DETROIT (news agencies) — The serial killer lured women one by one into vacant homes to be murdered, posing their nude or partially clothed corpses amid cheap booze pints, crumbling sheetrock and hypodermic needles.
The slayings set Detroit on edge, prompting authorities to dispatch crews on overtime to scour the city’s decrepit stock of abandoned properties for more bodies. When the killer was charged in 2019, the police chief at the time told reporters that his department had been “very diligent, relentless” in solving the crimes.
But now, a year after DeAngelo Martin was sent to prison for committing four murders and two rapes, it’s clear that police were hardly diligent or relentless.
Over 15 years, Detroit police failed to follow up on leads or take investigative steps that may have averted the eventual killing spree, despite having received repeated warnings that Martin was a violent predator, an Associated Press investigation has found.
“It’s astonishing,” said Jim Trainum, a retired Washington, D.C., homicide detective who specializes in reviewing police investigations for possible wrongful convictions. “All the police had to do was one little thing, one little thing here or there, and they would have put a stop to this whole process and these women would still be alive. Just one thing.”
In uncovering the failures, the news agencies relied on more than a dozen interviews, hundreds of pages of court documents and records from prosecutors and police, including a lengthy internal affairs report, obtained through public information requests.
The files reveal that the bungling started in 2004, when evidence from the rape of a 41-year-old woman was stored in a kit — and then forgotten for years in a warehouse, along with thousands of others. When police finally reopened the investigation, the victim had long been dead.
The lapses continued all the way into 2018, when police arrested the wrong man in a strangling. Even after a state crime lab linked Martin’s DNA to the death, police only sought his arrest weeks after he had raped a woman in his grandmother’s basement in 2019 and had killed thrice more.
Detroit’s internal affairs branch issued a 247-page report that found the agency’s sex crimes unit did not properly handle DNA hits. Officers were confused about what number of assaults would define a serial rapist, and they were also reluctant to re-approach victims to persuade them to cooperate.
No mistakes rose “to the level of criminality,” the report said, but several officers had “neglected their duties.” Two were briefly suspended. An internal affairs supervisor summed up the debacles as a “total systemic breakdown.”
“That’s one way of categorizing it,” Detroit police Commander Michael McGinnis told the news agencies.
“Sitting here today, would I have liked to have seen a more aggressive apprehension effort made in 2018? Yes, I absolutely would have,” said McGinnis, who formerly served as the head of the homicide unit and now leads the department’s professional standards bureau. “But that’s sitting here in hindsight knowing exactly what I know today.”
McGinnis said the department has since changed the way it deals with crime victims and manages DNA leads. Supervisors and command staff now are more involved, he said, especially in cases with a serial offender.
“We learn from our mistakes,” McGinnis said, “and we resolve to do better.”
Relatives of Martin’s victims were furious when they learned through news agencies that police had chances to stop him before their loved ones were killed. They also wondered if the department would have been more aggressive if the victims hadn’t been among the city’s most vulnerable — and invisible — residents: women struggling with addiction, mental illness or homelessness.
“My sister would be alive today if the police had done their jobs,” said Anthony Ellis, the brother of Trevesene Ellis, who was found slain in May 2019. “She always looked out for everyone and didn’t deserve to die this way.”
Lisa Hohnstreiter, the daughter of Martin’s second victim, Nancy Harrison, said she was overwhelmed by the information obtained by news agencies. “My mom’s death could definitely have been prevented,” she said.
Martin, who is serving between 45 and 70 years in prison, declined a request for an interview.
Born in 1985, he was raised by his mother, Chantrienes Barker, in Detroit until she was arrested in 1998 for the kidnapping and murder of a 28-year-old Detroit man.
Barker had permitted the kidnappers to hold a rival drug dealer in her basement while they extorted money from his suppliers and family, court records show. Barker bought food for the kidnappers as they burned the 27-year-old captive with cigarettes and heated nickels, and stabbed him with a bayonet, records show.
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