Massachusetts Cop Forum banner

Hub slaying still haunts those pursuing suspects

6K views 2 replies 3 participants last post by  Lucia kiadii 
#1 ·
Lucia Roberts, 16, was killed in 1982. A detective says the slaying was tied to an alleged rape at an officers' club.


Retired police detective Richard Armstead pursues the
Silver Shield case at his home in Maine. He believes
police were responsible.
(FRED J. FIELD FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

By Maria Cramer, Globe Staff | September 26, 2007

Louise Roberts felt certain she was giving her 11-year-old daughter a better life when she sent her from their village in Liberia to Boston in 1977 to live with a family friend.
"We in Africa, we think America is heaven," Louise Roberts recalled in a recent telephone interview. "I told the woman to give my daughter the best of education and the best care."
Five years later, on a warm August evening, two men chasing a soccer ball in Franklin Park in Dorchester stumbled upon a body nestled in a thicket of trees and bushes.
It was Roberts's daughter, Lucia Kai Roberts. She had been strangled. Her purple pants had been yanked down to her thighs, and her red and white striped shirt pulled up.
Her killing was never solved, but the case became one of the most polarizing and closely watched in Boston after two city police officers were implicated and ultimately cleared.
A quarter-century after the slaying, the headlines have faded, but Louise Roberts, 64, is still looking for answers. Several times, she has traveled to Boston to visit her daughter's grave and to meet a retired police detective who has made it his personal mission to crack the case. She wants police to make her daughter's killing a priority.
"I don't want those people to just walk away," she said. "Her soul is not at rest."
The retired detective, Richard Armstead, 78, a gray-haired grandfather who grows vegetables at his home in rural Maine, keeps news clippings and police reports of the case carefully preserved in a leather folder. Every time Boston names a new police commissioner, Armstead said, he calls him about the case.
One of the two accused officers, now 67, said the damage to his reputation still stings 25 years later.
A friend of Lucia Roberts who was questioned repeatedly by police about her death said he remains bitter about the treatment.

Full Story:http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/09/26/hub_slaying_still_haunts_those_pursuing_suspects/
 
See less See more
1
#2 ·
Jaysus Harry, at least post the whole story!

Hub slaying still haunts those pursuing suspects

Lucia Roberts, 16, was killed in 1982. A detective says the slaying was tied to an alleged rape at an officers' club.

Retired police detective Richard Armstead pursues the Silver Shield case at his home in Maine. He believes police were responsible. (FRED J. FIELD FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)
By Maria Cramer, Globe Staff | September 26, 2007
Louise Roberts felt certain she was giving her 11-year-old daughter a better life when she sent her from their village in Liberia to Boston in 1977 to live with a family friend.
"We in Africa, we think America is heaven," Louise Roberts recalled in a recent telephone interview. "I told the woman to give my daughter the best of education and the best care."
Five years later, on a warm August evening, two men chasing a soccer ball in Franklin Park in Dorchester stumbled upon a body nestled in a thicket of trees and bushes.
It was Roberts's daughter, Lucia Kai Roberts. She had been strangled. Her purple pants had been yanked down to her thighs, and her red and white striped shirt pulled up.
Her killing was never solved, but the case became one of the most polarizing and closely watched in Boston after two city police officers were implicated and ultimately cleared.
A quarter-century after the slaying, the headlines have faded, but Louise Roberts, 64, is still looking for answers. Several times, she has traveled to Boston to visit her daughter's grave and to meet a retired police detective who has made it his personal mission to crack the case. She wants police to make her daughter's killing a priority.
"I don't want those people to just walk away," she said. "Her soul is not at rest."
The retired detective, Richard Armstead, 78, a gray-haired grandfather who grows vegetables at his home in rural Maine, keeps news clippings and police reports of the case carefully preserved in a leather folder. Every time Boston names a new police commissioner, Armstead said, he calls him about the case.
One of the two accused officers, now 67, said the damage to his reputation still stings 25 years later.
A friend of Lucia Roberts who was questioned repeatedly by police about her death said he remains bitter about the treatment.
Recently, after calls from the Globe about the case, homicide detectives called Roberts to assure her they would chase down any new leads, said Elaine Driscoll, a police spokeswoman.
"Every homicide is a tragedy, regardless of how much time has passed," Commissioner Edward F. Davis said in a statement to the Globe. "Our heart goes out to the family members and loved ones of Lucia Kai Roberts, who seek closure in this case."
When the case erupted in 1982, it ignited racial tensions that were still smoldering from the court-ordered desegregation of Boston schools. In mostly black neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester, many were wary of white officers who patrolled their streets. To Armstead, the was the result of those tensions.
A deputy superintendent told Armstead he had heard that a young, black girl was brought to the Silver Shield Athletic Association, a private officers club in Roxbury, and forced at gunpoint to perform oral sex on at least six white officers four weeks before Lucia Roberts died.

The official, Armstead said, described how a detective who was at the club heard the girl scream, stormed into the room, and rescued her. He took her into his patrol car and as they were pulling away, the girl jumped out of the car and fled.

Weeks later, Lucia Roberts's body was found. She was 16.
There was little to tie the two events together, and the alleged Silver Shield rape was never prosecuted, but Armstead is convinced that Boston police officers raped Roberts and then killed her to keep her quiet.
In Liberia, Louise Roberts learned of her daughter's death through relatives in New York. Police sent her a letter informing her that they had questioned one of her daughter's 15-year-old friends.
The friend - who asked to be identified only by his first name, Kelvin - said he remembers police coming through his neighborhood and pulling him into their patrol cars as his friends and neighbors stared.
"That's something I'll never forget," Kelvin, a 40-year-old Army sergeant first class, said by phone from Texas, where he lives with his wife. "The way they questioned me I felt accused. It's bad enough to lose a friend."
He recalled Roberts as a lively tomboy who loved basketball and hopscotch and spoke English with an elegant, British-inflected accent that set her apart from other Roxbury teenagers.
There never was an arrest. The department's Internal Affairs division investigated the allegations three times and each time cleared the two officers whom Armstead had accused.
Thomas Nolan, a Boston University criminologist who was a young patrol officer in 1982, said that even the closeknit corps of Boston police officers would not be capable of keeping a rape and murder secret for decades.
"I don't think that the subculture was that strong," he said. "There is a line that cops will not cross, and they're not going to cross the line into murdering a girl and covering it up and doing it successfully."
One of the officers Armstead accused is still on the force and declined to comment. The other retired two years ago and lives in Weymouth. The Globe agreed to withhold the officers' names at their request because of the age of the case and because neither was ever charged.
The retired officer said the charges upset his children and his wife, who at the time was too embarrassed to leave the house. "I couldn't win a turkey in a raffle, but I won this . . . thing. Even to this day, it's a sore spot," he said.
Armstead still believes that police were behind the girl's death and said he has no regrets. "I knew I was right," he said. "I know it went down."
The girl's mother - a retired health aide who moved to the United States in 1983 and now lives in Staten Island, N.Y. - blames police for the crime. But she acknowledges that other relatives had their own suspicions about family members who might have killed her daughter.
She cries easily when she talks about her daughter, who loved singing, earned money braiding hair, and was so honest she once told an employer a co-worker was cheating on her time card. Roberts is losing hope she will ever learn the truth about her daughter's death. "I am tired, I am weary, and I am giving up," Louise Roberts said. "If someone could just come out and say, 'Yes, this is what happened.' I will keep praying to God. God has the answer to everything."
Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.


Kinda sketchy to me how you can compare one alleged incident at the Shield to another that happens weeks later when this girl was found murdered. Speculation and conjecture can only get you so far in a case and after having IA open and re-open it 3 times with no charges filed, I think it's a wash.
Gee the Globe didn't print the officers names. Very surprising there considering they splashed it all over the papers back when the story "broke".
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top