- 2 days ago
The day before Christmas Eve, police answer a call to find two women bound and suffocated. No sign of forced entry. They learn the victims owned most of Elm Street — and the killer may be closer than anyone dares to imagine.
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LearningTranscript
00:00Oh
00:30When all this happened, it was the day before Christmas Eve.
00:37That day, I was sick.
00:41I had like a cold, so I didn't go to work.
00:46A pretty close neighbor, Jerry, came to the door, Hunter and Helen, Helen, come quick, and he said, Mary Lou and Dorothy both are missing.
01:16So, my son, and I thought I walked over there with him.
01:27I had a jollo, real small, didn't hear not one, peep out nothing, just found them upstairs.
01:43He was a shock.
01:48They were blood from the living room all the way to the basement floor.
01:57When my son got to the basement, he heard him, he said, Mom, don't come.
02:07Don't come.
02:09Don't come.
02:20Oh, my God.
02:50It was the 23rd of December, 1997.
03:08I worked as a detective in the Homicide Special Assignment Section.
03:16You know, you never know what you're in for when you get to work,
03:19so you hope it's slow, because it's Christmastime.
03:24I was looking forward to spending Christmas with my family,
03:27no time to food, visiting, opening presents, and things of that nature.
03:31But the call came in, and we were dispatched out to Elm Street.
03:37Elm Street was a neighborhood that stood out by itself,
03:46like its own little peninsula.
03:49It wasn't a lot of crime or any action.
03:52As I got out the vehicle, you can see a guy standing in the front of the house.
04:00He had a hook on one arm,
04:02and that was just really odd to see someone with a hook on their arm.
04:09He said his name was Jerry Drury,
04:11wanting us to, you know, go in the house.
04:17He was very, very frantic.
04:18As I walk in the house, you can smell the blood.
04:35Blood.
04:38A Christmas tree.
04:41Those two things don't go together at all.
04:43There were footprints leading down to the basement.
05:00Just like, what am I going to see when I get down there?
05:13In the basement, there was a pile of clothes.
05:40But it really wasn't an ordinary pile of clothes.
05:43There was something wrong.
05:47As I pulled back the clothes,
05:49there's a body.
05:54All you're seeing was the plastic bag over their head
05:56with the duct tape around their neck.
06:00There was so much blood.
06:02You couldn't see a face.
06:05I mean, I've not seen anything like that
06:07since I've been at homicide.
06:09On the left side of the basement, there was another body.
06:10And in the same manner, with a bag over the head, duct tape around the bag.
06:22And when I went down and saw the second body, there was a tube sticking out of the bag.
06:34They were elderly ladies.
06:35I had elderly parents, and I just couldn't imagine having to come home to something that gruesome.
06:42It was just really, really, really horrific.
06:45I was working for the Detroit Police Department in the homicide section.
07:02When I arrived, we found out that Jerry's wife, Mary Lou, was 57 years old.
07:11And his mother-in-law, Dorothy Gilbert, was 74 years old, on oxygen, and more or less disabled.
07:20When you first enter a house, the evidence starts writing the picture for you.
07:31In this case, there was blood and drag marks.
07:39It looked as if there may have been a fight or a struggle.
07:42So, it is my belief that they were alive when they were taken to the basement.
07:54I would say that whoever done this preyed on them.
08:01The murder itself was brutal.
08:05And they left a trail behind them, which means that we weren't looking at a professional criminal.
08:12What really actually stood out is that there were, like, claw marks on the desk.
08:22I remember it like yesterday.
08:25That was strange because Jerry, he had a hook on his arm.
08:30And the fact that instead of completing a search for his wife,
08:34he went and got someone to go into the basement of the house.
08:38So, maybe he was involved in it himself.
08:53I was 20 years old in 1997.
08:57I lived on Elm Street since I was five years old.
09:00And we knew everybody.
09:04Like, even if we didn't know your name, we knew your face.
09:09When I seen my mom, my heart, it was in my stomach.
09:13My mom said they killed Mary Lou and Dorothy.
09:16And she was hysterical.
09:19She was bawling and crying.
09:21And Jerry's in the back of a cop car.
09:23And I'm just, I'm just as shocked as everybody else.
09:29I moved into the neighborhood when I was, like, five.
09:32Even as a kid, he came across as cold.
09:36Like, he didn't really look at me.
09:39It was like he gave me an eeriness about him.
09:42But it could be because he just didn't speak.
09:45Jerry stayed in that cop car for a long time.
09:48And I don't know, like, what was going on.
09:54I don't know.
09:55I think we all, like, everybody was actually scared.
10:03Jerry, he said he had left about 9.30 in the morning.
10:07He had a plumbing job that he went to.
10:09And that he arrived back at the house approximately around 12.30.
10:14And then he saw the blood trails.
10:16We asked Mr. Drury what possibly may have been missing.
10:25And during the search of the house, Mr. Drury discovered there was a bloody jewelry box that was empty.
10:35$400 in cash was missing.
10:37And credit cards were missing from the Drury home.
10:42The checkbook was missing.
10:44And they nickel-plated .38 revolver that had been taken out of the house.
10:56So based on the evidence that we saw, we knew it was a robbery.
11:02And then we found out that Jerry had a business partner.
11:05And it turned out that he was working.
11:10So we were able to eliminate him as the suspect.
11:15When the murders happened, none of us slept in our house that day.
11:19My mom, my dad, me, my uncle, none of us.
11:21I was actually scared for the first time.
11:28After it had happened, I was scared.
11:32I made my husband get up.
11:35Go to the bathroom with me.
11:37Because of the severity of the crime, the bags over the head, with the duct tape, it's a horrible death when you're gasping for air and you can't get it.
11:52It made me feel like, I've got to get this case closed.
11:56I've got to find out who did this and get them off the street before they do it again.
12:00I knew that there was a camera out there.
12:15It was Christmas time.
12:18And we had a double homicide.
12:22Items missing.
12:24Weapons missing.
12:25And a perpetrator that was out there that was armed in danger.
12:28The crime itself was horrific.
12:32The victim was Mary Lou Drury and Dorothy Gilbert.
12:37What I saw in that house was like a nightmare.
12:41I can't forget this case.
12:44Elm Street.
12:46It was not a crime-written area.
12:49So everyone was scared.
12:52Everybody was talking about it.
12:54And we really did not think it was somebody from our neighborhood.
12:58Everybody was coming up with somebody trying to rob them.
13:02But how could this happen with the neighbors right like that?
13:06The cousins were very close.
13:09It was an eeriness in the air.
13:11It was just a shame.
13:17I didn't want to believe that Mary Lou would die like that.
13:30It kind of shook me to the core.
13:38Like it was, it was one of the most heinous things that I've ever, like this was Elm Street.
13:46You didn't litter.
13:51You didn't bust the glass like you did on the other blocks.
13:54Like all the kids played together.
13:56It was just, it was nice.
13:59And I just could not believe that this happened to them.
14:05Like, oh my God.
14:07I love Mary Lou just as well as my mom.
14:20She never corrected you.
14:23She kind of let you learn your own way.
14:26She was super nice to me.
14:28And her mother, Dorothy, was more nice than Mary Lou.
14:34They were like family.
14:38Back then in Detroit, murders didn't get put on the news.
14:41And we got news crews out there.
14:45We got Channel 4, 7, everybody out here now.
14:48Two elderly women have been found murdered in their Detroit home.
14:52Police are still searching for any witnesses.
14:54Residents are on edge after a brutal attack the day before Christmas on Elm Street.
15:01At the time, I was working as the crime reporter for the Detroit Free Press.
15:05I get a call from my editor.
15:06We got a breaking story.
15:07We got a double murder.
15:08You got to go out.
15:11The Detroit was cold.
15:13So I bundled up and waddled my way out to the scene.
15:19At that time, there had been a rash of home invasions and murders in the surrounding neighborhood.
15:29Just a few weeks before, there had been a triple murder just a few blocks away.
15:41Two elderly sisters and a husband, who was in his 80s, had been stabbed to death.
15:55Twelve days later, before the Elm Street case, about four miles away from Elm Street, a mother, a daughter, and a grandson was actually shot to death.
16:13In this case, the home was also ransacked.
16:19In all three cases, there was no forced entry.
16:22So based on the similarities, the general public would say, oh my God, is there a murder spree going on in the city of Detroit?
16:32The first thought that you have is, could I be in danger?
16:36Like you've seen, people get jagged, people get robbed.
16:41But this was, like, different, different.
16:45This was, like, movie stuff.
16:48We never locked our door on Elm Street.
16:51And we was in the middle of Detroit.
16:54That's how safe we thought we were.
16:56It was a different feeling, what Mary Lou and Dorothy called.
17:00Like, it wasn't the same.
17:02They was our neighbors, and it was family.
17:05I was on day shift when we got a call from the medical examiner with autopsy reports.
17:17Based on Mary Lou's injuries, she was still alive during the time that they were putting the plastic bag around her neck.
17:28And the killer or killers decided to do the same thing to Dorothy.
17:35Dorothy had emphysema, and it was just really horrific that, you know, that she would just stick a rag in her mouth, duct tape her, knowing that it had an oxygen tank.
17:50The brutality of the killings, and also the fact that the body was partially covered, was just a true indicator that maybe it was somebody that knew them prior to the death.
18:05When somebody covers the body, it's not to hide the body.
18:09It's to remove them from their vision.
18:15So at that time, we went back to the vicinity of the other murders to see, are they connected?
18:22We had to see if there's any similarities with the Elm Street case, where we could say, okay, this perpetrator was over here as well.
18:33Well, what you do a lot of times is you have to look for what we call a modus operandi.
18:42We look for things that are similar to other crimes that have already occurred.
18:48None of that was present at the time of our investigation.
18:51One house, the person was stabbed, the other person was shot.
18:58We discovered the only thing that actually connected them was that there was no forced entry.
19:06There was never a correlation between them.
19:10Based on Dorothy's and Mary Lou's injuries, the perpetrator just really had a vengeance against them.
19:18It was a well-knit, close community.
19:25And the more that we looked and the more that we investigated, it definitely felt as if they knew their assailants.
19:34The evidence led us directly to Elm Street.
19:37And that's where we started concentrating our energies.
19:41The day after Mary Lou and Dorothy was killed, it was Christmas Eve.
19:56I don't even remember Christmas in 1997.
20:01Like, we would rather not have Christmas that year.
20:05You can't celebrate during that.
20:07Like, nothing as brutal as ever happened.
20:10But we went to the house.
20:18I was with my mom.
20:20It was horrible.
20:21Like, because we was helping clean up and stuff like that.
20:27Mind you, I'm 20 and I'm just...
20:30I honestly...
20:32I was scared.
20:35The lights, presents, everything like that was still there.
20:40There was, like, splats of blood in places that they didn't clean up off the floor, like the walls.
20:45You could see where the trail of blood has been.
20:51And, like, Jerry, he cried a lot.
20:54I...
20:55I can't forget, like, I have a picture in my head.
21:00And why did this happen?
21:04That was one thing I've never understood.
21:06We had to find out who had a motive to actually commit the crime.
21:23So, we went and did a survey of the neighborhood.
21:28During the canvas, we discovered that the Drury family pretty much owned the block.
21:35Mary Lou was in the business of renting the homes out.
21:39She pretty much picked her own neighbors.
21:41In this instance here, Mary Lou knew everybody.
21:48Mary Lou was the landlady.
21:51And, like, she gave me big boss energy without flamboyance.
21:55Like, she didn't have furs and she could have...
21:58She wasn't flashy.
22:00She was about her business.
22:02You knew not to play with her.
22:04Like, you knew to respect her.
22:07That's the energy she gave me.
22:08She had the office in the front that she would conduct her business.
22:17People would come in and out to drop their rent off.
22:22They really didn't lock the door.
22:24So, anyone in that neighborhood had an opportunity to be able to enter the Drury home.
22:31The family, they were pretty much vulnerable.
22:35She was fair.
22:36She rented with people who are on welfare.
22:39If you didn't have your rent money, she wasn't the type to be like,
22:42you've got 30 days and you're out of here.
22:44I think Mary Lou was perhaps too trusting.
22:47We all know what it's like to have a landlord.
22:49It's not usually a loving and friendly relationship.
22:53December 23rd was the day the homicides took place.
22:58That was close to the time that people would come in and pay rent to the Drury family.
23:02During the search of the house, I discovered that there was some weapons missing.
23:18Mary Lou kept the gun at her desk.
23:20You know, a fight could escalate at any moment.
23:29Well, we started asking people whether or not they seen anything remarkable.
23:35At the time, Jerry was at work from 9.30 a.m. up until 12.45 p.m.
23:41And that's when we discovered that one of the neighbors heard something.
23:51Hazel Johnson, who's sort of the next door neighbor, maybe a little bit of a nosy body.
23:57She was good friends with Mary Lou, and it was Christmas time.
24:01And so Hazel has some holiday cards that she wants to drop off to her friend.
24:04The family, they have five chihuahuas.
24:09The dogs knew the neighbor Hazel very well.
24:13Hazel was the cat lady on the street.
24:15She saved all the cats.
24:17If you walk past Hazel's house, you might see her walking around with a la-la, you know what I'm saying?
24:23Cats everywhere.
24:25Normally, the dogs would stop barking when they smelled her.
24:27Well, Hazel said that when she knocked on the door, she could hear the dogs barking frantically.
24:40The door was locked, which was very unusual.
24:45She's thinking that something's off, but she wasn't sure.
24:49If Hazel would have got inside that house that day, she would have definitely came to the same fate as Mary Lou and Dorothy.
24:59Like, if you walk past her house, that's all you would hear is them dogs.
25:02That's why everybody didn't understand how this happened, is because all these dogs would have been barking and nobody heard nothing.
25:11When I talked to the police, I said I didn't hear the dogs barking.
25:14When Pamela Vannoy was the tenant that lived above Mary Lou and Dorothy, maybe she had her or something.
25:26My mom would take care of Dorothy all during the day.
25:30And Pam moved in upstairs so she could be available at night.
25:35She was super nice to me.
25:38Like, she never yelled at me.
25:40She never did nothing like that.
25:42She was there to take care of Dorothy.
25:46Caregivers have a way of becoming endeared to the person they're giving care to.
25:51I would imagine that having a trusted person in their midst to take care of their ailing mother and treat her as a grandmother must have felt like a blessing.
26:02And based on the information that we received, Mary Lou and Dorothy got along great with Pamela.
26:13She even called Dorothy Grandma.
26:18The main problem was that Pamela Vannoy was nowhere to be found.
26:24The door was locked.
26:26Her vehicle was left outside.
26:28The question was, where was Pamela?
26:31Where is the caregiver?
26:33What time did she leave?
26:35And where did she go?
26:36And why hadn't she returned?
26:41We ended up getting a search warrant for her apartment.
26:44And looking at her apartment, it seemed like she just disappeared.
26:51If someone was going out of town, there's certain things that would have been missing.
26:54And those things were not missing at that time.
26:57We were thinking that Pamela could be the third victim.
27:00Pamela Vannoy could have walked in on the murderers in the act, and they could have killed her, too.
27:06So there could have been three victims that day instead of two.
27:09The day after the murders of Mary Lou Drury, who was Jerry's wife, and Dorothy Gilbert, who was Mary Lou's mother.
27:29Pamela Vannoy was here, everyone's talking, everybody's there, trying to figure out who could it be.
27:35But then the investigators started looking around and asking, who's supposed to be here and isn't here?
27:42Guess who?
27:43It was Pamela Vannoy.
27:44Pamela Vannoy was a caretaker and was really close to the Trier family.
27:50She lived right upstairs.
27:52But at this point, she was nowhere to be found.
27:55This gave us even a higher intensity on the search for her.
28:01She, too, could have been a victim.
28:04So we called in the first person that we talked to, the homeowner, Jerry Drury.
28:09He was thinking on what else he may have missed.
28:13And he actually gave us information that on the day of the murders, he saw Pamela and Mary Lou talking for a long time.
28:27He said she had a boyfriend who was living with her on and off.
28:32Pamela and Charles, their relationship, sort of volatile.
28:38Charles was around, did odd jobs.
28:40Early on, the Drury family felt like he could help with the house and the maintenance.
28:47Charles was a handyman.
28:50But he had a violent past.
28:54So Jerry thinks maybe something's off.
28:58From day one, it was always a feeling about Charles.
29:02It looked pretty bad.
29:05He never spoke to us much.
29:08I was actually scared for Pam.
29:18Later that day, we found a witness that Pamela came to her to use her telephone.
29:25She said the morning of the murders on December 23rd, that Pamela Vannoy and Charles Vaughn showed up at her house.
29:38And she was carrying plastic bags.
29:41Pam had a lot of her personal belongings, and she wanted to leave them at her house.
29:45And Charles went straight to the bathroom.
29:48She didn't think anything of it.
29:53Until when Charles came back, he pulled a gun and said, look, you didn't see us.
29:58And then they disappeared.
30:01It was a nickel-plated .38 revolver.
30:05It looked like the one that was missing.
30:07At that moment, we suspected Charles killed Mary Lou and Dorothy.
30:15He was armed and dangerous.
30:17He actually threatened a witness.
30:19So there was no telling if he would use that weapon for something worse.
30:32I continued to canvass the neighborhood.
30:37We found a witness.
30:40He made a statement that was revealing in several ways.
30:46So the neighbor, Helen, had been drinking with Mary Lou the night before.
30:53You know, it was Christmas time.
30:56My mother, she worked for Mary Lou like everybody else throughout the neighborhood.
31:02But Mary Lou took her to bingo every night, five nights a week.
31:07That night, Mary Lou told Helen that she had caught Pamela stealing $15 from her bingo envelope.
31:15And things went sour between the two.
31:24We found out Mary Lou told Helen that they had been trying to help her out because Pamela was a drug addict.
31:31Pamela used heroin and heroin moves people into a different category because now they need drugs just to maintain their own physical strength.
31:52And they're more inclined to take something that's not theirs.
31:57Pamela, she really, really messed up her trust with Mary Lou.
32:02Mary Lou wanted to be able to trust you.
32:04But if you lose her trust, she didn't want you inside her house no more.
32:08That's what was so hurtful about it.
32:14I knew Pam was no good to it.
32:19It was discovered that Mary Lou was going to evict Pamela the next day.
32:26Pam wanted to get an extension.
32:29And Mary Lou said, no, because you stole, you have to leave.
32:36So Pamela Benoy wasn't on the scene because she was supposed to be evicted that very day.
32:43Why?
32:43Because she had her sticky fingers in Mary Lou's bingo purse.
32:47It was too much of a coincidence that she got evicted from the home and the murders happened the same day.
32:58Was Pam the victim or was she actually the perpetrator of this particular crime?
33:06The cops used to say at the time, let's heat these people up.
33:09And they started blasting that and pasting it all over the news media.
33:13So their faces were on TV.
33:15We said, look, if you see these people, they're armed and dangerous, please call.
33:22I'm like looking on the TV and could not believe what I was seeing.
33:28I knew exactly who they were talking about.
33:31Somebody that had access to her mother that was helping her.
33:36It was just unbelievable.
33:39It was just unbelievable.
33:45Turns out some clerk sees their pictures, they just checked in, calls 911.
33:52Christmas Eve, 1997, someone recognized Charles Vaughn, the manager, gave us the information that they checked in on December 23rd.
34:02We knew that Charles was armed and dangerous, so we mobilized some units to go with us.
34:11We had to be on high alert.
34:14There was a possibility that there could be shots fired.
34:20This could escalate at any moment.
34:23You know that it's people are armed, they stole guns.
34:27This is the single most dangerous thing that any cop can ever do.
34:31After the murder,
34:41someone recognized Charles Vaughn and Pamela Vannoy at a hotel that was in Dearborn, Michigan.
34:52We knew that Charles Vaughn had a weapon.
34:56We saw movement by the vending machines.
34:59It was Pamela Vannoy and Charles Vaughn.
35:05We moved in abruptly.
35:07We did take them into custody.
35:16There was no fight, and they made the arrest.
35:26And we searched that hotel room.
35:30I poured back the heater.
35:32There was money that was behind there, credit cards,
35:36as well as a nickel-plated .38,
35:40and another weapon was a .38 Cobra,
35:43and it appeared to have dried up blood on the actual weapon itself.
35:49When the forensics came back,
35:52the blood belonged to Mary Lou.
35:55Once Pamela and Charles were under arrest,
35:59we talked to them separately.
36:01Charles said Pamela is a drug addict.
36:07She's jonesing for heroin,
36:10and so she's the one coming up with this concocted scheme to kill these people.
36:15He said he had no idea what Pamela had planned
36:18when he went upstairs to her apartment
36:21and left her downstairs with Mary Lou and Dorothy.
36:28And he said a fight ensued downstairs.
36:34And then everything just went quiet.
36:38After 20 minutes of not hearing anything,
36:42he went downstairs.
36:43He saw Pamela standing over the bodies.
36:49Charles said that he helped her move Dorothy's body
36:52because he was afraid of what she was capable of doing.
36:57Pamela has a different version of this story.
37:01According to Pamela,
37:02Charles wanted to do a robbery.
37:04He said,
37:05they've used us long enough.
37:09Somehow,
37:11this wonderful family,
37:13who took them in,
37:14gave them room and board
37:16and pocket money
37:17and paid them for an honest day's work,
37:19that somehow,
37:20he was owed more.
37:25They were going to wait
37:26until Gerald went to work,
37:29went to go downstairs.
37:32Coast is clear.
37:33The plan was simple.
37:34Tie them up and rob them.
37:36No harm,
37:37no foul.
37:37Little bit of harm,
37:38little bit of foul.
37:39But certainly no bloodshed and murder.
37:43But Pamela says,
37:44once they go back inside,
37:46some kind of switch went off
37:50and Charles became violently angry.
37:53She said that Mary Lou was begging and pleading
37:57before Charles did anything to her mother Dorothy,
38:01but he didn't care.
38:02Pamela said she tried to intervene
38:04and stop him
38:06from what would become a murderous frenzy.
38:09He turns the gun on his girlfriend
38:12and says,
38:14this deserves it.
38:17It wasn't a matter of who did it.
38:20Both of them were there at the time.
38:22Both of them became enraged
38:23because they had nowhere to go.
38:25They had no money.
38:26They had no family and friends
38:29that would take them in
38:30at that particular time.
38:33Truthfully, I don't believe it.
38:35I don't believe that one person did all of that.
38:39It was a two-person job.
38:40It's my belief that Dorothy heard the fight,
38:51heard the struggle,
38:53heard the yelling,
38:54and came to the assistance of her daughter,
38:56who was fighting for her life.
38:58And she, too, got caught up in the web of the killing.
39:08They were alive when they were taken to the basement.
39:12And they died a horrible death.
39:17They were both sentenced to life in prison,
39:20which I think was well-deserved.
39:26It's a sense of satisfaction
39:28that you were able to close a case.
39:33But the whole block was devastated by a homicide.
39:36Whatever sense of safety
39:40that this tight-knit Elm Street community had felt,
39:44that was over forever.
39:47Our life pivoted at that point.
39:50It didn't...
39:52Like, that was a pivot point of all of our lives.
39:57My mom didn't celebrate another Christmas
40:00until my son came.
40:03Mary Lou was...
40:06like a sister...
40:10to me.
40:12A world of ever change.
40:17I just...
40:19can't understand...
40:22why...
40:26why...
40:27somebody would just...
40:30just...
40:31give the new paper...
40:36December of 1997
40:38just shows you how sinister and evil
40:41people can be.
40:42And it doesn't matter what time of the year it is,
40:47evil definitely doesn't take a holiday.
40:49The address is no longer there.
40:54As a matter of fact, it's now a parking garage.
40:58But the memories of what happened on Elm Street is still alive.
41:04Never want another memory I did.
41:15It's still like a dream.
41:20I'll never put over it.
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43:09
20:15
20:19
41:31
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