrence Cowell was again convicted of murder and in January 1990 he was sentenced to 25 years to life. Mickey and Trudy's murders remained unsolved. Collene continued to keep the murders in the public eye by doing interviews with television shows like Unsolved Mysteries And America's Most Wanted. Gary and Collene even offered a million-dollar reward for information leading to an arrest. Looking to further the rights of victims of crime, Collene ran for mayor of San Juan Capistrano, California in 1993 on the platform of being a voice for victims' rights. She won the election and she became the first female mayor of San Juan Capistrano.
Even though the police had not made an arrest in Mickey and Trudy's murders, Collene openly talked about who she thought murdered them. She was sure that Mike Goodwin, a former business partner of Mickey's, was the person who ordered the murders. In the mid-1980s after working together for several years Mickey realized that Goodwin was stealing money from him so Mickey sued him. Mickey ended up winning a settlement of over half a million dollars. The settlement ended up financially ruining Goodwin. Collene knew that Goodwin told several people that he wanted Mickey dead. Micky even knew that Goodwin wanted him dead.
Shortly before he died Mickey told Collene that he was afraid that Goodwin might hurt him or Trudy. After Collene's tireless campaigning for Goodwin's arrest, Goodwin was finally arrested nearly 13 years after the murders. It turned out that Colleen's hard work of keeping Mickey and Trudy's story in the spotlight paid off. Two former neighbors of Mickey and Trudy's saw an episode of America's Most Wanted which featured a segment about their murders and the neighbors recognized Goodwin because they saw him near the couple's house at the time of the shooting. They saw him sitting in a car with a pair of binoculars.
At Goodwin's trial, which started in late 2006, 15 people testified that they heard him say that he wanted to kill Mickey. He was ultimately convicted, and he was sentenced to two life terms. The police and the District Attorney said that Collene was instrumental in getting Goodwin arrested. The two gunmen have yet to be found. One of the men was described as being six feet tall, thin with a muscular build. The second man was shorter about 5'10' and he was also muscular, but he was stockier than his partner.
In 2010 78 year-old Collene Campbell was a public appointee of the Commission on peace officer standards and training. At a meeting in the autumn of 2010 Colleen was chatting with a sergeant from her home town, Alhambra. She asked the sergeant how things were in Alhambra. The sergeant said that things were going well. They only had one unsolved murder on the books. He said that the murder had been cold for over 75 years, so no one was really expecting the case to be closed. Collene asked him about the case and the sergeant said that the murder happened on January 3, 1933.
A police officer with the city, James Nerison, happened upon two men trying to blow up a safe in a theater. One of the men shot Nerison with a shotgun, and he died because of his wounds. Colleen was shocked when she heard the story. She said she knew who the killer was because her father had killed the killer. She explained that in 1936, three years after Nerison was killed, her father, who was the Chief of Detectives in Alhambra, responded to a bank robbery. A shootout ensued and two of the three robbers were shot. One was killed and the other was injured. The robber that was killed was 43 year old Clarence Smith.
After he was killed in the shootout a witness from the theater robbery came forward and said that Smith was the person who shot Officer Nerison. To prove that she was telling the truth, Collene went home and found some newspaper clippings about the shootout that her mother had saved. When the sergeant read the newspaper articles he realized why the case was considered open even though the police had killed the perpetrator three years after the robbery. The reason it wasn't closed is because they wanted to find the shotgun that was used to kill Nerison.
They never ended up finding the gun so the case was never officially closed. Several decades later when reviewing cold case files no one on the police force realized that the shooter had been found, so the case was marked unsolved instead of closed. For being instrumental in helping close a third case Collene Campbell was given an award by the city of Alhambra. Gary Campbell died in November 2017. He and Collene were married for 66 years. Sadly the body of their son Scott has never been found.
1. Melinda Dawson
In April 1998, Melinda Elkins and her adopted mother Judy Johnson were guests on the television program Maury. They were on the show to discuss Melinda's adoption. In February 1963, Johnson adopted Melinda from a doctor named Thomas Hicks who ran a clinic in McCaysville, Georgia. She also paid Hicks $1,000 which Hicks said covered all the adoption costs and she took Melinda home to Barberton, Ohio. It turned out that between 1951 and 1964 Hicks ran a black market adoption ring. Hicks would deliver a healthy baby, but tell the mother that it was stillborn or died shortly after birth. Hicks would then take the healthy baby and sell to couples living in six different states.
Hicks died in 1972 and he destroyed most of his records before he died. It's believed that Hick's stole and sold over 200 babies and this included, Melinda. On the morning of June 7, 1998, before the show even aired, April Sutton, Judy Johnson's other daughter, opened the door of her Barberton home and saw something that she will probably never forget. Standing in the doorway was her six-year-old daughter Brooke. She was covered from head to toe in blood. Brooke had spent the night at her grandmother Judy Johnson's home. Brooke told her parents that she and her grandmother had been attacked. She said that her grandmother had been stabbed and she was lying in front of her couch. She said that her grandmother was dead.
April's husband raced over to his mother-in-law's home and found 58 year old Judy Johnson dead in a pool of her own blood. The police were called and one of the first things they did was interview Brooke in her hospital room. Brooke said that sometime in the early morning hours someone had attacked her grandmother. According to the autopsy report Johnson had not been stabbed. Instead she was beaten with a blunt object. The beating broke her collar bone, jaw, nose and skull. After she was beaten she was sexually assaulted. Finally, she was strangled, which was the cause of death. The sounds from the attack woke Brooke up and when she went to investigate the noises, she saw a man in the kitchen. The man scared her so she ran back to the bedroom that she had been sleeping in and the man followed her into the room.
In the bedroom she was also beaten with a blunt object and sexually assaulted. She was left for dead, but amazingly a few hours after the attack she regained consciousness. She tried calling a few people whose telephone numbers she had memorized, but she couldn't get a hold of anyone she knew. In one call to a neighbor Brooke got the answering machine, and she left a message saying that somebody had killed her grandmother. After Brooke couldn't get ahold of anyone by phone she decided to walk over to a neighbor's home. She rang the neighbor's doorbell and the neighbor, who was feeding her children, came to the front porch.
The neighbor made Brooke wait on her front porch for about half an hour, and then she drove Brooke to her parents' home. The police asked Brooke who attacked her and her grandmother. Brooke said he looked like Uncle Clarence. Uncle Clarence was Clarence Elkins who was married to Brooke's aunt, Melinda. Melinda is also April's sister and Johnson's other daughter. The police rushed to Clarence and Melinda's home, and they took Clarence into custody. The police asked Clarence where he was between 2:30 and 5:30 a.m. which is when they believe the attack happened. Clarence said that he was out drinking at a local bar and he got home at 2:40 a.m.
The attack happened over an hour away from Clarence and Melinda's home and Clarence said he was too drunk to drive. The police found hairs on Judy Johnson, and they did not belong to either her or Brooke. The hairs were compared to Clarence's hairs and the hairs did not come from him either. Nevertheless, Clarence went to trial a year after the murder. The District Attorney's only evidence against Clarence was Brooke's testimony in which she said that the man who attacked her was her Uncle Clarence. Clarence claimed that he was innocent. His lawyer pointed out that there was no physical evidence tying him to the crime.
Clarence was ultimately found guilty, and he was sentenced to 55 years to life. The attack destroyed the relationship between Melinda and her sister April. A big factor in the demise of their relationship was the fact that Melinda backed her husband's claims of innocence. She knew that Clarence didn't kill her mother and attack her niece. They had been married for 18 years, and she knew that he was not capable of doing something that barbaric. Secondly she was awake when Clarence came home after drinking on the night of the attack And he was there when she woke up in the morning. If he did somehow sneak away he didn't act like he had just sexually assaulted and beaten his mother-in-law and niece and left them for dead. His clothes weren't bloody and he didn't have any cuts or scratches on him.
Melinda wanted to prove that her husband was innocent, but she had no training that would help in a criminal investigation. To learn about the science of forensics she started watching the television show Forensic Files. A few years after the attack Brooke Sutton started to doubt her own testimony. She became even more doubtful about three years after the attack when she was shown a photograph of Clarence. She specifically remembered that the killer had brown eyes and Clarence has blue eyes. Linda noticed that when Brooke was interviewed after the attack she said that the man looked like her Uncle Clarence, but she didn't say that it was her Uncle Clarence.
Also before Brooke left her grandmother's home looking for help she called a neighbor and she left a message on their answering machine. In the message Brooke said somebody killed my grandma. Linda pointed out that she didn't say my Uncle Clarence killed my grandma. Based on Brooke's recantation Clarence's lawyer tried to get him a new trial, but they were denied. In 2004 the Ohio Innocence Project had male biological evidence that was found inside the victim tested. The DNA did not belong to Clarence Elkins. Even though the only witness recanted and the DNA left at the crime scene did not match Clarence it was not enough to get Clarence a new trial.
Melinda knew that if she was going to clear her husband's name then she had to find the person who killed her mother and tried to kill her niece. She started compiling a list of suspects who had a history of violence and frequented bars near her mother's home. She then approached her suspects while they were at the bar and in some cases she flirted with them. Then when they weren't looking she would grab stuff that they left their DNA on like cigarette butts and beer bottles. Then Melinda ran into a roadblock. DNA testing was very expensive and the Elkins had already spent all their money on Clarence's defense. To raise money for a DNA test and for more legal help Melinda did a fundraiser on the Internet. She ended up raising $40,000. That was enough money to get one DNA profile developed.
So if they were going to test someone's DNA they needed a strong suspect Because they might not have another chance to catch the killer. Melinda was reading some news articles that she had collected and one of them caught her attention. Around the same time that her mother and niece were attacked three girls under the age of 10 were sexually assaulted in Barberton. A man named Earl Eugene Mann was arrested for the sexual assaults and in April 2002 he was sentenced to seven years of prison. Besides the ages of the victims three things caught Melinda's eye. The first was that Mann has a history of violence. Secondly he had been released from prison in June 1998 just days before the murder. But what really caught her eye was the name of Mann's common-law wife whom he was living with after he was released from prison. Her name was Tonia Brasiel.
One odd aspect about the morning of the attack that the police never really paid any attention to was that Brooke who was covered head-to-toe in blood walked to a neighbor's home and she told the neighbor that her grandmother was dead. The neighbor made Brooke stand on her front porch for 30 minutes, and then drove her home. Why did the neighbor wait so long to do something? Most people who encounter a little girl covered in blood who is saying that her grandmother has been killed, they'd probably called 9-1-1 immediately. That neighbor was Tonia Brasiel. Earl Eugene Mann quickly became Melinda's top suspect. In an amazing turn of events Mann had been transferred to the same cell block as Clarence.
Melinda relayed what she found out to Clarence and told Clarence to see if he could get some DNA from Mann. Clarence watched Mann and one day he saw him drop a cigarette butt. Clarence picked off the butt and he mailed it to his lawyers. Mann's DNA was compared to the DNA left at the crime scene and it was a match. Amazingly this still wasn't enough to get Clearance a new trial. Then in October 2005 the Attorney General of Ohio did something very unusual. He held a press conference where he strongly advised the County's District Attorney to dismiss the charges against Clarence. It was the first time that an Attorney General intervened on a case on behalf of the Innocence Project.
Finally, on December 15, 2005, after six and a half years in prison, Clarence was released and officially exonerated. Unfortunately, the ordeal put too much strain on the marriage of Clarence and Melinda. They ended up filing for divorce not long after he was exonerated. Melinda remarried and her last name is now Dawson. Clarence sued the city of Barberton and he won a settlement of over five million dollars. In August 2008, Earl Eugene Mann pleaded guilty to murdering Judy Johnson and attacking Brooke Sutton. He was sentenced to 55 years to life. After solving the murder of her adopted mother Melinda has tried to solve another mystery, which is who is her real family. In 2015, using Ancestry.com, she found a third and fourth cousin, but has yet to find any more immediate family.
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