Shattered Glass (Sumei Chen)
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Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts. He saw somebody sitting in the driver's seat of a car. He walked up and pressed the muzzle of the gun next to the glass and fired one round. This man had to be the suspect because he knew so much detail about the case. If we could track the gun down or find the gun, that would be it.

I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasiga Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murph. Just about every woman I know has made habit of certain things almost reflexively to try and keep themselves safe.

avoiding dark alleys, staying off your cell phone when walking at night, maybe looking into your backseat whenever you get into the car. And most of these are common sense measures that apply to everyone because criminals are most successful when their victims are alone, distracted, or unprepared.

But of course, even the most vigilant among us cannot always be kept safe from those rare few people determined to do us harm. In today's story, we're highlighting one such case that took place in San Diego, California in October of 1993, when an innocent victim found herself in the path of a career criminal with deadly results. You know, I'll have to tell you, San Diego was pretty crime-free.

We do have murders, but they're low for a large city. That's Tony Johnson, who retired as the senior investigator for the San Diego District Attorney's Office. But back in 1993, when our story begins, Tony was still on the force at the San Diego PD. I was working the Beach Northern Division in uniform as a sergeant. And that's not a bad job either. You know, you get to ride a bike up and down the boardwalk. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Over the course of his long career in law enforcement, he handled hundreds of crimes. And when it came to solving homicides, I don't think he was boasting when he said there were too many to count. His approach also struck a chord with me. The way I see it, you don't really solve a homicide by yourself. You're always working with somebody. So some cases I worked almost exclusively, but not entirely by myself. Others, I was part of a team. So I quit counting years ago.

But as we've said before, there are many cases that stick with you.

Because of the victim, the crime itself, or maybe the unique details of the case or the long twisted road to solving it. So let's go back to San Diego of the 1990s. It's October 27th, 1993, about 10.15 p.m. A security guard was working at an apartment complex on 3rd Avenue downtown when suddenly one of his tenants emerged from the elevator into the lobby screaming that he needed help.

The tenant, a man named Donald Duke Duong, was frantic, telling the guard that his girlfriend was bleeding and unconscious in the underground parking lot. The security guard called police and then followed Donald back downstairs to try to render aid. And that's where he found a truly horrific scene. Donald's girlfriend, 46-year-old Sumi Chen, was slumped over in the driver's seat of a white Cadillac, her face covered in blood.

When paramedics arrived, the first responders were able to detect a slight pulse, and she was rushed to UCSD Medical Center with what appeared to be massive trauma to her head and face.

But despite the best efforts of doctors, Sumi succumbed to her injuries and was pronounced dead. The cause of death? A gunshot wound to the head. With the death of Sumi, San Diego lost a beloved neighbor, friend, and well-known pillar of the community. She was a 46-year-old Chinese native. She owned the restaurant called Potstickers in San Diego along with her husband.

Along with her husband. Perhaps a jarring detail for police on the scene, since the man who called them Donald Dukedong had described himself as Sumi's boyfriend. But we'll let Tony describe this particular arrangement. She had recently separated from her husband. She was dating a gentleman named Donald Dukedong.

And Donald had an apartment in a apartment complex down on 3rd Avenue, and she would frequently go and visit Donald and stay the night with him. And according to Donald, that was the plan for this particular night. The thing was, is that Sumi did not have a key to Donald's apartment. So frequently when Donald was gone, that they were going to meet, she would arrive before Donald did.

And she would follow somebody. You know how when the gate opens up, she would follow a resident into the apartment complex. And then she would just park and wait for Donald to arrive. Donald claimed that he pulled into the parking lot a little after 10 p.m. As usual, the security gate closed behind him about 60 seconds after he drove through. Donald arrived and he saw Suni's car, so he parked.

Shattered, but still intact. The only missing glass was a hole about the size of a quarter, or in this case, a bullet.

He saw Sumi slumped over in the sea, so he ran to the lobby of the apartment complex about a security guard, came back, and then they called the police. But this is where Donald's story starts to go a little sideways. When first responders arrived, the doors of the Cadillac were still locked and the keys were in the ignition. Initially, Donald claimed that he had no way to get into the car to help Sumi while he waited for paramedics. He was visibly shaken.

Still in shock, I think. But a few minutes later, Donald's memory suddenly came back to him. He turns out he had a set of her keys. He just, in the panic, he claimed that he had forgotten that he had a set of keys because, of course, he wanted to get in the car and try to help her. Of course, no one knows exactly how they would act in an emergency. And as Tony said, Donald was clearly in shock.

But this small inconsistency in his story is just the kind of thing that gives investigators pause as they begin an investigation. Which is what they begin to do, processing the crime scene, searching for evidence, dust for prints, and most importantly, track down any potential witnesses. It's a multi-story apartment complex. The canvas turned up a number of neighbors and residents who had heard the gunshot.

One particular person was the one who Sumi followed into the garage and he remembered

Sumi following him in. He parked. He watched Sumi for a period of time. She sat in the car. He finally got out of his car and went to the elevator and Sumi was still sitting in the car. The neighbor put Sumi's arrival at just after 9 p.m. and witnesses claim that the gunshot went off about 9.30, just 45 minutes before being discovered by her boyfriend Donald. Which, as far as timeline goes, is a pretty tight window for this crime to have taken place.

So the next important question is, who else could have been in that parking lot during that extremely small time frame? There was one witness who actually saw a suspicious character kind of loitering around in the downstairs parking lot. It was described as a tall, well-built African-American male, and he was kind of wandering through the parking lot in the car's

The witness did not recognize the man as a resident of the apartment complex, but did take notice of something the man was carrying. He was carrying a canvas bag in his hands or over his shoulder. It was kind of unique. It was leather and dark colored, and it kind of stood out.

So as I mentioned, we do have a pretty tight timeline here, and we have multiple ear witnesses to the gunshot and a possible eyewitness to a potential suspect seen in the vicinity around the time of the murder. We're off to a good start. And after examining the crime scene, investigators also had a pretty good theory of the crime as well. A woman alone in her car, a non-resident seen lurking in the parking lot, or a woman in

All the markings of a potential robbery. But there was one problem. Sumi's purse was still in the back seat and nothing from the car was stolen. She had cash in her purse, I think about $140, $150. Everything else was undisturbed. So it looked like, once again, the person never made entry into the car. The suspect just walked up, shot, and walked away. ♪

So this is one of the first things that I thought of when the crime scene was explained to me. The fact the door was locked when the victim was found. Did the suspect just walk up and attempt to rob Sue me? And she got scared. She couldn't open the door. She was fumbling with the lock. The shooter got frustrated and just fired a shot. But why not complete the robbery? Why not just take any of the victim's possessions?

Or in a seagull, why not just take the car? And, you know, here's something that you may or may not know. Like most violence during robberies happens because of either fear on the part of the perpetrator or frustration, just like you said, Scott. Maybe they're trying to get in and she's not letting them in. Maybe she makes some jerky motion and they get scared.

But again, I think the point is, if you're going for that property and something goes wrong and you fire the gun, why not at least complete the mission, if you will? And here again, there was no evidence of any struggle and no property missing. Some of the uncertainty around Sumi's murder would be cleared up by the autopsy, which concluded that the cause of death was indeed suicide.

a single gunshot wound to the head. But Sumi had suffered other injuries that were also telling. Her injuries were that of on her left hand, as though she had raised her hand up. In addition to the injuries to her hand, there was considerable trauma to her face. She suffered multiple tiny injuries to the side of her face, almost like a shotgun.

Initially, the investigators thought maybe that was the broken glass from the window. But it turned out that a very unique type of ammunition was used called MagSafe. And MagSafe was the cause of the unique injuries on the side of the face in hand.

So the bullet fired from the assailant's gun entered through the window, leaving a small hole in the glass, which then fragmented into hundreds of deadly projectiles. This was obviously not your typical bullet. MagSafe was a very rare, extremely rare type of ammunition. In fact, it was so rare that you could not buy it off the shelf. You had to actually write to the manufacturer. He handcrafted each bullet.

It was designed and marketed with a very specific purpose: lethal power at a short distance. Who the customers were for this particular kind of ammo, police were eager to find out. The original homicide team actually wrote a warrant for the manufacturer and got all the sales records going back for one year.

and comb through the sales records to see if they could identify a suspect. But in the meantime, homicide detectives were also focusing attention on potential suspects they knew to be close to Sumi, starting with her boyfriend, Donald. Now, according to Donald, Sumi had no enemies, no recent disagreements or conflicts, and no lifestyle issues that would ever make her the target of this type of violence. So could this have been a random robbery? Sure.

But investigators could not ignore the obvious, that you had a married woman murdered at her boyfriend's residence, which could also mean a love triangle that had turned deadly. The initial thought was that it was a robbery and that somehow it was interrupted. Maybe somebody walked in or the offender just panicked and left. That would be the most logical scenario. Of course, the other scenario is that the boyfriend, Donald, did it.

And then the other scenario is that the ex-husband might have done it. Whoever it was stood over a defenseless victim, fired a gun at point-blank range, and left her to die alone in her car. Whether he would ever be caught was still anyone's guess.

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In San Diego, California, detectives were just getting started in their investigation of the 1993 murder of Sumi Chen, a 46-year-old local restaurant owner who was gunned down in her parked car. When she was killed, Sumi had been waiting for her boyfriend in the garage of his apartment building.

And while he might have been expecting her, police wanted to know if anyone else might have known about their arrangement, namely Sumi's husband. She had recently separated from her husband, and she would frequently go and visit Donald and stay the night with him. But according to Donald, her separation from her husband of 30 years was amicable. Apparently, he was aware of Sumi's relationship with Donald.

The husband appeared to be almost okay with Donald going out with his wife. And that might be so. But if I'm working this case, I'd want to hear that straight from the husband. Because just on its surface, anger over an affair is most certainly a motive for murder.

So investigators did make plans to contact Sumi's husband, only to discover that he was out of the country. But in this case, it ultimately was not cause for alarm. He was not considered a suspect because he was actually in Taiwan at the time of the shooting.

So given the husband's solid alibi, it makes sense to then turn to the other man in Sumi's life, her boyfriend, who also happened to be the person that first discovered her in the parking garage. And remember, even though he did run for help, he claimed to first responders that he wasn't able to get into the locked car to help Sumi because he didn't have keys to her car. Only he actually did.

His story didn't make a lot of sense because he had the keys to the car, but he said he didn't. He kind of fell into suspicion right away. Police invited Donald to the police station for some routine questions. But the more they learned about Donald, the less routine those questions became.

Donald was kind of an interesting character. According to Donald, he and Sumi fell in love when he brought her flowers at her restaurant. But according to Donald's reputation, this was no innocent meet cute. Interestingly, he had done that previously with another woman who owned a restaurant in the same area. So it was almost like he was a male version of a gold digger.

He was assertive or aggressive towards married women. GSR, or gunshot residue testing on hands and clothing, turned up no evidence that he had recently fired a gun. But a search warrant of Donald's home did turn up some troubling evidence. They actually got a consent search of his apartment and they found a .45 pistol wrapped in clothing under his couch. Not only that, the gun was loaded.

But since it was clearly a .45, police were pretty certain this could not have been the murder weapon. But still, let me just say, just finding any gun would give me pause because I'd be wondering why in the world, after being questioned by police in the aftermath of his girlfriend's shooting murder, Donald never saw the need to mention gunfire.

that he owned a firearm. He was also not helping his cause when he was unable to tell police exactly where he was at the time of the murder. He claimed that he was out shopping and just bopping around with no alibi. When they polygraphed him later, he did not do well on the polygraph and the results leaned toward deception.

So as our AOM community already know, a failed polygraph is not admissible in a potential trial, nor is it even proof that he was guilty of a crime. But it did raise suspicions that Donald was hiding something.

So you kind of had 50% leading towards Zonnel as a suspect and 50% leading towards some unknown person. So, Scott, you know, you have to start to think about, as I'm sure investigators did, what could the potential motives be? You know, is it a boyfriend killing a girlfriend who's technically married because he's jealous maybe of this amicable relationship she's having with the husband? Or maybe is there some sort of jealousy for something else? You know, I don't know.

If it's him being the boyfriend, why stick around and cooperate with police? It's pretty obvious that people don't always tell the truth to law enforcement, but that doesn't mean they've committed a crime, including murder. So that's why the test is, for me, so inconclusive. People get nervous being hooked up to a machine that can detect whether they're being truthful. So that's natural. Again,

Again, that is not a huge red flag for me as it may be for others. While the possibilities swirled, what was not up for debate was that there were no eyewitnesses or forensic evidence tying Donald to the crime scene before his arrival and nothing to dispute his version of events. Eventually, Donald was released and with no other viable suspects, no arrests were made in connection with Sumi's murder. And as we hear so often in these cases,

it just goes cold. A few years later, they started up a, they called the HEE team, the Homicide Evidence Assessment Team.

with San Diego PD, and they took another look at this case. They brought Donald back in. They polygraphed him a second time. As in the first time, he didn't do very well. But then again, once again, they just couldn't develop any evidence, and it went cold at that point. Sumi's murder remained unsolved for the next 22 years. But then in 2012, out of nowhere, San Diego police received a disturbing letter. It says, to whom it may concern, my name is James Blackman Sumi.

I am an inmate at the California Department of Correctional Rehabilitation at California. And this inmate had knowledge about the murder of a woman in a parking garage in 1993. How did he have this information? Because according to James Blackman, he was the one who killed her. Want to connect with more family and friends and their native language is in English?

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22 years after 46-year-old San Diego resident Sumi Chin was gunned down in her own car, someone was claiming responsibility for her murder. A man named James Blackman had written a letter addressed to the San Diego Police Department confessing to the killing. The issue that came up with this first letter, just in conversations with my fellow workers, is that the...

And for clarity, Vacaville is a prison mental health facility. But whatever his motivation was for sending this letter or confessing, James Blackman was persistent. So a few months later, he wrote a second letter to the district attorney's office saying,

and then a few months after that he wrote a third letter to the city attorney's office james blackman was a career criminal with a long history of residential burglaries felony assaults auto theft and armed robberies but he seemed to have no connection to sumi chen or her boyfriend donald and

And police, of course, have to be wary of this type of strange confession coming up out of the blue, especially from someone who's either incarcerated or here coming out of a mental health facility, because you immediately have to ask, what is the motivation?

Are they trying to trade information for a more lenient sentence? Are they saying something because of their own mental health concerns, just relieving a guilty conscience? Or are they maybe just making it up for notoriety? So clearly, one way to find out here is to try to place Blackmun at the scene. And as it turns out, he was on the streets in San Diego in October of 1993, around the time of Sumi's murder.

He also matched the general description of the man a witness had seen lurking around the parking garage on the night of the murder.

And the San Diego Colt case team decided that this was enough to warrant an interview with James Blackman. So initially, because of the suspicion and the lack of credibility, they had a guy named Chuck King, who's a sergeant up at the prison, do the interview. The sergeant at the Vacaville facility invited Blackman into an interview room to ask him about the three letters that he had written.

and any more details he could provide to corroborate his own confessions. Scott, you and I have had these conversations before. And, you know, even just saying that, someone out there might be saying, well, how do you corroborate your own confession? But it's really more for investigators, right? They need this check for all the reasons we enumerated a minute or so ago earlier.

to make sure this person's telling the truth, you know, whether it's their observation of him or maybe some details he knows. And, you know, you know, certainly, Scott, that investigators often hold things back in thinking about something that might pop up just like this. Yeah.

You're right. And we always talk about how a timeline is the spine of any homicide investigation. So if you have a solid timeline and you could corroborate everything within that timeline and place him within that framework, then you have some strong evidence to move forward to believe that potentially he could be telling the truth here. And this could be the biggest break in the case yet. And investigators did just that.

He did a great job on the interview, elicited a lot of detail, almost to the point where this man had to be the suspect because he knew so much detail about the case and about the location, the facility, the car. When the interview was over, the sergeant notified San Diego police that he was convinced that Blackman was telling the truth. He confessed completely to the crime and had details that apparently nobody else would have. He gave a

Detailed confession as far as going to an underground parking lot. He had a big gun. He saw somebody sitting in the driver's seat of a car. He walked up and pressed the muzzle of the gun next to the glass and fired one round.

And perhaps the most chilling detail of all, after striking Sumi with a single bullet from his gun, he simply turned and calmly walked away from the scene. But so far, there was nothing that told police that Blackman could not maybe have pieced these things together from newspaper articles about the shooting until he started talking about the gun. He specifically mentioned that the bullet hole was about the size of a half dollar gun.

And even more so, he specifically mentioned that the ammunition was kind of weird. It was kind of like red and made out of epoxy, which obviously fits the description of the MagSafe ammunition. As for why Blackman decided to fire on an innocent, unsuspecting victim? He said or claimed that he was hearing voices that told him to kill or shoot somebody. He denied robbery.

He denied any type of personal relationship with the victim. -You know, we often hear the words "open and shut case," but we know there's no such thing.

But, you know, here we have a confession and that's the beginning, but it's not the end. And you don't need other evidence beyond someone's own admissions or a confession if you have actual proof of the crime. But of course, it's all about whether that statement is truthful. And here you have someone who is also coming out of a mental health facility, so obviously has their own mental health issues going on. You have to be doubly, triply sure that it's

isn't because of their own mindset that maybe leads them to say something that isn't true. So while you don't have to corroborate his story, you want to for those reasons,

And here, maybe the way to do that is to go out and try to find that gun and see if it can trace back to him. And that is exactly what investigators did. They checked his arrest record with an eye for any charges of gun possession. And incredibly, here's where the next big turn in this case comes.

They discover that Blackman had actually been arrested just four days after Sumi's murder. And in the arrest report, the officer had noted that Blackman was in possession of an unloaded handmade gun. He actually came up to a uniformed police officer downtown. He said that two Hispanic males were chasing him. At that time, he had a big leather bag over his shoulder.

When the officer wanted to look in the bag, he ran. The officer caught up with him, looked inside the bag and found the gun. And so he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. And wasn't the man who was seen in the garage also carrying a similar leather bag? So that's yet another strong piece of circumstantial evidence. However, I'd still be looking for that murder weapon. The whole essence of this case boiled down to corroboration because really all we had was Blackmun's statement that

And as good as it was, it wasn't quite good enough for the attorneys.

Because you need something, just a little bit, but you need something to kind of back up that story. If we could track the gun down or find the gun, that would be it. Because we could do ballistics and see if it's possible that that gun could have been used. Which would hopefully not be too hard because if he was arrested with it, it should still be in evidence. But we also have to account for the passage of time.

Unfortunately for us is that those weapons are disposed of and it turned out that the weapon itself had been thrown into the ocean many years ago. But we had the paper trail of the gun, we had a serial number of the gun,

And if we could track back on that and find out more about the gun, we might be able to get to the bottom of this as to whether or not that gun is a viable murder weapon. And so police pulled up all the burglary reports from the early 1990s in San Diego until they found a report.

of a gun owner reporting a rare .38 caliber handgun stolen from his home. - And we were able to locate the owner of the gun who lived right here in San Diego County. Told him, yeah, he turned out he was a gun dealer back in 1993. He was a licensed gun dealer.

Magsafe, if you remember, is a unique handmade ammunition that is rare. So chances are that that stolen gun not being the murder weapon that killed Su-Mi, unlikely.

And so a little icing on the cake here. In that same burglary report was listed a large leather bag. He said that he had gotten a leather bag on his recent trip to China, and the leather bag had been stolen in the burglary along with the gun.

And that leather bag, I think, was the same one that Blackman was seen with in the apartment complex. So I would also want to know why, after 22 years, he finally decided to confess and whether that has any relevance to the case or potentially his credibility. It's a question that I put directly to Tony. Scott, I wish I knew that, honestly. He claimed that he wanted to find closure for the family.

which I believe is horse sh*t, excuse my language. Tony and his fellow investigators believed that given his long history of burglaries, another motive was much more likely. I think he went up to Rob, sue me. She panicked. She locked the door and he just fired and then said, "Uh-oh," and left.

Okay, so a quick rundown of the evidence against him. First, there was the unique MagSafe ammunition used in this murder. Blackman's arrest in possession of a stolen weapon that used that particular ammo, matching the description also of a man seen at the murder scene. And then of course the multiple confessions by letters and in interviews with details that only the killer would have known. The DA's office decided that all that combined was sufficient for a murder charge.

So we fell with the Blackmun statement, the paper trail documenting the gun, even though we didn't have the gun itself, that we had enough for a case against Blackmun for murder. As we've said before, we can't see inside a suspect's mind or know exactly why he committed the crime. And in this case, we also can't know for sure why he finally decided to confess.

But Blackman's behavior leading up to the trial did give hints at his possible motivation behind coming clean. According to Tony, Blackman was eager to get these proceedings over with and just wanted to make sure that he returned to state prison.

He was very upset that he was not given access to the kind of programs that they have in the state prison because obviously once we brought him down we kept him in county jail while the trial was pending. He said, "I want the programs." I said, "Well, you

plead guilty then. A guilty plea would spare the court a trial and ensure that Blackman would be sent back to the place he had been calling home for the last 22 years. He wanted to plead guilty on his first court appearance, which was the arraignment. His attorney would not let him until he at least looked through the case file, and he pled guilty. And so in 2016, 42-year-old James Blackman pled guilty to the murder of Sumi Chinn.

As to why he confessed, I don't know. Maybe he just doesn't want to get out. He was worried that he was going to be released and maybe he is institutionalized and he just wants to stay in custody. It was bittersweet justice for Sumi's surviving family. But the verdict came as an incredible relief to Sumi's boyfriend, Donald, who had spent the last 22 years living under a cloud of suspicion. Which is an unfortunate, sometimes tragic consequence of some investigations.

how uncertainty and suspicions can affect the lives of everyone who the crime touches. So after the trial, Tony made sure to get in contact with Donald directly. I told him, you are absolutely 100% clear you are not the bad guy. Just wanted you to know that. Actually, he was relieved. I didn't realize how much he thought about this over the years.

It's clear to me that this was justice delayed. The defendant made several attempts to take responsibility for this brutal murder, but it appears those written confessions were just stuffed into a box. A complete breakdown, I believe, of the system.

But I also think it's important to state a single piece of evidence, no matter how damning it could be, like in this case, a letter of confession, but just on its own merits would even simply secure a conviction. So much has to go into verifying, picking it apart, because that would be the job of a good defense attorney to challenge it. If you don't have the answers to those challenges, your perfect case goes down the drain.

Yes, a letter like this one and ones in similar other cases can break a case wide open. But that's just the beginning and not the end. For Sumi Chin, the most everyday, ordinary thing led to loss of her life. Sitting in a parking lot waiting for her boyfriend.

You can be careful, not engage in unnecessary risk, but even then, sometimes things like this do happen. Sumi Chin lost her life so senselessly and unexpectedly, and that is an additional layer of tragedy. Maybe our little silver lining takeaway today, as we remember Sumi, is to live each and every day being grateful for what we have and to be present in the here and now.

Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original. Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond. Researched by Kate Cooper. Edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday. Already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts.