People PEOPLE True Crime Split II

IN 1980 A PAIR OF WOMEN—barefoot and dressed in white robes—walked into an Arizona church with a baby girl. They handed the infant to an astonished congregant and said they were part of a traveling religious sect, then walked out as mysteriously as they had appeared, leaving the child behind. More than 2,100 miles away in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., members of the Clouse family were trying to find 21-year-old Dean Clouse, his 17-year-old wife, Tina, and their year-old daughter Holly Marie. Soon after the young family’s move to Lewisville, Texas, Dean and Tina’s letters home stopped abruptly. “It was nerve-racking,” says Dean’s mother, Donna Casasanta. “I would jump out of my skin every time the phone rang. If they found a body around my son’s age, or around Tina’s age,…

AMBER HAGERMAN ADORED playing with her Barbie princesses, loved the color pink and spent hours riding bikes with her 5-year-old brother Ricky. “She loved being a little mommy to her little brother,” said Amber’s mother, Donna Williams. On the bright afternoon of Jan. 13, 1996, the siblings were pedaling around the parking lot of an abandoned Winn-Dixie grocery store near their grandparents’ house in Arlington, Texas, when Ricky left for home. Before Amber could join him, a man drove up in a black pickup, snatched her off her pink bike and drove away. An elderly neighbor in his backyard got a glimpse of the scene and dialed 911, but by the time police arrived, there was no sign of the 9-year-old. Four agonizing days later a man walking his dog…

NO ONE IS A PERFECT PARENT, but Alicia Jackson was determined to be an amazing mom to son Jeremiah, whom she called Juju. Their Columbus, Ohio, apartment was filled with child-rearing books, and Jackson, 25, loved showing Juju off at church on Sundays and dressing him in the scarlet and gray of her alma mater Ohio State. “She was so excited when he was hitting all his milestones,” says cousin Shauntay Jackson, who notes that Juju was born two months prematurely. “And you could feel the love.” That love was evident even in the most unimaginably horrific of scenes. On Dec. 2, 2010, Jackson’s live-in boyfriend Eugene Wilson got home to the couple’s shared apartment to find her viciously stabbed more than 30 times in the neck, face and chest. Little Juju,…

‘ALL I WANT IS FOR MY DAD TO TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED’—ELLIE GREEN FOR AS LONG AS SHE CAN REMEMBER, Ellie Green wanted to do everything she could to make her adoring mother, Angela, proud. So she put in extra practice time on the piano, learned multiple languages and focused on school, becoming valedictorian of her high school graduating class. But in the summer of 2019 the mother-daughter pair hit a rough patch. Green returned to the family’s Prairie Village, Kans., home after her freshman year at the University of Kansas and semesters spent studying in Italy to find Angela clearly out of sorts. “She told me that she was having a really hard time not having me at home anymore,” says Green. “I am an only child, and…

THE PELHAM PARKWAY SECTION of the Bronx was not an easy place to grow up in the 1990s, and like many kids in the neighborhood, 13-year-old Minerliz “Minnie” Soriano knew to stay close to home. If she needed pocket change, she sold candy door-to-door in her apartment building. A straight A student who dreamed of becoming an astronaut, she would sometimes sit cross-legged in the lobby of her apartment building doing her homework as neighbors such as Joseph Martinez, a fellow space buff, passed by. “I used to make fun of her,” says her best friend, Kimberly Ortiz, who walked home from school with her almost every day. “I used to tell her, ‘We’re from the Bronx. We’re not going to be astronauts.’” On Feb. 24, 1999, Minerliz left Middle School…

FOR THE GRAUBART BOYS, David and his “tagalong” little brother Joe, growing up in Surfside, Fla., with their buddy Danny Goldman was a snapshot of Americana: bikes and boats and “fishing right out your back door,” remembers David. It was the 1950s and ’60s. The Vietnam War was a fixture of the evening news as the boys hurtled toward age 18 and the dreaded military draft. But the guys only knew Surfside as a place where no one locked their doors and where Danny’s mom, Sally, would cook breakfast for the gang. “It was very sweet,” says Joe. That blissful image was shattered on March 28, 1966, the day before Danny’s 18th birthday, when a husky man with a limp entered the Goldman home through their unlocked sliding doors around 4:30…