At six-thirty a.m. on the morning of January 21st, 1998, an alarm clock went off in the bedroom of twelve-year-old Stephanie Crowe, who lived in Escondido with her family. After several minutes of the clock buzzing loudly throughout the house, the girl’s grandmother went to Stephanie’s room to see why she wasn’t up yet.
Horrifyingly, the bloodied body of the twelve-year-old was lying in the open doorway of her bedroom. It appeared that the girl had been stabbed nine times while she was still in her bed, then had attempted to crawl to her bedroom door for help before she succumbed to blood loss.
Because there was no sign of forced entry into the house, police initially focused their attention on members of the girl’s immediate family, and confiscated all of their clothing for testing. Additionally, authorities separated Stephanie’s parents from their other children—fourteen-year-old Michael and ten-year-old Shannon—who were taken into protective custody and questioned about the crime without their parents’ consent and without an attorney present.
From the beginning, investigators were suspicious of the teenaged Michael, who appeared distant and allegedly unconcerned about his sister’s death, reportedly playing a hand-held video game while the rest of his family reacted with anguish to Stephanie’s murder. They were also skeptical of Michael’s account of his movements that night; he claimed that he had awoken at four-thirty a.m. with a headache, and had gone down the hall to get a painkiller, but had not seen his sister’s body at that time. Detectives were doubtful that Michael could have completely missed seeing her, as his bedroom was right across the hall from hers, and she was lying very clearly in the open doorway of her own room.
Michael Crowe was subjected to an intense, several-hour interrogation, in which officers informed him that Stephanie’s blood had been found in his room, that a clump of his hair had been found clutched in her hand, and that the computer voice stress analyzer utilized during the questioning demonstrated that he was being deceptive. None of these allegations was true, but California law does allow for interrogating investigators to lie to suspects in order to elicit a confession. After a full day’s session, Michael was returned to the Polinsky Children’s Center where he and his younger sister were being held; then the following day, he was brought back for further interrogation.
After many more hours, Michael Crowe finally cracked and told police that he must have killed his sister because of all the purported evidence that he had done so, though he told them that he could not remember doing it, and was unable to provide specific details. At the encouragement of law enforcement, Michael wrote an apology letter to his sister, and informed detectives that he had killed her because he was jealous of her for being more popular and better at everything than he was.
It didn’t help that Michael was an introverted kid who wore black, liked video games and fantasy literature, and had written a story in which a character named Odinwrath was plotting to kill his sister. Partly due to his demeanor, police seemed adamant that he was the culprit, and apparently went to ridiculous lengths to fit the fourteen-year-old into their narrative of the crime.
The murder weapon was still an issue, however, as it had never been found. As it happened, though, the mother of a fifteen-year-old friend of Michael’s named Aaron Houser phoned police about a week after the slaying and claimed that a knife had been stolen from her son’s collection. Investigators undertook an all-out hunt for it, finally discovering it hidden under the bed of another one of Michael’s friends, fifteen-year-old Joshua Treadway. Joshua admitted that he had always liked the knife and had stolen it last time he was visiting Aaron, and on the strength of this confession, officers arrested Joshua on petty theft charges and then relentlessly grilled him for eleven hours about the murder of Stephanie Crowe.
Joshua initially insisted that he had only stolen the knife, but as the questioning went on—and as officers reportedly denied the teenager sleep and food over yet another marathon session the following day—he eventually buckled, claiming first that Aaron had actually given him the knife to hide because it had been used in the murder, then finally caving in completely and giving police the story they seemed to want: that all three boys had planned and ruthlessly carried out the slaying of Stephanie Crowe. All three boys were subsequently arrested and charged with murder.
Right from the beginning, though, the prosecution’s case encountered problems. The judge presiding over the proceedings ruled all of Joshua’s confession save for the last two hours inadmissible, on the grounds that it had been coerced. Since the final two hours were where the boy had given the detailed plan behind the murder, though, Joshua was set to stand trial first, though his confession could only be used against him and not the other two boys. Michael Crowe’s confession was also ruled inadmissible for the same reason; he and Aaron were to be tried together, after Joshua’s day in court.
As jury selection began in Joshua’s trial, however, there was a momentous break that completely cut the legs out from beneath the authorities’ favored scenario.
It turned out that on the same morning that Stephanie’s body was discovered, another woman living on the same street had called 911 to report that a man who seemed threatening was following her back to her residence. When police arrived, they found that the man was Richard Tuite, a transient with mental health issues and a criminal record. Tuite was taken back to the station and questioned, and his clothing was also confiscated, but he was eventually released.
However, it turned out that Richard Tuite had provably been in the Crowes’ neighborhood on the night of Stephanie’s murder, and that morning’s 911 call had not been the first one. The night before, as a matter of fact, two other residents of the same street had phoned to report the drifter, who was walking around the neighborhood, behaving erratically, knocking on doors, peering in windows, and asking for a girl named Tracy. Tracy, incidentally, was Tracy Nelson, a former friend of Tuite’s when they were both teenagers. Tuite had apparently fallen deeply in love with Tracy, but she had not felt the same way, and he had become so enraged at her gentle refusal of him that she had been obliged to cut off all contact because she had begun to fear him.
One caller to 911 on the night Stephanie was killed even alleged that Tuite was in the middle of the street, shouting to no one, “I’ll kill you, you fucking bitch.”
Not only that, but a police officer who had come to investigate the disturbances had actually pulled into the Crowes’ driveway at around ten p.m. and had seen the laundry room door to their house closing, but did not find it prudent to investigate. The family had told authorities that they were actually in the habit of leaving the laundry room door unlocked, and suggested that the killer could have entered through this door without having to break in.
Though a cursory examination of Richard Tuite’s clothing on the day of his arrest had not yielded anything unusual, a more thorough analysis revealed three drops of Stephanie’s blood on Tuite’s red sweatshirt, as well as a tiny amount on the white t-shirt he had been wearing underneath it. Tuite was arrested for Stephanie’s murder, and a sheepish police department released traumatized teenagers Michael Crowe, Aaron Houser, and Joshua Treadway. Two of the boys’ families would eventually sue the police department over the affair, and would be awarded substantial sums in 2011: more than seven million dollars to the Crowes, and four million dollars to the Housers. The Treadway family had abandoned the lawsuit years prior.
Richard Tuite was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the Stephanie Crowe case in 2004, and was sentenced to thirteen years, though because he had attempted to escape from custody prior to his trial (he was re-apprehended after only a few hours), he was saddled with an additional four years. Had that been the end of the story, the Stephanie Crowe homicide would be considered a solved case, but more twists and turns were yet to come.
In 2011, the manslaughter charge was overturned on appeal, with the judge citing the lack of physical evidence tying Tuite to the crime and several other factors. A retrial was ordered, which commenced in 2013.
At the second trial, the prosecution leaned heavily on the fact that Richard Tuite was demonstrably less than five-hundred yards from the Crowe house on the night of the murder, had been behaving in a frightening and violent manner according to numerous witnesses, and likely could have entered the Crowes’ home through an unlocked door. They also pointed out that Stephanie’s blood had been found on his clothes, and further that he was found to have an unusual brand of cough drop in his pocket that was of the same brand as the ones that had been sitting on the Crowes’ kitchen counter, suggesting that he had indeed been in their home that night.
The defense responded with the fact that none of Tuite’s fingerprints or hair had been found in the Crowe home, that he would never have been able to find Stephanie’s bedroom in the dark in an unfamiliar house, and that the family’s dog had apparently not barked to alert the Crowes to an intruder. They also claimed that the blood evidence could have been later cross-contamination from another piece of evidence being placed in the same locker, as it was allegedly not noticed when Tuite’s clothing was first confiscated. Further, they attempted to demonstrate that Stephanie must have been killed by at least two attackers, using the pattern of the stab wounds to posit that at least one person must have been holding the girl down while another person stabbed her.
Whether any of this was true or not, evidently enough reasonable doubt was engendered by the defense’s arguments that Tuite was found not guilty at this second trial, and summarily released. The Crowe family was furious, but the jury had spoken. The question remains, then, whether the case is truly unsolved, or whether the killer of Stephanie Crowe simply got away with murder.
Crime Immemorial 