4 men arrested after podcast helps solve decades-old murder of teen girl
FILE: Louisiana investigators are crediting a podcast with helping to solve a decades-old murder (Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)
Louisiana detectives are crediting a local podcast with helping to solve the decades-old rape and murder of a teenage girl.
Over the past few days, police charged four men with aggravated rape and second-degree murder for killing Roxanne Sharp, 44 years after her body was found in the woods.
Who killed Roxanne Sharp?
The backstory:
Sharp was 16 years old in 1982 when she was raped and murdered in the woods in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, about 30 miles north of New Orleans.
Eventually, the case went cold, remaining unsolved for decades until investigators asked a local media company to produce a podcast about Sharp’s murder. "Who Killed Roxanne Sharp?" went live last year with six episodes.
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What followed were crucial tips from the public and new witnesses contacting investigators.
What they're saying:
"It helped our investigators piece together where Roxanne was days before to the time she died, to where we're at now," Louisiana State Police spokesperson Marc Gremillion told The Associated Press. "It was a very large help with getting that message out to the public, and then, therefore, those witnesses getting back to us."
Perry Wayne Taylor, 64; Darrell Dean Spell, 64; Carlos Cooper, 64; and Billy Williams, Jr., 62, have all been charged in connection with Sharp’s death.
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Cooper and Taylor were already in prison on unrelated charges, and Williams and Spell were arrested earlier this week. Police said Sharp knew the four suspects and frequented the neighborhood where they lived.
Northshore Media Vice President Charles Dowdy, who helped produce the podcast, said his team didn’t think there’d be much interest in the case, but "we were quickly corrected."
"Cold cases don’t close themselves," Covington Police Department Chief Michael Ferrell said in a statement. "They close because people show up, year after year, and refuse to quit. That is exactly what our agencies did, and today, Roxanne and her family finally have the justice they have waited so long for."
The Source: This report includes information from The Associated Press.