Original subtitles

In Cincinnati, we have River Fest, and it's the biggest

event of the year.

They have music, they have fireworks,

they have games for the kids.

I mean, a little bit of everything for everybody.

But you're really waiting for the big event to happen.

Where are you going to be to watch the fireworks?

Based on being River Fest, it would have been a skeleton

crew at the police department.

The night crew would work six at night

till two in the morning.

And what we would say, When you're on nights,

you sit around and wait for death.

We start off the day celebrating the end of

summer at a big party, and we ended up

investigating a murder.

911, what's your emergency?

There was a 911 call that came in to the police dispatch.

There was a foul odor coming from a trash bin,

maybe a dead dog, dead cat, dead possum.

The garbage bin was found in the rear of the apartment

building on Elm Street.

The building is kind of like an old brownstone.

It's probably been there since the 1800s.

Officers noticed a bunch of flies around the area.

They looked into the trash bin and saw maggots.

Uniformed officers on scene, just based on the smell,

would know that it was probably a decomposing human

as opposed to a decomposing dog.

It's something that-- it's ingrained in your psyche.

There's no smell like it.

The officer looked in, saw a blanket, took out

a knife, cut the blanket, and moved the blanket away with

a knife and saw a human leg.

Officers put up crime scene tape to cordon off the area.

A crime scene's a piece of evidence, so they decided not

to pull the body out the scene.

They made arrangements to have it towed up to

the coroner's office.

The body was wrapped in two blankets, a sheet,

like a floral sheet, which had some burn marks on it.

Whoever disposed of the body tried to more than likely set

the body on fire.

The problem was that one of the blankets was fire

retardant, so it never caught.

At this point, whoever did it went through great lengths to

try to cover up the fact of what he or she did.

Once the body was out, the body was unwrapped

from the blanket.

He was a black male, about six-foot to six-foot-three,

heavy set, probably over 200 pounds.

He was wearing blue jeans, no shoes, and only one sock.

He had no identification on him, no cell phone, no jewelry

to speak of.

The only identifying mark were a tattoo on his left forearm.

It said "stacks."

And the two Ses on the front and the back were dollar signs.

And a chain around his neck with a key.

It's September, right? End of the summer.

It's hot.

A body will decompose at a higher rate when it's hot,

as opposed to cold.

The coroner had determined based on the maggots,

the decomposition of the body, that it was probably there

at least from one to three days.

So time of death probably would have been around August 31st

or September 1st.

The coroner had said he was cut, he was beaten,

he was strangled.

There was defensive wounds.

His hands would have gone up during the attack

to try to protect himself,

and he defended himself as best he could.

The victim was big, and he was fighting back,

and he went down hard.

So they had to do a lot of damage to finally kill him.

He fought valiantly before he finally succumbed.

This is probably one of the more vicious attacks based

on the fact of everything that was used.

Someone who would do something like this would be a predator.

I was the Hamilton County courts reporter for

the Cincinnati Inquirer.

So that involved covering all of the crime that came

through the courthouse.

There was a lot of violent crime.

Shootings, homicides.

The 2005 relationship between the Cincinnati Police

Department and the city wasn't that good.

Because in 2001, Cincinnati police shot

an innocent young man.

The death of an unarmed black man set off

days of rioting in Cincinnati.

The kind of thing that we saw recently with George Floyd

happened then.

People were very distrustful.

Everyone was holding back information.

They felt that they were protecting their neighborhood

by not giving information to the police.

Even if they managed to find someone who had seen something,

it's gonna be a very difficult task.

This was gonna be an uphill battle.

There was an urgency in this case to identify the victim.

Fingerprints were taken,

blood and tissue samples were taken in order to get DNA.

We would then run John Doe through the computer system,

but DNA came back with nothing in file.

So that led us to believe that

the person had never been arrested.

The biggest clue on who it was would have been the tattoo.

We looked at the tattoo "$tack$,"

and stacks is usually-- means a stack of cash.

So based on that, it led us to the motive.

Maybe they got killed for money.

What we do on a crime scene is we'll go back the next day

and kind of do a recanvass to see if there's anything

we might have missed.

We were able to come up with a 911 caller who told us that

on September 2, 2005, she saw several individuals

load something big into the trash bin and rolling

the trash bin out to the curb.

She said it was suspicious to her because this was the day

after trash had been picked up.

That's kind of like the ding, ding, ding.

The bells go off, and this is somebody we want to talk to.

One of the two people was a woman,

someone who had really long hair.

And this woman was with a well-built man.

She did say that she saw the maintenance man roll it

back from the curb a couple days later.

And the odor in the trash bin got more foul

as the days went on.

Based on her interview, we were able to find the name

of the maintenance man.

He confirmed that he did roll the container back to

the alleyway from the street corner a couple of days after

it had been rolled out.

The fact that a body was found in just everybody's like

run-of-the-mill trash bin,

people had to be very worried.

Some don't want to come forward

because they don't want to rock the boat.

They didn't want to become a victim.

I'm all right as long as I mind my own business,

as long as I keep to myself.

But some people realize it can be you.

And you have to come forward. You have to do something.

And your conscience gets to you.

How can I let this go on?

People knew there was a monster out there

they were looking for.

A person who would do this is a predator.

We knew at this point we had a killer out there who had

killed at least one person, then we didn't know if there

was other victims out there.

Word was spreading among people.

What was happening?

And could they be next?

It was particularly horrific

just to find a body that someone had abandoned in

a trash can, and not to really know what had happened,

and not to know who did it.

The people on Elm Street, they were afraid.

Over the Rhine is a great place to live.

It's absolutely beautiful.

It has so much history and character,

but there's a lot of urban myths that surround

this Elm Street area.

Just down the street is one of Cincinnati's most historic

buildings, Cincinnati Music Hall.

It is a big, grand building with stained glass windows,

But it was built where there are graves.

And ask anyone in Cincinnati, and they'll tell you

that Music Hall is haunted.

There's always been rumors of haunting in this area,

but this was more terrifying than any

of these urban legends.

This time, there was a real-life killer.

People in the neighborhood, they just know that somebody

came in the community

and ended up dead.

And if it can happen to him,

it can happen to me.

And so they didn't want to become a victim.

Detectives didn't know who the victim was, so they had to

label him John Doe.

The biggest clue was the tattoo.

So what we did is we would get a hold of Crimestoppers,

and they would work with their partners in the media

that hey, homicide is looking for somebody

who had a tattoo of "$tack$."

Crimestoppers is used when they really don't know who the

victim is, somebody might call because they want to remain

anonymous, or somebody might call just because they think

they know something.

Every now and then, somebody is gonna speak up and say,

"No, no, I'm not gonna allow this.

I've seen too much."

After a couple of days, we got a call from a person by

the name of Eric Wallace.

He said he knew a person who had a tattoo on

his left forearm. It said "$tack$,"

and his name was Chris Amos.

I tried to reach Chris a few times on his cell phone,

but he didn't answer.

I didn't think really much of it because

that's a party weekend.

But they ran a Crimestoppers thing.

They had found a body, and they had no leads.

They had just been able to identify that there were

tattoos saying "young $tack$."

And I'm sitting there thinking, like, well,

I only know one person.

I just was praying and praying and praying that it wasn't him.

Chris Amos Jr.'s dad, Chris Amos Sr., said that

his son, Chris Amos Jr., lived in Covington, Kentucky,

which is right over the river from where the body had been

found, and that he lived in an apartment there.

Mr. Amos provided us with a photograph of his son.

And from the photograph, it matched the height

and weight of the unidentified body that we had.

And based on the dental records, we were able to

identify the victim as 18-year-old Chris Amos Jr.

Chris Amos Jr. was my best friend.

I was four or five years older, but he's like a little brother

to me. He liked to joke a lot.

He was a jokester. He loved to tell funny stories.

Chris loved to rap.

He was as talented as anybody I have ever been around in

the music realm.

He was very good at what he did.

Chris was one of my best friends.

♪ Baby, we can come through

♪ Baby, if you up, you should come through ♪

We met in high school. We used to call him "Stacks."

"You know Stacks over here?" And I was like, "No."

It was like, "He be rappin'," and Stacks was Chris.

So I introduced myself, "Wassup man?"

And then it was a rap from there.

We just kept going on, battle rapping, and he was

definitely competitive.

Chris and his dad were so much alike that they had

butted heads.

He wanted to live his own life and not constantly be told how

to live his life.

Eventually, he wanted to have his own apartment.

Chris was a hard worker.

He finally moved into his own place.

Trying to be grown, he took the first step

in becoming the adult.

How could this have happened?

He didn't have, like, mortal enemies.

Chris's father pulled up on me.

Later on, he told me that Chris had got murdered.

Man, I bawled my eyes out that-- me and his father

was crying together. And I couldn't--

I couldn't bring myself to, I don't know.

It was heart-wrenching, man.

The pain that Mr. Amos felt, I mean, it's--

you can't describe it. It goes so deep.

And sometimes that idea of tough love,

sometimes it gets real tough.

Who would want to do this to-- what--

what did he do to somebody?

So with little to go on, detectives retrieved the key

they found on Chris Amos' body.

We had that key.

And since we had an address now for where Chris Jr. lived,

we went there with that key and put it in a lock

and it opened up the door.

We didn't find any furniture turned over.

We didn't find any blood.

We didn't find any murder weapons.

So that would be a good indication that Chris wasn't

killed at that location.

His cell phone was not in his apartment.

So we knew that the cell phone was missing.

We then got the search warrant on his cell phone number to get

phone records and go back to the date and time when

Chris was killed.

But cell phone records take a while to get back.

He had "young" here, and "$tack$" here.

He was 18, so called himself "Stacks,"

you know, everybody put the "Young" on it.

You were either a "Young," a "Lil", you know, Lil Wayne.

"Young Stacks" just comes from having stacks of money.

Seemed like a pretty big clue.

Detectives believe that this is the motive

that they've been looking for.

You still have that theory that it was a robbery,

a set up robbery.

But it was kind of ironic that he called himself that,

because he did not have a lot of money.

He did anything to get some extra money.

You know, you had to get the money to pay the rent.

Chris didn't own a car, and he didn't hang in those

areas where he was found.

Nobody knew why he would be in Cincinnati.

All the information we were getting from people who knew

him, he was a good kid, he had several jobs.

Chris worked at a nursing home.

Me and my mom were able to help Chris get a job at a very nice

nursing home in Covington, Kentucky.

He was really good with the elderly people.

He got along really well,

and every one of them loved him.

Chris would volunteer on some of his lunch breaks to go get

some of his favorite residents and bring them down for lunch.

His co-workers were cool,

except for one of his co-workers.

Mr. Amos did tell us a story that Chris had some dispute

with another employee at the nursing home.

This could be something as callous as a co-worker who's so

pissed off at him for some perceived slight at work that

they would do this to him.

That's not unusual in a case like this.

And they fought.

And this person ended up getting fired.

And he blamed Chris.

Certainly a tip like that we would have to follow up on

because that certainly would be a motive for a killing.

Chris worked at the nursing home.

He had some dispute with another employee at

the nursing home.

We've had cases in the past where there's disputes at work

and led to a killing.

That certainly would be a motive because the type of

injuries that Chris had on him led us to believe that it was

probably somebody who he knew,

somebody who he had a dispute with.

We were able to follow up on that lead.

Detectives showed up at his co-worker's door.

He admitted they did get in a fight and that he didn't like

Chris, but he said he didn't kill him.

We were able to determine that he was out of town at

his aunt's house at the time of the murder and he couldn't have

committed the murder. So that's a dead end.

And we were very concerned that this case may never get solved

because every lead that we had at the point

was turning up nothing.

Chris's dad, Mr. Amos, didn't know who could have

killed his son or what happened.

It's important to him to see justice done,

and it's important to him to feel whole again.

He had to do something. There's no way in the world

he could just sit still.

Mr. Amos knew of the distrust that the Black community had

with police, and he was willing to put feelers out

in the community to try to find out who killed his son.

He wasn't thinking about his own safety.

He wasn't thinking about himself.

He was thinking about all the things that he couldn't do

for his son anymore. But he could do that.

He did come up with some leads.

I remember Mr. Amos saying he found out that Chris was

hanging out with the wrong crowd.

But Mr. Amos didn't know who Chris was hanging with.

I mean, he had heard nicknames.

In a street culture like this, nobody knows anyone's

real names. Everyone has a nickname.

It's a way to stay anonymous.

Why would a kid like Chris, who had such big dreams and had

never been in trouble, be hanging around such

unsavory characters?

Chris was not that guy.

That was not his, you know, M.O.

That was not his thing.

That was not what he was known for.

But we got some information that Chris was selling.

It's an easy way to make money.

He wasn't a street guy, but he had to get the money to

pay the rent.

When you feel like your back is against the wall,

you normally do something that you wouldn't normally do.

You step out on a limb, and sometimes

those limbs break.

And by the time you figure it out, it's too late.

We didn't know who Chris was hanging with that night.

Mr. Amos had given some information about a rap studio

that Chris would also go to.

And it turned out that that rap studio was on Elm Street.

Based on the fact that Chris was found on Elm Street,

that was something that had to be followed up on.

There were a few underground recording studios.

We would go to the studio, and then we would rap.

We got our phones, so we would record, like, voice messages

over us rapping over beats.

Chris and Calvin were both aspiring rappers.

Mr. Amos thought that maybe there was some type

of confrontation.

Detectives knew that this was a personal attack.

So that pointed them in the directions of someone

who knew him.

A couple days later on, I was riding down the street,

hanging out, and I pulled up to my house.

And I seen two white men in a suit.

And they walked up to me like, "Hey, are you Calvin Powell?"

And I was like, "No, my father's not here."

And they was like, "Yeah, you the one

we looking for." And I was like, "Uh, me?"

And he said, "Man, we're from Homicide."

He said, Chris's father might have implicated you.

I'm like, "Wow, for real, for the murder?"

And they say, "Yeah."

I was taken aback because I was like, man,

he blamed it on me.

I'm like, how did he tell them that I did it?

Me, I was kind of like, wow, his father, he really

not playing. That was scary.

I told the detectives, Chris and I got into a heated

text message conversation.

When I spoke to him that day, he was at home.

And we had got into a confrontation about

the people he was hanging with.

I warned him because Chris had no idea how dangerous those

people were that he was hanging with.

He took it as me trying to

go against him or test him.

And he said some things he shouldn't have said.

I said some things I shouldn't have said.

And we were going back and forth with it.

That was the last time I talked to him.

And two days before, that was the last time I had seen him

ever again in life.

Mr. Amos must have caught wind of the text messages or read

them because I was going to the funeral.

But I went to shake his dad's hand, and he was like,

"Where were you?"

I said, "I don't know." I was like, "I was here."

And they were asking me questions.

I was crying.

I found out they didn't want me at the funeral because

they thought I did it.

I was hurt, man. I was deeply hurt.

But I knew I didn't do it. And then I started getting mad.

My feelings were hurt, and I started getting angry.

Every time someone tells the police the truth,

they say, you know how many times I've heard that?

I said, "Hey, I didn't do it." I knew I didn't do it.

That's crazy.

There was some type of confrontation.

Maybe things escalated.

It's certainly something that needs to be followed up on.

But y'all investigating me, you are doing your job.

But are you, though?

They were wasting their time looking at me, instead of

focusing on who actually did it.

The people on Elm Street in Cincinnati and the people in

Covington, Kentucky, they were afraid.

They still didn't know who did this.

Was this killer gonna strike again?

I was definitely cautious. It's like a Zodiac killer.

You just walking around chilling, bam, somebody killed.

You don't really know when it's gonna happen or what's

gonna happen or who's doing it.

So they were scared.

I was afraid to leave my house.

When you have traumatic experiences, your body,

your brain reacts in certain ways.

Well, my reaction was, I ain't leaving the house.

Detectives didn't know what else the killer was capable of.

There was no telling what was next.

Based on the circumstances that we thought at that time,

yeah, there was a good indication that

he or she would kill again.

And the information that Mr. Amos gave us was that there

could have been some dispute or something between

Calvin and Chris.

That was something that had to be followed up on based on

the fact that Chris's body was found on Elm Street

and the studio was also supposedly on Elm Street.

Yeah, I had a alibi.

They ruled me out because no evidence led back to me.

We had ruled Calvin out as a suspect.

He couldn't have committed the murder.

I was hurt, man. I was deeply hurt.

When you're hurt, it just turns into a lot of anger sometimes.

I was young, and I was just mad at that man.

And I still kind of am upset about that, but I don't hold

any grudges or anything to him.

He was a father who lost his son.

We were very concerned that this case may never get solved.

Once we got the records back, we went back and concentrated

on incoming and outgoing calls between August 31st

and September 1st of 2005.

Around the time of death or what we thought

the time of death was,

we were able to determine there was at least 29 phone calls

that came in or out of Chris's cell phone

after his time of death.

Somebody was still using Chris's cell phone.

Detectives worked down the list of calls that had been made,

and they pinpointed the name Jenna Gundy.

Police called her in for questioning.

She was upset, didn't know why she was being called down here,

which is typical, said she didn't know

who Chris was, didn't have anything to do with it.

She had said that she had let two of her friends

us her cell phone,

and she thought that maybe one of her friends had known Chris

or someone named Chris.

Also, one of the calls that piqued our interest was a call

to La Rosa's Pizzeria in Cincinnati.

You have to give a name, especially for delivery.

Maybe a pizza was delivered to an address.

Hey, maybe that's the crime scene.

And when police did check that, the order had been placed under

Winnie Cartwright's name, and Winnie Cartwright

was one of the friends

Jenna Gundy let her use her phone.

Winnie Cartwright came in for an interview.

Her demeanor was that she didn't know why

she was coming in.

She said that she and her boyfriend had lost

her cell phone, and she bought this for $10.

She said she bought the phone from a person by the name of Teayha Webb.

So when she said "Teayha Webb," that rang a bell to us because

that was the other person who used her cell phone.

We did a computer search on Teayha, found out that

she came up on Elm Street.

Knowing that she lived on Elm Street and Chris's body was

found on Elm Street, we knew that was someone

we needed to talk to. We went out to that location,

got in contact with her.

She was willing to come in for an interview.

She was saying she didn't know anything that was going on.

You know, why is she here?

But after a while, she finally admitted that

she knew who Chris was.

The fact that she knew Chris and lived right by where

his body had been found, that was enough.

They went and got a search warrant.

When we went in, we noticed the place was

kind of disheveled.

We were able to go back into the bedroom.

We found some sheets

that had the similar pattern on the sheets that we found

Chris's body wrapped in.

And we also found a metal pipe and at least two box cutters.

We also found some blood spatter back in the back

bedroom where the box cutters and the pole were also found.

Based on all the things that we found, the box cutters,

knowing that Chris had been cut, we assumed that could have

been one of the weapons and a pipe found there,

knowing that Chris had blunt force trauma-- it was nice to

know that we probably found our crime scene.

Back in the office, we said,

"What do you know about this?"

She said, something to the effect of, "I'm not the one

"who killed him.

I'm not going down for this, but I knew who did it."

On November 16, 2005, Teayha Webb agreed to give a formal

statement on what she knew about the murder of

Chris Amos Jr...

Teayha said that her boyfriend, Donald Jones, wanted to rob

Chris because Donald Jones had owed Chris money.

He also heard that Chris had made a lot of money,

so they assumed that he was flush with cash.

We also had some information, too, that Chris might have had

a thing for Teayha.

So the plan was for Teayha to get Chris to come down

to her apartment.

Teayha Webb was a honeypot.

Honeypot is a female who lures men to be robbed

by their boyfriend.

So she admitted that she was the honeypot to lure Chris down

to that location.

On September 1, 2005, Donald Jones brought along

his friends, Tony Frye and Keith Bond, to help out.

Police then set out to find Tony Frye and Keith Bond.

It didn't take them long to find Bond and Frye.

They were in the Justice Center on another crime.

I made arrangements for them to be transported over to CIS,

the criminal investigation section.

They both said that they had a part in it.

They said that they had Chris tied up, and that they were

trying to find out where Chris' stash was,

both drugs and money.

They said he was denying that he had anything.

And Jones was taking a cigarette and burning Chris's

arms, forearms with it to try to get him to say where it was.

He was struggling. He was fighting back.

They did this while Teayha Webb's son

was in the next room, Chris was pleading

for his life, and this little boy heard everything.

When they were done, they took everything Chris had.

And it wasn't that much. He had $7 on him.

In fact, the most valuable thing he had were

his Timberland boots. So they took those.

Keith Bond also said that he actually disguised himself

putting on a wig so he wouldn't get noticed.

No one would know who he was when he wheeled

the trash can out.

Bond and Frye admitted that they were there, but they wanted to

minimize what they did.

But for us, for a confession like that, all we need is for

them to admit that they were on scene.

They all said that Donald Jones was the main culprit.

Donald Jones had no qualms about killing somebody, none.

When police picked up 32-year-old Donald Jones,

he claimed he didn't know anything about the murder.

And he said he didn't even know Webb.

But they had found a letter in Webb's apartment with his name.

During the interview, one of the things that we can do is

use evidence that we don't necessarily have as a way to

elicit a certain response.

And we had said that we had fingerprints on a trash bag.

Once we told him that, he started to sob

and admitted that he did it.

No conscience.

It's almost medieval, you know, what he did.

Execution style. Holding somebody down.

I don't think he had a heart.

Whatever he had beating inside of him, it couldn't have

been a heart.

Months later, all four pled guilty.

Donald Jones got a life sentence.

Frye was sentenced to ten years,

and Bond was sentenced to 24 years.

Teayha Webb ended up getting five years of probation for

tampering with evidence.

For Mr. Amos, it's hard to mention his son's name,

because sometimes you mention your child's name, things flash

through your mind subconsciously.

Remember this and that and that.

To mention that name,

that can basically increase the grief.

He's not the same man that he was before his son died.

It's a different person.

That name doesn't mean the same now.

I cannot tell you how much it still

just really hurts to this day to realize that somebody had it

in their heart to kill him.

I just, I still can't figure it out.

I really can't. I loved him dearly.

I still love him to this day.

And what I miss about him most was, for real,

was his smile, man.

He had a crazy little kinda sideways smile.

I miss him, period, man. He was my friend.

Miss everything about the guy, you know what I'm saying?

It was just, that was just my dude, man.

Amen.

May God rest your soul, brother.

We'll see you on the other side, man.

Love you and miss you.