Jury Acquits Man in 1978 Murder of 5 Newark Boys - New York Times

A jury acquitted Lee Anthony Evans of murder charges Wednesday in the case of five boys who disappeared in 1978 and were believed to be burned alive, leaving unresolved one of the city's coldest cases.

Mr. Evans, 58, a mason who has lived most of his life in the Newark area, a fact that he used in his defense as a sign of his innocence, showed little joy in the verdict. "If you smash something up, tear something up, you can't put it back together," he said.

Relatives of the boys gasped quietly in the courtroom as the verdict was read Wednesday morning, after about 14 hours of deliberations over several days.

In acquitting Mr. Evans, the jurors rejected the testimony of his cousin, Philander Hampton, a petty criminal who pleaded guilty to the murders before the trial began. His words alone linked Mr. Evans to the boys' disappearances.

The verdict followed two weeks of testimony and arguments from the Essex County prosecutor's office and Mr. Evans, who chose to represent himself through most of the cross-examinations, lending a from-the-hip, if at times meandering tone to the proceedings. A defense lawyer, Olubukola Adetula, was assigned by the court to assist Mr. Evans, an opportunity of which the defendant seemed to avail himself only toward the trial's conclusion.

Mr. Evans was charged with the murders of five boys — Alvin Turner, 16; Melvin Pittman, 17; Randy Johnson, 16; Ernest Taylor, 17; and Michael McDowell, 16 — on the night of Aug. 20, 1978. After discovering that the boys, who helped Mr. Evans with odd jobs, had broken into his apartment — the skinniest among them wriggled through a bathroom window — and had stolen marijuana, Mr. Evans decided to exact revenge, the prosecution said.

He gathered the boys in two trips in his green pickup marked "Evans and Son" and brought them to an empty, three-story building on Camden Street, the prosecution said. His cousin, Mr. Hampton, used to live there, and Mr. Hampton helped that night — believing the whole thing was a prank to scare the boys — by guarding two of them while Mr. Evans found the other three, Mr. Hampton testified last week. Then, with the five assembled, Mr. Evans "packed" them into a closet, secured it with a single nail and poured gasoline on the floor, Mr. Hampton said. He demanded a match from Mr. Hampton, who, surprised to see his cousin go through with the murders, fled the building before the fire began, he said.

No bodies were found, despite searches with cadaver-sniffing dogs and sonar that would detect unusual voids in the earth where the building, completely destroyed, once stood.

The case of the missing boys stymied the Newark police, which did not investigate the disappearances with homicide detectives until recently.

The case against Mr. Evans rested squarely on Mr. Hampton, who came forward in 2008 and gave a recorded confession to the police. Investigators spent more than a year trying to corroborate the confession, and arrested both men in March 2010. At some point, the police searched a second location for the bodies, leading Mr. Evans to suggest at trial that the police did not wholly buy Mr. Hampton's account.

Mr. Hampton has used and sold drugs for several years, and has been arrested and locked up for thefts and other crimes. In exchange for his testimony, he pleaded guilty to the murders and was sentenced to 10 years, but he could be paroled as soon as 2012. Upon his release, he has been promised $ 15,000 for relocation purposes for his safety, he testified.

Mr. Evans was freed on bail, in large part because of his lack of a criminal record and his ties to the community, and in interviews he maintained his innocence and attacked the case against him. He argued before the jury that relatives of the five boys who said they last saw the victims with Mr. Evans had changed their stories over the years.

The trial brought something of a sideshow, largely outside the jury's presence. Judge Patricia K. Costello repeatedly admonished an assistant prosecutor, Peter Guarino, for what she characterized as below-the-belt legal tactics. Despite having been warned not to, one of Mr. Guarino's witnesses, a police officer, blurted out that a witness to the building fire saw two men running away — a claim that Judge Costello had deemed inadmissible because the witness was dead. Mr. Adetula demanded a mistrial, but was denied. Later, Mr. Guarino himself asked a witness if he was aware that Mr. Evans's dead brother had been convicted of an unrelated murder. Another call for a mistrial was denied, but Judge Costello chastised the prosecutor, calling his conduct "astonishing" and promising to address the matter at a later time.

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