Fate of 5 Teens a 20-Year-Old Mystery

Twenty years ago this month, five teenagers were playing basketball in a schoolyard in inner-city Newark.

Hours later, they vanished.

After chasing countless leads, administering lie-detector tests, dragging rivers and combing through records, police remain mystified by the case.

“You have to wonder what transpired,” Sgt. Derek Glenn, a spokesman for the Newark Police Department, said in an interview this week. “Even one of them alive, having made contact in some fashion or form, even through a third person, hasn’t happened.”

The five--Randy Johnson, Alvin Turner, Melvin Pittman, Ernest Taylor and Michael McDowell--were all 16 or 17 when they disappeared.

Mostly average students at Weequahic High School, they lived within five blocks of each other in the poor, mostly black, industrial port city. Only one of them had ever had a scrape with the law.

On Sunday, Aug. 20, 1978, the gang of friends quit playing ball about 4 p.m.

Some hopped into a pick-up truck driven by a local handyman, who said he dropped them off at a nearby corner.

A couple of the boys were seen on a Newark street later that night, and the mother of one boy told police she last saw her son drive off in the back of a truck late that night.

The most solid clue came a few days later when the mother of another of the boys received a collect telephone call. The unidentified male caller offered to reveal the boys’ whereabouts in exchange for $750.

Police traced the call to a pay phone at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and surmised it was one of the boys trying to get money after running away. The person never called back.

Yet unlike the case of many runaways, no one has ever heard from any of the boys in 20 years. However, there is no evidence that they are dead, either.

Police checked military enrollments and religious cults. They even checked the bodies flown home from the Jonestown, Guyana, mass suicide in 1978 and the victims of Chicago-area serial killer John Wayne Gacy a few years later.

There are no fingerprints on record for any of the boys and dental records for just one.

The handyman was cleared of suspicion after undergoing lie-detector tests.

The parents of the boys stopped giving interviews long ago, and many of the police detectives who worked on the case have since retired.

But the case is not closed. It is classified as unsolved, or a so-called cold case, said the police department spokesman. It is periodically reviewed in the event of a possible new lead or in case information was overlooked, he said. Police remain in contact with the missing boys’ families.

“It intrigues a lot of people in the department,” Glenn said.

Two years ago, a local psychic led police to dig up parts of a five-acre field off the New Jersey Turnpike, not far from Newark International Airport.

The psychic, Dorothy Allison, said she had a vision that the boys had been slain and their bodies burned and dumped in the desolate, weed-filled expanse.

But while Newark police gave the psychic a plaque honoring her efforts in the case, her lead was a dead end.

The case never attracted the publicity that it might today, when murders such as that of child beauty contestant JonBenet Ramsey in Colorado command headlines nationwide, said Glenn.

Perhaps that’s because the boys were black or from unremarkable homes in an inner city or because the media’s appetite has changed, he said.

“We’re looking now at cases that aren’t nearly as dramatic as this,” he said.