Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Shakara Carter

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

When Shakara Carter is found strangled to death on a dead-end road in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she’s days away from testifying against a serial rapist. But she’s also one of about two dozen sex workers killed in the area over the years…and unlike some of those victims, Shakara’s killer is elusive.  If you have any information about Shakara’s case, please contact the Grand Rapids Police Department at 616-456-3400. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/.Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-shakara-carter/

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And before we jump into today's episode, I just wanted to say thank you guys for the incredible outpouring of support that you've shown Britt since she shared her journey with you all last week. And I'm also so grateful for how supportive you have been of me and the whole Audio Check team as we support her.

If you haven't listened already, there is an update from Britt waiting for you in the feed and Britt got to share what's been going on over the last few months. Honestly, I know it was a little nerve-wracking for her to be so open and honest and vulnerable, but I told her, you guys were gonna be amazing and you freaking were.

You guys are the best kind of community. You are so supportive, so understanding, and it was just love. And I love that about you guys. And I am grateful for every single one of you crime junkies out there. Now, as we mentioned in that update, it is still just gonna be me for the time being

because I wanna make sure these stories keep coming out while Britt takes care of herself. And the story I have for you today is one that I definitely wanna tell because it is about a woman who I can almost guarantee you have never heard of. If you Google her name, you won't even find much. She's one of about two dozen sex workers

killed in Grand Rapids, Michigan over the years. Since there's not a lot of information readily available about this case, we really had to put on our detective hats. So we sent our reporter Nina out to Michigan to dig up what she could. And the more we found, the more questions we had because this story has so many moving parts, but it needs to be told.

This woman is more than a statistic. She was a mother. She had a family that loved her. She was a breast cancer survivor and she matters. This is the story of Shakara Carter. MUSIC It's March of 2007 and in Kent County, Michigan, prosecutors are gearing up for a big trial and hoping to finally close a case, actually multiple cases that have been hanging over

their heads for years. Five women have accused a man named Scott Gordon Payne of sexual assault, starting way back in the late 1980s. And prosecutors are feeling confident about their case, not only are four of the five women set to testify against him. But thanks to one woman named Shakara Carter, it's a slam dunk. It was her report that kind of jumpstarted an investigation into a serial rapist because they linked her case to one that came shortly after it.

And the DNA that they recovered from Shakara's sexual assault exam not only matched Scott, but his DNA then also matched the DNA in three other open cases that weren't even on their radar at the time because they had happened years before. So Shakara testifying is a key part of the case against this guy. She brings all of the pieces of the puzzle together. And in fact, she had already testified against him during a preliminary hearing in December of 2006. Well, at that time, I've been raped before and I haven't report things in, but this one

that just took me by a big shock, I mean, I don't know if it's been a shock, but this one was just devastating to me. And so I told him. It seems like a silly question that I'm going to ask, why did you, why did the sex act occur? Was it because of the transactions, because you expected to be paid or why did it happen? Why did it happen? Because he's a crazy idiot.

According to Grand Rapids Press reporter John Agar, Shakara is actually looking forward to testifying against Scott again because she wants to put this guy in prison. But just three days before his trial is set to begin, at around 7.05 on Friday, March 16, 2007, a disturbing dispatch comes into local police that will throw a wrench in the prosecution's case. A woman heading into work says there's a man lying on the side of the road next to this place called Coding's Plus. That's a painting business where she works.

It's on the 600 block of Chestnut Street, Southwest. She says it doesn't look like this guy's breathing and his clothes are all disheveled, like his pants are down, his shirt is up. Officer Michael Fave and some other cops pull up within a few minutes and sure enough, they see someone on the ground in a snowy patch of grass on the side of the road near the company's mailbox. But the victim that they're seeing isn't a man, it's actually a woman. She's face up with her feet and part of her legs in the roadway and her head is facing

north toward the store. Her pants zipper is down, her sweatshirt is pulled up near her head and her left breast is exposed. Officers quickly check for vital signs, but there are none and she's cold to the touch. They would later learn from her fingerprints that she was 33-year-old Shakara Carter, the star witness in the upcoming trial against Scott. Of course, this catches detective's attention right away. I mean, talk about motive, but there's a catch.

If Scott was involved in her murder, he'd have had to have had help because he's been locked up ever since late 2004 for robbing two banks in Missouri. And even though police know this wouldn't have been the first murder orchestrated behind bars, they also have other avenues to pursue, an avenue that specifically stuck out to Mike from the second he got on the scene. Because when he got there, he got this sense of deja vu that caught his attention. You see, this is not the first time that he's found a woman's body here. The 600 block of Chestnut Street is a desolated dead end, like a side street off a main road

in an industrial part of this city. And Coding's Plus is right at the very end. It's not a road that you drive down unless you have a specific purpose there. You're either going to work or you're up to something. And on March 25, 2001, this is almost six years ago to the day, Mike was one of the responding officers who found 35-year-old Julene Walker at that exact location, also lying in the snow. She had been stabbed to death.

Now, notably, it was clear that Shakara had been strangled, so the cause of death was different. But then being in the same location was just too eerie. To add to this, just a few months ago on Thanksgiving of 2006, the body of another woman, 28-year-old Starkinia Vance was found on a grassy parkway just a quarter of a mile away. She had also been strangled, and police theorized that she had been killed somewhere else and then dumped in that location. Both of those cases are still unsolved.

And like Shakara, Julene was a sex worker. There were reports that Starkinia was too, although it's possible she just hung out in the same areas. Mike has a feeling that, just like Starkinia, Shakara was killed elsewhere. Because even though she's lying in the snow, there are no footprints anywhere near her. But there is a single, fresh tire track about three feet long in a patch of snow near her body. It actually stops just short of her body.

It looks like the driver might have pushed her out of the car, then did a U-turn and went back out toward the main road. Now, they don't know yet what other physical evidence they have to work with. So while the scene is being processed, police turn to the people working at Coatings Plus to learn what they can about the time leading up to Shakara's discovery. The woman who called 911 tells them that she was just coming to work when she spotted the body. She went and got a flashlight to check and make sure since it was dark, which is probably

why she thought it was a man. But once she verified, she said she stayed back and called police. Officers speak with nine other Coatings Plus employees who got to work at various times between like 5.50 and 6.25 am. They all say that they didn't see anything suspicious, certainly none of them saw a body on the road. So police fan out to Canvas the other businesses on Chestnut Street. And it's a good thing they do because it turns out that someone did see something unusual.

An employee from a recycling center tells Officer Mike that he was outside talking on the phone to one of the company's drivers at 6.10 am. And that's when he noticed across the street a car trying to drive up a hill next to Coatings Plus. Now, there's no road on this hill. It's literally a dirt path, a trail that leads up to a wooded area and a railroad overpass. People are not supposed to drive on it, which is why it caught this guy's attention in the first place.

So police wonder if the driver was panicking. If this is the person that put her body there, maybe they were trying to get out of there without doubling back past other businesses. But the employee says that the car couldn't make it up the hill. So the driver had to come back down and headed out the regular way. When an officer walks up the hill to check it out, he sees tire tracks in the dirt similar to the one by Shakara's body. And there's a pile of wood blocking the trail at the top of the hill, and it hasn't

been disturbed. So that's proof to police that the car didn't get all the way up since it would have been knocked over. Unfortunately, the recycling employee didn't get a good look at the vehicle. According to a police report, all he saw were headlights and taillights. What's interesting is that his timing doesn't totally match up with what the Coatings Plus employees say. Because if the driver was leaving around 6.10 am, the woman's body would have been there

around that time too, right? But no one else saw her body around that time as they were coming in. So I don't know if he had the time wrong or if someone else did, but either way, we are still talking about a very tight window here. Police also learn that a truck driver spent the night outside of a hardwood flooring company waiting to unload some lumber in their parking lot, which faces Chestnut Street. But the truck driver had already left by the time officers learned about him. And all they know about him is that he works for a Kentucky-based company called Flatout

Express Inc., and he was hauling a load of wood for another company in that state. While detectives are learning all of this, crime scene techs have been processing this scene. They collect a fresh-looking cigarette butt that they find next to the tire track, along with a hair that's stuck to a bandage on Shakara's right hand. And when she's moved to the morgue for an autopsy, they collect even more evidence. Cell clippings, hairs, swabs, all in hope of finding some foreign DNA to match to an eventual perpetrator.

What happens next has been a little hard for us to piece together. Nina submitted records requests to the Grand Rapids PD back in December of 2021, and we managed to get a couple of redacted reports, but the bulk of the request still hasn't been filled by the time I recorded this. I guess there's like a FOIA backlog in their department or something. But it didn't help that the lead detectives who worked this case are actually retired now and wouldn't talk to us. But we did manage to speak with people who could shed a little light on the case, including

Officer Mike and Grand Rapids Police Chief Eric Winström. Chief Winström joined the department this year, so he doesn't have first-hand knowledge of the case, but he looked over the case file for us, and he says that one of the early steps police take is to try and account for the last few hours of Shakara's life. And right away, they get lucky. They see that an officer had contact with her just the night before, at around 11.30. That would have been Thursday, March 15. Police knew that she was a sex worker, and the officer saw her working downtown.

Now, she wasn't arrested or anything. The cop says that he spoke with her briefly, like, hey, stay out of trouble, that kind of conversation, and that was it. So this doesn't really get them anywhere. That's when detectives decide to interview other local sex workers to see if they have any info or if anything's circulating within their groups. And they know that to do this, the best place to start is on South Division Avenue. According to Ken Kolker's reporting for the Grand Rapids Press, South Division Avenue

has long been known as, quote, prostitution's business address in Grand Rapids, end quote. Many of the other sex workers who were killed over the years worked on South Division, and a lot of them knew each other. So when investigators start asking around, they learn that a woman named Ruth had been telling everyone that she saw Shakara the morning she was killed. It takes a couple of days to track Ruth down, but Chief Winston says that once they find her, she's cooperative. She tells police that she saw Shakara with a client of hers, a white guy in a blue vehicle

maybe around 6.30, 6.35 in the morning on March 16. And the police report says that two unnamed witnesses claimed to have seen Shakara that morning. And according to a police report, there is another witness who recalls seeing Shakara around the same time in a blue car in a parking lot about seven minutes away from Chestnut Street. So that narrative, like her being alive at 6.30, actually does line up with the only other part we know for 100%, which is that she was found at 7 AM.

This would work. Now, there's a note in the police report that Shakara had a white coat, black purse, and cell phone, but none of those things were found with her body. But get this, on Monday, March 19, a man contacts police to let them know that he has her purse. The man tells detectives that he found Shakara's purse leaning upright against a bus stop sign that's right in front of his work site, which is actually just around the corner from Coating's Plus. He said that he found it at around 7.50 AM the same morning that she was killed, not

even an hour after police were called. He says that he went through it to try and identify who owned it, but he didn't have any luck. And it sounds like he contacted police after he saw the murder on the news and realized like, oh my God, this might be evidence. Chief Winston stressed that the man who found the purse was never a suspect. And he also says that some items were missing from the purse, but he won't say what or how police even know that something was missing.

Now the same day that detectives recover the purse, they decide to revisit this theory that maybe Scott was involved, the guy that she was supposed to testify against. And they're looking at it, I mean, even if only to rule out this theory once and for all. So they start delving more into his background to see if he could have gotten someone else to maybe kill Shakara for him while he was locked up. But they learn that this guy's pretty much a loner. He doesn't have a criminal circle or anything like that.

Several records show that he hasn't had any visitors and there's only two phone numbers that he's reached out to. What's strange to me is that Chief Winston says that he can't find any record of investigators actually following up with the people attached to those numbers. He also says there's no record of detectives interviewing Scott about the homicide or even any attempts to interview him, which I was super confused about. But when Nina ran the scenario past a lieutenant that she knows, he said that since Scott was incarcerated and about to go to trial, police would know that he has a lawyer, so their

hands might have been tied when it came to speaking with him directly. Again, I still don't understand why they don't follow up with the contacts or at least attempt, like let him say no or let the lawyer say no, but is what it is. I don't know. And ultimately, here's the thing. Maybe it didn't matter because when it comes to real motive, it just wasn't there for Scott. I mean, his trial got delayed, but it went ahead without Shakara.

I mean, there were still four other victims, all of whom lived to see the trial and three of whom testified. Why would he have only one witness killed when he has all of these others to worry about? Also, the prosecutor was allowed to play audio from Shakara's earlier testimony for the jury. So even though she's not physically there, they got to hear every word that she said. And let's not forget about the DNA. You can't make that go away. Prosecutors say that the odds of it belonging to someone else besides Scott is one in 17.2

billion. I don't even know what that means. On June 1, Scott is found guilty in four of the five cases, including Shakara's. He gets life in prison on top of the federal sentence he's already serving for the bank robberies. So all in all, police just can't connect this guy to Shakara's murder. In fact, according to his trial transcript, the prosecutor specifically tells the jury that he's not a suspect in that case.

But the more they learn about Shakara, the more they learn that there are other men that she has been around that are pretty dangerous. Like this guy named Kim, a 52-year-old registered sex offender who had a previous arrest for kidnapping. Detectives see that just a few months before, like November of 2006, Kim was charged with creating a public disturbance. And Shakara was with him at the time. Apparently, police caught them having sex or doing something sexual because Shakara was

considered a suspect in that case, even though she wasn't charged with anything. For what it's worth, Kim is a white man, which if you remember, Shakara was last seen with a client that was a white man. But Chief Winstram says that Kim wasn't found to be a suspect, although I don't have any details on how or why they ruled him out. Now police had also conducted a bunch of sting operations to catch clients in 2006, and it looks like they revisit some of those people who were arrested back then, but all of those guys were dead ends too.

And June that year, based on what we can tell, it seems like the homicide investigation is pretty much put on the shelf, though to me, there is still a lot of work that could potentially be done to further the case. For instance, Chief Winstram says there's nothing in the case file about detectives trying to locate that truck driver who parked near Chestnut Street overnight. Maybe he saw something or heard something. Either way, someone should have followed up with him. The chief says that leads dried up almost immediately, and detectives were spinning

their wheels. But there was just nothing to pursue. But in and around Grand Rapids at the time, women keep getting killed. Just a few months later, on Wednesday morning, September 5th, it's deja vu all over again. A passerby calls 911 to report a fire in a vacant lot on the southwest side of town, about five minutes from where Shakara was found. When firefighters arrive, they find the body of a woman burning under a tree, and nearby, they find a gas can.

Within a couple of days, the woman is identified as 45-year-old Linda Gardner, who was also a sex worker. We're up to four victims now in this area within a matter of years. All of them are black women, and all of them are sex workers. But even though police classify Linda's death as suspicious, they stop short of calling it a homicide. According to Wood TV reporter Joe LaFergie, the toxicology report reveals cocaine in Linda's system, and because her body was so badly burned, they can't determine the manner of

death. Sergeant Chris Postma, who's also one of the lead investigators on Shakara's case, tells Grand Rapids press reporter Nate Reigns that police have, quote, no sense whatsoever, end quote, that Linda's death is related to Shakara's, Starkinia's, or Juleen's, because Linda's body was the only one set on fire. But we've talked about this on the show before, when we interviewed Lewis Lessinger, a forensic psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He told us that serial sexual murderers will often experiment at crime scenes and do something

with one victim that they didn't do with others. Now, that's not to say that we should assume all murders in the same area are connected. There were other cases of sex workers found murdered that were for sure not connected to Shakara's case. And they know that because when the perpetrator was found, it turns out, like Scott, they were in prison when Shakara was killed. But there is at least one guy who popped up on their radar who was not in prison. And in fact, this guy didn't even have a criminal record.

So he wasn't on police's radar at all. Until the fall of 2008, when a vicious assault links him to a gruesome quadruple homicide and puts him square on police's radar for Shakara's case. Grand Rapids police officer Gene Tobin is working his usual night shift on Thursday, October 16, 2008, driving through the south side of town around 2.40 a.m. And that's when he sees a truck in the middle of the road and next to it, a woman screaming for help as a man beats her with a handgun. The man takes off running and Gene chases the guy, but he loses him.

Luckily, the assailant left his red pickup behind so police impound it. And figuring that he'll need to get around somehow, they tell area cab companies to be on the lookout for a white man wearing a black shirt. And that pays off because at around 6.45 a.m., police get a call from a dispatcher who says someone matching that description just came in to get a cab. He was all sweaty and there were bloodstains on his shirt. Police stop the cab a few blocks away and arrest the passenger, who is 31-year-old Troy Brake.

When investigators speak with the victim, who is a woman named Mary Louise Parker, she tells police that she's a sex worker and Troy had picked her up at around 2 a.m. on Division Avenue. Now, she didn't know him, but he seemed nice enough. So according to Ken Colker's reporting, she got into his pickup and they headed over to a garage next to a vacant house where she brings clients. But he wouldn't pay up front and she asked him to drop her back off. Instead, he grabbed her in the truck.

She fought back and managed to get out, but he chased her with a gun, kicked her and grabbed her hair. She was able to get away again and ran behind a nearby building to hide. She said that she was waiting behind this building quietly. And after a little time had passed, she figured that this guy probably left since he hadn't been able to find her. But when she peeked around the corner of the building, he was there, just staring back at her, which is an image that I cannot get out of my head and gives me full body chills.

He grabbed hold of her and choked her with her own jacket, smashed her face into a picnic table and then raped her. She also held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her, forced her to undress and told her to get back in the truck with him. She screamed for help and didn't think anyone had heard her, but it turns out a man who was outside smoking a cigarette did and he called 911. Although strangely, it sounds like Officer Tobin wasn't actually dispatched. He just happened to be in the area.

Mary Louise was severely injured in the attack. Her neck and face are bruised. She has a broken rib and she even needs to get staples in her head and stitches in her ear, but she is alive. Troy is charged with sexual assault and attempted murder. Police confiscate the gun that he used to beat Mary Louise, which was a.40 caliber Glock. And as detectives go over the case details later that day, that's when they make a startling

discovery. There's a bulletin that's been at their office for a couple of weeks from a department in nearby Ottawa County and the bulletin asked their departments to be on the lookout for a.40 caliber Glock handgun because it had been used in a recent quadruple murder that was unsolved. The victims in that case were Charmaine Zimmer, her son's 20-year-old Jeremy and 18-year-old Tyler and Jeremy's girlfriend, 18-year-old Catherine Brown. They were all found dead in the Zimmer home, which had been set on fire.

But Charmaine and her sons had been shot first while Catherine, who was naked from the waist down, was beaten to death. So now, here they are looking at a.40 caliber Glock used not too far away in another attack. So Grand Rapids detectives call Ottawa County and let them know, hey, we arrested this dude, Troy Brake, earlier today, he had a gun like the one you're looking for. Now at this point, law enforcement in Ottawa had already compiled a list of everyone in a five county radius who owns this specific gun, hundreds of names, including Troy, who does have a concealed carry permit.

According to MLive's reporting, since Troy didn't have a criminal record, he wasn't a high priority for police to check out as they're going through this long list. But now it's a different story because he's put himself at the top of their list in a spectacular way. So they barely hang up the phone before the Ottawa investigators run Troy's name through the Sheriff's database. Maybe it's a long shot, but there could be some connection between him and the four victims.

And when the results pop up on the computer screen, the detective can barely believe his eyes because it turns out that Troy Brake used to live right next door to the Zimmer family. Before the day is even over, police are searching Troy's home where they find another 40 caliber Glock and two spent shell casings. When those casings are compared with the others found at the Zimmer home, it's determined that they were all fired from the same gun. And it was the Glock that they found in Troy's house.

What's wild is Troy had been close with the Zimmer family at one point. He had even moved in with them for a while when he was younger. So police wonder how could he then go and do something so vicious? And back in Grand Rapids, there are even more surprises in store. Because detectives link Troy with another shooting, this one non-fatal, which took place about a month before the quadruple murder on September 1. In this one, Troy had propositioned a sex worker named Gina, and in what seems to be a pattern didn't have any money to pay her.

So according to Grand Rapids press reporter John Tunison, Gina got mad and stole something out of his truck, then rushed over to her friend's waiting car, which was parked nearby. But as she walked over, she heard two clicks and looks back to see Troy pointing a gun at her, and then he fired as she jumped into the car. Luckily, the bullet missed her, but her friend was shot in the arm. Now police know that if any of these allegations are true, let alone all of them, they are dealing with a very dangerous man. And even though Troy lives about 35 minutes north of Grand Rapids, in a different county,

he clearly spends a lot of time in this area. I mean, he certainly knows his way around the sex worker scene, and until September of 2007, he actually worked at a manufacturing plant not even 10 minutes away from where Shakara was found. So by late October, Joe LaFergie reported that Grand Rapids detectives are taking a fresh look at the recent string of sex worker murders. Shakara, Starkinia, and Linda Gardner to see if Troy could be involved. Although it is worth noting that in Starkinia's case, police had a description of a suspect,

and it doesn't look anything like Troy. They got that because a friend had told detective that she saw Starkinia getting into a silvery blue Chevy with a stocky six foot one inch tall black man who spoke with an accent. Now again, they have never said for sure that all of these cases are the work of one man. So you know, there's a possibility that Troy had nothing to do with Starkinia's case, but he could be involved with the others, or he could have just been involved in Shakara's or none of them, or all of them if that sighting by the friend wasn't the killer. I don't know.

Now I wish I could tell you what happened with that quote unquote fresh look that detectives were apparently taking into Shakara and the other women's cases, but I can't because Chief Winston told us there is nothing in her case file to indicate that police ever looked at Troy in connection to her homicide. So I don't know if it just didn't happen, which would be ridiculous. Or if there are details on those investigative efforts in Troy's case file somewhere, maybe he has another alibi, maybe they've already cleared him, but without records, I just don't know.

Ultimately, Troy was convicted for the assault and rape of Mary Louise, and two months later, he goes on trial for the Zimmer murders. He denies killing anyone, but by now prosecutors have a theory about what the motive was. And it was all about Catherine. They alleged that he shot the family so he could rape her, and then he set the house on fire to try and cover his tracks. Catherine was too badly burned for a sexual assault exam. Now, this theory that they came up with is actually backed up by an inmate that Troy

met during his time in jail. The inmate testifies that Troy said he wanted to have sex with Catherine so badly he would have done anything to make it happen, even if it meant getting rid of everyone else in the house. He says that Troy also confessed that he beat Catherine to death instead of shooting her because shooting would have been too good for her. He tells the jury that Troy hates women. He felt like they had mistreated him and that they're only good for one thing, and he says

Troy told him that he liked soliciting sex workers, then refusing to pay them after sex and pistol whipping them when they won't get out of his car. Troy is found guilty of all four murders as well, and after that it looks like the non-fatal shooting charge is dropped. But after he's convicted, things seem to quiet down for a while, until August 8th of 2013, when a man taking a walk with his mother finds the half-knewed body of another woman near a creek on the east side of town. It's the body of another sex worker, 47-year-old Marie Nettles.

The ME determined she had been strangled. There's also a shoe print on her and a little pool of saliva on her thigh because whoever killed her spit on her too. Within a couple of months, MLive's Angie Jackson reports that police have zeroed in on a suspect in her case. 28-year-old DeMarco Carnegie, who had just been released from prison in June after serving time for armed robbery, they connected him to her murder with a license plate reader that put his car about a mile and a half from where Marie's body was found the night before

she was found there. But the biggest thing against him was DNA. Something shows that DeMarco's DNA is on her body, that spit on her thigh, and it was also inside of her. Police believe that they had sex before he strangled her, which I'm sure you could try and write off if you wanted to say that he was a client and it was consensual. But the spit? No.

That's a lot harder to explain, so DeMarco is extradited back to Michigan in 2014 where he's charged with Marie's murder, and it looked like he was planning to go to trial, but then, according to Grand Rapids Press reporter Barton Dieters, he decided to plead guilty. Now, it doesn't seem like police ever considered him in connection with Shakara's case, or at least if they did, Chief Winston says there's no indication of that in her file. As far as we can tell, he wasn't in jail when she was killed, but I don't know if there's any other potential connection between the two of them.

And of note, DeMarco is a black man, well, again, remember, the guy Shakara was supposedly last seen with was white. But 2014 does mark a turning point, because law enforcement finally starts to get answers in some of their unsolved murders, thanks to the Kent County Metro cold case team. They had been resubmitting evidence for lab testing, hoping that advancements in forensic technology plus, you know, a fresh set of eyes in general would get results, and sure enough, it was working. In March that year, the unit announces that they know who stabbed Julene Walker to death

back in 2001. He was a man named John Robbins Lasinski. He was 66 at the time, and he was a suspect in Julene's murder back when it happened, because he looked like the composite sketch. But he denied killing Julene, actually, he denied knowing her in the first place. He wouldn't consent to a DNA test, and even after investigators got a warrant to obtain his DNA, there was no match. But years later, detectives resubmitted everything, and the advanced testing reveals a link.

But unfortunately, it's too late to charge him with anything, because he died of lung cancer in 2004. Instead, detectives just had to present their findings to the DA's office, which concluded that in all likelihood, John killed Julene, so case closed. Now, obviously, John dying in 2004 means he couldn't have killed Chikara. But a few months after closing Julene's case, the team puts another homicide to bed. Starkinia Vance's case. Historians say a man named Anthony Curtis Gundy strangled her in November of 2006.

And this was not a shock to police. Anthony had become a top suspect right after the murder, and for good reason. His DNA was found on Starkinia's body, even though he denied knowing who she was. Now, you're probably thinking like, okay, they have the DNA, why are we waiting till now? I think part of the problem was, because Starkinia may have been involved in sex work, police couldn't prove that the DNA meant Anthony killed her. However, when the investigators reopened the case years later, they revisit some surveillance

footage that they had of a silvery blue car that Starkinia's friend mentioned. And they're able to connect that car to Anthony, which is just like a good reminder. It's not always DNA we're waiting for in these old cases, sometimes just going back and doing the legwork works. Now, the prosecutor reviews their findings in this case. And according to Fox 17 reporter Rob Westaby, the prosecutor considers it closed. But again, it's too late to charge Anthony with anything because he died of respiratory failure within a year of Starkinia's murder that was back in August of 2007.

Even as these other cases were getting solved, Shakara's case remains open. Her evidence was resubmitted for DNA testing in 2014, and an unknown DNA sample was found. So I'm not sure where, but I do know it was entered into CODIS, but there is still no resolution. Chief Windstrom did tell us that as far as he knows, Anthony was ruled out as a suspect in Shakara's case. But again, we're left with kind of incomplete information because he couldn't locate any records to confirm exactly how he was ruled out, whether it was strictly through DNA or

if there are any other reasons. He says that he reached out to the Michigan State Police Crime Lab after we contacted him and asked them to review their records. He says if there's any evidence in her case that wasn't tested against Anthony's DNA, they're gonna actually do that. We haven't heard any updates by the time I recorded this, but we're gonna be checking back in with them to see what happens. Now speaking of unsolved cases, Grand Rapids has had its share.

We analyzed a bunch of news coverage and records and came up with a list of two dozen women who were murdered and another four who went missing in and around the area over the last few decades. We were looking for cases that might be similar to Shakara's so we didn't count domestic homicides. Many of the victims on our list were sex workers, and in about half of the cases we found, a suspect was eventually named or convicted, 11 men altogether. We researched all of them to see if we could find any connection to Shakara's murder

and we were able to rule out nine of them for sure, eight of whom were in prison and one who was dead. Only two of them, Anthony and DeMarco, were alive and as far as we know, not in jail in March of 2007. Now Troy Brake's victims were not on our list because of the circumstances of the case, but we've also seen no documentation that he has been ruled out or how. By all accounts, he was a free man at the time who clearly had a violent temper. And FYI, we reached out to him through the prison email system but never heard back.

Now this doesn't mean that any of these guys killed Shakara, after all Anthony has apparently been ruled out and to my knowledge DeMarco was never a suspect to begin with, but no matter what her case deserves another look, there is a family still grieving. We spoke with Shakara's stepmother, Carlotta DeGrate, and we also spoke with her oldest daughter, Brianna, and they told us that Shakara had a lot of struggles. She had substance use disorder and didn't have custody of her children and she had trouble with depression and anxiety, but her family says that she was a warm, loving woman with a bright smile and a silly sense of humor.

Brianna was adopted when she was little and since reuniting with her biological family members a few years ago, she's heard a lot of stories about Shakara, good and bad. And the common thread that runs through people's memories of her is that even on her worst days, she was a bright light, the kind of person who brought others together. Carlotta says Shakara had started going to church a few months before her death after a successful breast cancer operation. She really wanted to turn her life around and be with her kids and the lack of resolution knowing that her murderer has never been held accountable is a pain that her family still

lives with every day. And we hope that they don't have to live with this pain forever, that maybe you might be able to help. So if you have any information about the murder of Shakara Carter, please reach out to the Grand Rapids Police Department at 616-456-3400. You can find all of our source material and pictures for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast and I'll be back next

week with a brand new episode. Crime Junkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck, do you approve?