Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Shattered Souls: The Car Barn Murders | Episode One: "The Oldest Cold Case"

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

SPECIAL LOOK AT A BRAND NEW PODCAST! "Shattered Souls: The Car Barn Murders." Retired detective Karen Smith discovers that her father kept a family secret for decades. In 2002, her father revealed that Karen's great uncle, Emory Smith, was the victim of a heinous murder and that her grandfather had been held as a suspect. Karen begins her journey to solve her great uncle Emory's murder. Subscribe to the Shattered Souls podcast now to hear all new episodes!Apple PodcastiHeartSpotifyMusic: The New Real by Sam Johnson at www.samjohnsonlive.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. This is veteran forensic detective Karen Smith, and you're about to hear the first episode of my new podcast, Shattered Souls, The Car Barn Murders. More episodes are available now on the Shattered Souls podcast. Just search for Shattered Souls, The Car Barn Murders, on your favorite podcast app. It felt like a detective story. The Car Barn Murders on your favorite podcast app. a witness to the murder because some prostitute told him that the car could be found in a garage owned by a former D.C. officer named Greene. It is straight out of a movie. I don't want a single

word written about that case. Do you understand? Welcome to Season 2 of Shattered Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast contains graphic language and is not suitable for children. There's a possibility it could be solved one day. Cover-ups, secret meetings, gangsters, bootleggers, prison snitches, murder. This season has all of the plot points of a film noir, a fictional Hollywood screenplay. But everything I'm going to tell you is factual. We're going to go back in time this season, before the Great War, before suburbia and picket fences and television.

This was the time of the Great Depression, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, when Prohibition had just ended and people were struggling to make ends meet. Gangsters and rackets had taken over the major cities, and mob boss Al Capone, well, he was sent from Atlanta to Alcatraz. The date of this case was January 21st, 1935. Two men were killed that morning, and both of them worked for the Capital Transit Company in Chevy Chase, Maryland. James Mitchell was an accounting clerk and had been employed there for nearly 40 years. Lawrence Emery Smith, he went by Emery, worked as a mechanic and a watchman for 15 years. The case quickly became known as the Carbarn Murders. It's the oldest cold case in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Both of their lives would end tragically on the same day, but in separate locations, which was a conundrum for the detectives in charge. For the better part of 86 years, this case file has sat on a shelf in a basement collecting dust. There were some follow-ups over the years, some new revelations, but it remains unsolved. And that's where I come into the story. This wasn't a random case that I chose to investigate. This case came to me, because Lawrence Emery Smith was my great-great-uncle. Learning that your own family member was the victim of a horrendous murder, no matter how far removed that person is personally from you, it's a punch in the gut.

And you add to that fact that the case is still unsolved, and you personally have the knowledge and experience to try to solve it, well, it becomes compulsory. But there's a lot more to that story. For me, this saga started over 20 years ago, right after I became a cop. I was on a visit to see my parents in Maryland, and my father and I were talking in the garage one morning after we shoveled the overnight snow from the driveway. It was really quiet, and there was a lull in the conversation. Dad walked over to the mini fridge, and he popped open a soda, and he smiled at me, and I asked him what he was thinking

about. I could see the gears turning with that squinty-eyed look that all of the Smiths get when we think too much. Now, Dad wasn't what I would call a practical joker, but he did enjoy throwing a zinger out every now and then to get a reaction, and I would consider what he was about to tell me his crowning achievement. He sat down and offhandedly mentioned Uncle Emery and told me that his own father, my grandfather, had been named as a suspect on the same day as the murders. I could feel the blood drain from my face, and I just stared at him. He nodded, and then he took a sip of his Dr. Pepper, and he told me what he knew about it. Then he gave me a little wink and a nod that maybe I should look into the file.

Every family has secrets, but this was beyond the pale. I sat down with my coffee, and I just looked at my dad. And he shook his head, and he said that all of my older relatives knew about the case, but they never talked about it. I asked him what he wanted me to do. I was just a rookie cop. I didn't have the faintest clue about how to go about investigating a murder, let alone a case from 1935.

And he shrugged, and he said there was probably nothing to do, but he just thought I should know the story. I laid in bed that night and thought about my grandfather, who had just passed away the year before. My grandfather, a suspect in a away the year before. My grandfather, a suspect in a double murder? No, this was too much. Of course my grandfather didn't murder his own uncle and another man. It's absurd. But who did? And why was this case never solved? That conversation in the garage stayed in the back of my mind,

and over the years, after I had a number of serious crime scenes under my belt, my dad and I would sit at the kitchen table and talk about it. It was my impression from him that all of the leads garnered by the detectives in 1935 went nowhere. I figured that the case file would be so dust-covered and scant that anyone who might be inclined to look at it wouldn't have anything to work with, since all of the people would be long dead, and no court process would happen anyway. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and I read some old newspaper articles that my father had kept in a scrapbook, and I concluded that he was likely right. A case that old would forever remain on the cold case shelf,

forgotten to the sands of time. The years passed, and I moved on with my career, but I still thought about my great-uncle's case from time to time. Then, in 2016, during our nightly phone call, my mother told me that one of our distant cousins back in Maryland had called out of the blue to ask if we had seen a report by NBC Washington about the Carbarn murder case. Well, at that point, we all lived in Florida,

so of course we hadn't. And our relatives sent Mom and Dad a link to the story. It started as a robbery, including $60 in quarters, $31 in dimes, and a single $20 bill. A meticulous list kept by James Mitchell. It's all kept on the back shelf of the county's cold case evidence room. The first in a line of boxes filled with stories of families who never got closure. It's not a case that we're actively investigating. We do have to focus on our cases where we have either victims

who are still alive, victims' families who are still alive, and where the suspects might still be out there and could be brought to justice. That was Tisha Thompson, who was an investigative reporter for NBC Washington. Dad and I talked the next day, and we were both surprised to see the amount of information inside of that case file and I wanted to know more. So I contacted Tisha Thompson directly to tell her my family's story. She was thrilled to hear from a family member since both she and the detective

had no idea that any of the relatives of either victim were still alive. She immediately made arrangements to fly down to Florida with a crew to interview me and my father for a follow-up piece, which aired on NBC Washington a couple of weeks later. They never talked about it. That's what Ralph Smith remembers about growing up in Bethesda in the 1930s.

It wasn't until he was a teenager that he began to hear whispers. His father had been a suspect in the Carr Barn murders, one of our region's most famous murder mysteries. My dad was home asleep and they came in and roused him out of bed. He said at that time he was a suspect. They wanted to know where his uncle was and he said, well, he's at work. He says his dad and his three uncles continue to work for the trolley company. But as time passed, the Smith family assumed police had given up on finding

the killer. Karen says the Factor family is still searching for answers, shows how cold cases can haunt families for generations. Tisha sent me a link to the follow-up story, which included even more detailed footage of the papers inside that file and the evidence they still had. I reached out to the detective directly because I wanted a copy of that file to read it for myself. There had to be more suspect leads in there than just my grandfather. I called the detective's office phone and right off the bat, I was met with some pushback. That was surprising, but after I told him about my law enforcement credentials, he was a little bit more open to sharing some of the information, but he said that I would need to travel to Maryland to see what was in there. I couldn't understand the hesitation, since nobody was working the case and wasn't

planning on doing so. In the interview for NBC Washington, it was made clear that it wasn't a priority for the department, since time would be much better spent on more recent cases that could be adjudicated. But after my request for the file to be mailed to me was turned down flat, I just left it alone, since I wasn't able to travel to Maryland at that point. Well, the ramifications of being unable to go to Montgomery County in 2016 hit a lot harder than I thought. I wanted to get answers for my father, to give him some closure and at least give it my best shot. But the timing was just off. And as time went on, my dad's health declined and I moved to California.

A trip to Maryland was out of the question. Now I was spending my time going back to Florida to visit, and unfortunately, two years after Tisha Thompson's interview, my dad passed away. I wish that the timing had been better back then, so that I could have made that trip to Maryland. Maybe my dad would have had some answers before he died. So my drive to take on this ice-cold case and follow the leads stems from wanting answers for him, to finally have some closure after 86 years for my dad, my grandfather, and my other relatives who spent decades wondering what happened and who killed Uncle Emery and James Mitchell that morning. This journey is my acknowledgement and follow-through of that first conversation in the garage that snowy morning,

and that special little wink and a nod my dad gave me over two decades ago. When I first started seriously considering this investigation for season two, the first thing I did was contact some of my relatives, who I hadn't spoken to for years. And I quickly found out that curiosity about the murders extended down to the next generation. My first cousins once removed, as a genealogist would call it. These were the kids of my great aunts and uncles, the younger ones from my father's generation. And I told them that I was going to look into our great-uncle's murder, and all of them were over the moon to hear this. And it was right then that I realized just how powerfully this case

had affected my entire family for three generations. My great-aunts and uncles talked to their kids about Uncle Emery and handed down newspaper clippings in books and photographs of extended family members I never even knew existed. They were always haunted by it, by the fact that these murderers were never caught and brought to justice. Was it someone they knew? Would the names in the case file ring a bell for one of them? Well, the Smith family was a very quiet and unassuming bunch of people, certainly not the type to push

the police for updates. I'm an exception to that rule. And nobody ever dug too deeply. The family rumors just sufficed, but the case never faded completely from their minds. In June of 2020, I started the process of getting the case file, and I wasn't going to travel across the country to see it. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Montgomery County Police Department, and after four long months of phone calls, follow-up emails, and letters, I finally got a thick manila folder in the mail. I tore open the envelope and sorted through the copies, which were haphazard and completely disorganized.

My living room became a sea of paper, and after I got everything cataloged, I started to dig in, and the first thing I wanted to find was my grandfather's name. Like my dad said in his interview with Tisha Thompson, my grandfather was woken up from a sound sleep, and he was hauled to the Bethesda police station For questioning I found out from the case file That they rounded up everyone Who worked at the Chevy Chase Lake Trolley Barn So my grandfather wasn't an anomaly

I knew in my heart That he couldn't have done it The detectives did hold him for most of the day While they ran down his alibi He was in bed all night with my grandmother Who was pregnant with my father at the time. They finally cleared my granddad late that afternoon, but before he could go home, my grandfather was summoned to Pumphrey's funeral home. He had to identify the body of his own uncle. To add insult to injury, Emery Smith's mother, my grandfather's grandmother,

died from pneumonia that morning, within an hour of her own son, without ever knowing about the murder. I suppose her not knowing is a blessing in disguise. And both of their burials couldn't take place until almost a month later, because the ground was frozen, and the procession got stuck in the snow. After hearing all that, it's no wonder why my grandfather never talked about it. Like so many unsolved murders, the case took on a life of its own

and was given a moniker by the press when it hit the headlines of the Washington Post for weeks. The detectives pounded the pavement for lead after lead, arresting dozens of suspects only to release them days later. This went on for months, then years, until eventually everyone gave up and moved on to newer cases with fresh leads. This isn't a new story. It happens to families all the time, and it's heartbreaking. Sometimes the ball gets dropped. Sometimes, well, sometimes it's just a confluence of things that only start to make sense when you take a 10,000-foot view. Hold on. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's go back to the beginning with a quick history lesson. This case became known as the Carr BarnBarn murders for a very specific reason. The Capital Transit Company, where both of the victims worked, had a monopoly on mass transportation in and around the Washington, D.C. area in the 1930s. And before buses became the norm, trolley cars ran almost around the clock, shuttling people to downtown D.C. and then back to the expanding suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia. It was the Great Depression. Cars were a luxury, so most people would pay a modest fare to ride the trolley to their destination. For $1.25, you could get an unlimited weekly trolley pass. And if you just wanted a single one-way ride,

you dropped a dime into the till. There were several hangars, or car barns as they were called, where the trolley cars would be stored and maintained before they set out on their respective routes. The main office car barn was located at the intersection of 36th and M Streets in Georgetown. If you've ever seen the movie The Exorcist, that famous stairwell at the end of the film, it's right there next to the old car barn, and it goes up to the campus of Georgetown University. Another car barn was at Chevy Chase Lake. That's where the murders happened. The Chevy Chase Land Company purchased large parcels just over the line dividing Maryland

from the District of Columbia, and they started development in 1890. They built a streetcar line to connect Chevy Chase to Washington, and to entice people to buy houses outside the district, they built an amusement park with a merry-go-round and a bandshell auditorium. Prospective buyers would ride in on the trolleys, and then they'd get the hard sell while they enjoyed their cotton candy and lemonade. That was the beginning of Chevy Chase, Maryland. The amusement park eventually went defunct, and a huge community pool was built for the new residents. And there were two structures at Chevy Chase Lake that figure importantly for this case. The Trolley Barn,

which was a huge structure on the east side of Connecticut Avenue, and the Car Barn Office, the ticket office, which sat on the west side next to the new pool. One thing remained the same, Connecticut Avenue. In order to get to Chevy Chase Lake, you had to take Connecticut Avenue, head north from the office, and Connecticut Avenue would take you into Kensington and further into rural Maryland. Take it south, and you would go into the District of Columbia, past the National Zoo and DuPont Circle.

And if you kept going, you would eventually end up on the west side of the White House. Now there's the stage for this season. Let's talk a little bit about the victims. James Mitchell was born on November 26, 1876, in rural Maryland. His father was the overseer of a farm, and by 1900, James had gotten himself a job as a conductor for Capital Transit on the expanding trolley system. By 1903, he was married to Mary Lowe, and they had three children. Sadly, one child died when she was just two years old. and Mary were living in a modest two-story row house in southeast D.C., just south of Lincoln Park, which is a little more than a stone's throw from where the now-defunct RFK Stadium sits. By 1930, they purchased a home just across the Potomac River in Anacostia, Maryland. They were

doing well, despite the Depression, and James Mitchell had moved his way up from conductor to clerk and then became the receiver and accountant for all of the cash receipts taken during the week from each of the 24 trolleys at the Chevy Chase Lake barn. James Mitchell was a tall man, slim, with blue eyes, and thick graying hair. He liked to roll up his shirt sleeves and hold them in place above his elbows with a rubber band, reminiscent of an old barkeep. He had made a good living for his small family, and he was a dedicated worker for Capital Transit. His friends all said that he was responsible, diligent, and exacting with his

accounting. Lawrence Emery Smith was born on April 4, 1893, and he also grew up on a farm in rural Maryland. He was the youngest of 12 children, and one of his brothers was my great-grandfather. After working on the family farm during his teen years, Emery went to work at Union Bridge, Maryland, in the Limestone Quarry, and he married his first wife, Myrtle. A few years later, Emery left the quarry and went to work at Capital Transit as a full-time mechanic and a part-time watchman. He and Myrtle got divorced and he married his second wife, Edith, and adopted her two daughters, Alice and Helen. They purchased a brick two-story in Bethesda, Maryland, which was just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Chevy Chase Lake car barn. Emery was a short man. He was chunky, with gray eyes and light brown hair. Like most men in

my family, he was one of few words, but he was excellent at working with his hands in a mechanical job, and he could fix just about anything. He had very little formal education, and the 1930 census indicated that he was illiterate. He couldn't read and write, and the childish signature on his World War I draft card is indicative of that. But this was a different time. It was common for rural farm family members to leave school at a young age to help tend the animals in the land. As I mentioned, Emery's mother had been bedridden with pneumonia for a couple of weeks. On Sunday, January 20th, he went to visit her, knowing that it might be the last time he ever saw his mother, and he kissed her goodbye and told the others at her bedside that he would

be back the following weekend, but that never happened. Emery was killed on Monday morning, and within an hour of his murder, his mother died in her bed. On that cold morning of January 21st, 1935, the biggest storm in a decade had blown through the eastern seaboard and blanketed the Washington, D.C. suburbs with almost a half a foot of snow. Just before sunrise, both men were murdered during the commission of a robbery. James Mitchell was in the locked money cage, tallying the weekly deposit, mostly coins, and putting the money into canvas bags. A Brinks truck was scheduled to pick up the cash on its weekly run in just a few hours.

The total cash on hand was $1,269, which is around $24,000 in today's money. While Mitchell worked quietly in the office, Emery Smith, the night watchman, was out on patrol of the grounds, and he made his way through the snow across the street to the car barn, where the trolleys were parked. The evening accounting clerk, John Stout, left James Mitchell in the money cage and went home when his shift ended at about three o'clock in the morning. John Stout said that Mitchell bid him a good night and bolted the front door shut behind him. Emery Smith tinkered away in the car barn doing last-minute repairs and readied the trolleys for their early morning run. He punched his time clock card at 4 23 a.m. Around 5 10 a.m. Around 5.10 a.m., a witness named Parker Hanna arrived at the ticket office to work the

early bird shift. Hanna said that when he arrived, he parked his car next to Emery Smith's by the water pump and went to the front door of the ticket office. He called out to James Mitchell to let him in, believing the door was locked like it always was that time of the morning, and when he got no answer, he tried the doorknob, and to his surprise, the door opened. He went across the hallway to the cage door separating the hall from the office, and through that metal grate, he saw James Mitchell dead on the floor in a pool of blood. At seeing Mitchell's body, Hannah panicked, and he ran back out the front porch, down three steps, and across the street to the car barn, trying to find the regular night watchman, a man named John Baxter. Parker Hannah didn't know that Baxter and Emery Smith had swapped shifts at the last minute to accommodate that final Sunday evening visit with his mother. Hannah yelled out, but he got no response from anyone at the car barn,

so he ran back across Connecticut Avenue and he saw headlights of a car coming. He hid behind a tree until he realized that the car belonged to another transit worker named Linwood Jones. Jones arrived along with a third employee, Robert Abersold. Parker Hannah came out from hiding and he told Jones and Abersold about Mitchell lying dead on the office floor. Jones ran into the office, and he tried to call the police from the phone in the waiting room, but according to Parker Hanna, Linwood Jones was so overwrought that he hung up before the operator could answer. Jones and Abersold hopped back in the car, and they drove about a mile down the road to the

Chevy Chase Fire Department to use their telephone to report the murder to police. And at that point, there was no sign of Emery Smith anywhere. Police officer James McAuliffe overheard the Washington Station dispatcher report an apparent murder at Chevy Chase Lake at about 5 20 that morning. He was one of two officers working the night shift for Montgomery County and he sped to the scene. When Jones and Abersold came back from the firehouse, Hannah joined them and reported that all three men went back into the office past the caged area where Mitchell lay dead and they went down the hallway to the trainman's room. All of the doors were unlocked, which was completely against protocol. Inside the trainman's room, all three of them found a man asleep on a bench. This man was Francis Gregory. According

to Parker Hanna's statement, Linwood Jones woke Francis Gregory up and told him that Mitchell had been murdered. Gregory jumped up from the bench and ran out the rear porch door into the deep snow in his stocking feet. Jones ran after him and caught him a short distance away and brought him back into the office to wait for police. When Officer McAuliffe got to the ticket office, he met with the three men and looked at Mitchell from the hallway. McAuliffe could see that he'd been shot multiple times in the head. McAuliffe then contacted Officer Frank Soper, the other patrolman on duty, and when Frank Soper arrived, he went back to the firehouse and

called Detective Theodore Volton, Sergeant Leroy Rogers, and Police Chief Garrett. All three of them arrived within the hour. Parker Hanna finished his initial statement by saying that on his way to work from Kensington, a town about two and a half miles north of the car barn office, he didn't see any other cars pass him on the road, and he said it was really foggy. He saw no car lights either on or off the road that morning, and he added that inside the car barn, three or four of the trolley car's lights were on, as though they'd been readied for the routes, but none of the trolleys had been

pulled into the circle out front. Now that several detectives were on the scene, they split up to get more statements. Sergeant Rogers and Officer McAuliffe went down the street and interviewed an earwitness by the name of Charles Smallwood. He was the night watchman for the Thomas W. Perry Coal Company. Mr. Smallwood reported that he went into the basement to stoke the furnace at about four o'clock in the morning. A short time later, he said that he heard shouting and gunshots from the area across the street. He said it was around 435. He didn't call the police. Witness Robert Abersold was also interviewed, and according to his statement, he saw no other automobiles as he headed south on Connecticut

Avenue toward the car barn, and he said it was foggy. He parked his car near Hannah's and Smith's by the water pump. He said that Linwood Jones approached his car and said, don't park, let's drive up to the firehouse. Abersold asked Jones what happened and Jones said, somebody got held up in there. And he asked Jones if the man was dead and Jones replied, yeah, he's dead. He said that Jones got into his car and they drove to the fire station.

Robert Abersold said that when he got back to the Carbarn office, he went inside alone and saw Mitchell's body through the wire door. And while he was standing there, another trolley motorman by the name of Brooks came into the room and stood with him looking at Mitchell. Abersold said that he went down the hallway to the trainman's room, leaving Brooks standing in the hallway by himself. In the trainman's room, he turned to his right and opened the door leading to the locker room. It was unlocked. When he came out of the locker room,

he spotted Francis Gregory sleeping on a bench underneath a ladder. And Abersold noted that the bench was really near the wall that separated the trainman's room from the office where Mitchell was. Abersold said he didn't pay too much attention to Francis Gregory and instead went out the rear door of the office, which led to a porch where the empty money bags were stored. That door was also unlocked. He came back into the trainman's room to find all of the others standing there. Abersold said that Brooks yelled at Francis Gregory saying,

how can you sleep like that? Look what happened out there. Abersold said that Francis Gregory made no comment, but instead got up, went out into the hallway, looked into the room where Mitchell was, and came back into the trainman's room and said, Oh my gosh. Two eyewitnesses gave completely different accounts about the movements of Francis Gregory after a horrible murder involving multiple gunshots in an adjacent room. Did he run out into the snow or didn't he? after a horrible murder involving multiple gunshots in an adjacent room. Did he run out into the snow, or didn't he?

Did he really sleep through the whole crime? As the interviews continued, Detective Theodore Volton and Sergeant Leroy Rogers took the lead. From their initial report, quote, It was found that upon arrival, the door to the cashier's cage was locked, and on the floor, on his back, lying in a large pool of blood, was a man, height 5'11", hair gray, no coat. No one had entered the room since the discovery of the body, unquote. Nobody had located Emery Smith, and there was no sign of him anywhere at the car barn across the street. His car was parked next to the water pump, just like everyone said.

The engine was cold, and Smith's.45 caliber handgun was in the glove compartment. His overcoat and his hat were on the seat. A missing person search was initiated by the Chevy Chase Fire Department. They fanned out and searched the surrounding woods for my great-uncle, and after several hours, they hadn't found him, and nobody had heard from him. The detectives worked the scene, gathering clues from inside and outside the ticket office. Information was coming in full bore, and they wrote down notes in pencil as fast as they could in order to keep some semblance of who said what, who saw what at what time, and they began assembling

an extended investigation. Detectives from the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore police departments were requested by Chief Garrett to assist, since they had a lot more resources and experience with murder investigations. The hours ticked by, and the firemen kept looking for Emery Smith in the woods near the car barn. They were convinced he couldn't be too far away. After all, there was no blood in the snow outside the office, and no evidence that he'd left on his own since his car was still there with his overcoat inside. It was too cold to go very far without it. At around 8.30 that morning, a Montgomery County school bus driver made his way down Connecticut Avenue. At the bridge that crossed Rock Creek, about a mile north of the

Chevy Chase Lake office, the bus driver stopped when he noticed something weird in the snow. He put the bus back in gear and continued down the road until he saw the police cars at the ticket office and told the detectives what he saw. Rogers, Volton, and several firefighters went to the northwest corner of that bridge, and there in the snow, they saw blood, drag marks, shoe prints, and other evidence. They looked into the flowing water below. There was no sign of Emery Smith The men started a search along the banks of Rock Creek And a short time later, about 200 feet away from the bridge Fireman William Piles discovered the body of my Uncle Emery

Face down, floating in the water He'd been beaten and shot four times in the head. Opening music by Sam Johnson at samjohnsonlive.com Underscore music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com Shattered Souls is produced by Karen Smith and Angel Heart Productions in partnership with Red Seat Ventures. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.