[Joe Kenda] It's August 2nd of 2010.
We're in Washington, D.C.
And the worst part of DC is an area
known as the Seventh Ward.
The Seventh Ward is high crime.
It is violent. It is drug dealers.
All right, bye, Tisha.
-Bye. -Bye.
[Joe] Latisha Frazier, she's 18 years old.
She's a fry cook in a McDonald's
in the Seventh Ward.
Latisha's mother and her sister
are waiting for Latisha to come home.
So, it was planned that everybody would meet up,
and she's supposed to be there.
But she didn't show up, and we calling and calling.
Phone's just going straight to voicemail.
There was too many signs that just wasn't normal.
[reporter 1] Developing in the district tonight...
[reporter 2] Latisha Frazie disappeared...
[reporter 3] ...after leavin her job at McDonald's.
[reporter 4] Latisha Frazie went missing last summer.
We classified this as a critical missing person.
The fact that my little sist is missing, it's a stressful situation.
[reporter 5] Police have no yet recovered a body.
That's what I feel truthfull that it's foul play.
[police sirens approaching]
Where is Latisha? No one seems to know.
[clock ticking]
[Joe] I spent my career closing murder cases.
But I'm not the only one who answered the call.
It takes a rare breed to solve the unsolvable.
To catch a ruthless killer.
To find justice for the dead
That's what it takes, to be an American detective
[producer] Jackie Middleton. Marker.
[Jackie] I joined the Metropolitan Police Department
in October of 1986.
It's every officer's desire to become a detective.
The top, top tier.
A homicide detective gets to investigate
the most heinous crime there is.
You get to hunt the beasts.
[Mitch] Jackie Middleton's a great detective.
And Jackie was great because of her rapport with people.
She can calm people.
She was passionate.
She knew how to turn a switch off and on when it was needed,
and she could be tough.
At the time, I had transferred from homicide
and was working in the Seventh District.
[phone ringing]
Middleton.
[Joe] Jackie Middleton was a well-experienced
missing persons investigator
and a well-experienced homicide detective.
She's summoned to the front lobby
of the precinct building
to meet Latisha's mother, and her sister and the fathe
[mother] Do you have kids?
[father] Go get somebody that can help me!
[mother] Come on now, I mean...
-Our daughter is missing. -I understand.
Hey, hey.
[Jackie] So, I spoke with the family,
and they were complaining about Latisha being missing.
[Joe] They are more than alarmed.
They need help to find their loved one.
And the most obvious place to look for the help
is the police department.
Y'all come with me. Y'all come on to the back,
I'll help you find your daughter. Y'all, come on. Come on back.
And that was the beginning of the relationship between
the Campbell-Fraziers and myself.
[Barry Campbell] So, we set out and Jackie talked to us
She kinda calmed us down, and, you know,
made us feel comfortable about
them looking into our daughter's case.
First question we always ask is,
has she ever ran away?
[Caroline Frazier] We said, "No, she never ran away,
'cause that's not Tisha, you know?"
Tisha always came home when she got off work.
And did what she had to do for Diamond and everything.
Who's Diamond?
[Latoya] Tisha's daughter.
[Latisha] I'mma get you!
[giggling]
Oh... Ah!
Latisha left behind a daughter, Diamond,
who was three at the time.
[Barry] Oh, Diamond.
Her and her mother was like a team.
The only time she wasn't with her mother
is when her mother was at work or school.
But outside of that they was together
all the time, hooked to her hip.
[Joe] When you're the mothe of a small child,
you come home to care for that child.
If she's not home,
it's because she can't come home.
Nobody leaves a child behind. Nobody.
No, something's definitely happened.
Okay, listen, guys. We'll find her.
The concern is, is that she's not missing,
but she's been harmed in some way.
I treated this case as if it was a murder
from the very beginning.
Thank you.
[Joe] We've gotta proceed quickly
to find out where this girl is.
The longer she's missing, the more danger she's in.
[softly] Thank you.
[Jackie] And so, first thin that I thought we needed to
was speak to the last person who saw her.
So, Middleton goes to the McDonald's,
speaks to the manager.
We wanted to find out if she had any problems
with anyone on the job.
Were there any customers she was having issues with?
Latisha? She's one of my best employees.
[Joe] They all like Latisha
They admire her for her willingness
to advance herself.
[Latoya] She worked hard.
Once she graduated high school,
she wind up working for McDonald's.
And also she was getting her Culinary Arts degree.
She loved cooking, so I know being a chef
was one of her things that she wanted to do eventually.
Did Latisha have any problems here last night?
Nothing I can think of.
[Joe] Nothing that's out of the ordinary.
One co-worker sees her leave to go to the bus,
as is usual.
So, we receive information that she got on the P bus,
which is the bus that she rode home all the time.
Detective Middleton, Metro PD.
So, Middleton identifies the driver on duty that night.
Yeah, I just want to know, have you seen this girl?
[driver] Yeah, she rides the bus all the time.
[Jackie] Do you remember seeing her last night?
[Joe] The bus driver says th she was with a man.
Now, that's interesting.
So, who is this man?
Middleton goes back to the family
with the description provided by the bus driver,
and the mother immediately says, "Oh, that's her boyfriend,
Rianel Mills."
And that he rides the bus with her sometimes.
-How was work? -[groans]
They would always be together,
they kinda, like, grew up together.
[Joe] Something goes wrong
between people that are romantically involved,
it can be a very emotional, and thus,
a very dangerous thing.
Historically, when you have cases like this,
it's the boyfriend or the husband.
[Mitch] That's the first person you're going to look at,
probably 9.5 times out of 10, it is that person.
[Joe] So, Middleton finds her boyfriend.
He's also very concerned,
because this is out of character for Latisha
to not make contact.
I need you to tell me about the meet-up
with Latisha on the bus.
After work, she normally get on the bus with me.
Ride the bus every day.
[Jackie] Apparently he had met her, coming from work.
She said she was going to meet some friends.
She got in the area of 22nd Street,
and he continued to go home.
It is her custom to call him every night,
to say that she got home safely.
But that night of August 2nd, she never called.
You willing to take a polygraph test?
Yes.
[Jackie] I am not the perso that did the polygraph.
The polygrapher views the case,
and they ask questions about,
you know, when's the last ti they saw them,
do you know what happened,
did you cause the disappearance?
Things of those nature.
There was no deception.
There was nothing that raised the radar
that this is our guy.
We did verify his story, so things were lining up.
Can you think of anybody who may know where Latisha is?
-Did you talk to Marcus? -Who's Marcus?
Diamond's daddy.
He is the biological father of Diamond.
He thus becomes a suspect.
Say bye to Daddy.
[Mitch] Even if the father is not dating her at the tim
there's gonna be disputes, because the child is involve
So as a detective, you most definitely
want to first start there.
So, Marcus, what have you been doing?
Let's go ask him.
Middleton's interview with Latisha's boyfriend
yields the identity of someone else.
The father of Latisha's child, Diamond
So, Middleton needs to find Marcus,
and see what explanation he has
for the disappearance of Latisha Frazier.
We went to his house, and he was interviewed.
Marcus, so, what was your relationship with Latisha like?
It was fine.
[Jackie] They were trying to co-parent,
um, you know, their children
They had this baby when they were, like,
15 and 16 years old.
So they're doing the best they can.
Were y'all having any problems
over Diamond or anything like that?
Nah, everything was cool.
[Joe] He's very cooperative
and willing to submit to any testing whatsoever.
We were able to get him to take a polygraph.
And he passed that with flying colors.
[Jackie] We talked to a lot of people.
We couldn't find anybody tha said that it was volatile,
or there was any issues,
or that he would have done anything to her.
So, Middleton has no reason to believe that
he has anything to do with
her disappearance. Good for him.
[Jackie] So, after we ruled out the obvious,
we start looking to people that she trusted.
Her boyfriend said she got off the bus,
communicated that she was gonna stop and see some friends.
So, naturally we wanna talk to these kids
that she was supposed to be going to see.
Middleton has determined a group of friends exist.
They listen to music, they play video games.
They all like Latisha.
They're all friendly with her.
They are Brian Gaither, Johnnie Sweet, and Lanee Bel
Did you guys see Latisha the night she disappeared?
No. She never showed up.
And of course, nobody didn't see her,
she never made it to the apartment.
So, Latisha, was she having any problems with anybody?
No, Tisha was cool with everybody.
[Latoya] She was never involved in, like, craziness
She loved to have fun,
always kept a smile on her face, like,
even at a moment where she might have been hurting,
she still smiling.
Everybody said that Latisha Frazier lit up a room.
[Barry] She just smiled all the time, and, you know
she was really friendly to people,
and they gravitated to that.
[Johnnie] Tisha had her stuff together, man.
Doesn't make sense.
Everybody painted her to be
a very genuine, nice, caring, responsible young lady.
[Joe] All Middleton has learned
is how concerned everyone is
but nobody really has any knowledge.
Latisha has vanished.
And no one seems to know how that might have happened.
In a case like this,
what makes it even more difficult,
you have a four-year-old chi
who wants to know where her mother is,
and you can't tell her.
You'd love to be able to, but you cannot.
[Barry] There's a lot of emotional things
that are going on within her
And you wanna help but, like, you really can't
But she's missing that, and I'm...
I know that took a toll on her.
[Joe] The longer it takes to find her,
the less likely it becomes
that she will be found unharmed.
Someone has done something awful to Latisha Frazier.
So, we started interviewing people in the neighborhood.
[Mitch] Canvassing the neighborhood is very important.
Hey, guys.
Because you never know who may have seen something.
Just wanna know if you've seen this girl.
[Joe] In a neighborhood like the Seventh Ward,
the code of silence is a problem.
Never tell the police anything.
[Jackie] The Seventh District's
probably the roughest area of D.C.
It's where the most violent calls come from,
majority of the shootings, majority of your homicides.
[Mitch] There's always been a lot of violence
in that particular community
And people don't talk to the police.
There is a concern of being retaliated against
for cooperating with law enforcement.
You don't wanna get involved with the police,
you don't wanna bring any light to yourself,
so you just say you don't know.
So, we started posting flyers
in the area that she kinda frequently hung around.
[Latoya] We stood out on the streets placing flyer
and to people in their cars
um, people walking in the street.
[Caroline] We was all over.
We were just throwing them around,
putting them up everywhere.
[Joe] Flyers with tear-off phone numbers
to Crime Stoppers.
Anonymous reporting of information.
You can even get a reward.
And no one's gonna ask your name.
But very shortly after we started putting them up,
people would snatch them down.
[Barry] Every day we would post flyers,
and we would come back the next day,
they all would be gone.
It didn't make sense to me.
Why would you pull down flyers of a missing person?
Somebody's trying to find her.
She has family.
She has siblings.
She has a mother, she has a father, she has a child.
So, we was like, "Okay, what's up with this?
Who is it that doesn't want us to figure this out?"
[Joe] Middleton becomes immediately alarmed.
Somebody wants this investigation to go away.
Because they're responsible for it.
Someone has been tearing down the flyers
posted around the neighborhood asking for the whereabouts
of Latisha Frazier,
and/or knowledge of her disappearance.
We knew that someone there knew.
But we were absolutely getting nothing. No breaks.
[Joe] So, Caroline, Latisha's mother,
makes a decision,
it's time to get the press involved in this.
[Caroline] About a week or t after she went missing,
that's when Sam Ford came in the picture.
[Gordon Peterson] Latisha Frazier disappeared in August.
D.C. Bureau Chief Sam Ford is live
in Southeast Washington with that story. Sam.
Well, Gordon, we are on 18th and Trenton Place
in Southeast Washington,
where 18-year-old Latisha Monique Frazier disappeared.
[producer] Sam Ford, take one. Marker.
I'm Sam Ford.
I'm the principal reporter for stories in Washington, D.C.
The family would call saying that
this young girl had disappeared,
so I thought, "This is interesting. Let's go."
[Latoya] Sam Ford had came through
and he was actually doing a news clip on us.
And I mean, he's a really good guy.
[Sam] Caroline Frazier, the missing woman's mother,
was back at Seventh Police District headquarters
again today,
joined by a host of family members and friend
who desperately want to kno where Latisha Frazier is.
I mean, I've been out there every day, like I said.
[Joe] Caroline's gonna prow these streets
with Sam Ford, and a camera
And see what they can learn
that Middleton would never have access to,
because of the code of silence involving the police.
It was a lot of doors we knocked on.
And asked them, did they see Tisha out here, and all that.
[Sam] We got to know these people,
we saw how serious they were
We felt for them, you know?
They had the love for their child.
And they just kept pushing, and pushing and pushing.
[Jackie] While they continue to stay in the streets,
we were trying to fish it ou
trying to figure out who it was, but we...
We just couldn't break anybody.
[Sam] You know, we kept covering this story.
And at one point,
somebody started doing, like, ugly stuff on Facebook.
Not only do we have people tearing down the posters,
now her sister, Latoya, is receiving threats
via social media.
They're awful threats.
[Latoya] Somebody made the Facebook page.
It said "Monique Frazier,"
using her middle and last name.
And they started in with the threats,
until I had, like, a whole book of threats.
[Sam] January 13th, 10:15pm
[reading message]
[Caroline] They was nasty.
They called us everything in the book.
I'mma be honest, like, I was terrified.
Some of those messages was, like, horrific.
[Sam] " Her black [bleep] has been gone.
Keep the flyers out of the [bleep] hood.
We took them down."
The threat indicates that Latisha Frazier
is already dead.
It's clear to Middleton this is not a missing person,
this is a homicide.
[Jackie] We were blown away
There's somebody who is saying that they know
that she's deceased.
So of course we wanna interview that person.
How do you know? What's your involvement?
[Joe] So, Middleton uses the IT services
of the police department
to recover the IP address
of where these threats originated.
They find the location wher this IP is addressed.
We gear up, we go out to this address.
[sirens approaching]
[tires screech]
[Joe] If their suspicions are correct,
they may be finding a murderer there.
You've got to be kidding me.
[Jackie] We get there, it's a vacant lot.
There's no house there where this address
-should have been. -They find nothing.
[Jackie] It's like somebody used
an address that did not exis
[Joe] This is the curse of the Internet.
It gives everyone anonymity
The most dangerous of all things.
Step out here in the sunlight,
tell me your name and your mother's name,
and then repeat what you were going to say a minute ago.
And people won't do it.
[Jackie] And then after tha
we continued to pass out flyers,
try to interview people.
But we came up with nothing.
[Joe] This investigation has gone on
for almost six months.
There is hardly any hope
that Latisha Frazier is alive and well.
I think after those months of passing out flyers,
my mind at that point just went to mush,
because it's like,
I knew something had to happen.
All I could do was just close my eyes
and really pray.
'Cause I couldn't do nothing else.
No one gets to play God.
The family deserves to know
what happened to their daughter.
Every family does.
[Jackie] You had this wonderful person missing,
and nobody's saying anything
You have to put your boots to the ground, as I say,
level to the pavement.
Talk to people.
Eventually you're gonna reac the heart of someone.
Someone's heart strings will be pulled.
And they will tell you what you need to know.
[Chris Kavanaugh] In Januar of 2011,
Caroline Frazier was still on local news,
passing out missing person flyers for Latisha Frazier.
[phone ringing]
Middleton.
On every flyer we put out,
"Call Crime Solvers with your tip."
Okay, hold on. What did they say exactly?
So, someone called in and gave a tip.
[Joe] They say they know
what happened to Latisha Frazier.
And further, they know who's responsible for it.
And everything just started falling together,
from that one call.
I need this girl down here right now.
[Joe] One thing that is certain about murder cases
the truth finds a way of escaping,
despite Herculean efforts to prevent it.
It still finds a way.
[phone ringing]
Middleton.
[Joe] Middleton is contacte by an anonymous informant.
They say they know what happened
to Latisha Frazier.
[Jackie] We were able to track that person down,
and basically told them that, you know,
it was important that you help.
Latisha's family need to know
what happened to their daughter.
They couldn't give, you know,
the whole spiel of what happened.
But they could give us who was there.
And I just... just couldn't believe who was involved.
I was shocked.
The informant says
that Latisha Frazier was murdered by her own friends.
Johnnie Sweet, Brian Gaither and Lanee Bell.
The very same friends who Middleton interviewed
and put on a performance of no knowledge of the event.
I was in awe, because these people were her friends.
I heard there was some more people there.
[Joe] The informant says there were three other peopl
that were present at the time.
So, a total of six people.
It's not common where you have a murder
that is committed by six individuals.
What are the odds of that?
Thank you.
[Chris] They had different degrees of culpability.
But arrest warrants were obtained for all six.
You needed a big team of detectives
to bring them in, round them up.
[Joe] When you plan an arrest like this,
the first thing is surveillance.
You gotta put eyes on these people.
You can't guess where they are, you have to know.
That him over there?
[Jackie] Mmm-hmm.
That's our boy.
The arrest teams fan out.
[clicks radio] We got eyes on the suspect.
[clicks radio] Okay. Let's make our move.
Coordinate it on a radio, and it's time to hit it.
And they apprehend everybody at the same moment.
-Hands in the air, Johnnie. -Get on the ground!
[shouting]
Show them your hands! Police!
Police, down on the ground! Show them your hands!
[sirens approaching]
Get on the ground now.
Down on the ground!
Now, down, on the ground.
Get on the ground.
[Joe] Everyone is marched ou in handcuffs,
placed in a police car,
driven to an interrogation room,
where they are alone.
[police radio chatter]
There is zero opportunity to discuss
what they're going to say with anyone,
other than the police.
So, how do you wanna do this?
[Joe] Middleton is taking a calculated risk
by rounding these people up
They don't have a provable charge against anybody.
They need somebody to run their mouth.
We're just gonna have to talk to them one at a time.
It only has to start with one.
You break the surface tension of the glass,
and the glass crumbles.
The very same thing with humans.
Break the surface tension..
The lies fold.
All right, Johnnie. I'm gonna need you to tell me
what you know about what happened to Latisha Frazier.
I got nothing for you, man.
I told you guys, I haven't seen her.
I never saw her the night she disappeared.
Mmm-hmm.
[Chris] Many of the individuals, at first,
said they had no idea what they were talking about
They had this code of silence.
[Mitch] It was amazing that these young people
were able to keep it quiet that long.
Because young people run their mouths all the time.
I mean, all the time.
That's the one you need to crack right there.
Why do you say that?
'Cause I know her.
I told them that this young lady,
oddly enough, was a member of my church at that time.
Anneka Nelson was her name.
Jackie was telling us how to use church to our advantage
to get her to confess.
She's religious. She has a sense of right and wrong.
Pursue that.
Listen, young lady.
I don't know how involved you were exactly.
But I do know that you were there, so,
I know that this is tearing you up inside.
But trust me, the truth will set you free.
Okay.
She can't deal with this anymore.
She has to tell them the truth.
Okay, you have the floor. What happened?
Tisha came over to Johnnie's apartment
after she got out of work.
[Joe] She comes over to say hello to her friends
There's a confrontation that immediately occurs.
She is accused of stealing $900 in cash
out of Johnnie Sweet's apartment.
She is then immediately assaulted.
We all started hitting on her.
And things just got out of hand.
[Jackie] It started off with the girls assaulting he
and then the guys got involved.
Then they all started hitting her, started kicking her.
[Joe] It's an absolutely savage attack.
Something beyond the pale.
She was moaning, so they put a sock in her mouth.
[Mitch] They put duct tape over her mouth.
They put a pillowcase over her head.
You place her in a closet,
you leave her there. I mean, how she gonna breathe?
What happened to Latisha's body?
I don't know. Um...
They got rid of the body somehow.
[Jackie] There's no body, so now we have to prove
that person we're talking about
is the person that was there.
It's very important to find physical evidence.
[Joe] We need to find something, like blood,
like part of Latisha Frazier
It's critical to the case. Absolutely critical.
So, Middleton takes the CSI crew with her
to Johnnie Sweet's apartment
And they go over this apartment
with a fine tooth comb.
If you don't clean up properly,
there's always gonna be evidence that's left behind
[Chris] They sprayed a chemical
all throughout the bathroom
to be able to see if they could find
any traces of organic material.
Hit the lights.
[Chris] But they couldn't locate any.
There was evidence that the defendants
had used bleach to clean up,
and bleach ordinarily will destroy forensic material.
So we thought that our chanc
of being able to find something was very slim.
What about in here?
[Mitch] Nothing.
[Joe] The floor, looking at it, had been cleaned,
thoroughly with something.
The difficulty is, blood has a tendency to seep.
It seeps between floor cracks.
Between wall board and the floor.
All right, well, cut up the floor.
[Chris] It was a big production.
I remember that the evidence technicians
had to have someone bring a circular saw
to literally saw a hole in the floor,
so that we could try to use it for forensic testing.
[saw turns on]
So, if there is blood in this closet,
they're gonna find it.
[Jackie] When you have concrete evidence to say yes,
it was her, she was here.
It's almost like the smoking gun.
[Joe] After six months of effort,
now we are two inches away
from putting these people in prison.
But we have to get those last two inches. We must.
Or nobody's going to jail.
Well, this is a six-month investigation,
involving some very unpleasant people
who have already lied to the police a number of times.
And now one of them confesses.
[Chris] Anneka Nelson, she came forward
and told the police what she knew
about what had happened that day.
[Joe] But there has to be evidence
in support of your confessio
Which in this case is traces
of Latisha Frazier in that closet.
The forensic search is everything to this case.
[sirens in distance]
Heard back from forensics.
Well, I'll be damned.
[Joe] Middleton is thrilled to discover that
the CSI team has recovered human blood
from the closet, under the floor.
So, you need to do a comparison
to see if this blood is related to Latisha Frazier.
Well, how do you do that
if Latisha Frazier isn't here any longer?
[Joe] So, Middleton goes to the apartment
where she lived, to recover some of her personal things
to get a DNA sample from her toothbrush,
her hairbrush, or any other device.
We moved, so we had to get rid of that kind of stuff.
[Joe] There is nothing remaining
that belonged to Latisha Frazier
that might have some DNA sample on it.
But that doesn't mean you're out of luck.
There may be another way.
You can take DNA from a family member,
to see if there was a match with the DNA recovered.
So, they was gonna swab us for the DNA.
[Chris] At the time in 2010
I had not heard of using the parental links
in a no-body case to try to establish
the existence of a homicide.
This was one of the first times where that happened.
[Joe] So, a cheek swab is taken from the mother,
one from the father.
When that goes through the laboratory
and comes back, it is in fact a match.
The blood in that closet
is the blood of Latisha Frazier.
That is no question.
[Latoya] I already knew tha something happened to her,
but to get the confirmation
that she's actually gone, like,
my heart could have dropped to my feet.
Like, my sister's gone. You...
How do you get another little sister?
That doesn't happen.
You know? So it kind of tore me up a lot.
[Joe] When Middleton first talks to these three people
Bell, Sweet, and Gaither,
she knows little or nothing about this case.
Now we have a different circumstance.
We had a sense of what happened.
Now we had to corroborate that.
So, the detectives then go to Brian Gaither.
He was a little bit of a leader of the group.
[Brian] I don't know, man, I...
I don't know what happened to that girl.
[Joe] They all think they're smart.
They're gonna talk their way out of this.
No you're not. No you're not.
You're talking to an experienced homicide detective.
Not some guy on a city bus.
And they're gonna pick at you until you start to bleed.
Then we're gonna see how smart you are.
We know Latisha died inside of Johnnie's apartment.
And we know that you put her in the closet.
[Jackie] When you hit people with facts,
you can't refute the facts.
I believe the more they realized
that we had information,
that's what helped make them start cracking.
Look, man...
She wasn't supposed to die or nothing.
[Joe] Brian Gaither realize
there's no way out of this for him.
And he confesses his involvement
and tells the story as to what happened.
Johnnie said Tisha owed him 900 bucks.
So he had to teach her a lesson.
[Mitch] The plan was for Johnnie Sweet
to get her over there,
and he had some young ladies who was part of their little crew,
who were going to beat her up.
They invite her over to the apartment,
which is not uncommon.
Hey, what's up, y'all? I got some fries if anyone's hungry.
Why y'all slamming doors?
Shut up, bitch.
[coughing]
[Joe] And before anything can be said,
an assault begins,
with Latisha Frazier as the focus.
[Latisha coughing]
[screaming and sobbing]
And it just went out of control.
[Joe] It's like watching a group of jackals
attack an animal in the wild
The pack mentality.
It's frightening. Humans can be extremely frightening.
What did you do?
I put her in the sleep hold.
[Joe] Gaither picks her up with his forearms
under her chin,
where you restrict the airway until the person passes out.
He then tapes a sheet over her head,
and puts her in a closet.
They go check on her a little while later,
and discover that she's dead.
So now, they have a dead body in the closet.
Now they're in panic mode. "What are we gonna do?"
We put her in the bathtub.
The bathtub. Why?
'Cause we were supposed to cut her up.
[Joe] Johnnie Sweet suggest that they dismember her bod
so it can be disposed of.
He attempts to do this with a kitchen knife.
Neither of these people understand
how difficult that is.
[Jackie] It just becomes a disaster.
They can't dismember her.
So they put her in a tub, like a storage tub,
and place her in a closet.
So now, got to get rid of the body.
We put her body in a dumpster.
A dumpster?
It's just so heartless.
[Mitch] Oh, wow. That was.. I was shocked.
That these young people just say,
"Let's just throw her body in the dumpster."
That was... that was just coldness.
[Jackie] It was cruel the way they did her.
Nobody deserves that.
But especially not this young lady.
Now, Middleton is faced with trying to recover her remains.
[Jackie] We learned that the trash from that dumpste
led us to a landfill down in Southern Virginia.
[Joe] Now, it's been in thi landfill for over six months
which means it's buried unde hundreds of feet of garbage
Hundreds of feet.
The most dangerous thing about a landfill
is it produces methane gas.
[Chris] The specialist said that given the dangers
they ultimately would not engage in
a landfill excavation.
The Fraziers and Campbells
did not get the proper burial for their daughter.
That was... [laughs humorlessly]
...outrageous. It wasn't fair to none of us.
I don't feel like nobody deserve to
have to lay to rest in a trash landfill.
Like, that's just...
Developing in the district tonight, a guilty plea
from the man accused of killing teenager, Latisha Frazier.
Prosecutors said they had planned
to use ABC7 news clips
against 25-year-old Brian Gaither.
We shot this video as we followed the victim's famil
leafleting the neighborhood where she disappeared
in August 2010.
Gaither put his arm around Frazier's mother,
offered to let her search this apartment,
where he now confesses he and five others
attacked Frazier and choked her to death.
[Jackie] We believe that she was in that room
when the mom was actually in the unit looking for her.
But I didn't know and I didn't smell nothing,
so I figured, like, you know, she ain't here.
That's the part that's just sickening to me.
Truthfully. That's just crazy.
He actually hugged my mom and said, "Ma, you know,
if I knew where you daughter was,
you know I'd let you know."
So for me, I'm just like...
What type of people are you?
[Joe] Johnnie Sweet maintained his silence,
refused to make a statement
He was found guilty of first-degree murder
and sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Gaither was also sentenc to life in prison.
Lanee Bell, she was sentence to three years,
because she was not physically involved
in the event itself.
[Chris] The rest of the defendants
had different degrees of culpability,
Anneka Nelson being the leas
and Kamal Hassan and Cinthya Proctor
being somewhere in the middl
They received between 18 and 52 years
depending on their culpability.
[Latoya] I mean, I was glad that they caught somebody,
but they can never serve a sentence enough
that I would feel is justice for us losing her life.
[Jackie] I mean, she was a young lady.
A kid pretty much. She was 18 years old.
And she was doing the best that she could.
And at the end of the day,
she lost her life over nothing.
Did $900 even exist? Probably not.
There was absolutely no evidence, ever,
that she had stolen the money.
In fact, she was the only one out of all of them
who had a job.
I didn't believe that one bit.
'Cause I know my daughter.
So if she working every day,
she don't need to steal from nobody.
So, what is the motive for this crime?
Rage, anger, jealousy?
Something was said they didn't like?
Who knows?
[Latoya] I really wish that
everything happened differently.
I wish she was still here.
You know, they took her away from so many people.
I'm grateful to have my niec
Like, she's so beautiful, and they look like twins.
Like, she gonna grow up and look just like her mom,
so I'm grateful for that.
Miss her being here. Miss her smiling.
And I think about her every day.
[Barry] We still celebrate her life every year.
And, you know, she's not forgotten.
You know, she won't be, ever.
You know?
[Joe] Detective Middleton was emotional
when I spoke with her about this case,
because you get that way.
There are certain cases
that just never actually go away.
They will always be with her. It's just the way it is.
It is the most difficult part of police work.