Newark police have announced the arrests of two men in a mystery missing persons case that spanned three decades.
The case of the five missing teenagers baffled Newark, New Jersey police detectives for almost 32 years after they simply vanished one night without a trace. The five boys — all 16 years old — were last seen alive on Aug. 20, 1978 at the corner of Clinton Avenue and Fabian place in a working class neighborhood in Newark.
According to police, Lee Evans, 56, and Philander Hampton, 53, murdered the five boys in retaliation for stealing their marijuana.
The two men and a third accomplice herded the boys at gunpoint into an abandoned house within blocks of where they last seen. The teenagers were tied up, gagged, doused with gasoline and set on fire. They were burned alive. The intensity of the flames destroyed the abandoned house they died in and the two houses on either side of it.
The families of the teens reported them missing the next day. But the fires and the disappearance of the five teens were never linked.
The mystery was finally solved last year when one of the killers broke down and confessed his part in the slayings to a family member of one of the dead teens. A third suspect in the crimes died of natural causes in 2008. At the time of the murders, Hampton was 21 and Evans was 24.
According to myFox News, the five teens had broken into one of the suspects’ apartments and stolen marijuana. Evans was immediately suspected since he was the last person to see the boys alive. The contractor had routinely hired the boys to do odd jobs around the neighborhood. He was repeatedly interviewed in the months after the disappearances but was cleared as a suspect after passing a lie detector test.
The site where the abandoned house once stood is now home to Mattie Williams and her grandson, Kenan. She said police arrived on her doorstep last Summer with search warrants and a ground penetrating sonar device. “They were looking for bodies,” said Williams. “But they found none.”
