We watched excited children lick dripping double-dipper cones as their parents matched them scoop for scoop or ate top-heavy sundaes loaded with whipped cream and bright maraschino cherries – happy families out for ice cream on a hot summer day.

Low-key, the four of us sat at a red wooden picnic table beneath a green pavilion at a popular Wilkes-Barre business. My wife sat across from a soft-spoken woman spooning mango-flavored ice from her cup. I had already finished my large root beer slushy while Odetta Todd enjoyed her fruit-flavored frozen treat. We dug in like little kids relishing innocence in a sweet sunshine-filled world.

Despite the terrible loss that brought us together last week, we had a nice time.

We talked about soul music and laughed about Odetta’s age, so young at 52 she knew nothing about the Delphonics, Philadelphia’s love song legends from the late ’60s and early ’70s who so sweetly sang “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time).”

We also talked about the great Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, to whom Odetta’s been listening lately, and his anthem about why Black women like her and the woman sitting beside her need to pay particular attention to the message of the song “Keep On Pushing.”

 “ ‘Cause I’ve got my strength

And it don’t make sense

Not to keep on pushing

Hallelujah, hallelujah

Keep on pushing”

I once posted a link to this hopeful song on my Facebook page among supportive comments advocating reopening the Juanita Todd homicide investigation. I have so far posted nine columns about her murder on that page. The song provides encouragement and the promise of perseverance.

The woman sitting beside Odetta had been friends with Odetta’s murdered mother, Juanita. Young Black women sharing the same circle of friends, they worked hard, tried to enjoy life and raise their children as best they could. That’s why the woman spoke with Wilkes-Barre detectives following Juanita’s September 28, 1972 murder, telling them information about a male friend of Juanita’s, the man she still believes killed her friend.

Now she worries that so many years have passed police might have “lost” her statement.

She believes that same man carved the words ‘You’re next’ on the outside of the wooden door to her apartment after she talked with police. She said she reported the threat to police and an officer took photographs of the door.

More than 50 years later she clearly remembers when that man later pointed his finger in her face and said “I’ve killed before. I can kill again.”

No ‘70s soul song lyrics match those deadly words.

But our nostalgic trip down oldies’ music lane then took on an equally grim significance.

Odetta said her aunt had told her about the O’Jays, another ’70s R&B group, and how she found one of their 45 RPM records on the record player in Juanita’s apartment as she was removing her sister’s most cherished belongings after Juanita’s murder.

“‘Back Stabbers,’ ” Odetta said. “The song on my mother’s record player was ‘Back Stabbers.’ ”

Released one month before Juanita Todd’s murder, the song’s lyrics remain a chilling omen of what lay ahead for the 22-year-old mother of two who died with 22 stab wounds in her body. Juanita Todd suffered stab wounds in her back.

The words to the song “Back Stabbers” slash a nightmarish edge into the heart of Juanita’s killing.

“I believe (my aunt) shared that with me for a reason,” Odetta said.

The O’Jay’s words are predictive:

“A few of your buddies, they sure look shady

The blades are long, clenched tight in their fists

Aimin’ straight at your back

And I don’t think they’ll miss”

Juanita Todd’s killer’s blade didn’t miss.

The autopsy report confirmed the cruelty.

“Back: There are six superficial penetrating lacerations located along the right scapula ranging in diameter from .5 cms. to 1 cm. They are approximately distributed 5 cms. right of the midline. There is also noted at the level of L-1 a deeply penetrating puncture wound at the posterior axillary line.”

Even today those cutting “Back Stabbers” words give rise to haunting questions that beg answers.

“I keep gettin’ all these visits from my friends, yeah, what they doin’ to me?” sang the O’Jays. “They come to my house again and again and again and again ….”

Were some of Juanita Todd’s “friends” involved in her murder? Odetta and her mother’s friend believe they were. Ghostly “Back Stabbers” lyrics still wield solemn power to provoke many people, mostly Black people living in Wilkes-Barre, into remembering the names of those supposed “friends” who still live in the city.

The people who loved Juanita believe clues and truth lie in the O’Jays’ warning:

“Smilin’ faces smilin’ faces sometimes tell lies (back stabbers)

(They smilin’ in your face)

They smilin’ in your face) might be your neighbor

Your next door neighbor, yeah (back stabbers)”

Odetta Todd says her mother sensed danger from people she knew, smiling faces she once liked. Shortly before her death Juanita scheduled a hearing with Magistrate Michael Collins to obtain a restraining order to keep three specific former friends away from her. Juanita died three days before that hearing took place.

One of those people is the man Odetta believes killed her mother – the same man who threatened her mother’s friend and yet a second woman friend of Juanita Todd. Both women said they reported the threats to Wilkes-Barre police. That man still lives in Wilkes-Barre.

Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolche has not yet met with Odetta and Tamu Todd. He and Wilkes-Barre Police Chief Joe Coffay will hopefully soon  sit down with these still grieving sisters and dedicate resources and skills to reopening a modern, thorough investigation with help from the Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI.

Now that Odetta Todd is listening to Curtis Mayfield, she’ll sooner or later hear another of his many greatest hits. A woman of abiding Christian faith, Odetta will no doubt agree with some of the words to “People Get Ready,” the 1965 song Mayfield said he wrote that links struggles of “freedom” and “slavery” while stressing an abiding faith in God.  

Mayfield said in interviews he wrote the song in response to both the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the deadly September 16, 1963 KKK church bombing on Bloody Sunday in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four Black girls.

Police eventually identified the guilty killers in that terrible tragedy.

I still have faith we can find Juanita Todd’s killer.

More than 20 years ago Odetta Todd stood alone knocking on the front door of the small brown-shingled house on a narrow Wilkes-Barre street.

After waiting and feeling the increasingly frequent stress that often made her wonder if anyone was listening, she turned away in frustration. A solitary figure fighting the world all by herself, pressure creased her face that day in 2000 as she turned back to the old house, stepped to a window and peered inside. Undeterred, she went back to knocking on the door.  

To say Odetta, now 52, refuses to give up would be an understatement. For decades she has relentlessly pursued every lead, every rumor and every instinct surrounding the unsolved murder of her mother. Brave in the face of adversity, Odetta refuses to give up.

On September, 28, 1972, Wilkes-Barre police found 22-year-old Juanita Todd’s naked body with 22 stab wounds and a knotted bedsheet tied around her neck. Odetta, then 18-months-old, sat on the floor by her mother’s head. Her baby sister, Tamu, played in her crib in another room. An uncovered electric fan played its death knell, spinning sharp blades in the deadly air.

The power of that long-ago horror sent Odetta to the brown-shingled house in Wilkes-Barre years later to talk with one of her mother’s friends and ask for help. Standing firm in her mission, Odetta waited patiently for the woman who lived inside to finally open the door. Welcomed and seated at the kitchen table, a friendly yet tense conversation provided a rare glimmer of hope for Odetta, a young Black woman who had then spent 28 years living in the shadow of her mother’s cold body.

The woman told Odetta she’d try again to help police with the case. She said she always believed she knew who killed her friend, Juanita. The woman said she believed the same man threatened her after he found out she had talked with police following the murder.

“You’re next,” said the note she found on her front door.

Wilkes-Barre police always considered that man a suspect yet never cornered him. City police never thoroughly followed up on what Juanita’s friend told them. It’s unclear if police ever interviewed that suspect.

The day Odetta and I visited Juanita Todd’s friend, she told us about another friend of Juanita’s who also knew information about the case and also spoke to police during the original investigation. She backed off when she said the same man threatened her.

Fear grew in the city.

Rumors spread – some true, some false.

Both women had told police about a piggy bank they had seen in this man’s apartment after Juanita Todd’s murder. They knew the piggy bank belonged to Juanita. But when police visited the man the women said threatened them, the piggy bank had disappeared. An officer found a blood-stained coin in the apartment and turned over the potential piece of damning evidence for analysis.

Both women believed that man killed Juanita Todd.

And both women agreed to meet with Odetta and me to talk again about how they could best serve the memory of their long-dead friend. Both had promised Odetta they would again talk to detectives if detectives wanted to talk to them – anytime, anyplace, anywhere. Juanita Todd’s friends said they would even testify in court.  

But these conscientious Black witnesses didn’t trust white Wilkes-Barre police.

And they feared the suspect even more than they feared the cops.

So Odetta wasn’t surprised when the second woman said she changed her mind and no longer wanted to talk about what she knew. The first friend, however, repeated to us what she had already told Odetta and Wilkes-Barre police.

Sitting with Odetta and her mother’s friend that afternoon, I listened to the woman talk about when she and Juanita were young and how she used to laugh at how “square” Juanita was. Odetta seemed relaxed, happy for the first time in the seven years I had known her. To laugh and listen to joyful stories about her mother provided a rare treat – loving insight into the woman Odetta never knew. When soft memories loaded with love and life ended, though, loneliness poured in as it always did.

Solitude often fuels Odetta’s obsession.

Passion to unravel the mystery of the woman who gave her life and then 18 months later lost her own has taken on an impenetrable force of its own. The violent killing police failed to solve drives Odetta as much as any of the many worries that plague her existence – so many worries I sometimes wonder how she has the strength to go on.   

Yet go on she does.

“I won’t give up,” she said when we left her mother’s friend’s house that day so long ago.  “I’ve been through too much.”

Still, she sounded tired, disappointed and hurt.  

“I’m not giving up,” she said. “Even if nobody’s behind me.”

In 2000 Odetta Todd at least had her mother’s friend behind her, the woman who courageously agreed to talk again with detectives – to even testify in court if police ever made an arrest.

That brave woman died last year in 2022.

The second woman still fears the suspect who still lives in Wilkes-Barre. Police need to know that and do everything in their power to ease her fears – everything in their power to ease the ongoing fears of mostly Black people who worry police and prosecutors just don’t care.

Does Odetta Todd truly stand alone?

No matter how long it takes or how much money it costs, good people of conscience with the power to reopen a thorough, modern investigation into Juanita Todd’s murder will hopefully refute this stark, telling question.

Others will turn away, political pretenders who forsake decency and call their cowardice public service.

I speak with Odetta regularly and believe she knows detail and context about her mother’s murder better than anybody. The abundance of facts she compiled in a lifetime of loss comprise a wealth of information into which investigators can dig deep.

Odetta Todd wants to help. She doesn’t want pity, to make trouble or use her mother’s death as an excuse for her own past failings. Odetta Todd deserves and has earned our respect.

Juanita Todd’s death story is Odetta Todd’s life story – the story of a city, a county, a community still struggling to find its identity, a chilling story of a knife-wielding killer who likely still walks among the living.

Odetta Todd believes she knows who killed her mother. She wants to share all she knows with police who already know the man’s name. After more than 50 years other suspects are alive as well.

The best smartest cops might never solve this tragedy.

But they need to try again.

“I picked up the baby, Odetta, in my arms,” said Wilkes-Barre police detective Thomas Bird, his eyes staring into space like he was seeing a ghost and I wasn’t there.

That March day we talked almost 30 years ago marked the first time in 22 years the cop whom colleagues called “T-Bird” publicly shared his story about finding Juanita Todd’s two babies near her butchered body.

More than 50 years have now passed since she died.

Juanita Todd’s murder remains unsolved.

A hellish sight tore at T-Bird’s heart and mind when he entered Todd’s second-floor Academy Street apartment in the early hours of September 28, 1972. Somebody had stabbed the 22-year-old Black woman 22 times, leaving her nude corpse on the floor with a knotted bed sheet tied around her throat.

In 1994, when the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader and I persuaded police and prosecutors to take a closer look, in addition to weeding through piles of unorganized interviews, T-Bird said he relived the gruesome scene of violence he would never forget. Even as decades passed, T-Bird said he often thought about what he encountered that night in the neat apartment where Juanita Todd, who worked as a secretary at the telephone company, did her best to raise her children.

Even before Luzerne County District Attorney Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. reactivated the investigation in 1994 and asked T-Bird to be part of a new investigative team, T-Bird said he often talked to other cops about the case and how the gruesome nature of what he witnessed bothered him. For a young policeman who dreamed of someday being promoted to detective, the 1972 crime scene screamed as the kind of horror that couldn’t help but shape the way he would come to view his job.

Police had received an anonymous 3 a.m. telephone tip from a man apparently calling from a phone booth at the United Penn Plaza on South Main Street across the street from Juanita Todd’s apartment. Police have never disclosed whether they lifted fingerprints from that telephone receiver. The caller’s identity remains unknown.    

When T-Bird entered the apartment he witnessed a shocking sight he never saw before and would never see again. Odetta, 18-months-old, sat by her mother’s head. Five-month-old Tamu played in her crib in another room.

“She was sitting on the floor by her mother’s body. An electric fan was close by,” T-Bird said.

Had baby Odetta been alone for too long, T-Bird said, she likely would have reached for the hard metal blades cutting through the sweltering humidity on a fan that had no safety guard.

“Somebody was worried about those little girls,” T-Bird said. “Somebody cared about them, in a strange way.”

T-Bird said he would always remember walking into the hot apartment that awful morning and finding Juanita on the floor in a thick pool of blood. T-Bird said he looked at the young woman’s naked butchered body and sensed a viciousness that taught him just how cruel the human species can be. Looking at those healthy babies, the city police officer sensed a confounding gentleness too.

Police never figured out who might have cared for Juanita Todd’s children during the approximately 15 hours that passed from the time the coroner said she died to the time police found her body.

The babies appeared fed.

Somebody changed their diapers.

Rumors that a woman cared for the children as Juanita Todd died still circulate throughout Wilkes-Barre, particularly among members of the Black community who remember the crime and the failed investigation.

Now adults with children of their own, Odetta and Tamu handle their deep hurt and trauma as best they can. The women still need people who care – this time for the right reasons.

In 2023 our responsibility as a community is to persuade law enforcement officials to reopen this investigation with a new generation of detectives, including seasoned Pennsylvania State Police cold case detectives who might be better equipped and better trained to solve this heinous crime. Last Monday I contacted state police asking what it will take to get their cold case unit involved in the Juanita Todd case.

Police long ago said they collected blood samples, fibers, a murder weapon and other physical evidence. Modern technology and improved forensic testing can revisit those original tests. With renewed interest, smart police work and luck, police and prosecutors might make up for their lack of successful investigative action after the homicide and during the short-lived 1994 reactivated investigation in which state police didn’t participate.

Wilkes-Barre police also said in 1972 they had identified several unnamed suspects.

Douglas DeGraffenreid might be willing to talk with police a second time in the California prison where he’s serving a life sentence for murder. Wilkes-Barre detectives privately considered DeGraffenreid their main suspect and T-Bird personally interviewed him in prison in 1994.

DeGraffenreid fled Wilkes-Barre in 1972 on the night before he was scheduled to take a lie detector test. Police never bothered to look for him then even after he called Wilkes-Barre police from California two years later and offered to surrender on another charge.

In 1993 I located the murder suspect in just a few days.

Only after settling into the Los Angeles area with a wife and children did DeGraffenreid become a California killer.

I sent DeGraffenreid a letter last week asking if we could talk.

And what about other unnamed suspects Wilkes-Barre police acknowledged in media interviews at the time of the murder, people whose names have been known by police and others from the beginning?  

I even know their names.

What about three people Juanita Todd feared so much she asked Magistrate Michael Collins to approve a restraining order to keep the trio away? Does any official record exist of the hearing Juanita Todd’s family members say Collins scheduled to occur three days after Juanita died? Are those three people the same people police privately identified as suspects?

When the second failed investigation ended in 1994, I believed Juanita Todd’s murder would likely remain unsolved. I believed investigators had permanently closed the case. Whoever killed this young Black mother would likely go unpunished. Police would officially carry the case on their books indefinitely because no statute of limitations exists for homicide. But no one would focus on the hunt for her killer. No one would seek and find the truth.

In my final Times Leader columns about the reactivated 1994 case I gave T-Bird and the lead detective credit for the work they did. I now know how wrong I was to praise the bigoted white lead detective who lied to me, to the people of his city he served and worse, to the Todd family before convincing colleagues to close the case.

That bad cop later served time in federal prison for his part in Luzerne County political corruption.

To this day many people, particularly Black people born and raised in Wilkes-Barre, believe racism, sexism and political corruption protected Juanita Todd’s killer or killers. You can read their comments on my Facebook page whenever I post a new column, a new video reading or new promotion calling attention to the investigation.

Wilkes-Barre Mayor George Brown, Wilkes-Barre Police Chief Joe Coffay, Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce and Wilkes-Barre City Council members Tony Brooks, Bill Barrett, Mike Belusko, Beth Gilbert McBride and John Marconi have failed to publicly respond to several emails and six consecutive columns asking them to support reopening the Juanita Todd investigation.

While these public officials claim to represent the best interests of the city and county, they hide from bold leadership that shapes the core of public service. As more time passes with weak inaction as its guide, more and more people involved in this tragic story die.

T-Bird is dead. The white racist lead detective is dead. John Lowe, the lead detective in the original case – eventually demoted for his incompetence for bad behavior while investigating a different Wilkes-Barre murder – is dead. Magistrate Collins is dead. Juanita Todd’s mother and father are dead.

Is passion to solve this painful homicide also dead? Is compassion lost? Do inequality, discrimination and social injustice still govern Wilkes-Barre?

If so, hope for the city dies as well.

Juanita Todd’s life matters.

Wilkes-Barre Mayor George Brown knows the terrible details of Juanita Todd’s story.

City Police Chief Joe Coffay does, too.

So does Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce.

In addition to these three public officials, I also sent emails and my first five columns about the 1972 unsolved Wilkes-Barre murder of Juanita Todd to Wilkes-Barre city council members Tony Brooks, Bill Barrett, Mike Belusko, Beth Gilbert McBride and John Marconi

More than 50 years have passed since police found the 22-year-old Black woman naked and dead on the floor of her second-story apartment with 22 knife wounds in her body. Her babies rested nearby – 18-month-old Odetta close to her body, five-month-old Tamu in a crib.

Five long decades have gone by without answers to questions that could bring closure to a family and a community that has suffered in silence for too long. We’re no closer to an arrest today than we were back then. Or are we?

A modern investigation might solve Juanita Todd’s murder. New forensic technology, particularly advances in DNA science, might increase the chances of resolving this tragic crime. Renewed interest in this case might overcome the indifference that too often controls the way too many people live.

We need all the help we can get to solve Juanita Todd’s murder, mostly from people in power who can and will influence other decision-makers to restart the investigation police have essentially closed for 30 years. Long before law enforcement officials restarted the most recent 1994 probe, 22 years had passed with no police work on the case.

Terrible truth has eluded us for more than 50 long years.

We need genuinely interested and truly skilled public servants to restart and lead this mission. Public faith in public trust continues to weaken – often deteriorating for good reason. Restoring faith in politicians and police is crucial to morality and decency. Without protection and leadership, humanity crumbles beneath evil.

That’s why I’m recruiting good citizens to help.

We need you.

Everyday people who want to encourage law enforcement officials to revive this investigation will hopefully include church leaders, particularly Black church leaders, the local branch of the NAACP, the local Black Prince Hall Masons and young Black Lives Matter leaders who led hundreds of protestors in a June 2020 march on Public Square in the wake of police murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We need new voters, old voters, high school students and college students, particularly from downtown Wilkes-Barre-based Wilkes University and King’s College. We need everyone who can and will fight for social justice. We need to hold public officials accountable.

With the exception of WNEP-TV, credible local and national mainstream media so far have expressed no interest in helping raise awareness to this shameful injustice. Not one Wilkes-Barre or Luzerne County public official has publicly declared support for a new investigation.

That’s life in an apathetic community.

People of conscience must now consider one day filling Wilkes-Barre City Council chambers with protestors demanding action. An end-of-summer rally on Public Square could bring together hundreds of people to encourage each other and press for answers.

Justice for Juanita Todd is long overdue. But no progress will occur without significant public pressure. I’m looking for help, not a fight.

The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader and the Citizens’ Voice daily newspapers remain bitter rivals born of a 1978 Times Leader walkout that morphed into a sometimes violent strike and eventual split that resulted in a still unsettled war of words. Editors at both papers can show common community purpose by writing editorials asking for a recharged look into Juanita Todd’s death. Those editorials could be shared to emphasize just how important Juanita Todd’s legacy is to our hard part of an increasingly cruel world.

Ample reason exists to reactivate the inquiry with a thorough, modern investigation utilizing advances in DNA and other forensic testing.

Maybe we’ll fail to solve Juanita Todd’s murder. But maybe we will identify and convict her killer. I say we because unless we really try as a community we’ll never know who we are. Unless we commit to succeed we’ll fail again and again as a principled society. More missteps are unacceptable.

Good people working together increase the chances of police making an arrest or arrests. Longtime residents of the Wyoming Valley, of which Wilkes-Barre serves as the Luzerne County seat, still embrace “The Valley with a Heart” moniker, a romanticized and shallow image created in the early ’50s by a local radio personality.

The time has come to put up or shut up.

The decision to restart the investigation into Juanita Todd’s murder requires a genuine commitment from competent people charged with protecting and serving everyone. The legwork and investigative technique of solving a decades-long homicide is difficult and expensive. Yet, the cumulative cost of inaction is always much greater than the fair cost of conscience. Too many people have let themselves and others down for too long. More people should have Juanita Todd and her family on their minds.

I’ve offered to talk with sources confidentially and not for attribution in future columns unless they want to be quoted in support of or opposition to resuming the investigation.

Some talked.

Some listened.

Some didn’t bother to respond to any of my emails.

In the 17 years I lived and worked in Wilkes-Barre as a Times Leader newspaper columnist (as long as I lived anywhere) I made a practice of not talking off the record with most elected officials. I needed information to publish in the paper, not information to keep secret from people in my city who needed to know what was going on. In this case, I agreed to speak confidentially with sources as an independent journalist because people involved in this case need to talk now more than ever.

Neither persistent journalism nor hard-nosed detective work guarantees change. But dogged perseverance in the hunt for truth empowers the afflicted. The odds of progress increase through public support.

The time has come for Wilkes-Barre and Luzerne County officials to state publicly if they do or do not support reopening the Juanita Todd case. We need to know the names of who will and will not help the ongoing pursuit of justice, fairness and equality in a struggling town where Black lives often still don’t matter. The time has come for those officials to tell us exactly what they will do to help.

No excuse is acceptable from any elected or appointed Wilkes-Barre public official who ignores this ongoing travesty that disrespects race, class, gender and other living, breathing identities in this small city they all represent.

Inaction is indefensible. Indifference is unforgivable. Fear is understandable but inexcusable.

I once wrote a column calling Wilkes-Barre the pound-for-pound “most racist city in America.”

Only the pure power of the people will change that bleak reality.

Douglas “Bay” DeGraffenreid swears he didn’t kill Juanita Todd.

What if he is innocent?

More than 50 years ago police in Wilkes-Barre, PA, privately called DeGraffenreid their only suspect. Just because you’re a suspect doesn’t mean you’re guilty. But, if DeGraffenreid is an innocent man, why did he borrow money and flee to Los Angeles, CA, the night before taking a lie detector test to which he had reluctantly agreed?

A DeGraffenreid family member told me 30 years ago he believed he knew why.

“Douglas didn’t kill that girl,” said the man who asked that his name not be used. “But he figured that the cops were going to pin the murder on him or the guys who tortured that girl to death were going to kill him. Either way he’d lose.” 

The family member who communicated with DeGraffenreid in prison where DeGraffenreid is serving a double life sentence in California for murder, said he believed DeGraffenreid actually tried to shelter Juanita Todd from people who posed a threat to her life.

“Ever since Juanita and Douglas were teenagers, they were very good friends,” the man recalled. “Juanita felt protected with Douglas around.”    

That’s why Juanita asked Douglas to stay in her apartment, he said, providing no details about if, when or for how long DeGraffenreid stayed.

Wilkes-Barre was changing for the worse in the weeks and months before somebody stabbed the 22-year-old Black mother of two babies 22 times, knotted a bed sheet around her neck and left her nude body in a pool of blood on the floor. Police believed she died 15 to 24 hours before they found her body on September 28, 1972, at 3:15 am.

Some men, including one with whom Juanita had a relationship, were selling a large quantity of illegal drugs in Wilkes-Barre and had forced her to let them use her second-floor apartment at 13 Academy Street, DeGraffenreid’s relative remembered.

Whenever Juanita objected she paid in pain for her protests, he said.

Douglas once hunted down one of those men, beating him worse than the man had beaten Juanita. DeGraffenreid’s relative with whom I spoke a long time ago recalled a conversation he said he had with that same man Douglas assaulted just before Juanita Todd died.

“He come in the bar saying, `Man, oh man, I can’t believe what Juanita done,’ ” the relative said. “He said, `She must be crazy to do that.’ ”    

What Juanita did, said the man with whom I spoke, was flush illegal drugs worth a lot of money down the toilet. The grapevine on the street put a $250,000 price tag on the cost of that white powder that might have ultimately cost Juanita Todd her life.

People who knew Juanita back then agree the young woman wanted nothing to do with drugs — that she wanted to raise her two daughters minus the madness. If she took a stand — however risky that stand might have been — it makes sense to believe that’s why she challenged those who wanted to turn her home into a drug house.

Juanita Todd worked hard to provide a good, clean life for her children. The drug story still circulates throughout Wilkes-Barre whenever Juanita’s death is discussed in detail.  Some of the people who survived those bad old days are still alive. They still talk about the gross injustice the Todd family continues to suffer.

Those bad old days remain some of Wilkes-Barre’s worst times.

Not only did the June 1972 Agnes Flood decimate the city and surrounding region just three months before Juanita died, other suspicious deaths, police dishonesty and political corruption took its toll then and in subsequent years during the ’70s.

In 1975 two men kidnapped, beat and dumped Wilkes-Barre Magistrate Michael Collins in a field near the New Jersey border. Collins, a primary candidate in a re-election bid, ran against Francis Hannon, a politically-connected man-about-town whose mother worked at City Hall. A personable young white man, Hannon owned and rented numerous properties in the city and aspired to one day hold increased political power. The attack on Collins occurred five days before the primary in which Collins defeated Hannon. Collins, who suffered a fractured skull in the attack, went on to win re-election. He died in 2000.

In 1978 Wilkes-Barre police found the body of an on-duty Black Wilkes-Barre police officer who died in a shooting at the end of his shift. That officer’s family rejected the official finding of suicide and believed he was murdered. Some people still believe he was murdered.

Also in 1978 city police arrested and a jury convicted former magisterial candidate Francis Hannon for the murder of Olga Burns, a tenant to whom Hannon owed money.

“Suspicions that Hannon’s connections provided him cover to commit crimes were so strong that – after his 1978 trial and conviction – Burns’ relatives pushed for an inquiry into whether city police protected Hannon from prosecution,” said one of many Wilkes-Barre Times Leader newspaper articles about the Burns murder.

“The police probe led by (District Attorney Chester Muroski) eventually produced a report alleging dozens of errors or omissions by police. The police chief at the time, John Ruddick, retired about a day after the report was given to city officials. A captain of detectives who allegedly hindered the investigation of Hannon was suspended and demoted,” the Times Leader article said.

That same suspended and demoted captain of detectives had once headed up the Juanita Todd investigation.

A judge sentenced former magisterial candidate Hannon, who law enforcement officials suspected of masterminding the Michael Collins abduction but whom police never arrested for the crime, to serve a life sentence for killing Olga Burns.

In April 1999 Juanita Todd’s daughter Odetta wrote a letter to Hannon after hearing rumors that Hannon might have known her mother. Odetta even sent Hannon her mother’s photograph. Hannon responded that same month in a type-written letter from prison.

“I don’t think I ever met her or rented to her (Juanita Todd),” he wrote.

“I am sorry I can’t be more helfful (sic),” he wrote. “I wish I could provide more information to you. It is obvious to me that you love and miss your Mother very much. And of course that a big part of your life is missing. I wish you the very best. I hope that you obtain the necessary information to obtain closure on your Mom’s situation.  So you can get on with the rest of your life. I wish you well and the best of luck in your search for the truth and all of the facts thereof.”

Hannon wrote to Odetta Todd from a Virginia prison. Pennsylvania Department of Corrections press staff said in an email this week they have to research why Pennsylvania corrections officials moved Hannon to another state and where he is currently incarcerated if, in fact, he remains alive.

Not long after I first wrote about Juanita Todd 30 years ago, then Luzerne County District Attorney Peter Paul Olszewski, Jr. put together a city and county team of police and prosecutors and re-opened the investigation, interviewing old and new witnesses who might have vital information.

City police never tried to locate their suspect DeGraffenreid after he fled the city in 1972 and then ignored him after he phoned two years later from California asking to surrender on unrelated charges. After I easily located DeGraffenreid in a California prison in 1993, two Wilkes-Barre detectives flew to California to interview him.

DeGraffenreid’s family member even acknowledged “maybe Juanita told him things she told no one else.”

During the prison interview Degraffenreid denied killing Juanita. He said he didn’t know who killed her, according to what the city detective who led the investigative team told me after he returned from the trip.

The reactivated investigation stopped.

Thirty years later the time has come for police to again interview DeGrafenreid. Housed in the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran, CA, Degraffenreid has been eligible for parole since 2015.

Maybe DeGraffenreid will take the lie detector test he left behind in 1972 when police said other people who knew Juanita had taken a lie detector test and passed, including the Wilkes-Barre man DeGraffenreid had allegedly beaten for hurting Juanita.

“Wilkes-Barre Detective Capt. John W. Lowe has disclosed that five persons recently underwent polygraph or lie detcetor (sic) examinations in connection with the September 28 murder of a city woman,” the Times Leader reported Sunday, November 12, 1972.

“The five persons, including one female, voluntarily took the polygraph tests at the State Po (sic)-Barracks in Wyoming (PA). Three other persons, two males and a female refused to take the lie detector tests which were administered by a polygraph specialist assigned to the State Police facility at Montoursville,” said the Times Leader article. “The State Police polygraph specialist came to Wyoming Barracks on several occasions to administer the examinations with the final test being given late in the week.”

 “Police have pinpointed a number of potential suspects,” reported an October 1, 1972 Wilkes-Barre Times Leader article.

Some of those suspects still live in Wilkes-Barre as do some of the 50 witnesses the Times Leader reported police interviewed in the week following the murder.

“Detective Capt. John W. Lowe vowed, ‘I’m hopeful that someday this case will be solved. As long as I am a member of this police department, I won’t forget the case,’ ” the Times Leader reported.

“Do you have a suspect or suspects at this time?” a Times Leader reporter asked Lowe.

“Yes.” Lowe replied.

Lowe died in 2006, leaving an obituary that included Juanita Todd’s name among a few other notable cases he investigated during his career.

The October 1, 1972 article said, “Trooper William R. Koscinski, Member of the Criminal Investigation Unit at the Wyoming Barracks, has been assigned with the city police department to work on the case.”

State police reportedly tested physical evidence they gathered at the crime scene.

“Sources reported that despite reports to the contrary, ‘concrete physical evidence was uncovered in the victim’s apartment,’ ” another Times Leader article said. “It was reported that evidence is being analyzed in the State Police crime laboratory and that the results of this analysis should be made known within a few days.”

If that newspaper article is accurate, the Pennsylvania State Police should also have reports and scientific data available for any reactivated investigation.

Pennsylvania State Police did not assist in the revived 1994 investigation. A former person close to the case recently said PSP detectives were busy at the time solving another Wilkes-Barre homicide – a white, middle-class man whose wife poisoned him – that still attracts national media attention from a largely white true crime-obsessed audience.

Juanita Todd was simply not a priority.

After all these years Douglas DeGraffenreid remains as important as ever – a born again God-fearing man, based on letters he wrote to Odetta Todd from prison.

“I could always use the prayers offered by one that has an earnest heart towards our lord and savior!” DeGraffenreid wrote in a 1998 letter.

Righteousness requires his help to add context to new forensic testing that might help solve this terrible mystery that continues to crush hope among decent people in a frequently heartless city who deserve better.

Justice can prevail only if police reactivate their investigation. Justice can triumph only if law enforcement officials rise to the challenge of why good cops become cops in the first place. Justice can win only if public officials continue the search for truth.

Douglas “Bay” DeGraffenreid might very well be an innocent man.

Maybe he didn’t kill Juanita Todd.

But, if not him, who?

Black and full of faith, Mimi Todd’s great-grandchildren Dione and Amanda dance gracefully beside the Mt. Zion Church pulpit to religious hymns playing over well-worn speakers. Smooth movements proclaim God’s majestic spirit as the young people wave skyward and say goodbye.

Dressed in matching red robes adorned with two wide white stripes that shape a cross, the nimble siblings from the Abundant Praise Dance Ministry set the mood for Mimi’s homegoing service celebrating death as a time to rejoice in her return to her heavenly home.

A white coffin with golden handles holds the body of the 90-year-old family matriarch. Bouquets of pure white and deep crimson flowers glow in soft light. A photograph displayed on a big screen behind the dancing brother and sister brings out her gray-haired dignity. Her striking color portrait framed and placed on an easel beside the casket crowns this powerful farewell.

Another great-grandchild, Vincent, sits in the front row on a folding chair. Wearing his United States Marine Corps uniform, he lifts a white-gloved hand, wipes his eye and prepares to rise, stand before the congregation and read Psalm 23, reassuring the flock that they will fear no evil as they walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

According to Mimi Lee (Bates) Todd’s obituary, she “went from suffering to glory on Monday, November 1, 2021.”

Suffer she did.

When Mimi and I sat together in her home almost 30 years ago, I felt her deep sense of loss. I asked about her daughter, Juanita, who died September 28, 1972, in a knife attack that slashed 22 wounds in her body.

More than 50 years later Juanita Todd’s murder remains unsolved.

Mimi Todd sighed the day we talked about her daughter.

“She was an average girl,” she said. “She would give you the shirt off her back, to use a phrase. She was just that friendly with the people she met. She wasn’t an honor student in school, but she made passing grades. She didn’t graduate from GAR (high school) but she did graduate. She got her GED and got involved in secretarial work. And that’s what she was doing, working at Bell Telephone.”

Apologizing for “butterflies in my stomach,” Mimi admitted she felt nervous.

In the weeks before we spoke police had reactivated the investigation 22 years after Mimi Todd’s daughter died. Detectives say they never “reopen” a murder probe because an unsolved murder case never closes. Work always continues, police say.

Until it doesn’t.

In 1972 Wilkes-Barre police said they were working on the case “around the clock.”

Then the clock stopped for more than two decades.

In 1994 Mimi seemed anxious about renewed interest in her daughter’s murder. An unconscionably long time had passed since anybody, let alone anybody with a badge, asked questions about Juanita.  

Taking a slow, deep breath, Mimi Todd said, “She was born December 16, 1949. Wilkes-Barre’s not her home. She was just shy of her 12th birthday when we moved here from Tallahassee, Florida. My husband was looking for work. It wasn’t that pleasant when we first came because he couldn’t find any, but finally he found work in the (coal) mine and he worked there at Glen Alden until it shut down. She was 11 years old when we came here. I didn’t know 11 years later that I would have to bury her.”   

On September 28, 1972, according to Wilkes-Barre police, after receiving an anonymous telephone tip from a man, police found Juanita’s body on the floor of her second-floor Academy Street apartment. Somebody had wiped her home clean of fingerprints, police said.

When police reactivated their investigation in 1994 Mimi Todd again had some reason, if only a little, to hope for justice. Two detectives planned to travel to California to interview Douglas “Bay” DeGraffenreid, the man investigators publicly called their only suspect. DeGraffenreid fled Wilkes-Barre the night before a scheduled lie detector test. He remains incarcerated, growing old in a state prison where he serves a life sentence for a Los Angeles murder.

Claiming he thought so highly of Juanita and her family that he made a point of riding in the hearse with Juanita’s body at her funeral, DeGraffenreid denied killing his friend. He said he believed another man who knew Juanita Todd set him up.

At the crime scene police found 18-month-old Odetta and five-month-old Tamu, fed, changed and resting near their mother’s nude, bloody remains. Mimi Todd and her husband, Junius, raised the girls who called Juanita’s parents “Mom” and “Daddy.”

“Juanita wasn’t as talkative as Odetta and not quite as shy as Tamu,” Mimi said. “She was in between. She was just an average teenager. Back in the ’60s there wasn’t all that much to go to anyway. Maybe to the movie. She went to church, Sunday school and a picnic occasionally.”

Mimi Todd seemed weary that day we spoke, drained mostly by the exhausting pressure of knowing few people truly cared about finding her daughter’s killer. But she never gave up. Her abiding Christian faith held strong, driving her to a devoted lifelong membership in Mt. Zion Baptist Church where she served on the missionary board and did volunteer tutoring.

“She was a friendly girl,” Mimi Todd said of her daughter in a voice soft with a haunting trace of the old South. “Maybe too friendly.”

Until she died Mimi Todd led a full and humble life among family and friends. She sang with Sr. Belle Williams Choir, loved playing the lottery, reading dream books and watching “Wheel of Fortune” and old westerns like “Wagon Train” and “Gunsmoke.” As a respected churchwoman in Black Wilkes-Barre she witnessed change, some good, but not enough awakening for white people wielding systemic power to pay attention.

Proud Black Baptist Protestants from the segregated Jim Crow South, the Todd family had moved to Wilkes-Barre for a better life. Instead of their finding joy in Wilkes-Barre, born-and-raised rulers in this white ethnic Catholic kingdom judged them unworthy. The powerbrokers and the powerless alike looked down on Black people like the Todd family. In the end, all Mimi Todd wanted was for people to listen, really listen, and take seriously her daughter’s death that still impacts overwhelmingly white Wilkes-Barre despite class or creed.

Young descendants of the Todd family have not forgotten nor forsaken the lessons their elders taught them. Standing courageously beside his mother, Odetta, Lance Todd, another great-grandson, addressed the faithful at Mimi Todd’s homegoing.

“She moved from Florida to Pennsylvania, in 1957 to be exact,” he said. “At this time in Pennsylvania it was pretty much illegal to be Black. I hate to say it like that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. So pretty much it was illegal to be Black. It was rough, rough – obviously before there was any kind of civil rights or civil legislation.”

Fixating on the continuing lack of justice, Lance also spoke of his grandmother, Juanita Todd.

“She was murdered here in Luzerne County,” he said.

In this hard town unfairness and discrimination remains a glaring unhealed wound.

Thirty years after the last time police and prosecutors lost their way in this case, law enforcement officials have more than enough reason to resume their investigation into Juanita Todd’s murder with the increased benefit of modern forensic technology.

During Mimi Todd’s life she never saw a verdict in the violent crime that stole dear daughter Juanita. It’s not too late to liberate the entire community from that burden.

We must wave goodbye to injustice in both Mimi’s and Juanita’s names with the same devotion that the two dancers expressed at Mimi’s service when they raised outstretched arms to the heavens and saw hope for a new and brighter day. We must fight discrimination with the same steely commitment shown by that young Black Marine who stood tall in church to profess his belief in the holy promise that “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

We must refuse to punish the young by making them feel it is still illegal to be Black. We must right wrongs of our past with passion, even love.

Truth lies in that pursuit – a truth that sets us free.

Blood.

Fibers.

Hair.

A knife.

A blood-spattered coin.

Suspects.

Evidence means everything in a homicide investigation.

Police and prosecutors need physical evidence, circumstantial evidence, new and old evidence – all the evidence they can gather to solve a murder case.

Evidence shapes the soul of hope for justice in the more than 50 years since the Wilkes-Barre murder of Juanita Todd, a 22-year-old Black woman and mother police found nude and stabbed 22 times in her second-floor Academy Street apartment.

Do Wilkes-Barre police still have the evidence they collected from the September 28, 1972 murder?

Seasoned prosecutors with whom I recently spoke give police the benefit of the doubt and presume all evidence gathered at the scene still exists. After we spoke about the case I asked these veteran prosecutors if they thought investigators should take a fresh look at the Juanita Todd murder.

“There is no reason not to,” said one successful former prosecutor whose opinion I respect.

That’s why police and prosecutors should restart the investigation even without new evidence. Enough old evidence might exist to test with new technology that will lead to an arrest and conviction in the death of Juanita Todd.

I’ve met a lot of lawyers during the decades I investigated and wrote about crime. I’ve observed some of the best criminal attorneys in the country at work on some of the biggest criminal trials in the country.

In 1990 I testified at a Wilkes-Barre murder trial under cross-examination by a defense attorney who once represented Mafia boss Fat Tony Salerno. In 1994 I traveled to Los Angeles and wrote about the first week of the OJ Simson trial. In 2005 I sat in a courtroom with the late music legend Michael Jackson every day of his four-month-long child molestation trial. In 2017 I spoke for months about a Scranton political corruption case with one of the former federal prosecutors who convicted infamous Boston killer and gangster Whitey Bulger.

I’m interested in what knowledgeable prosecutors and defense attorneys think about crime, especially homicides. I’m particularly interested in what some of these hardened lawyers think about the death of Juanita Todd and the resumption of the investigation into her murder.

The lawyers with whom I’ve recently spoken said they cannot think of a good reason why police and prosecutors should not revisit the Juanita Todd case. Budgets, time constraints, staffing concerns, egos, politics and departmental rivalries can be prioritized as a committed search for truth continues.

Forensic technology, particularly DNA testing, advanced significantly between 1972 and 1994 when a team of Luzerne County police and prosecutors last reviewed the evidence in Juanita Todd’s death. In the past 30 years improvements in DNA technology and other forensic science have advanced even more.

If significant physical evidence does still exist, law enforcement officials should submit that evidence to modern scientific laboratories that specialize in high-tech testing. Other evidence police should review includes potential witnesses whom they may or may not have interviewed previously.

One crucial witness is Douglas “Bay” DeGraffenreid whom Wilkes-Barre police in 1972 at the time called their only suspect during the original investigation. DeGraffenreid is serving a life sentence for an unrelated California murder and last spoke with Wilkes-Barre police in 1994 when two city detectives traveled to California to interview him in a state prison.

DeGraffenreid fled Wilkes-Barre in 1972, the night before a scheduled lie detector test he reluctantly agreed to take. He later said he worried police might arrest him because police found his wallet at the crime scene. He said he left his wallet in the glove compartment of the car of another man he believes tried to set him up.

DeGraffenreid has consistently denied killing his one-time friend Juanita Todd.

He is crucial to the case, not because new evidence links him to the crime, but because he now might cooperate with detectives and share information he had not previously shared with police.

One veteran prosecutor with whom I recently spoke said the idea of interviewing DeGraffenreid a second time is not unreasonable. What DeGraffenreid might offer police easily justifies the cost of sending two detectives to California, the seasoned prosecutor said. Another veteran prosecutor said despite DeGraffenreid’s questionable credibility as a convicted killer, new information he might provide linked with old yet newly tested forensic evidence could lead to additional clues that could solve the case.

Assuming Wilkes-Barre police took blood samples, were all the samples tested? Do untested blood samples exist? If so, can experts test them with new technology? The doctor who performed Juanita Todd’s autopsy wrote in his report that he found fibers beneath two of Juanita Todd’s fingernails – one on each hand –that he turned over to police. If those fibers still exist, they also can be tested with new and improved technology even if police tested them more than 50 years ago.

Forensic experts can also test the bloodstained sheet somebody tied around Juanita Todd’s neck. Experts can test the pubic hair Juanita Todd’s daughter, Odetta, said police once told her and her family investigators found at the crime scene. Odetta Todd said the police told her the pubic hair did not belong to her mother. Experts can test the knife police reported they found “protruding” from the right side of Juanita Todd’s “abdomen.”

Somebody once told me about a blood-spattered coin one Wilkes-Barre police officer said he turned in to supervisors after finding it in the apartment of a potential witness in the case. Does such a coin exist? Did such a coin ever exist? Don’t ask me why police visited this apartment and an officer took a blood-spattered coin he said he found.

If this is true, a report should be filed somewhere. Numerous other reports should be filed as well – reports containing crucial details about the California prison interview with DeGraffenreid and interviews with other witnesses and potential suspects – if, in fact, such interviews occurred.

The late city detective Tom Bird who responded to the crime scene told me in 1993 he believed somebody fed Juanita Todd’s babies that terrible September night in Wilkes-Barre. Somebody might have even changed their diapers.

“It was real hot,” said Bird. “And the fan was one of those big floor model jobs. The 18-month-old (Odetta) was sitting right by it.”

Odetta’s five-month-old sister Tamu lay safe in a nearby crib.

“There was no safety guard on the front of the fan,” Bird said. “It would have sliced the little girl’s hand off if she had reached for it.”

 “Somebody was in that apartment and fed those kids,” he said “Between the time of Juanita’s killing and us finding her, somebody fed them. There was even an open loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. I reached inside the wrapper and felt it. It was still soft, fresh.” 

Despite police officially naming DeGraffenreid as their only suspect, police privately said more than one murder suspect existed. Were other people in Juanita Todd’s apartment when she died?

Police need to find out.

Blood.

Fibers.

Hair.

A knife.

A blood-spattered coin.

Suspects.

The evidence should be available to a mostly new generation of diligent investigators who take seriously the painful mystery that shrouds the shameful death of Juanita Todd.

As any good detective or prosecutor knows, evidence means everything in a murder case.

Cops called her “colored.”

Two white male Wilkes-Barre police officers described Black homicide victim Juanita Todd as “colored” in the box reserved for “race” in their September 28, 1972 “initial crime report.”

This pejorative helps us understand why police failed to work as hard to find who killed the 22-year-old single mother of two as they might have worked had she been the daughter of a white cop or the mother of white children. Defending the use of the derisive term as commonplace in a different time only excuses official cruelty that hurt and belittled Black people, denying and depriving them of equal access to justice and protection under the law.

In the eyes of countless white people in an overwhelmingly white town, Juanita Todd was not one of us. At least Deputy Coroner Walter W. Lisman had the decency to describe Juanita Todd’s nude body as “black” in his September 28, 1972 report.

The police officers also wrote in their report, “Two colored female children, approx (sic) ages 1 and 2 were in the room with the victim.”

More than 50 years later those Black children have families of their own. Odetta Todd and her sister Tamu still seek answers about their mother’s death as they continue their fight for fairness.

In February 1994 Juanita’s mother, Mimi, told Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reporter Mitch Morrison she “doubts whether the police ever launched a serious investigation.”

“Black on Black (crime) was never a big issue,” she told Morrison.

Mimi Todd believed white cops neglected Black victims – even murder victims like her daughter whom the autopsy report calls a “Negro.”

To deny racism exists in Juanita Todd’s case is to deny common sense.

Mercy matters.

But in one grim case when Wilkes-Barre police did express interest in “Black on Black” crime, racial discrimination still ruled. Years before police reopened the Juanita Todd investigation, I wrote numerous columns about the 1986 murder of Hugh “Mac” McGhee, a 96-year-old Black man robbed, tortured, strangled with a belt and possibly raped in his small Wilkes-Barre home.

City police arrested three Black men for killing McGhee. Police only arrested a fourth suspect, a local white woman whose father worked with state police as a civilian employee, after I reported her alleged role in the crime and wrote columns in which the key witness in the case implicated her in the homicide.

Trent Ward, one of the accused Black men, told me from jail he was in another state at the time of the murder. After I reported his story, police and prosecutors finally pursued his claim that he could not have participated in the crime. Prosecutors dropped charges against Ward and he walked free.

Wilkes-Barre police had charged an innocent Black man with murder.

Sometime later I asked a well known detective who investigated McGhee’s murder – the same detective who as captain of detectives would head up the reopened 1994 Juanita Todd investigation – why he hadn’t previously checked out Ward’s alibi that was not difficult to confirm.

“We needed another N…..,” he said, using America’s most powerful racial slur.

Although I considered that detective a friend at the time, we were very different people. His comment bothered me for years. It still does. Why didn’t I write a column about his white-hot racism? Why didn’t I alert people in my community to the untold damage a racist white cop in our midst could do?

For better or worse, journalists protect our sources. Off the record is off the record.

Because that same former criminal investigator died in 2020 at age 70, I can now lay bare his story to show how bigotry systematically played a crucial role in Luzerne County criminal justice.

In 1993, after a chance meeting with Juanita Todd’s brother in a Wilkes-Barre bar and seeing her memorial photograph in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader where I worked, I started writing about the case. Because of my news columns, Luzerne County District Attorney Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. assembled a task force of several city and county detectives to reopen the 22-year-old case. Olszewski appointed the well known Wilkes-Barre chief of detectives to head up the team.

In 1994 I located suspect Douglas DeGraffenreid in a California prison. The detective captain and another city detective traveled to California to interview him. Not long after the prison interview, the lead detective convinced colleagues to abandon the case because DeGraffenreid refused to confess to the murder.

Good cops still cared.

Bad cops never did.

Police had stopped looking for DeGraffenreid about two decades earlier when he left the state less than two months after Juanita Todd’s murder. City detectives had already interviewed him and, based on their suspicion that he knew more than he was saying, asked if he would submit to a lie detector test. He reluctantly agreed to take the test. Then he fled.

Officials later issued a warrant for his arrest but for another crime. DeGraffenreid was wanted for an aggravated assault and battery against a friend of Juanita’s, a man who accused DeGraffenreid of attacking him several weeks after her murder during an argument in The Soul Bar on Hazle Street. 

DeGraffenreid left town, however, and missed his assault hearing scheduled before Magistrate Michael Collins. Luzerne County Judge Richard Bigelow issued a second warrant for DeGraffenreid after he absconded, charging him with violating the year probation he was serving for burglaries.

Claiming they lost track of their prime murder suspect, Wilkes-Barre police quit looking for DeGraffenreid. But police did know his whereabouts. Shortly after DeGraffenreid left town, a newspaper article in The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported the suspect contacted Wilkes-Barre police to turn himself in.

Police dispatcher Henry Wichowski reported receiving a call from DeGraffenreid who informed the officer he was calling from Los Angeles, California.  DeGraffenreid admitted beating up a Wilkes-Barre man before he took off, according to the newspaper article. DeGraffenreid said he was tired of being pursued and wanted to give himself up. He told the officer if the police wanted him they should contact the Sheriff’s Department of Los Angeles County.

Nobody bothered to call.

DeGraffenreid remains incarcerated in a substance abuse unit of a California state prison serving a life sentence on an unrelated Los Angeles homicide he committed after moving to California. He has been as consistent in his denial of guilt in the Juanita Todd case as the Wilkes-Barre detective captain had been in his pattern of dishonesty.

After the detective captain retired from the Wilkes-Barre Police Department in 1995 he went to work as Luzerne County’s public safety municipal coordinator.

In 1999 then Mayor Tom McGroarty criticized retired Wilkes-Barre officers for padding their overtime as members of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s drug task force. Police made few arrests, critics charged. The extra money increased the detective captain’s city police pension as well as that of his partner, the same detective who accompanied him to California and spoke with DeGraffenreid. The suspect says the detective captain never saw or spoke to him during that visit.

In 2003 Luzerne County commissioners appointed the former detective captain to the board of the county housing authority that oversees public housing for low-income residents, many of whom are Black.

In 2007 the former Wilkes-Barre detective captain was among a group of county employees who attended a gang conference in California. The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported, “Some had questioned the conference, which cost the county about $10,000, because it had not been approved in advance.”

In 2008, the year after I returned to Northeastern Pennsylvania after living in California for five years, I heard talk of the former captain’s latest political scheming. In addition to serving on the housing authority, a position to which he brought no related qualifications, he also worked investigating backgrounds of FBI special agent applicants.

I checked his county expense reports, saw discrepancies and called him to say we needed to talk. We met alone in a conference room at the radio station where I then worked. He wanted to talk off the record. No, I said, this time everything is on the record. When I pressed for answers about his expenses he reminded me of the Juanita Todd case as if he had done me a personal favor.

“I went to California to interview DeGraffenreid,” he said.

“You were supposed to go to California to interview DeGraffenreid,” I said.

Accusing me of harassing him, he threatened to take legal action. He stormed out. We never spoke again.

In 2009 this former Wilkes-Barre captain of detectives pleaded guilty to a federal felony in connection to his housing authority work and cooperated with federal prosecutors, providing information against three other public servants who pleaded guilty to federal public corruption charges.

His lawyer told the judge his client should be spared prison because of his distinguished service as a police officer. His lawyer said the detective was devastated he let down the public, his family and himself, and that his otherwise outstanding reputation was now tarnished, the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported.

“If we don’t take that (violation of the public trust) seriously it’s silent anarchy,” the judge said before sentencing him to serve two months in prison. “It’s troubling to me that you were a police officer and stooped to this kind of behavior.”

This “distinguished” former police officer was the same man who arrested and charged an innocent Black man with murder – the same man who used his power to control and close the Juanita Todd case by unduly influencing city, county, state and federal law enforcement officers with whom I socialized and regarded as sources.

We drank together. We shot guns on a police combat range together. The detective and I helped convict a white Wilkes-Barre dentist who killed his wife and tried to cover up his crime. When my father, a legendary former Pennsylvania State Police detective, suffered a stroke and he and my mother moved back to Scranton from the Harrisburg area, the detective drove him there as I followed with my mother in my dad’s car.

Yet, despite the good this bad detective did, he disrespected Black people so much he and other white law enforcement officials dismissed Juanita Todd as just another “colored” woman they considered undeserving of a complete and honest investigation into her merciless death.

Biased and reckless from the start, the context of how police handled this case only added to the eventual failure of the investigation. Did police actually test blood, fibers and other physical evidence they found at the crime scene?

Police wrote in their initial report that “A knife was protruding from her right side (abdomen)”. Do Wilkes-Barre police still possess that murder weapon?

Do police have the “small strands of fiber-like material” the autopsy report says the doctor removed from beneath her fingernails and turned over to city police? Do police still have the blood-stained sheet somebody tied around Juanita Todd’s neck? Does DNA exist that can be tested with new and improved technology?

What still exists are suspects.

And not just Douglas DeGraffenreid.

Do police and prosecutors know the person many people believe killed Juanita Todd is alive and well and living in Wilkes-Barre? That alleged perpetrator’s name today is the same as yesterday.

Black Wilkes-Barre has not forgotten.

More than fifty years later truthful answers to these questions remain long overdue.

Each cut, 22 stab wounds, rips Juanita Todd’s flesh, drawing blood for each of the 22 years she has lived.

The blade tears open her face, her neck, her breasts.

An electric fan whirs in the small stifling apartment as Juanita’s babies – Odetta, 18 months, and Tamu, five months – lay unharmed near their mother’s body. Somebody knots and tightens a bedsheet around Juanita’s neck. Somebody might even feed the toddlers and change a diaper.

It is September 28, 1972, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Almost 51 years later police no longer look for this proud Black woman’s killer or killers.

Cops didn’t look too hard back then, either.

About 30 years ago I wrote a series of newspaper columns that prompted then Luzerne County District Attorney Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. to reopen the police investigation. That was 22 years after Juanita Todd died – one year for each year of her young life.

Twenty-two knife wounds.

Twenty-two years of age when she died.

Fate sometimes conjures unlucky numbers.

Olszewski told Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reporter Mitch Morrison in February1994 the case’s “reactivation was prompted” after he read my columns about the murder.  

“Before that I never even heard of it. I was in seventh or eighth grade when it happened,” said Olszewski, who went on to become a Luzerne County judge and now practices law in Northeastern Pennsylvania as a smart veteran prosecutor and defense attorney.

WNEP-TV this week aired “The Unsolved,” a two-part investigation into the Juanita Todd murder. The report omitted too much crucial information. More facts need to be reported. More must be said.

That’s why I’m re-examining the case. Each Sunday of my new series I’ll post a column on my website and on Facebook. On Monday I’ll read the Sunday column in a video posted on Facebook. We’ll revisit the past, chronicle the present and hopefully create a more just future in Northeastern Pennsylvania, a historically corrupt and racist region.

We owe Odetta and Tamu, their families and our community more than we have given.  There is no such thing as a cold case. All unsolved murders seethe with loss. All unresolved homicides boil over with pain. Unanswered questions burn hot with heartache.

WNEP renewed some interest in the case but not enough. My search will thoroughly reevaluate facts known and facts not yet publicly disclosed – facts I didn’t know then which I just learned in the few days since the television report.

I welcome local media outlets and other journalists at platforms such as NBC’s Dateline, 20/20, BBC True Crime, BlackPressUSA, podcasts such as Black Girl Gone and documentary film makers such as Robert May to join me in the ongoing search for truth about Juanita Todd, a strong Black woman mainstream society has mostly forgotten.

I called Odetta the day after WNEP-TV broadcast part one of the story.

“I didn’t expect to be talking with you this afternoon,” I said when Odetta answered.

“I didn’t expect to be talking with you, either,” Odetta said.

We last spoke briefly about four years ago when we ran into each other in a Wilkes-Barre area supermarket. That day young family members stood nearby, polite and quiet. Since then her son graduated from a state university with a degree in criminal justice. I smiled, left with my groceries and went on with my life.

Odetta went on with hers.

Our life experiences remain vastly different for many reasons. A white middle-class male can’t see the world through the eyes of a Black woman who says she remembers her family being called “colored” and “Negro” in a city that still calls Black people worse. I can’t feel what Odetta feels. But I can use my privilege and experience to help her try to set straight a crooked record of inequality and injustice. I can do that and I will.

Race matters in this story.

Gender matters in this story.

Class matters in this story.

We all matter in this story.

“My mom was tortured and tormented to death,” Odetta said when we spoke Thursday on the phone.

While we talked Odetta helped me remember. At almost 72 my memory isn’t as sharp as hers. I stopped writing about too many homicides in which I once specialized and put aside the terrible details of cases in which I once played a part. I told Odetta I don’t regret much about my turbulent decades as a local newspaper columnist. But I’m sorry I failed her family.

I once sat talking quietly with Juanita’s late mother and father in their small house, people of sound faith who raised Odetta and Tamu the best they could. I assured them I would do everything I could to help find their daughter’s killer or killers and push police and prosecutors to make an arrest. I hope they believed me despite their having every reason to distrust police, the press and white people.

But I didn’t do enough. I tried my best. I found the man police called their “one main suspect” whom they lost for decades until I located him in a few days in a state prison serving a life sentence for a California murder. I pushed. But, no, I didn’t do enough.

My biggest mistake was trusting the lead detective in the case whom I believed wanted truth as much as I did, a “friend” who later served time in federal prison after pleading guilty to political corruption and years later died in disgrace.

As renewed interest in the case grew, the detective and his partner flew to California to interview their “one main suspect,” a friend of Juanita Todd’s, who denied he killed her. When the detective returned, he told me he spoke to the man in prison. Evidence was weak and prevented police from making an arrest, the detective said.

I believed him.

The detective went to California all right, but his “one main suspect” says the detective never interviewed him. The detective’s partner, another hardcore white cop not known for his investigative skills, visited the prison, talked briefly to the suspect and reported back that the inmate had nothing to say.

The lead detective put on an empathetic face when he told me the case was over.

Officially it was.

I wrote a newspaper column commending the detective and his partner for trying. Odetta told me this week she got mad at me when she read that column in which I praised the lead detective for being one of the best cops in the city’s history. Did that detective, my “friend,” manipulate me into thinking the main sole suspect was the only suspect?

If so, why?

Because other murder suspects in the case still exist, Odetta said.

Police always knew that, she said.

Nobody told me.

The one main suspect remains in prison in California. He still denies the killing. Thirty years ago he refused to confess even after the detective offered to work to relocate the man to a Pennsylvania prison if he pleaded guilty to killing Juanita Todd so he could serve his sentence closer to his family.

That inmate and I need to talk.

When I ended my search for truth so long ago I let down Juanita Todd’s family.

That’s why I must return to the story and look deeper into who killed an unassuming Black woman and mother who died a savage death in a tough tribal town of about 43,000 people where I lived and worked for 17 years, an overwhelming white ethnic place I once called in a column “pound for pound the most racist city in America.”

Back then I wrote a lot about race. 

Not much there has changed.

Police and prosecutors must again reopen the case. The search for truth still matters for judges, prosecutors, cops, journalists and good citizens everywhere.

Truth secures us.

Deceit tears us apart.

The system in which most people still place faith stole justice from Juanita Todd’s family, friends and community in a bold abuse of public service and accountability. Powerful people, white people, controlled and dominated the Juanita Todd case in an unconscionable abuse of power. If any of us ever hopes to progress as a civilized society we must together face the aftermath of their betrayal.

I want to help change this unjust world.

So must you.

The troubling case of Juanita Todd is complex, uncertain and still constantly changing. But, like it or not, hope for our future remains a stark and unsettling matter of black and white.

Better than a wind-up alarm clock, the gulls squawking encouragement outside Sam Bennett’s open bedroom window woke him with the sacred call of the wild. Announcing the dawn of a unique evolutionary day, the birds soared, gliding above his balcony and building at the Paradise Apartments, swooping excitedly as if they knew today would mark unimaginable metamorphosis for a new age.

Sam Bennett rolled slowly to his knees from a worn mattress on the floor. Planting one foot after the other on the hard wood he rose slowly, wriggling his fingers, rotating his neck and starting to gently flap his arms until he found a lazy rhythm. Then Sam stood still.

No more practice.

No more thought.

No more hesitation.

Time to fly.

Sam hadn’t slept all night, lying awake feeling his heart pound in his throat and the muscles twitch in his arms. Jitters didn’t throw him. Just butterflies, he thought, the word for a bundle of nerves named after delicate creatures that flew with ease, lifting and riding natural air currents without a conscious thought. If Sam’s instincts proved correct, within the hour he would take wing and fly alongside the monarchs and the gulls, showing the world he, too, could fly. To put himself in the right frame of mind Sam mixed a glass of orange Tang breakfast drink powder with tap water like the astronauts drank when Sam first dreamed as a kid of taking off.

Yes, the time had come.

Within minutes Sam Bennett stood at the edge of the Paradise Apartments’ roof overlooking the pier and several grouper fishing boats docked in the harbor two stories below. Shirtless Sam Bennett calmly swayed, balancing on bare flat feet with black hair sprouting from the tops of his toes. He wore a pair of 40-year-old cutoff blue jeans with white bleach stains burned into the thighs. To reduce aerodynamic drag, he had cut his unruly hair the night before using a cereal bowl he placed on his head that resulted in his looking like Moe in the 1962 movie The Three Stooges in Orbit, one of Sam’s all-time favorites. Breathing slowly, deeply and ready for takeoff, Mother Nature’s newest sky pilot grinned and prepared to kiss the peachy salmon sky.

RayRay saw him first. Kim spotted him next. Randall and Durkin came jogging up from their morning run on the beach and stood silently by the swimming pool, not knowing what to do or say. Ruby turned from where she had been doing warrior pose yoga on the dock and looked up. Time seemed to stop. Everybody knew what was about to happen.

Nobody wanted to interrupt Sam’s reverie or scare him, although everybody knew by now Sam Bennett didn’t scare easily. The freedom promise he made to himself mattered more than the heavy odds of dying. Nobody would ever say Sam killed himself. Trying to fly after training, practicing and believing he would fly for his entire adult life did not define suicide – madness maybe but not suicide. Anyone who had a heart loved Sam Bennett, rooting him on even though they all knew he might perish.

Like Sam often said, “You don’t know unless you try.”

Bending at the knees, Sam began to flap his arms up and down and up and down leaning forward, leaning back and leaning forward once again. Margot circled high above his head, landing on one of the dock railings. Flapping spotless gray and white wings up and down and up and down she did her best to offer moral support and encouragement to her dear human friend.

Now she waited.

Dillon circled, too, landing beside his gull friend and literally waited with baited breath since he had earlier gorged himself on a breakfast of shrimp, crabs and clams folded into a corn tortilla dripping with chipotle sauce he dug out of a hotel Dumpster.

You could almost feel time go by.

And on this magnificent Clearwater Beach morning off the edge Sam Bennett went. Gravity took over as soon as he left the roof with his chin raised and his arms spread as wide as any screaming eagle’s wings. Sunlight glistened from his watery eyes, probably reflected from the chlorine-filled swimming pool as he started to plummet faster and faster.

Kim gasped and turned away.

Randall and Durkin screamed at the same time.

“Sam!”

RayRay took off rushing closer to the drop zone with the power of a blitzing Buffalo Bills linebacker to be the first one to try and revive his longtime pal when he smashed into the concrete. Ruby stared as Sam dropped into what could be his final descent.

Then up he went.

Sam’s sudden ascent comprised a split-second change of direction in Sam’s downward trajectory – upward movement that seemed impossible except during a tornado or hurricane. But the wind today blew haltingly as Sam rose. How could he ascend? Flapping with what seemed like stronger strokes and increased acceleration, Sam climbed about an inch higher from where he had started. Gliding now, Sam Bennett banked to the right, sailing forward before descending another inch, now nosediving toward the ground.

This is it, Ruby thought.

Sam’s cooked, RayRay thought.

“Oh, shit,” Dillon said.

Then up again he went, banking this time to the left before turning to the right, accelerating and advancing in a straight line. Five momentous seconds of what any credible witness would swear looked like flight passed before Sam went down, down, down.

From the beginning almost everybody had stood frozen except Rocco and Ricco, the muscle-headed professional wrestler duo who had been practicing summersaults, flips and leaps near the pool. They heard the commotion and raced to the scene as soon as they spotted Sam on the roof. But first they grabbed the extra-large air bag they were using for their stunt practice and dragged the safety cushion into place on the ground beneath the roof from which Sam had taken off and where he would crash.

Bullseye!

Not splat!

Bullseye!

Sam Bennett’s body slammed into the thick soft mat. The bag sucked him into warm comfort as the buffer embraced his girth. Climbing into the center of the bag, Rocco and Ricco quickly lifted Sam to safety. Critics might refer Sam to a rubber room when, in fact, our hero found refuge in an inflatable womb. As you might expect, no critics spoke up that day.

Raising Sam onto their shoulders the two strapping wrestlers cheered. Marching Sam around the swimming pool like the winning football coach at the Outback Bowl, they knew an accomplishment when they saw one – once enjoying their own moment of glory when Rocco bit legendary grappler Hulk Hogan on the ankle, making him cry in the ring, while Ricco bit the Hulkster on the shoulder like a hungry sewer rat after jumping on his back and refusing to let go.

Like everybody else on the scene, the “Terrible Twins Tag Team from Hell” believed Sam Bennett had flown through the air with the greatest of ease. If only for five seconds, in their minds’ eyes he flew. Everybody who witnessed the event would eventually agree over many drinks that Sam Bennett flew. Nobody called the newspapers or the television stations. Nobody shot video or posted on social media.

They knew.

They just knew.

 “Did you see me?” Sam asked Ruby.

“We saw you, Sam,” Ruby said. “We all saw you.”

“Who wants to buy me a martini?” he asked.

                                                                  The End