Aaron "Peanut" Lamont Smalls (Ace of Spades, Virginia)

Our card this week is Aaron Lamont Smalls, the ace of Spades, from Virginia. When Aaron was found shot to death in 2001, investigators dug through piles of tips and several key pieces of evidence to try and find his killer. But each lead seemed to dry up quicker than the last, and the case eventually went cold. Now, more than 20 years later, investigators are still hopeful that they can uncover the and give them the closure they deserve. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the deck.

So at the time that we were there, there were no keys found with the vehicle, nobody around the vehicle. The deputy got out and opened the car doors. The only thing that was unusual about it at that point was that the back seat was missing out of the vehicle.

When the deputies ran the license plate, they found that it had been reported stolen about two weeks ago, on January 25, 2001, and it was now February 6.

Well, that obviously prompted us to return to the scene. And ultimately, we discovered that the individual that was in the back stuffed in the trunk was Aaron Smalls, a Black male out of Newport News, Virginia.

Aaron, who was known almost exclusively by his nickname Peanut, had been missing since January 25th, the same day she'd reported her car stolen. And just a quick side note I'm going to call him Peanut from now on, but you'll hear sheriff.

So it's our protocol that once we found that there was someone in the trunk that was obviously dead, we didn't disturb the body until the medical examiner got there.

While they waited, they turned their attention back to V. She told them that she and Peanut lived together in Newport News with his son. He was originally from Philadelphia, and most of his family, including his son's mother, still lived there. And it seemed like, despite the distance, he was pretty close to them. In fact, on the day he went missing, his brother was actually in town for a visit.

So the last time that anyone saw him was his brother at 8.

V was during all of this. But here's where things really get interesting. When Peanut didn't return with the car, she reported it stolen, but Peanut himself wasn't reported missing until January 28th, that's three days after he was last seen. I can't explain this gap in time. And the NNPD wasn't able to confirm who filed the missing persons report, so I could be missing some context here.

And once the body was removed from the trunk was when we could see that there was a shotgun blast to the chest area.

With Peanut's body on the way to the ME's office, investigators were able to do a more thorough search of the car. His missing slipper was nowhere to be found, but tucked into the back of the trunk were two t-shirts stained with blood and a cell phone.

It's not a high crime area. If you talk about major crimes like robberies, murders, that type of thing basically larcenies from vehicles. I mean, we've had some issues with people dealing drugs up there in the past. But pretty much the same thing that you can find in other apartment complexes as well.

The timing of when the car appeared varied.

We don't have any idea where the shooting actually occurred. It clearly didn't occur in the parking lot of the apartment complex, or somebody would have heard that or seen it. So he was killed somewhere else, put in the trunk of the car, and then that car was dropped off at Country Club apartments.

Despite no one witnessing the homicide, some residents had seen someone with the car. And this person wasn't peanut, they said. It was a man who was black, clean-shaven, roughly six feet tall, maybe 180 pounds, and in his late 20s to early 30s. Those who saw this man said that he had been in or around the car the first couple of days after Peanut went missing.

There was actually some people that claimed that they saw him driving the car, and then the best description claimed that they saw him get out of the car. Walk around it a couple of times.

There was even one resident who claimed that he'd spoken to this guy. He told investigators that the man got out of the parked car, approached him and asked for a cigarette. He matched the description the other residents gave them, but this witness got a clear view of what he was wearing a dark jacket and a knit cap.

They did the same thing that most anyone else would do They would call around and ask if anybody had seen him. They made people aware that he was missing along with the car.

After speaking with his friends and family, investigators headed to the cell phone store next to confirm if he had made it there. But they couldn't find any evidence that he had ever been to the store. On the 25th. So they circled back to the family to try and see if maybe there was somewhere else that he could have gone. And that's when they learned that Peanut had recently been in some trouble with the law.

We do have family members who acknowledged that they knew that Aaron was in fact dealing drugs. I don't know that there's any evidence that he was moving large amounts. It sounded more like smaller amounts of marijuana and cocaine that he was moving on a regular basis. At the time that Aaron disappeared, there were actually indictments out for him from a local drug task force on drug charges. Based on the other information that we had had from the family and from the task force.

With this information, investigators thought this could be their missing link. Maybe Peanut had gone to make a drug deal up in York County before going to the store and then something went wrong.

Well, based on experience, you would think that the life that Aaron Smalls was leading was probably somehow related to what caused his death. I mean, over the years, I've worked multiple cases where someone owes you money, you owe someone money. And this is the result, the fact that they get tired of waiting for what they're owed. And they're going to make an example.

Despite living what might've been considered a risky lifestyle, investigators couldn't find any other red flags. Peanut's family couldn't pinpoint any known enemies, any history of bad drug deals or even run-ins with shady characters. They couldn't think of anyone who matched the description of the guy seen with V's car, and investigators weren't able to find anything to connect Peanut to the complex itself either. Like he didn't seem to know anyone who lived there or in the surrounding area.

Well, the phone owner stated she lost a phone.

Now I had a ton of questions about Wanda, like, what are the odds that you lose your phone in a mall? That's about an hour away, by the way? And then it shows up, a month later, in the trunk of a reportedly stolen car with a murdered man. But the only additional information Sheriff Montgomery could provide was that Wanda didn't know Peanut or anyone associated with the case. So I don't know if they dove into her phone to see if they could put some pieces together. She seems like just another one of those frustrating loose ends that I can't tie up because we just don't have the information. But even without Peanut's physical phone, they were still able to pull records from the last two weeks of activity before he went missing.

We know that, you know, on the date that we found the car, that obviously he died within a fairly short time, whether it was days or a week. There really isn't any way to know other than we have a start date. Which is the last day he's seen, and then the day that he's found, and in between there, any one of those days are possible.

At that point, investigators decided to turn back to the public for help. They put out another call for information about the case. And an acquaintance of V's came forward and said they'd seen a car matching the description of V's vehicle. On January 27th, just two days after Peanut disappeared.

There was an individual who saw the car at a Dodgers Chicken place on Jefferson Avenue in the Denby area of Newport News. But the individual driving the car did not match Aaron's description. They did not believe that was Aaron.

While this witness was certain Peanut wasn't the one driving, they weren't able to provide a very clear description of the person who was. What they did know for sure was that the driver was a Black male. And this immediately made investigators think of the man seen with the car at the apartment complex. Due just to the timing.

I would say that we would make that assumption that it's probably the same person that was seen getting out of the car. Up at Country Club. It's all in the same timeframe.

They still couldn't id the man, though, but there were also other tips coming in that they dug into, and that's when they came across a woman.

She saw Peanut later that day, made him aware of this phone call and, according to her, said that he was holding a firearm. Didn't say whether it was a handgun, shotgun, what it was, and that was all the information that she had about it. She didn't inquire any further, and after this pretest statement, she was polygraphed on whether or not she had any specific information about Peanut.

So the next step was to track down Daryl.

Sometimes they're involved in crimes and you don't want to get rid of the gun, but you don't want to be caught with it either. So you pass it on to a trusted friend or accomplice and say, hang on to this. For me, for whatever reason, for a period of time, sometimes law enforcement's fortunate enough to get a hold of that gun and trace it back to crime.

Did you get a hold of the gun that Peanut was supposedly holding?

No, no, we never found any firearms that were associated with this case.

Daryl was adamant that he didn't have anything to do with Peanut's murder. And since they couldn't find this firearm or a single shred of evidence that he could be involved, investigators were once again forced to move on to another tip. You see a single house slipper.

We got contacted by an inmate in the jail.

The jail is in York County, literally five minutes from the apartment complex where peanuts was found, so investigators headed over there to talk with this other inmate. But when they asked him about the story, his cellmate told he denied ever making any statements about peanuts murder. And what's more, he claimed he didn't even have a cousin by the name that the cellmate gave investigators. But they weren't just gonna take this guy's word for it.

Investigators along with public works people from York County actually put devices down into cameras, down into the sewage system for considerable amounts of distance through the whole neighborhood. Never could locate a shotgun in any of the locations that were remotely close to what was described by the person in jail.

Investigators were once again forced to move on time started flying by, according to reporting by David McCauley for The Daily Press. There wasn't any movement in the case for five years. But as time went on, so did advancements in DNA technology. And in July 2006, investigators decided to send those two shirts from the trunk off for more testing.

Actually, he was a known associate of Peanut. Once we drilled down into some of the interviews, it wasn't uncommon for them to be seen together.

They finally tracked Anthony and when they told him about the DNA match, he was like, Well, of course, my DNA popped up. Those are my shirts. At some point, he says. He'd left them with VeE or in the trunk, and they had been there for a while before the murder.

So that was his explanation for why a shirt with his DNA would be in that vehicle, which at that point was a plausible explanation.

Just like everyone else they'd questioned in this case, Anthony swore up and down that he didn't have anything to do with Peanut's homicide. Throughout the interview, he fully cooperated with investigators and he even agreed to give them another DNA sample to compare to the profile they had, which they did. And it was a match again, but they just didn't feel like Anthony was their guy. If he was as close with Vee and Peanut as it seemed, then it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility. For some of his stuff, like the shirts, to end up in their possession, just to be extra sure. Investigators tried to come up with more sinister explanations for why the shirts may have been there, but ultimately they couldn't find anything. And with that, Peanut's case went ice cold.

We get a call at least once a year from some relatives from Philadelphia asking if there's any developments in the case. They've been thankful that we have resurrected the case a couple of times on local news channels and on national media. But to this point, we don't have any real person of interest or any one person that we're zeroing in on. The interesting thing about it is various people have given bits and pieces of information.

After his murder, Peanut's son went back to Philadelphia to live with his mother. And while he's surrounded by family members who love and support him, he's grown up without ever knowing why his father was taken away.

There's a young man out there that grew up without his father and his mother, as far as I know, and some of his relatives are still alive. And we'd probably like to know that the person that committed this crime has faced justice. You would think, with the amount of time that he's been in jail, the only way that this crime is going to be solved that if someone had specific knowledge of it was to come forward at this point in time and make us aware of some piece of evidence that we've not been made aware of before now, and as time goes by, it's probably less likely that that occurs. And I would like to think that somebody will hear this and go, you know, we're going to make that phone call.

For more information about the 2001 murder of Aaron Lamont Smalls, also known as Peanut, please don't hesitate to call the York-Pocosin Sheriff's Office at 757-890-4999.