Lawrence O'Connell (Jack of Spades, Washington DC)
2023-04-05 00:28:31
For years, some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people and distributed those cards in prisons hoping inmates would come forward with information needed to crack these cold cases wide open. Now, audiochuck is dealing you in. Each week, we will be working with investigators and family members to bring you the details of some of the coldest cases from around the country in hopes that someone listening can finally bring these victims the justice they deserve.
Our card this week is Lawrence O'Connell, the Jack of Spades, from Washington, D.
C One Friday afternoon. In 1994, 35-year-old Lawrence seemingly vanished into thin air after leaving his workplace. And a disturbing discovery the following day left everyone with more questions than answers, even to this very day. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the deck.
An outdoor farmer's market at the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium was still bustling with activity when a man, whom we'll call Don, walked past with his dog. Even though the afternoon sun had done little to warm up the chilly February day, a frigid breeze wasn't going to keep Don and his dog from enjoying their Saturday stroll along the Anacostia River. But in the blink of an eye, Don's pleasant walk took a dark turn. When his dog suddenly made a beeline for a cluster of trees along the riverbank. In complete horror, Don realized what his dog was trying to get to.
Sprawled out along the tree line was the severely beaten body of what looked to be a middle-aged man. It was clear the man was dead, so Don immediately contacted Washington D..C.'s Metropolitan Police Department. Jim Tranum was the on-call detective that weekend, so he quickly responded to the scene.
The victim was a white male in his 30s. He was dressed businesslike, except where he had no sport coat on, but he had a tie and pants. He had bindings around his two wrists. They were separated apart so they weren't bound together, but it was like he had been bound to a chair or something.
Several personal items were scattered around the man, and investigators found a rock covered with blood closer to the river. Which told police the victim hadn't gone down without quite a fight. What wasn't at the scene, though, was a wallet or any kind of ID. But just as they were trying to piece together who this man was, authorities from a neighboring agency showed up. They were from Fairfax County, which is a suburban county west of D..C. And they said earlier that morning, they'd gotten a call from a woman named Maria, who said her 35-year-old husband, Lawrence O'Connell, was missing. So when they heard about this body being found, they had a suspicion.
It was the guy that they'd been looking for, Maria told police. Lawrence was supposed to pick up their 8-year-old son from school the previous day when he got off work at around 4 p..m. But at 5.30, she got a call from the school saying that he never showed up, which was completely unlike him. So she started calling friends and local hospitals, trying to figure out where Lawrence was, but now police knew where he'd been.
Not only did the deceased man fit Lawrence's description, but he was also found just two and a half miles from where Lawrence worked. It took only a short time to officially iD him as Lawrence O'Connell. The following day, Lawrence's autopsy was conducted and it was determined that his cause of death was blunt force trauma. They also found that his body was covered in defensive wounds, confirming what evidence at the scene suggested that Lawrence fought his attacker or attackers until his last breath. While the autopsy was underway, investigators worked to piece together a timeline of Lawrence's last movements.
Detective Tranum reached out to Lawrence's bank and the credit card companies that he used and requested his transaction history. But this was 1994. A request like that wasn't as quick and painless as it is today, so he knew it could take days to process. In the meantime, investigators went to his workplace. Voice of America, which is an international broadcasting network located in the heart of D..C. They were able to confirm that Lawrence had been there Friday and he had signed out just after 4 p...m.
Now, The Voice of America is located downtown, on the mall, right in a very high tourist area. You know, a lot of rush hour traffic, pedestrian traffic. Lawrence would park his car several blocks away in a parking space that he rented in a condo parking lot.
When investigators checked, his car was still sitting in that lot, but they weren't sure. That meant he'd never made it to his car because they were told that it wasn't parked in his usual spot. And Detective Tranum couldn't remember exactly. But supposedly, the car was either backed in or pulled into the space, which was the opposite of how Lawrence normally parked. Also, the rear license plate had been bent upwards a bit, which they found strange.
So detectives theorized that his car might have actually been used to abduct him. And then maybe after he was killed, the killers brought it back to the lot. Whatever happened, they knew one thing for sure.
We know that he left work and he never made it home.
Because it was a busy area of D.
C.
Especially around 4 o'clock on a weekday. And no one had come forward yet about seeing a violent abduction in the area. Police assumed the kidnapping was something more discreet.
He could have met somebody that he knew, went with them voluntarily, somebody could have come up with him and shown him a weapon hidden in such a way.
Obviously, it was clear to investigators that a lot of pieces were missing. But a few days into their investigation, they got a call that helped them begin filling in the gaps. The person calling was an employee at a local liquor store who said that they had seen the media reports about Lawrence's murder and recognized his name. They recognized it because for the past few days, the store had been holding on to his credit card. Naturally, after hearing this, Detective Traynham went right to the liquor store. Not only to retrieve the card, but also to find out how and why they had a dead man's card in the first place.
The employees told Traynham that they had the card since Friday evening when something weird happened.
A short white female, wearing a baseball hat and glasses, walks in. And she wants to buy a bottle of Hennessy, I believe, and a carton of cigarettes and some snack food.
Again, this was 1994.
And back then, not all stores had the modern credit card reading machines that you see today. Instead, they used these carbon copy credit card imprinter machines. Where you'd like, insert your card and would make a physical carbon copy of your entire card, and then you would sign that copy.
So as she's signing for it and somebody, one of the employees walks in and says, Hey, the cops are out there giving parking tickets. And she goes, Oh my God, I can't get a ticket. And she ran out, leaving everything behind, including the credit card.
The store held on to the woman's items and the card in case she came back, but she didn't. Now this weird lead seems promising. But they didn't have a photo of this woman or even a real name, they did have a signature, and even though it was obviously fake. If they ever found the woman, they might be able to compare handwriting samples. And finding her wasn't totally out of the question, because if she used the card at this liquor store, maybe it was used other places.
Soon enough, Lawrence's bank history came back, and investigators learned that the card had been used at multiple stores after he clocked out of work at around 4 p.
M The first transaction was an attempted withdrawal of a few hundred dollars from an ATM, about 20 minutes after Lawrence would have left work. The attempt was unsuccessful. Which police later learned was because Lawrence had an issue with his account that he needed to rectify before withdrawing cash. But whoever was using Lawrence's card at this point didn't let that deter them.
Sometime later, I think it was about an hour or so later, we traced his credit cards to a shopping mall down in Charles County, Maryland, which is about 30 miles south of D.
C Now rush hour traffic on a Friday, you don't drive 30 miles south of D..C. Unless you've got someplace to go, someplace to be, it's just going to take a while.
But somebody had walked in to what was then a people's drug store. It's now a CVS and used a credit card to purchase about $40 worth of material, personal items. Just junk, you know, like a couple deodorant sticks, you know, some stuff along that line. And then they also at the. There was a Chinese restaurant next door where they purchased three orders of Chinese food. Then, about a half hour, 45 minutes later, something along that line. They're back in D...C. back on Capitol Hill, not very far from the bank where they went to originally.
To summarize, Lawrence's credit card was Downtown D.
C at an ATM shortly after 4, then an hour later, it was 30 miles away, at a shopping center and Chinese restaurant. Then 30 to 45 minutes after that, it was back on Capitol Hill in D..C. Literally all over the place. Investigators went to each location.
Lawrence's card was used looking for a description of the person who used it, looking maybe for more signatures. Anything, but they got something even better. The ATM that was used that afternoon had a surveillance camera and they got a hold of the footage.
The woman, obviously in the ATM photo, was trying to conceal her face, but she was, you know, wearing a baseball hat with sparkles on it and glasses at that time. And she had his pin number, and she, you know, kept trying to withdraw some money.
The woman looked exactly like the people at the liquor store had described, a short adult female with a baseball cap and glasses. Now, before seeing the ATM footage, investigators weren't sure if the woman seen at the liquor store was directly involved in Lawrence's murder. Or if she just happened upon the card somewhere and decided to use it. But since the ATM transaction occurred less than 30 minutes after Lawrence clocked out of work and she knew the pin, they were now pretty confident the woman was directly involved. Investigators wasted no time and whipped up a sketch of the woman with a detailed description to distribute to local newspapers. The Washington Post reported that the woman was around 30 years old, five feet one inches tall, 120 to 130 pounds, with strawberry blonde hair, freckles and a quote unquote rough complexion.
Once the description and sketch were released to the public, the floodgates were opened.
We had several tips, we were running them all out, but we had a couple that we thought were interesting for various reasons. So what we did was we went. And we were able to obtain handwriting samples from various sources, not directly from these people, but from various sources like court records, where they signed for something. One of them had been under investigation for an incident in P.G. County. They had written out a written statement.
And so we went back to the handwriting expert who basically said, Okay, you know, here's the signature. Can we figure out if any of these people said? And he came back and he pretty much said, We're 99 percent, he's like 80 or something like that percent. Sure that it's this person right here, and so that's pretty good.
But so we thought we had some good, solid forensic evidence.
The person, the handwriting expert, pointed the finger at a 20-year-old woman, who we've been asked to call Susan. Investigators learned that she was experiencing homelessness and was currently living in an apartment at a local homeless shelter with two of her children. So police sprang into action.
So we got an arrest warrant for her for credit card fraud, and then a search warrant for her house. Hoping to find some kind of link not only to the victim, but also to other people who she was associated with. So early one morning, we go knocking on the door and we place her under arrest and we bring her in for an interview. Really, an interrogation, so, you know, going there while we search her place.
Traynham was one of the detectives questioning Susan that day, and he remembers the hours long interrogation well. It began with Susan vehemently denying that she ever used Lawrence's credit card, so they asked her to submit to a voice stress test.
Now, a voice stress test is in a way kind of like a polygraph, they claim that by measuring the tension in your vocal cords. When you answer questions. Like you would a polygraph exam, you can tell whether or not somebody is being deceptive, but just like a polygraph, it's even more pseudoscience than a polygraph. But we were being taught to use this as a tool, and we were taught that it was like, close to 100 percent accurate. She took it.
She failed it.
This fueled investigators to double down on their interrogation, which ended up lasting 17 hours.
The tactics that we were using, I'm not a screamer or anything at all, was that mostly we were looking for cooperation. Look, you know, if we were using the theme. We know that you didn't likely didn't kill him, but you know, we need your help. And also we confronted her with the handwriting expert. She finally did confess, and, you know, gave a detailed statement in which she admitted things. And some of it was right on the money, and some of it was like, crazy stuff that we just went OK. So we took that to the prosecutor's office and she was charged with the murder.
According to The Washington Post, Susan told investigators that Lawrence had earlier solicited her for sex, but she decided she didn't want to do it, which made Lawrence mad. So she and a couple of her male friends decided to rob Lawrence. To quote, teach him a lesson. But, like Traynham said, some of the things Susan said in her confession didn't sit right with him. She couldn't tell them what stores she used the credit cards at.
She got the names of the credit cards wrong. But it was still a confession. And it was the operating assumption of nearly every law enforcement agency back then that nobody who is innocent would confess to something they didn't do. And she mentioned things in her confession that police hadn't made public yet, so, discrepancies or not, investigators were confident that they had their mastermind behind bars.
And if this had been a single perpetrator, we would probably have stopped right then and there. Because, hey, we got the confession. Now it's time to move on. But since we had other suspects, perpetrators, we had to continue.
The search of Susan's apartment at the homeless shelter found nothing of value. But Traynham thought maybe the administration at the homeless shelter would be able to offer anything to lead them to possible shady acquaintances. The shelter said the best thing they had was a log, like a sign-in sign-out sheet, that anyone entering or leaving the shelter had to sign. It was something that they were super strict about, so Detective Traynham asked to see it.
And what it said made his jaw drop because Susan's sign-in and sign-out times didn't match up at all with the timing of Lawrence's kidnapping and murder.
She was out that night, but she wasn't out during the critical times that we needed her to be out. In order to have participated in this, to be the places that we knew, or quote unquote, knew that she was. So we were stunned. We were trying to figure out, OK, well, how could this be? And they were very strict about it.
And so if she was to have people co-conspire with her in order to forge, they would have to be leaving spaces for her to sign in. Which involved about half a dozen or a dozen or so people. And that would also take a lot of pre-planning, which people typically don't. Do. You know these murders?
Detective Traynham was beginning to question Susan's guilt, wondering if a completely innocent woman was sitting behind bars awaiting trial. So he took his findings to his superiors. But his doubtfulness was largely ignored.
And once you commit yourself to something like this, my department made a big deal. We solved this murder. It's all over the media and all that the U.S attorney's office had committed.
Now here's a lowly detective saying Hey, we may have the wrong person. You know, there's something going on here. It's hard to get the bosses to turn that train around. So we had to do more work and so we kept working at it.
Over the coming months, Detective Traynham looked for other ways to prove that Susan wasn't their killer.
And one of the things that we finally decided is, look, we got to go back. What is the original basis of our evidence on this case? It's the handwriting.
They had initially based their suspicion of Susan on one handwriting expert's testimony, but what if that guy got it wrong? They just wanted to double check with another handwriting expert. Detective Traynham pulled some strings with the Secret Service and got permission to use their handwriting expert. At this point, police weren't relying on random documents and things Susan had written on like they had the first time.
Now they actually had what they call exemplars, where Susan had written out Lawrence's full name. Traynham handed the exemplars and credit card slips over to the handwriting expert and waited for answers, which ultimately confirmed his fears.
He says Absolutely positively, she did not sign these credit card slips. And so then I went back to my bosses and all that, and I said, Well, this is a problem, and they said, No, it's not a problem. Just get another expert.
Traynham followed orders and found another expert to review the handwriting, this time from the FBI, and just as Traynham suspected, the FBI expert agreed with the Secret Service. Susan did not sign those credit card slips.
And they said, By the way, who is this guy that you're using? Because we've never heard of him and we're a small community. And it turns out that he worked for another federal agency locally. But he was being used by the prosecutor's office as an expert because he was there and accessible. He had been testifying as an expert several times.
But it turns out that there's two schools of handwriting, and one of the schools is this one that teaches you how you can determine somebody's personality from their handwriting. And it's just total off-the-wall crap. And not only that, but he was not only the agency's handwriting expert, but also their firearms expert, their fingerprint expert. And we just know today that you just can't do that.
I mean, you know, you got to focus in on one discipline.
The evidence had piled up the homeless shelter log and the two separate experts from the Secret Service and the FBI. So the prosecutor's office had no choice but to give in. After eight months of sitting in jail awaiting trial, Susan was let go. The case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning she could be retried for the same crime in the future.
Still, we were mystified about, you know, how did she know all these details?
This was something that continued bothering Detective Traynham and his colleagues, even as they went back to the drawing board and tried to track down other potential suspects. But they'd lost nearly a year of precious investigative time on trying to pin the crime on Susan. And that was difficult to come back from. The leads dried up and the media moved on, and by the time the early 2000s rolled around, Detective Traynham was tired of Susan's false confession.
Just eating away at him, he wanted to find out where he went wrong. He began going through things with a fine-toothed comb. And he decided to watch Susan's confession that he had filmed all those years ago. And that's when he realized he hadn't just taped her confession. Instead, he'd accidentally recorded most of the 17-hour interrogation.
Our policy was we didn't videotape everything before, like the entire interrogation, but only the last part. Well, we videotaped the part where she said she found the credit cards and we let the tape run.
Because of this, Detective Traynham was able to go back through and carefully examine what went wrong and where. And he came to the conclusion that he was the problem.
I realized that I now knew why she felt like she had to tell us something, and then I realized how she learned. And I started going back and doing research on this stuff. And I found out that there was a lot of research out there as to how this occurs, how false confessions happen, and this was just a textbook case.
Traynham realized that he had accidentally fed Susan information during the interrogation. All that information she quote-unquote knew, and all those details she gave that only the killer would have known. He had inadvertently told them to her. But that wasn't the only problem Traynham found with the interrogation. He was also very critical of his own techniques during the interview.
Back then, we were taught that long interrogations were necessary, and that we were basically told that an interrogation did not end. Until one. The suspect confessed, two, they asked for an attorney or three. You ran out of things to say, and as you can tell here, I don't run out of things to say. So, yeah, the normal interrogations were considered normal. I mean, long interrogations were considered the norm, and it didn't surprise anybody.
It wasn't just the longevity of the interview, it was also how he approached the conversation.
It's basically the accusatory approach. After I've determined that you're guilty, I then go into interrogation mode and that's when I tell you that, look, we know you committed this crime. Our investigation has proven it. We have all the evidence we need.
There's nothing that you can say that's going to change our mind. All we want to know is why I can lie to you about the evidence. Now, here's the thing with Susan.
We did not lie to her about the evidence. One thing I didn't believe in lying because it's problematic for a lot of reasons. The thing is what we were saying we believed to be true, but it wasn't, and so it had the same effect as a lie.
What Tranum is referring to is the handwriting expert, which was later proven to be inaccurate, as well as the voice stress test, which he now refers to as pseudoscience. Which, of course, all of this they believed at the time and didn't realize they were working with inaccurate or possibly exaggerated information.
That a scientific expert said that she signed the credit card slips, that this scientific machine has proven that she's lying. So what does that do? That boxes you in? Oh my God, I'm going to get convicted no matter what, even though I'm innocent because of the science.
Or maybe the science is true? Maybe I did do it, but I just don't remember that sort of thing.
Beyond that, Detective Tranum realized that he even said some things during the interview that could have been interpreted as indirect threats.
Thing is, I didn't like do threats, but they were implied out there. You know, the thing is, if you're looking at doing jail time, what's going to happen to your kids? Do you have to say it in order for it to be there in the back of your mind?
Tranum was flabbergasted he thought he'd been so careful, but despite his best intentions, he had contaminated. A suspect. Which not only stole eight months of a young woman's life away, but also led to months of an investigation essentially being made null and void. And all of this is terrible for Susan, and especially for her kids, but there is something about this that feels like a breath of fresh air.
I think a lot of times when we see missteps like this, whether they're purposeful or not, they tend to be swept under the rug. But Detective Tranum wanted to do what he could to make sure no one else made the same mistakes that he did in that interrogation. He actually went on to co-author a chapter of a book entitled Criminal Investigative Failures, which I used as a source for this episode. And in it, he talks about his involvement in Susan's false confession. And he became a guest lecturer at colleges, speaking about interrogation techniques. Which, again, this level of accountability is refreshing to see.
I'm not saying it fixes the mistake, doesn't magically repair the investigation or gives Susan or her kids those months back. But Tranum's openness about his oversight did, and hopefully still is, preventing others from doing the same thing with their investigations as far as Lawrence's case, Tranum said. There has been little movement since Susan was let go back in 1995. But it's not just because they got behind the ball with the whole false confession fiasco. He said that because Susan was formally charged with Lawrence's murder, the case is technically classified as closed at the Metropolitan Police Department.
Because that's how they keep stats. Let's say that you have five people who committed the crime, once you arrest one, the case is considered closed and it would count as a stat. The policy was that even if the case never got to trial, it would always remain closed. So let's say that the case got dismissed before going to trial because your witnesses were questionable or whatever like that. Or there's a problem with it.
It would still stay closed on the books.
Tranum said that he would bet a lot of money that no one is investigating Lawrence's case now. We can't confirm that because the Metropolitan Police Department declined our request for an interview about Lawrence's case. But the thought of Lawrence's case file just sitting on a shelf collecting dust is something that bothers Tranum to no end. Because he knows more could be done, especially now with advancements in technology.
Things like the bindings, things like the tie, because of course, the suspect would have been pulling on the bindings. Things along that line. You could possibly get DNA off of them.
It's been nearly 30 years and Lawrence's family is still waiting for answers. Answers they may never get because, apparently, to some, stats, are more important than getting real bad guys behind bars. And ensuring actual justice is done. In closing, I want to make sure we don't forget who Lawrence was and the impact he left on those who knew him. Friends and family told The Washington Post in 1994 that Lawrence was a quiet and hard working man who loved traveling and learning new things. In fact, he was taking lessons to learn Mandarin, Chinese at the time of his death. But above all, he loved his family, a family that was forever torn in two by his murder.
His son, his wife and those who loved Lawrence have waited long enough. They deserve answers, and Lawrence deserves justice. If you know anything about the murder of Lawrence O'Connell in February 1994, please call the Metropolitan Police Department at 202-727-9099. And also feel free to contact them and let them know. They should look into Lawrence's case again, whether they consider it closed or not, because no one has been held accountable.
The Deck is an audiochuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast..com. So what do you think, Chuck, do you approve?
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