Crime Immemorial

It was August of 2000, and twenty-one-year-old Laneshia Crowder, known as Lane to friends and family, was living in the town of Carrollton, a safe and friendly exurb of Atlanta, with her two children: two-year-old daughter Lyric and seven-year-old son Kenneth. On Saturday, August 12th, the family had been on an outing, and they all returned home at around nine-thirty p.m. Soon afterward, Laneshia put the children to bed, and then spent the next two hours chatting with friends over the phone. It was the last time anyone, other than her killer, would speak to her.

Sunday passed, and then Monday. By the time the evening of Monday, August 14th rolled around, Laneshia’s neighbor realized that he hadn’t seen or heard from Laneshia at all, and became concerned enough to go to the Crowder home to check in on her. He peered through the bedroom window and beheld a horrifying sight: two-year-old Lyric was sitting on top of Laneshia’s very still, prone body, which lay on the bedroom floor. The neighbor fled to the home of another neighbor, Carl Neal, and the men called the police.

When officers arrived, they discovered that Laneshia Crowder had been savagely beaten and kicked to death. Lyric Crowder was unharmed, but heartbreakingly, she had been attempting to put Band-Aids on her dead mother’s wounds.

In the second bedroom, seven-year-old Kenneth was found, also severely beaten, but miraculously still alive. The child was rushed to the nearest hospital, where he eventually recovered, though he suffered from permanent brain damage.

An autopsy determined that Laneshia had likely been slain in the early morning hours of August 12th, not long after she last spoke to her friends on the phone, meaning that her two children had been in the home with her dead body for approximately thirty-six hours before they were rescued.

There had been no indication of forced entry, so investigators assumed that Laneshia had possibly known her killer or killers, or that they had knocked on the door and forced their way in when she answered it. In addition, nothing had been stolen, suggesting that Laneshia’s murder had been the sole purpose of the attack. According to Kenneth, who despite his grave injuries was able to give a fairly detailed description of the incident to police, there had been three assailants. Lyric Crowder, in later years, also claimed to have a vivid memory of what the killers looked like, and gave this information to the authorities.

Laneshia had previously been in a relationship with a man who had violently abused her, and his involvement in the crime was examined, though he had been in jail at the time of the murder. Interviews with several friends who Laneshia had been speaking to on the phone on the night before she was murdered also seemed to spark no solid leads.

Authorities did recover a murder weapon from the scene, but did not disclose to the public what it was, in the hopes that the information could be used to root out false confessions. Many other details and forensic evidence have been withheld for the same reasons.

Both Lyric Crowder and her brother Kenneth speak to the media fairly often, still hoping that the case will be solved and they will have some closure in the vicious murder of their mother.