Urban Legend (Gregory Ross)
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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. Before we get started today, we do want to give you a graphic warning about today's podcast. Because we will be discussing a very vicious murder.

Yeah.

Please. So he was saying please? Yeah. Screaming, young dad. He was going to say, no, please, I'm going to do it, please, please. He said, no, no. What did you see when you went down to the cellar that second time? Body with no head. Okay, the body with no head. No head, too. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.

I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. As we prepared for today's episode, the phrase kept coming to mind, a neighborhood in fear.

And for the episode, we're going back to Brooklyn, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is a beautiful, historic neighborhood in Brooklyn, filled with brownstones, it has bustling nightlife, and it's easily accessible to Manhattan. And these days, it's a relatively nice, safe place to live. But back in 1987, crime was at a high, and brutal violence made it an extremely dangerous place to live. The violence, the shootings, and the homicides were always pretty violent.

And for today's episode, I spoke with retired detective Mike Preet, who I've known for years, to get some insight into a particularly gruesome crime. And it was such an unusual case that it actually became urban legend. You know, I love the way the NYPD and also the FDNY, the fire department, describe busy precincts or busy firehouses.

For firefighters, they call it turning a wheel. That means that the fire engine's always going out and always working in a busy firehouse. So listen to how Mike describes the 7-9 at the time he was there. It was considered an A-house for us. Back in the day, the A-houses were the really active houses just based on the amount of crime and violence.

But here's the thing. When you grow up in an area like that, or certainly when there's a lot of high crime, parents have to watch their children differently. Kids need to watch themselves differently. While you need to be vigilant everywhere, there is a pervasiveness of the threat that follows you everywhere. And that is exactly what families face every time they let their children out of their house, whether it was to go to school, play with a friend, or go somewhere else.

There was a school, PS44, really was the left side of the block. And on the right side of the block were brownstones. It was a pretty violent block. And the crime in the city really factors in what happened on December 10th of 1987 in that neighborhood. Picture that morning. It was like so many other mornings. There are kids running the streets late for school.

And it was on that morning in 1987, on that walk to school would be far from normal for those kids. Towards the back of the school, there was a dumpster and lying right next to the dumpster was a garbage bag. A body bag.

Think about the traumatizing thing for any one of us to make that find. And here you have it basically in the back of a schoolhouse left for children, elementary school children, to find. I always think of it from the eyes of, you know, what would my kids think?

What an incredibly horrific find for anyone. We have the crime scene photos. Obviously, we don't share them, but we're able to take a look at the crime scene as the body was found by those children. And, you know, without describing it all, it is horrific to even look at with the experience that we have and all the years we've had on the job.

And so the children quickly notified a school custodian who didn't even know if what they saw in the bag was human or just a large animal. It was really that disfigured or just not so clear. But he knew not to touch it. So what he did is called 911. And while all of you can imagine how shocking it is to see any dead body, and I can certainly say that that is the case for myself, no matter what condition they were in, this one, as Scott said, was particularly gruesome.

uniform patrol respond. And here now they have a garbage bag containing a body, dressed, covered in blood, missing 90% of the head. You know, Scott, for yourself, just when you think about a body that has been left mutilated like this one, what comes to mind? A very personal crime, clearly. But it raises so many questions about the body in a bag next to a dumpster. Why not in the dumpsters? That would be my first question.

So there is a sloppiness about it or a brazenness about it. And remember, this is not a body that is dug out from a field or in a ditch or in a forest that was hard to be found. It is laying only partially in a dumpster in the back of the school. And that to me says something about the killer or the people that moved this body that is going to be very interesting to figure out the what, why, and who. ♪

So as uniformed officers are beginning to set up their crime scene, the first thing they notice is a trail of blood and a trail of blood that led from the body away from the body. So what does that mean? They are able to walk back the blood trail from the rear of the school across the street to a building on Madison Street.

In a lot of these stories, we talk about, you know, DNA, forensics, technology, digital forensics. Those are incredible tools. But here is some really old-fashioned police footwork, what we call gumshoe work. And when detectives would follow this blood trail, it would take them to a building, to a basement, where this homicide investigation would really heat up.

I think this is worth repeating just these sentences.

Blood up and down the stairs. They're in the basement. There's a chair, a bloody axe, and two people sleeping in that very basement. I mean, that is not a group of words that would normally go together, but that is your crime scene. This is apparently where this person was murdered. And could these sleeping people be your best witnesses? Or could they be your killers?

Now you have a pretty large crime scene. So you actually have where the body was recovered and now possibly the place that that crime was committed.

So walking into a scene like that, you have to approach it first by securing that potential weapon, which is an axe. You want to make sure you get that out of the way that nobody can grab it. So it's officer safety first. At the same time, you're trying to preserve the crime scene. It's a bloody crime scene. You don't want to be walking around footprints, handprints, fingerprints. Blood attaches to all of that.

And then at the same time, you want to see if these two people who are sleeping are actually sleeping and they don't need medical attention because potentially they have overdosed. So this is like sort of a incredible storm of events happening in one picture. The basement is kind of like shooting gallery where people would go downstairs to use drugs.

shooting galleries. The term on the streets dates back to the 70s, where you'd find these abandoned buildings or apartments or even alleys where heroin addicts would be shooting heroin and often passing out with the needle still in their arms. The two individuals that were found in the basement were high. It took some amount of waking them up for them to even become coherent.

So once the two witnesses are brought into the Priest and Station house, they determine that they want to take a statement from them, but these two people were still under the influence of drugs. In fact, so once police were able, and it took hours, to get them in any condition to give a statement, boy, did they give a statement. Hey, would you tell me what happened on December 9th, 1987? And here's some of the interviews with the witnesses. I'll go downstairs.

I see the deceased on the floor and his arms and hands tied behind him. Okay, so you saw the deceased lay down on the floor, his arms and legs tied behind him. That leg got to me and I just leapt out. Okay, so you said you about-faced and leapt out. I leapt out of the cellar. What did you see when you went down to the cellar that second time? Body with no head.

Okay, the body with no hand. They said that not only did they witness the murder, but someone paid them to move that body from that shooting gallery, that building, and drag it across the street and place it in the dumpster. So this is the individual on the top floor who's now asking other people to move the body from the cellar? Right.

For the witnesses moving a dead body and leaving it, it could be considered a crime. It is a crime. I mean, right? And let's see...

Absolutely is. You are tampering with evidence. You are potentially involved after the fact. There's multiple crimes. So in the middle of the night, they struggled to move this dead body up the stairs. Okay, how did you move the body? With a shopping cart. Put it in a shopping cart, wheeled it across the street.

Did you put the body in the dumpster or? What they were told was to put the body into the dumpster and they just weren't strong enough. So you put the body down and you put panel boards, you said over top of that.

Now, here's something we should all keep in mind. If it had made it into that dumpster and then if it had been carted away by sanitation, it would have been taken to the city dump. And from there, either it would have been eventually just lost as other waste was put on top of it, but it would have been very difficult and sometimes close to, if not actually impossible to find. You know, to be honest, if that body would have made its way into the dumpster, we might not even be having this conversation today.

And now the next thing is that these are the witnesses that at least at this point investigators and potentially prosecutors are left with. These were not pristine witnesses. They're eyewitnesses, but they're very hard to interact with. And the state that they're in and the influence that they're under based on the narcotics is definitely going to bring their credibility, their reliability into question.

I agree with that. But the one thing is the evidence is matching their statement. They told investigators that they dragged the body and they carried it and they left it outside the dumpster. And they were found after the crime sleeping in that basement.

So would they really know that information about where the body was, how the body was left, what condition it was in, and the blood trail, had it not been true? So for me, their reliability factor comes up a few notches. But one of the initial questions you have to ask is, are they being truthful? Or are they covering up for something they did that was much more than just move the body? ♪

During the first witness interview with police, they were able to get the nickname or street name of the killer known in the neighborhood. Chabon. Chabon.

His name was Shaborn, but his name was actually Lewis Emanuel. Shaborn and a couple of other people drive up in the car, and they had a guy who was tied up behind his back and was screaming and covered in blood.

Now what's coming up next is, and I'm putting it mildly, extremely graphic.

And we're going to use the same rule that I always use in the courtroom, is you hold back certain things, even from the jury, that are overly gruesome or graphic. For example, I never showed crime scene photographs of the actual body unless the jury needed to see them. One, because jurors, people don't want to actually see that. However, if it was necessary for a piece of evidence or to prove something, the way something happened or where, then of course I would. But for the same reasons here, we are going to give you those details specifically

Because you can't really understand the magnitude of the crime, the type of crime, the brutality and how that all plays in, unless we tell you exactly what happened from there. They walked him downstairs into the basement and sat him in a chair. Okay, what was he doing? Describe what he was doing. This is the victim now? Yeah, this is the victim. Yeah.

This is an interview with another witness who was in the building. So he was saying, please?

And the whole time the guy was screaming, please and no and don't do this to me. You heard him screaming, young? Yeah. The guy said, no, please don't do it, please, please. He said, no, no, then it's through. That was it. So you heard the guy say no, no, but immediately before you heard the chainsaw going through something? Yeah. Okay, so it sounded as though the guy was alive until they put the chainsaw on. Yeah. Okay.

All I keep thinking is what type of a person is capable of such acts? Because detectives also believe that this person was alive when they began to use the chainsaw. And that right there is almost more than our minds should be able to bear. And at some point, Siobhan and the other people that he was with forced everyone to leave the basement. The witness says he goes outside and...

If you don't think the crime could get more gruesome, it can.

Further in their investigation, detectives learned that at some point the chainsaw ran out of gas and they had to finish it with an axe. Okay, so there was a hatchet inside the basement? Yeah. I mean, not to be too graphic, but you have to, in your mind, picture them using the chainsaw to cut through the head.

which is really going on an angle through the neck. And then we believe that maybe the final plot, they just use that act. It is a gruesome way to kill someone. It is a horrific way to die. And half hour later, Siobhan and the people come out of the basement and they have a bag that they're holding up above their head and they get back in the car and they leave.

And when I hear that, I feel three things. I'm horrified, obviously, by the whole story. I'm angry, not only at the person who did this, but even anyone that would have anything to do with what happened. But I also just feel sad.

It is an incredible story, but it also, as I said before, matches the evidence. And when the police heard the name Shaborn, they knew two things. One, he was a person that needed to be gotten off the streets as quickly as possible. And two, this was not going to be an open and shut investigation. ♪

The two guys who caused this case originally were top-notch guys. Through their notes, you could see that they knew Chabon as being a major drug dealer who controlled the area.

He was a very dangerous guy in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and police were anxious to see him behind bars. Detectives knew him to be a mid-level drug dealer in the neighborhood, involved in the narcotics trade for quite a while. He was a menacing figure who protected his turf and ruled that turf with fear. The crazy part is, he lived on the other side of the schoolyard.

And so police know who the killer is, where he might be. All right, did you know the dead guy? No. But there's one thing that no one knows. Did you know the name of the deceased? Who's the victim? I'd like to answer some questions about what happened on December 9th. No, I didn't ask them that, man. And why was he murdered?

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The first eyewitness to give detailed account of what he saw on the street that day well laid out one of the most graphic crimes we've talked about. A turn in the investigation would come once our John Doe body was brought to the medical examiner's office and investigators were able to lift latent prints from that body. And John Doe had a name. So they're able to do fingerprints?

And the victim had had a rap sheet. He had been arrested before. So his fingerprints come up. Gregory Ross. Gregory Ross was a 28-year-old veteran from the Bronx who served in the National Guard. He had served his country. He had come back. He had fallen into hard times, low drug usage. And he was basically hustling for money. And here is yet another facet of that addiction. You have someone who served their country and part of...

Whatever it was during their service, they came back and just had a really tough time and had definite struggles at that point with narcotics that, from everything we know, he had not had before. How sad is it that Gregory's struggle put him in such a vulnerable place? So whatever issues he may have had, he's a victim. And that's the way investigators would treat him with regards to this brutal homicide.

For me, I always reflect on the victim, right? Because the victim is a victim. He's not even from Brooklyn. Back in the late 80s, early 90s, you always saw people on the street corners. They were washing windows. We used to call them squeegee guys. But that's how he was hustling. And hearing Mike use the term squeegee guy...

You know, if you haven't lived in New York or you didn't live in New York back in the late 80s and then the 90s, you've probably at least seen them on TV. It's literally the people, or usually men, for whatever reason, that would come up to your window with the squeegee and would clean your window with the hopes of getting some change or a dollar, whatever they could, to help support themselves. The thing that wasn't making sense to detectives is why Gregory Ross? What was the motive?

For all you out there, you might think that because Gregory had a history of substance misuse and what investigators knew about Shaborn, that this homicide had to do with drugs. But the truth is, the motive is far from that. Detectives found a witness, a person who knew Shaborn well. And one day the two were hanging out and Shaborn told this witness what had happened. This is what he said.

He had to take someone's head to a certain person. And the reason he had to do this was because he had sold some cocaine or he was in the process of selling cocaine. And when she was delivering it, I guess they put guns at her belly and she was pregnant at the time. And they took the drugs from her? And they took the drugs from her.

What had led up to all of this is that Shaborn's girlfriend had actually gone to his supplier to pick a large amount of drugs for him and that she was supposedly robbed before she even got it back to Shaborn.

Those drug dealers had taken his girlfriend hostage and threatened to kill her. The only way he could free his girlfriend was he had to bring him, bring these people the money for the drugs that were lost.

So what Shaborn did was choose the head of an innocent man. What detectives discovered was mind-boggling.

Simply, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And brought down here.

So now you have potentially another witness, somebody Shaborn spoke to in jail, a jailhouse informant. And that is somebody that you want to immediately get in and get on tape and bring that evidence to your prosecutor, who hopefully will use that to move this case forward. You try to get the witnesses. There's a whole bunch of different investigative steps you have to do, whether it be getting their statement down, getting a DA's office, somebody to come down to audio them.

How strong of a case would that build, Anasiga? So what you have is, yes, of course you have a victim who's now named. You have these various witnesses who have been taped at different times, and they've actually named the killer. And they have the suspect who's actually known to the police. So while you think it's time to make an arrest, what you're going to learn is that that was going to prove much harder than expected. Detectives tried to round up all of their witnesses and build their case.

And so while you're waiting, detectives are being tactical. They just want to kind of keep tabs on their main suspect.

And so how they do that in New York City at the time, it's called an I-card. It's an investigative mechanism. It was literally a card at the time that law enforcement would put out and that it would say that if this person comes into contact with law enforcement, that then that other agency would let the detective

know, hey, I have your person here. It might be witnesses that they're looking for. It might be, in this case, a suspect. And so they weren't necessarily making a move. It would let you keep tabs while you were trying to build your case. But remember, this is in the days before the internet.

An iCard that drops in 1988 is not like a computer notification or an email like we're all used to and somebody doesn't get it on their phone right away. Somebody would call the office. And if nobody picked up the phone, nobody would get a notification.

And while waiting for somebody from a different squad or a different precinct or even a different borough to let you know they're in contact with either your witnesses or potentially your suspect, obviously you have to be patient, but you really want that phone to ring and you really want to know, especially where your witnesses are, because they're the ones you need to get in and to firm up that case. So waiting for that ICARI contact could be frustrating.

But here, because you couldn't locate the witnesses at a given moment, it legitimately was chaotic to try and locate some of these people. You did not want to bring in Chabon and go through a case giving him all the details that you know for him to be like, I ain't saying nothing. And then you have to release him back. You've made him smarter as he's walked out the door.

You want to do a single lineup, right? You don't want to do multiple lineups. So you may get an I-card call for one of your witnesses, but you still don't know where the other three or four are. And you also don't want to bring him in because constantly bringing him in is going to give his defense counsel the ability to say that you're harassing him. So what you need to do is you find your one I-card witness, you put them on ice, and you

And you wait till you get all of them together, and then you bring them all in at one time to do your live lineup, all in one swift move. And that prevents any issues with defense counsel saying, you know what, you're harassing my client. Chablon got locked up in December 12th. We had an I-card that was issued for him again on January 20th. He was locked up on February 1st. I mean, he just kept getting locked up.

And so the case goes cold.

But one issue may be really preventing your witnesses from really showing themselves, and not just the police, but just to anybody in that neighborhood. Because Bedford-Stuyvesant was a neighborhood in fear. You had a suspect who almost was becoming a legend on the street because he took somebody down to a basement, strapped them to a chair...

and cut their head off with a chainsaw. And if that doesn't reverberate in Bedford Stuyvesant that he is a guy who means business, I don't know what does. Think about just the legend of somebody being known to cut someone's head off with a chainsaw, right? Think about the fear that that provokes.

Once witnesses realize that they may be in danger, how difficult do you think it would be to get somebody to talk? That's true domestic terrorism. When it comes to bras, stop compromising, because now you can have it all. Beauty and comfort, support and breathability. At last, BallyBreathe has arrived, a breathable and breathtaking collection of bras, underwear and shapewear that feel as good as they look.

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Around 2003, I've now been promoted to detective and I've moved into the 7-9 squad and I was assigned to the homicide shooting team, but we also maintained the cold cases that were down in the basement.

His partner came to him with the box and said, this is the story about Gregory Ross. Everyone in the precinct station house knows about this. It's kind of been an urban legend case in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I think, he said to Mike Preet, we can solve this case. So together, they dusted off that box and they began to dig in.

But let me tell you a few things about Mike Prate. He is the type of detective that whenever he walked into your office, he might, you know, he'd have a joke to tell and a light word to say, but then it was down to business and he always had his file that was pretty meticulously organized. He is exactly the type of detective that you would want on a case, an age-old case, a decades-old case like this.

And when cases go cold, it takes a certain type of investigator to rework those cases. When you dig into these files, you look for discrepancies. Discrepancies in witness statements or locations or other things that may speak to you in this file. And that takes a tremendous amount of patience and a tremendous amount of legwork. But this was 2003.

As technology began to come forward, you realize that there was so much like you could pick up a case in January, find all the evidence, submit it for DNA. And then by the end of the year, you were getting some type of results back if you could move forward.

Because remember what this case was and what it wasn't. It wasn't a whodunit. They already had various witnesses saying exactly who had committed the crime. So the real legwork was going to be trying to reassemble those witnesses, many of whom were going to prove very difficult to find, and it was technology that was just maybe going to change the game.

There's public records tools that are out there that you could really rebuild a neighborhood and see everyone who was associated at a building going back to the late 80s. Each one of those people that were never interviewed becomes a potential lead or witness. Mike Praik calls it rebuilding the neighborhood. And I've always loved hearing him talk about that because I think it's such a unique approach. And I think it is a excellent investigative tool.

So while technology gave them many new leads, those new leads actually led them out of state. So they had to reassemble people, some of whom had been struggling with narcotics addiction at the time, who they found out had actually put themselves right into rehabilitation even soon after the crime. And then afterwards, they had basically gone off the grid to start a new life.

This event shook them so much that they went into rehab for a year. And you know when you go into rehab, nobody knows where you are. And when they came out, they just went off the grid.

And the other challenges were physically reassembling this file that had spanned for decades at this point. It wasn't a case that was going to rely on DNA. You had to see if your evidence still existed. You know, evidence is stored in this huge place in New York City, or at least one of the places called Pearson Place. And when I say huge, you know, it's like warehouses of this stuff. And we are talking about 20 years worth of crime and what is held in New York City. ♪

When I went to retrieve all of this different stuff, because now, you know, in the late 2000s, now you're able to do all kinds of DNA stuff, right? Now it's like magic. It was really hard to find some of the crime scene stuff because of contamination at the warehouse, contamination with other crime scene bags. There was a giant flood that flooded out all of Pearson Place. So think of all of the investigative evidence that you lose at that point.

But now let's come back to something else. This is the crime that had become urban legend over the last 20 years. And that is going to factor very much into the work that detectives have to do to try to reassemble this case. When you spoke to the old timers over the course of this investigation, people were like, yeah, I heard about that. And of course, everybody has their own version. If they weren't there, they heard of it.

And it really was a legend throughout the neighborhood. Over the years, we must have backed to speak to people eight or nine times.

So just picture Detective Mike Prait and his partner in a room at the 7-9. The cold case boxes are open and all the folders are on the table. And they're going through each DD-5, which is an incident report that's been filled out by the original investigators back in 1987 or any supplements that are part of it. And they're looking to find and then validate those witnesses. Because in a sense, if you're going to present information back online,

Back from 1987 to a prosecutor in 2003, you have to make sure that person you're talking about is still alive. It is a time-consuming, arduous process, but they have to check every box, dot every I, and cross every T.

We went through each detective DD5 and answered with a new one. So, hey, we're starting in 2003. Where does witness number one live? Oh, witness number one passed away in 1990. Well, then I would have to go through the whole process of making sure that I could truly account that that person, somebody's not just telling me they died. When I come to the DA's office, you're going to ask for the proof.

But how important really is it between the investigator, detective, and a prosecutor to really move a case forward for prosecution? You know, certainly detectives that I have very good relationships with, and Mike will, I think, would affirm this, that sometimes I'm not going to tell him what he wants to hear. I'm not going to be ready to make that arrest.

because of what I see is going to potentially be a problem in a courtroom, although he may think otherwise because of the case that he's been building for some time. So you have to have that good relationship sometimes to push the case forward by helping the other side, whichever it is, see it your way or not, or when there are those tensions, to get past them for the good of the case. I'm going to be responsible throughout that whole part of the DA's office to bring my witnesses down.

So the pieces are being put together and detectives finally get the green light to proceed with the DA. But there's only one problem. Shaborn had gone to jail, but now he's missing. Want to connect with more family and friends and their native language isn't English?

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The last thing detectives knew about Shaborn's whereabouts was that he was in prison. Shaborn had been locked up on a federal narcotics conspiracy in North Carolina. He had been sentenced to a substantial amount of time, but when Detective Prate went into the federal inmate locator... He just wasn't there.

Now, Anastiga, how do you think that could be possible?

I don't think he just disappeared into the federal system. It's not like, poof, he vanished. Very likely it's that he isn't showing up on paper or in the system because federal authorities don't want him to be found. And so the first thing I'm thinking is, is he involved with something else so that they are keeping his whereabouts a secret? So now we're bringing everybody together. We've been able to find and locate the witnesses that we believe we need. And now we can't find our guy.

So detectives reach out to their federal partners and say, hey, off the record, where is Shaborn? I know he's supposed to be in your system, but we can't find him. And the whispers came back in a phone call. This is one of those weird ones where you're like, somebody gives you a phone call and says to you, hey, I just want to give you a heads up. Your guy is in custody, but he's in WITSEC. And nobody's going to admit that he's in WITSEC.

So witness security protection at the federal level, that is the thing that you see in the movies. So many different steps are taken to protect the identity of various witnesses. And in this case, they found out that Shaborn or Lewis Emanuel had become a federal witness while in custody after being proffered.

If someone is being proffered by federal authorities, they are expected to talk about every single thing they have ever done and every single thing that they know about. And of course, I am talking about different crimes.

And when I say everything, I mean everything. It is amazing what you read on these reports that people will admit to because the deal is going to be this. If you are going to ultimately cooperate in a case, which is exactly why someone's proffered, is that the feds think they have built a case against you usually and that they are

potentially going to allow you to plead guilty or to become a witness, but only if you tell them everything you know and admit to everything you've done. And if you do that, then those sins, if you will, will be forgiven, obviously in the legal sense that it is all part of the open record. Your plea deal is your plea deal, and that's the end of it.

However, here's the hitch. If there is anything that you have left out, well, then all deals are off the table. So there is a lot riding on what is said in those rooms during those interviews.

And then Mike Prate, to his credit, said to the guy, listen, Shaborn is going to stand trial in Brooklyn for that murder.

He's going to be charged. That could blow up their entire case because he's already now proffered and testified in whatever case they had going on.

Now, and I'm going to put this gingerly here, there can definitely be tugs of war sometimes between state authorities and federal authorities or different agencies. And it is because everyone is working with their own objectives. So this push and pull about what happens, whether is he going to be the witness on the one case or the defendant on the other, tensions can definitely rise. But I can tell you certainly in my experience, usually the feds win.

This phone call between the U.S. attorney and Mike Prate set off a couple of waterfall effects. After that call happened, the U.S. attorney reached out to Shaborn, who's his federal witness, and say, hey, is this true? The U.S. attorney reaches out to him and says to him, hey, by chance, did you cut off somebody's head with a chainsaw in Brooklyn? Because I got these detectives calling me. And he's like, I don't want to talk about anything anymore.

What happens next is pretty interesting. Shaborn makes a phone call to a family member back in Brooklyn. And he says, detectives are coming from Brooklyn for me on that thing on Madison. I thought everyone was dead. So Mike Freight wants access to Shaborn to get a statement, but the U.S. attorney blocks him and would not give him access to interview Shaborn.

But that doesn't mean that Detective Prate and his partner don't have the rest of their witnesses now put together and ready to go. And it really is something when I think about all these different people coming together decades later to do what must have been such a difficult thing, coming in and talking about

This thing that had kept the entire community so fearful that no one would talk, no one would speak. It was almost as if that nightmare was ending. As you sat through each of those grand juries or each of those interviews, it really was like time stood still for those people that saw it. What they were truly scared of and what they've always said that they were truly scared of was having to go to trial.

Clearly, the fear was still there. He's sitting in a jail in North Carolina, and people in Brooklyn are still fearing Shaborn and his associates likely. And while he's in jail, his family and friends and associates aren't. And they start to make visits to people that are still in the neighborhood, to where they know where they are. They just talk to them, and they still fear in them.

Just think about the fear those contacts would instill. Now, imagine walking into your office, Anastasia, and knowing that your witnesses are teetering on their decision to actually testify, to come into court, to come to court.

For them, the fear is so real that they may not even show up. At what point do you start to weigh that balance between, can I take this to trial if I have no witnesses? Will the case have to be dropped? Or do you go into a mode of, how do I get Shaborn in the courtroom and get some justice for Gregory Ross and his family? For me, it would definitely come down to this. It's now or never.

That doesn't mean that you don't realize the potential problems at trial. Mike Pratt and his partner maintained a very close relationship with Gregory Ross's brother, all along always telling both detectives he wanted justice for his brother. Prosecutors were very concerned about the witnesses, and they really only had witnesses. They had no DNA or really no other critical evidence. So the decision was made to allow Sheborn to take a plea deal.

Louis Emmanuel Chabourne, now with gray hair, 53 years old, pled guilty to manslaughter. So nearly 24 years after murdering Greg Ross with a chainsaw, Chabourne Louis Emmanuel will serve two to six years behind bars. Two to six years. And Anastasia, I know how I feel about that, and I'm sure you feel similarly.

I think that anyone here is going to say two to six, only two to six. But I can tell you, without talking about the exact circumstances of this plea, you know, we know about the challenges.

We know from Mike Prate and everything we've read that prosecutors were very involved with Gregory Ross's family and that they were very worried what would happen if they took this case into the courtroom. Would they ever get the witnesses that so feared not only Louis Emmanuel Chaborn, but his family and associates that were still out there on the street, that they didn't know if they'd ever show up in court?

But no, there's no way to say that that was a sentence that was in any way commensurate with the crime that he had committed to Gregory Ross. It is certainly not the justice we all think that is deserved or appropriate for the crime.

Taking a 10,000-foot view of this case may be easier. And as it is with many cases, it's really looking at all of the elements in these cases and deciding what is the best way to proceed, always keeping in mind the endgame is your best attempt to get justice for the victim. This family wanted justice. They were involved. And the DA's office, at least I can tell you, at this case, was very involved with them. Who would have even thought that all these years later that somebody would be held accountable?

We often talk about motive, means, and opportunity in these homicide investigations. And I cannot myself remember any case where the opportunity was so random and the reason for the murder so incredibly callous. And Gregory Ross, wrong time, wrong place? Of course. Does any human deserve to be treated like this? Of course not.

He was a person who served his country and then fell on hard times, was brutally, horrifically murdered. But that he is not forgotten. Mike Prate, his colleagues made clear that Gregory Ross mattered.

And it was really a total team effort in this case that none of them would stop until they got answers and at least some amount of accountability of justice for Gregory Ross. 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 Frosetti Media. Ashley Flowers and Sumit David are executive producers. This episode was produced by Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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