NEWARK, N.J., March 23 (UPI) -- Five teenagers who vanished in 1978 were locked in the basement of an empty house that was then set on fire, police in Newark, N.J., said Tuesday.
Police Director Garry McCarthy told a news conference two suspects, Lee Anthony Evans, 56, of Irvington, and Philander Hampton, 53, of Jersey City, have been charged with murder and arson, The (Newark) Star-Ledger reported. They were scheduled for arraignment Wednesday.
Evans, Hampton and a third suspect, Maurice Woody-Olds, 48, who died in 2008, are cousins, police said.
Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor, both 17 in 1978, and Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson and Michael McDowell, all 16, had been helping Evans unload boxes shortly before they vanished. He was a suspect at the time but passed a polygraph test.
"This was a relentless pursuit of justice for the families of the victims," McCarthy said of the arrests. "This is one small step toward justice."
Over the years, police, stymied by the lack of physical evidence, pursued distant leads, including whether the teens died in the mass suicide of the Rev. Jim Jones's followers in Guyana.
"We've been waiting for this phone call for 30 years," McDowell's sister, Terry Lawson, said. "To receive it is shocking."
