Cold Case Files - REOPENED: A Confession for Carmen

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

In a big city like Philadelphia, it's easy for an unsolved murder to slip into the cold files and be forgotten. But in this case, one victim's boyfriend was set on doing everything possible to make sure people didn't forget, and that police didn't stop investigating. 

I took out the DNA report, and I showed him the DNA report, and I said, we're talking about quadrillion, 18 zeros after the number that says you. So now his mind is racing, because he also knows what's coming next. On this podcast, we talk a lot about small town murders, violence that happened to communities where you would least expect it. But what about the murders that happen in big cities? Is it more likely that a case will go cold when it's one in a pile of dozens or even hundreds? That's just what happened in Philadelphia in 1989 when a young woman named Carmen Baracal was raped and murdered. Her case was one of hundreds and was quickly pushed to

the bottom of the pile. But for Carmen's longtime boyfriend, every day was a reminder that her murder had not been solved and her killer had not been brought to justice. It would take over 15 years for Carmen's case to be solved. In the meantime, more murders would pile up in Philadelphia, and fewer people would remember the name Carmen Barakaw, until one investigator reopened her file and finally brought the case to a close. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. I'm Brooke, and this story, adapted from a classic episode of Cold Case Files, is told by the esteemed Bill Curtis. This was the 202nd homicide in the city that year,

so we're kind of familiar with getting a lot of work in this area. It's the summer of 1989, and the business of murder is brisk. On June 25th, Philadelphia homicide detective Jim Corbett heads out on the latest call, a body floating in Cobbs Creek. Now here's the trail. We'll take this trail down to where the body was discovered. You didn't see the victim until you got right in this area here, right close to the shore.

She was in the water, face down. I thought the worst. Her shirt was missing, her brow was off, and the brow looped around her neck. I assumed then that she had been raped and murdered. At autopsy, the coroner confirms corbett's fears a rape kit is taken and semen identified the time of death is estimated to have been between 3 and 7 a.m identifying the victim is made easy as word of the crime spreads and a young man named stephen m McNamee approaches the scene.

And I just asked, I said, listen, I said, last night my girlfriend left and she didn't come back. And I've been calling her and they said, well, give me a description. So I gave a description of what she was wearing at the time. The description Stephen offers is an exact match to the girl pulled from Cubs Creek. Little by little, I see more detectives coming over

and keeping an eye on me, and then they started asking me more questions, and I told them that I'm gonna run to her house, and they said, no, we'll drive you. And I opened their door, and her bed wasn't even slept in, and I just collapsed right there. I just fell on the floor, and at that point, I knew that it was her. They didn't have to tell me.

Police confirm the murder victim is, in fact, 18-year-old Carmen Berricol, a recent graduate of West Catholic High, and Stephen McNamee's girlfriend for the past five years. He told us he was with Carmen the night before. They had attended a party, went back to his house where they had gotten into an argument, and Carmen ran out of the house. And he went out after her looking for her.

He claims to have searched for her for a couple of hours and couldn't find her. So he automatically became a suspect at that point. The detectives took a picture of Carmen that I picked up and showed them, and at that point I went down to the roundhouse. The roundhouse, also known as headquarters of the Philadelphia Police Department. We had a suspect, we thought, the boyfriend of Carmen Baracol, agreed to come down with us. Stephen McNamee arrives at a little after 1 p.m. on the afternoon of June 25.

For the next 11 hours, he is questioned hard about his dead girlfriend. A lot of the interrogation was a blur. It's just three guys rotating one after another. We wanted to know if he had ever seen her after the argument, what happened after the argument, if he caught up with her or not. And if he had caught up with her, we wanted to know if he was responsible for

her death detectives focus on the details of McNamee's story the specifics of their fight and why she left his house Carmen still wanted to go out and I was trying to tell her that I couldn't. And I went upstairs for just a minute, and she walked out the door. And I ran out of the house. I'd just seen her turn the corner, and I ran up the street. And as far as I ran up the street, I didn't see which way she went. Well, I was suspicious because he said he went out looking for her at 4 o'clock in the morning and couldn't find her, and they lived right around the corner from one another.

I think they suspected me because I was the last one that seen her, as far as they knew at the time. So last one to be with her, that's who did it. Stephen McNamee passes a polygraph test. so last one to be with her, that's who did it. Stephen McNamee passes a polygraph test. Blood typing then eliminates him as a source of semen found inside the victim, and McNamee is essentially eliminated as a possible suspect. In his West Philly neighborhood, however, the locals are not so easy to convince.

It was really hard dealing with the people who said, you know, Steve's a murderer. And there were some people in the neighborhood that just, you know, were evil with, you know, Steve did it, I don't care what he says. I'd go into a bar and they would hush up. And I knew what the topic was. Stephen McNamee tries to ignore the whispers

and quietly grieves his girlfriend's passing. Meanwhile, police continue the hunt for Carmen Baracal's killer. In a city of Philadelphia, we have over 400 homicides a year. You can see it doesn't take long for another job to come in. Ken Curcio is a detective with Philadelphia's Special Investigations Unit, the place where murders go if they can't be cleared in 30 days.

In July 1989, Curcio takes over the Barakal file and begins to dig in earnest. We started looking into the area for known sex offenders, people that had a history of violent type crimes, especially amongst women that might be in that area. Well, we were able to trace down the ring. The ring is Carmen's class ring, the only item missing from her body. Six months into the case, Curcio discovers it has been pawned at a local shop. This is the ring that we had secured from the high school.

There was no doubt in anybody's mind that that was Carmen's ring. Curcio runs down the man who sold the ring, a plumber named Marvin, who tells Kursio he swiped the ring while working at a house in West Philly. Well, it made sense, and we checked Marvin out, and he cooperated with us, and we were convinced at the time that Marvin left here that he was telling us the truth. Next stop for Kursio,

the house from which the ring was stolen. It sits on West 63rd Street, two blocks from where Carmen Baracal was murdered. Here, Curcio meets a man named Raymond Williams. It could have been that the gentleman might have, let's say, found it. Found it on the street and left it in the house and it was done that way.

But of course, when he refused to cooperate with us, that's when the antennas go up. Williams refuses to submit to a polygraph or blood test. Well, at that point, he's one of our main suspects. I mean, he has possession of an item that the girl had on her the night she was murdered. He didn't want to cooperate with us in any way, so he would be listed as a prime suspect. The city convenes a grand jury, which listens to the evidence against Williams, but refuses to issue a subpoena

that would force Williams to talk. We were kind of stymied at that point. Guy didn't have a whole lot of friends. He wasn't a talkative type guy. Not much we could do with it. And it kind of got put aside and other cases were worked on. Carmen Baracal's murder moves from special investigations into the inactive or cold files.

There it sits for 15 years, until the right cop gets the right tip and gets Carmen Baracal's investigation moving again. I don't know, fate, God, who knows? This was one job that was meant to be solved. More on Carmen's case and the investigator who just had to solve it, after the break. Philadelphia is a huge city, but that didn't stop rumors of Carmen's murder from traveling like small-town gossip. For years, Carmen's boyfriend, Stephen McNamee, was the subject of heavy scrutiny, despite being cleared of the crime. I can't imagine how hard it would be to go through that, all the while grieving his murdered girlfriend. But the real killer was still out there,

and the cruel irony was that everyone but Stephen seemed to have forgotten that fact. That is, until one investigator heard about the case, and he just couldn't shake it. He had to know who killed Carmen. This is the article from the Overbrook Press that's dated July 6th of 1989. This is actually the newspaper that actually began my involvement in the case. Jude Conroy is an assistant DA in Philadelphia. In 1989, he read an article about the unsolved murder of Carmen Barical.

Fifteen years later, he finds himself riding past the house where Barical once lived and begins to think about the old case. And I came back to the office and we pulled a file out, which is right here. It had been in the office for the last ten years. Conroy is picking through the old boxes when two detectives named Chuck Boyle and Jeff Pyrie walk by his office. Their specialty, cold homicide.

I invited them in under the ruse of wishing them Happy Thanksgiving, but then, of course, telling them that I really thought we should take another look at this case. We knew nothing about the case. I actually didn't even recognize the name. So Jude actually had the case file there. So we took it with us.

In fact, I remember taking part of the case file home with me. In fact, I took this the first night home with me, and I read the case. Boyle spends the next week paging through every sheet in the box job, looking for a loose end that might be a lead. As Boyle reads through the coroner's report, he notices a rape kit was collected. We noted that we have swabs that were taken from the body of Quam and Barracole. I contacted the DNA lab, Brian Flieger, and gave him numbers on a property receipt, numbers that if we could look up and see whether we had this evidence. This particular kind of evidence is actually kept in our freezers here in the laboratory.

Flieger digs through the lab's freezer and pulls out an envelope dated 1989. This was the actual evidence that I looked at. You can see the container looks like it's about 15 years old. When we opened the envelope, the only thing that was left in there was actually the original tubes that the swabs were submitted in. The swabs themselves were going on, they were used up. You can see there's just wooden sticks, no swab. The swabs had been used up in prior testing, leaving nothing for DNA testing, or at least it would

appear that way. My next choice in this particular case was to take the tubes and swab the inside of the original tubes on the chance that some of the original material would have been transferred from the swabs to the inside of those tubes. Cases like this, you want to make sure you do everything possible to try to develop a profile. And after processing those, I was able to get a profile from the rectal swab. He said, you're not going to believe this, but we have a, I got a DNA sample. I said, you're kidding. And he said, yeah. And he said, look, we're going to enter it into CODIS.

The profile is uploaded into a DNA database of convicted felons. 10 days later, Chuck Boyle gets a second call. And then it was just before Christmas when he called me back and said that they had a, that CODIS had a hit on it. And that floored me. I remember thinking this was just

the most unbelievable Christmas present that I could ever receive. The match comes back to Raymond Williams, a convicted felon and one-time suspect in the murder. Conroy and Boyle believe they have ID'd their killer. Now they want to get him talking. What are we really looking for? I want him to admit what he did. I want his confession. In January of 2005, Detective Boyle takes Raymond Williams out of general population

at Greaterford Prison in Pennsylvania and walks him into interview room D of Philly Homicide. The scene is set for a confession to murder. I guess they would call it staging. Well, then that's what I'm doing. I'm staging a room. I want them to feel uncomfortable. I want their mind racing the minute that they come in here. I sat like I'm sitting here. Detective Bass was here, and Ray was here.

And I just said, Ray, do you know why you're here? Williams replies with a shrug. Then Boyle gets to work, laying out the building blocks in a case for murder. I took out the DNA report. I showed him the DNA report. And I said, Ray, if you can explain to me how your semen was found in her rectum, we'll take you back to greater. Raymond Williams offers nary a word of explanation or denial. It was almost like he got hit in the solar plexus with something now he's nervous and he's nervous because he knows it's over he knows we have so now his mind is racing because he also knows what's coming next and it didn't even have to be said but it was going to

be said ray the death penalty's coming boyle offers williams one way out one way to save his life the suspect considers then decides he wants to talk we got the typewriter in the room and we started i actually started the type and one of the first questions in the statement was, did you murder Carmen Barracol? Yes. That was the truth. Everything after that was a lie. His story is that he meets Carmen Barracol on the L train coming from Center City out.

And while talking on the train, she agrees to have consensual sex with him. And they decide to go down into the park. And that they had come down this path here, where the scene actually took place, which was right down this path. And that they had walked down this path that night. Boyle doesn't believe Carmen Baracal took the train that night or ever agreed to have sex with Raymond Williams. According to Boyle, this case is about a killer laying in wait and a young woman who never had a chance.

Raymond Williams grabbed her. And whether he used a weapon or he physically assaulted or punched her, whatever, he got her down into this area with the intent to rape her. While detectives and prosecutors don't believe Williams' story, they do accept his plea of guilty, an exchange for which Williams avoids execution row and receives a sentence of life with no possibility of parole. Pennsylvania's one of the few states where a life sentence is life.

He will spend the rest of his natural life in jail, so he will never, ever walk the streets of Philadelphia again. Am I satisfied? Sure, I'm satisfied. I'm satisfied for the fact that Raymond Williams will never rape, never murder anyone in his life again. While the conviction satisfies investigators, the sentence falls short for Stephen McNamee, a man whose girlfriend was raped

and murdered, and then suffered the whispers of neighbors and friends who deemed him guilty. It's been so many years of being blamed. I already lived the torture. I can't take back all the years of being blamed.

That won't happen. I think that he should fry. He shouldn't be allowed to live in prison. I just don't believe that at all. I believe an eye for an eye, and he should die. That's what I believe. While I can't say that I agree with Stephen's eye-for-an-eye sense of justice, I also can't say what it feels like to be wrongly accused of murder.

Even worse, the murder of a loved one. Hopefully, word of Ray's sentencing has traveled by now, and the rumors about Stephen have been put to rest, along with Carmen's case. As for Carmen, I think some justice was ultimately found, but I can't help but wonder about the other cases at the bottom of the pile, the other victims whose cases never made it into the newspaper and were never solved. Hopefully, someday their files get dusted off and reopened, and I hope someday I can tell you about their resolutions. Cold Case Files the podcast is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn, Scott Brody, and Steve Delamater. Our executive producer is Ted Butler.

We're distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and presented by Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at AETV.com and by downloading the A&E app.