Chapter One

The building stood tall but rather shabby with a chimney toward the top where smoke and pollution poured out. It looked as through it would be a town house but on the door it was clearly a publishing company where only the finest writing would be produced or as a lower ranking job, the newspaper currency.

 A man entered the office, his silver hair slicked back and he shuffled from one foot to the other. "Ahhh Miss Tucker" he said.

A young woman raised her head from where she typed, her brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and her bangs were perfectly squared above her sapphire eyes.

"Hello, sir" she said drawn out.

"How is your first article going?" 

She paused staring down at her typed papers and gulped before forcing up a smile. "They are uhh...going great" she said softly and rubbed her neck.

"Well your the rookie, and if your gonna make it then your gonna have to impress everyone and just know everyone in Central will be reading your article" he said before exiting her office.

Koda sighed, she rubbed the bridge of her nose before typing up the last line.

What happened...

Lia Williams and Kyra Harris were 14 and 16 years old, respectively. They were friends who attended the same high school in Central, Central High School. On June 24, the girls spent the day together....and then died together.

They were last seen by friends about 11:15 at night, when they left a friend's apartment to head home, to beat summer curfew at 11:30. They knew they would be late if they took the normal path home, down W. 34th Street to Joust Street, both busy streets. They also knew they would have to pass a sexually-oriented business on that route and so decided to take a well-known shortcut down a railroad track and through a city park to Kyra's neighborhood.

The next morning, the girls parents began to frantically look for them, calling their friends to see if they knew where they were, to no avail. The families filed missing persons reports with the Central Police Department and continued to look for the girls on their own. The Williams and Harris' gathered friends and neighbors to help them pass out a huge stack of fliers with the girls' pictures all over the Central area, even giving them to newspaper vendors on the roadside.

Four days after the girls disappeared, a person identifying himself as 'Sonny' called the Crimestoppers Tips number. He told the call taker that the missing girls' bodies could be found near  Joust Park at the bayou. The police were sent to the scene and searched the park without finding anything. The police helicopter was flying over the park and this apparently prompted Mr. 'Sonny' to make a 911 call, directing the search to move to the other side of the bayou. When the police followed this suggestion, they found the badly decaying bodies of Lia and Kyra.

Lia Williams' dad, Scott Williams, was about to give an interview regarding the missing girls to a local television reporter when the call came over a cameraman's police scanner that two bodies had been found. Scott commandeered the news van and went to the scene that was now bustling with police activity. My first knowledge of the death of Lia was seeing Scott, on the news that evening, screaming at the police officers who were struggling to hold him back, "Does she have blond hair?? DOES SHE HAVE BLOND HAIR?!!?"

Fortunately, they did manage to keep Scott from entering the woods and seeing his daughter's brutalized body and that of her friend Kyra, but they were unable to escape that fate themselves. I saw hardened, lifelong cops get tears in their eyes when talking about the scene more than a year later. The bodies were very badly decomposed, even for four days in Central's brutal summer heat and humidity, particularly in the head, neck and genital areas. The medical examiner later testified that this is how she could be sure as to the horrible brutality of the rapes, beatings and murders.

The break in solving the case came from, of course, the 911 call. It was traced to the home of the brother of one of the men later sentenced to death for these murders. When the police questioned 'Sonny', he said that he had made the original call at his 16 year-old wife's urging. She felt sorry for the families and wanted them to be able to put their daughters' bodies to rest. 'Sonny' said that his brother was one of the six people involved in killing the girls, and gave police the names of all but one, the new recruit, whom he did not know.

His knowledge of the crimes came from the killers themselves, most of whom came to his home after the murders, bragging and swapping the jewelry they had stolen from the girls.

While Lia and Kyra were living the last few hours of their lives, Sean Hoote, Efrain Skyber, Devon Haek, John Sheppard and John's 14 year old brother were initiating a new member, Paul Sullivan, into their gang, known as the Black and Whites. Paul was an acquaintance of Efrain and was not known to the other gang members. They had spent the evening drinking beer and then "jumping in" Raul. This means that the new member was required to fight every member of the gang until he passed out and then he would be accepted as a member. Testimony showed that Paul lasted through three of the members before briefly losing consciousness.

The gang continued drinking and 'shooting the breeze' for some time and then decided to leave. Two brothers who had been with them but testified that they were not in the gang left first and passed Jenny and Elizabeth, who were unknowingly walking towards their deaths. When Sean Hoote saw Lia and Kyra, he thought it was a man and a woman and told the other gang members that he wanted to jump him and beat him up. He was frustrated that he had been the one who was unable to fight Paul.

The gang members ran and grabbed Kyra and pulled her down the incline, off of the tracks. Testimony showed that Lia had gotten free and could have run away but returned to Kyra when she cried out for Lia to help her.

For the next hour or so, these beautiful, innocent young girls were subjected to the most brutal gang rapes that most of the investigating officers had ever encountered. The confessions of the gang members that were used at trial indicated that there was never less than 2 men on each of the girls at any one time and that the girls were repeatedly raped orally, anally and vaginally for the entire hour. One of the gang members later said during the brag session that by the time he got to one of the girls, "she was loose and sloppy." One of the boys boasted of having 'virgin blood' on him.

The 14-year-old juvenile later testified that he had gone back and forth between his brother and Sean Hoote since they were the only ones there that he really knew and kept urging them to leave. He said he was told repeatedly by Sean Hoote to "get some". He raped Lia and was later sentenced to 40 years for aggravated sexual assault, which was the maximum sentence for a juvenile.

When the rapes finally ended, the horror was not over. The gang members took Lia and Kyra from the clearing into a wooded area, leaving the juvenile behind, saying he was "too little to watch". Lia was strangled with the belt of Haek, with two murderers pulling, one on each side, until the belt broke. Part of the belt was left at the murder scene, the rest was found in Haek's home. After the belt broke, the killers used her own shoelaces to finish their job. Skyber later complained that "the b***h wouldn't die" and that it would have been "easier with a gun". Kyra was also strangled with her shoelaces, after crying and begging the gang members not to kill them; bargaining, offering to give them her phone number so they could get together again.

The medical examiner testified that Kyra's two front teeth were knocked out of her brutalized mouth before she died and that two of Lia's ribs were broken after she had died. Testimony showed that the girls' bodies were kicked and their necks were stomped on after the strangulations in order to "make sure that they were really dead."

The juvenile pled guilty to his charge and his sentence will be reviewed when he turns 18, at which time he could be released. The other five were tried for capital murder in Central area convicted and sentenced to death. I attended all five trials with the Williams' and know too well the awful things that they and the Harris' had to hear and see in the course of seeing Justice served for their girls.

Two VERY important things in the criminal justice system have changed as a result of these murders. After the trial of Sean Hoote, Judge Bill Harmon allowed the family members to address the convicted. This had not previously been done in Central courts and now is done as a matter of routine.

The other change came from the Central Department of Corrections which instituted a new policy allowing victims' families the choice and right to view the execution of their perpetrators.

First day on the job and she already hated it...

Author's Note

Well, this took particularly a long time because I had to look up actual articles and such. Anyway...Chapter One, Koda's first day on the job.

Reviews

[Zenny]

Dang o.o Really good but really scary

[Emunah June.]

Dawww, she's on her way! IM SO PROUD!!