Cold Case Files - REOPENED: A Cousin's Promise

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

On a fall day in 1978, an apartment manager in Reynoldsburg, Ohio takes a call. On the other end of the line is a frantic tenant who says water is pouring out of her ceiling. The super calls a maintenance man who forces his way into the apartment above, to try to find the leak. He makes his way to the bathroom and discovers a young woman in the bathtub, hands bound at the wrists, and strangled. Sponsors: Angi: Get your next project done with the help of a pro from Angi. Download the free Angi mobile app today or visit Angi.com  Progressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 29 million drivers who trust Progressive.   

Hey, Cold Case fans, we have something special for you. We're bringing you double the episodes every week. We know you dedicated fans need your fix in between new episodes. So every Thursday, we are back bringing some of our best episodes from previous seasons. Let us know which classic episodes you'd like to hear again in the comments. And don't worry, we'll see you back here every Tuesday for all new episodes of Cold Case Files 2. Now, on to the episode. I really heard my mom scream like a scream that I never heard before.

And she said, Darlene has been murdered. And it was like, no, oh my God, oh my God, no. She didn't deserve to die like that. And I felt that I needed to do something. On October 17th, 1978, 38-year-old Darlene Hines was found raped and murdered in her bathtub. She didn't have any enemies. She wasn't leading any kind of secret double life. She was a dental hygienist living in a small town that had only seen a handful of murders in the last 20 years. Her brutal killing was as shocking as it was frustrating for investigators. While detectives were shocked and frustrated, Darlene's family was completely devastated. One family member in particular, Darlene's cousin, Cheryl Cowans, was determined to find the killer and bring him to justice.

But despite Cheryl's dogged determination, it would take another two decades for investigators to uncover not one, but two credible suspects. Two suspects who seemed equally capable of committing such a heinous crime, and two suspects that Darlene had the misfortune of working with, side by side, every day. In 2001, when DNA evidence connects the murder to his victim, investigators are able to move in on one of their suspects. But a legal loophole could jeopardize the entire case. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast.

I'm Brooke, and here's Bill Curtis with a classic case, A Cousin's Promise. promise. I was very proud of the community. 288 units, garden-style apartments. It was a nice area. Rosemary Finley is the super for an apartment complex in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. At the end of another work day, she takes the call every landlord dreads. The tenant in apartment number nine apparently left the water on and is flooding the neighbors below.

So I pounded on the door and yelled, maintenance, maintenance. And nobody came to the door. So I had a master key and I unlocked the door and pushed it open, only to have it be slammed in my face. Through the closed door, Rosemary hears a voice. She assumes it to be that of her tenant, 25-year-old Darlene Hines. They said, I'm sorry, but I was running the bathtub and the water ran over. And I said, well, you're going to have to pay for the damages on this. And that the maintenance man is on his

way. Minutes later, a maintenance man unlocks the door and catches a glimpse of what he believes to be a woman. He said he had the same difficulty at first, unlocking the door and having it pushed. And then he said, as I pushed harder and got into the apartment, this person just scooted right into the kitchen. And he said, I really didn't look at them. The maintenance man is drawn down a hallway to the sound of running water. Inside the unit's bathroom, however, he finds more than a clogged drain. Darlene Hines lay naked in the tub, her head shoved underwater, hands bound, and a telephone cord cinched around her neck. The maintenance man rushes back to the front door, then to the kitchen.

He said, when I turned and came back, nobody was in the kitchen. And, of course, he didn't know whether to look for me at that point. Detective Jim Krause is the first to arrive to Darlene's apartment. He immediately notes no sign of forced entry. Pretty much someone she had to know, because she would not let someone in the apartment that she did not know according to the mother and her friends. She always walked through the peephole.

As I said, the area was in disarray, which was not typical of the way she kept house. Crime scene investigator Bill Mark works with Cross, processing the apartment for evidence. He starts inside the victim's bedroom. I would gather by seeing this that the primary purpose of the suspect's presence was the sexual assault. But then after having done so, he did search the purse for some types of valuable. Seaman, recovered from the body,

confirms Hines was raped before she was killed, her attacker apparently disguising his voice when the landlord came to the door and then fleeing the scene. A small amount of water in the lungs indicates Hines was probably unconscious before she went underwater. Most people aren't drowned.

You normally use that as a method for killing someone. Strangle them, shoot them, stab them. So my thoughts were it was an attempt to destroy physical evidence that might have been present on her body. Mark concludes his crime scene investigation and writes up a report on the case. Meanwhile,

a phone call is placed, one that changes a family's life forever. Around 10 p.m., Darlene Hines' cousin, Cheryl Cowans, is home in bed when the phone rings. I really heard my mom scream like like a scream that I'd never heard before. You know, and it was like, no, oh, my God, oh, my God, no. Cheryl makes it to the staircase where she meets her mom. And so she ran up the stairs, and she was screaming and screaming, and I came out the room and I said, Mom, what's wrong, what's wrong?

And she said, Darlene has been murdered. And I just couldn't believe what she said. And I screamed at that time, and I lost it. From the time they were kids, Cheryl and Darlene had been more like sisters than cousins. In the days that follow, the 17-year-old must put her grief aside and help detectives figure out who might have wanted Darlene dead. There was a guy following her from work. She met someone that she was a little afraid of at work, and he had been calling her.

Darlene worked as a dental hygienist at the Echo Community Health Center. The wannabe boyfriend is James Hughes, a shuttle driver at the clinic. Krause runs a check on the local and gets back a seven-year rap sheet, one that includes two convictions for rape. My impression was he was a controlling person, a predator. I knew he was too good not to look into as hard as we could. Detective Krause brings Hughes in for questioning.

Scared. Broke out in a sweat. I mean, noticeably broke out in sweats. It makes you feel like, okay, you're on the right track. He did it. Hughes claims he has never been to Reynoldsburg. His girlfriend, however, tells police Hughes had been in town on the day of the murder

and visited a transmission repair shop. That transmission shop is at Bryce and Main Street in the city of Reynoldsburg. And where Darlene Hines lived was at Bryce and Livingston, which was three-quarters of a mile away, but a straight shot. Kraus feels certain he has found his killer, but has no tangible evidence linking Hughes to the crime. Eight months after Darlene Hines' murder, evidence from the case is boxed up and sent to storage,

also known as the deep freezer for cold cases. There it lingers for more than two decades. This episode of Cold Case Files is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you can be doing right now.

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Because when it comes to getting the most out of your home, you can do this when you Angie that. Download the free Angie mobile app today or visit Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com. We've got a very different kind of sponsor for this episode. The Jordan Harbinger Show, which is a podcast you really should be listening to. Jordan's show, which Apple named one of its best of 2018, is aimed at making you a better informed, more critical thinker so you can get a sense of how the world actually works and come to your own conclusions about what's happening even inside your own brain. In one episode, Jordan talks to a hostage negotiator from the FBI who offers

techniques on how to get people to like and trust you, which sounds useful and disturbing at the same time. Another episode tells the story of a cinematographer who discovered a lost city in the jungle and made one of the most important archaeological finds of the century. Some episodes I think you'll love are The Conversation with Danielle Mestianak and The Conversation with Marina Nemet about surviving inside an Iranian prison. The episodes are loaded with bits of wisdom that you can use to legitimately change your mind and improve your life right away. Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show, that's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The brutal rape and murder of Darlene Hines was particularly frustrating for investigators

and family members alike. Not only did a maintenance man enter Darlene's home while her murder was taking place, but he also saw the killer, just not his face. Still, Detective Jim Krause was able to identify a suspect, James Hughes, a man with a prior rape conviction who worked with Darlene and was in town on the day of the murder, less than a mile from her home. But despite Detective Krause's certainty about James Hughes, evidence never materialized and investigators were forced to put Darlene's case on the shelf of cold case files, all but forgotten. One person, however, did not forget. 21 years later, Darlene's cousin Cheryl, now roughly the same age that Darlene was when she was killed, remains as determined as ever to solve the murder and bring the killer to justice.

In the fall of 1999, it's business as usual inside the Reynoldsburg PD. Dispatch fielding inquiries about traffic offenses and court dates. That is, until a little after 10 a.m. on September 30th, when a woman calls in and wants to talk murder. My cousin was murdered in Reynoldsburg years ago. I owed it to her. I owed that much to her. She didn't deserve to be murdered. She didn't deserve to die like that.

You know, I felt that I needed to do something. Cheryl Cowans was 17 when her cousin Darlene was raped and killed. Now she is 38 and wants to know why the case remains unsolved. I'm really kind of puzzled here. I want to know what's going on. Why haven't they investigated?

Why haven't they opened it back up? How can we go about opening it back up? I said, it's an old case, and if it's about the money, getting her case open, I know a lot of ways that you can make the money to get it open. If you've got to wash cars or rent a bake sale, then that's what you need to do, because they're not letting it go. Normally for our community, we only have a homicide

every five or six years on the average. Since 1958, we've probably only had maybe a dozen homicides total. On September 30th, Sergeant Larry Finkus sits down with Cheryl Collins to talk about the only cold homicide in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, the murder of Cheryl's cousin Darlene Hans, more than 20 years earlier. She believed or had information that we should investigate a person known in Central Ohio as Dr. Jackson, who was a serial rapist in the late 70s, early 80s. I really thought it could have been him. I really did.

Edward Jackson was a cardiologist who doubled as a serial rapist, sometimes tying up his victims and leaving them in the bathtub, an M.O. similar to the attack on Darlene Hines. I obtained a lot of information on Dr. Jackson and looked at the fact pattern of his crimes versus our crime scene photographs and the notes the original investigators had taken. And the more I read and the more I researched Dr. Jackson,

the more I was convinced it probably was him. Finkus' interest is sharpened when he discovers Dr. Jackson actually worked at the same health clinic as Darlene. My own gut feeling didn't have anything to do with it. It just didn't fit. Jim Krause worked the original Hines homicide investigation and believes his first suspect, another co-worker of Darlene's

and two-time convicted rapist named James Hughes, is good for the murder. The only person we talked to lied to us. The only person that didn't try to help. Then you see what his background was. Then all that helps you form your opinion and your gut instincts to, I think, that's the one. Investigators now have two suspects,

both men who can be connected to Darlene Hines, both with a history of rape. The science of DNA will determine if either man is the killer. We use what's called an alternate light source. We take it into a dark room, and anything, semen, saliva, certain bodily fluids will fluoresce under certain wavelengths of light. On October 25, 1999, forensic scientist Jennifer Duvall

begins examining items of evidence from the Darlene Hines homicide. There was a whole box of evidence from stuff that they had collected from her apartment, mostly bedding, sheets in a bedspread, some clothing. Semen recovered from the victim's body initially appears to degraded for DNA testing. Other items of evidence also fail to yield any trace of semen. Eventually, Duvall pulls out a scarf owned by the victim and puts it under the scope.

Well, on the scarf specifically, there was fairly large stains in the center of the scarf. And then when we mapped them with the chemical test for semen, they were positive. Testing indicates a robust amount of semen still present. Duvall immediately begins the process of DNA extraction. One week later, the lab has developed a partial genetic profile. That was probably one of the biggest breaks in the case. We were in business at that point. The next step for investigators?

Compare the unknown profile to blood samples obtained from two suspects. The first is Dr. Edward Jackson, a man serving 282 years for raping 36 women. He said, you can take all the blood you want. I didn't do it. And he said, basically, don't waste my time. Denials aside, Detective Finkus remains confident Jackson is his killer. Finkus follows through, however, with the second man on his suspect list,

an ex-con named James Hughes. Two decades after Darlene Hines was murdered, James Hughes has changed his name to James Martini. Little else, however, has changed. He sits down with cold case detectives and repeats the same story he told police so long ago. I met her at her job. I used to work for a company that transported a client to her job for blood tests and stuff like that.

You wouldn't have had sexual relations with her or nothing like that? No, I just met her. I knew if we made his DNA in the apartment, then he had problems because then we could put him where he said he wasn't. Unlike Jackson, Martini is reluctant to provide a sample of his blood. Sergeant Dave Bachmeuer helps the suspect along.

I just told him he could have a seat with the lab technician there and take his blood nice and easy or strap him down, take it the old-fashioned way, you know, but we were going to get his blood. Investigators send Martini's blood into the crime lab. Six months later, Jennifer Duvall's work is complete. We got a match on the scarf to James Martini. The chance that someone else could have that same DNA profile was one in more than seven quintillion in the African-American population. Your adrenaline shoots way up because, you know, then you're in the ballgame then. I mean,

the guy's going to be picked up and go to jail. Larry Finkus swears out a warrant and rolls to Martini's apartment. There's no answer. I mean, we know he's inside because we have surveillance and we've watched him come and go. For ten minutes, cold case detectives wait. Then their suspect makes his move. Our surveillance personnel told us that he just jumped the fence out back,

the six-foot privacy fence, and was taken off. I think the interesting thing was when we caught him, his comment that he was just leaving to go to work, but yet he worked about 45 miles away at that time and his car was parked out front, so I guess he was going on a long job. Cold case detectives slip the cuffs on Martini and charge him with murder. You wouldn't have had sexual relations with her or nothing like that? No, I just met her. According to the state, James Martini's audiotaped statement helps to prove two things.

He is a liar as well as a killer. We knew that he was the person that had sex with her. At least we were very confident with that. So our theory, though, had to be, obviously, that the same person who deposited the semen was the killer. DNA testing, coupled with two prior rape convictions, appear to make the case against Martini a lock. That is, until one of the original investigators in the case,

Bill Mark, is unable to testify. Mr. Mark was the only person who was going to be able to establish a chain of custody. The problem with the chain of custody would have been myself. At that point in time, I was recuperating from an illness and would have been unable to testify. At the time of the murder, Mark had taken custody of the scarf on which the defendant's semen was found. Without his testimony, the scarf would most likely defendant's semen was found. Without his testimony, the scarf would most likely be inadmissible at trial.

But we suddenly had a real legal flaw. We weren't going to be able to present the relationship between the scarf, these slides, and the deceased murder victim. That would have been a total gap for this jury. With a trial date looming, Termulin believes he is looking at an acquittal. The prosecutor scrambles to do what he can to make sure that James Martini does not walk out of court a free man.

At a bare minimum, he was obstructing justice because he was lying to the police. That carries a maximum sentence of only five years. Getting this fellow in prison again for five years was far better than having him walk free. James Martini takes the plea and is sentenced to five years in prison. For Cheryl Cowans, the sentence feels more like an insult. The system has failed her, plain and simple. How could he get five years when he spent 22 years living a productive life.

Kill her and get five years. It's not justice. It's not justice whatsoever. That was a slap on the head. This case doesn't end the way our cases normally end. I'm often left asking the question, was there justice? In this case, I can be certain there was none. Sadly, unless another murder charge came to light,

Darlene Hines' killer would walk free after serving only five years. Here's Detective Fink to explain. You know, if there's another victim out there that would come forward That would be wonderful If we could get him prosecuted on another case Because then that would keep him locked up probably for the rest of his life As it turned out, there was a case that came to light

Since Martini was sentenced And Darlene Hines wasn't the only person that was murdered But the call came just a little too late and Darlene Hines wasn't the only person that was murdered. But the call came just a little too late. While Martini was serving his time for Darlene's murder, investigators in Columbus, Ohio were working on their old cold case, the murder of 23-year-old Wanda Zellner, a nursing home aide who was stabbed to death in 1980.

Her two-year-old son was home at the time. Just prior to Martini's release, DNA from Wanda Zellner's murder was submitted to the state DNA database, and a match came back to James Martini. Investigators submitted a second sample to confirm the results, racing against time as Martini served the last weeks of his sentence. But they were too late. By the time the DNA match was confirmed, Martini was a free man, and in the wind. There was no indication that James was ever brought to justice for the murder of Wanda Zellner and an organization called Crime Stoppers has offered a $5,000 reward for any information that might help catch Martini. If you know anything about the

whereabouts of James Martini please contact Ohio Crime Stoppers at 461-8477. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings. Produced by Scott Brody, McKamey Lynn, and Steve Delamater. Our executive producer is Ted Butler.

We're distributed by Podcast One. Cold Case Files Classic was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by the one and only Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetV.com. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Ishmael Beah, who at the age of 13 was forced to become a child soldier. The first day that we went to war, I think it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me just on the way there. There was an ambush and then we started exchanging fire. And there was a kid that when we were training had looked up to me. He was

next to me and there was an explosion and his body flew and he was scared. There was blood all over my face and everything. And I just lost it. And I started shooting, shooting to kill. When you go and take out another life and dehumanize it, in reverse, you dehumanize yourself, your own spirit, your own being. And it takes a lot of undoing. I was once a kid who loved hip hop, run DMC, LL Cool J, learned Shakespeare, wanted to be an economist. And then I became a soldier. To hear about life in a war zone where he fought for three years before being rescued by UNICEF, check out episode 622 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.