Chapter Text
1. Akilah Wilson's Case:
- At 3:07 p.m. on March 21st 2005, 26-years-old Akilah Wilson was last seen walking home from grocery store along Monmouth Park Station with a friend, Mari Ibarra. Where they went to had a lunch at a cafe nearby. After Akilah telephoned her father at 3:47 p.m. to say she would be home in half an hour, the two women left the café at 4:05 p.m., with Akilah walking home alone. She was last seen three minutes later walking along Monmouth Park Station, by a friend of her sister who was waiting at a bus stop.
- When Akilah failed to return home, she was reported missing to the police at 7:00 p.m. A nationwide search for her followed, with 100 police officers and helicopters searching fields, streets and rivers around Wiskayok. Detectives who had investigated the abduction of Robin Hill were called in to help, Natalie Scatorccio and Van Palmer. Police and the Wilson family made many appeals for information, including a reconstruction on the NBC’s Crime & Court.
- The Crime & Court appeal included a direct appeal to Wilson, suggesting that she may have run away from home rather than fallen into the hands of an abductor or murderer. Her mother expressed hope that her daughter had run away, but said that she could not think of a reason why she would want to do so.
- A week after Wilson’s disappearance, the police stated that she was probably not taken by force. They reasoned that while she was unlikely to have gone off with someone she did not know of her own free will, no-one had come forward who had witnessed a struggle despite a number of apparent sightings of her prior to her disappearance. This suggested the possibility that she had willingly entered the home or vehicle of someone she knew.
- April 23rd 2005, the discovery of a body in the Ashby Creek prompted media speculation that the body might be that of Wilson, but the body was identified the following day as that of 73-year-old Taisie Smith, who went missing in March 2004 and whose death was not believed to be suspicious. In June 2005, despite further searches, the offer of a $100,000 reward by national tabloid newspaper Washington Post and her parents continuing to send text messages to her mobile telephone in hope of a reply, Wilson remained missing. That month, police told her parents that she was probably dead.
- September 18th 2005, human remains were discovered by mushroom pickers in Hartshorne Woods, Wiskayok, New Jersey. They were later confirmed through dental records as Wilson’s. Due to the severity of the decomposition, the cause of death could not be ascertained. No items of Wilson’s clothing or possessions—the purse, rucksack, or mobile phone—she had with her at the time of her disappearance have ever been recovered. The discovery of the body led the police to reclassify the case as a homicide investigation. Undertaken by Wiskayok Police, the investigation was code-named Operation Ruby.
2. The Crespo's Twins Case:
- September 19th 2005, at about 19:20 p.m. a 48-year-old gamekeeper named Pete Johnson discovered the bodies of two girls lying side by side in a five-foot-deep irrigation ditch near the edge of Collier Mills Wildlife Management Area, roughly 600 yards off a partially tarmacked access road near the southern perimeter of the forest zone. The location sat about ten miles south of Freehold, in the deeper, less-trafficked woods of Monmouth County, New Jersey. Johnson had been working the back edge of the pheasant enclosures with two friends, Lawrence Brody and Elena Smith after spending the past several days trying to identify the source of what he described as an "unusual and unpleasant smell" that had lingered in the vicinity. The odor had intensified by the week’s end. On the 27th, as they returned with the intent of investigating further, Johnson and Brody approached the ditch through waist-high undergrowth. It was Brody who spotted them first. Brody turned to his girlfriend, Elena Smith, and shouted: “Don’t come any closer, Elena! Get back in the van!” Brody immediately contacted local authorities to report the discovery. The girls had been missing for thirteen days when their bodies were found, and their charred corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition. No clear footprints were discovered at the crime scene.