THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 10, 1996 TAG: 9606100041
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 180 lines
Russell Lee knew something was wrong the instant he saw his daughter's car, its passenger window shattered, backed into a space at a friend's apartment complex.
``I'll never forget it,'' he said. ``It just seemed to me something bad had happened. I got that feeling.''
That was five years ago today. His daughter, Janice Lee, 30, was missing. And here was her car, a 1978 two-door Mercury.
Two days later, a mangled torso was found at Southeastern Public Service Authority's trash-to-energy plant in Portsmouth. It would be days before authorities made a definite identification: It was the body of Janice Lee, confirmed by X-rays taken a year earlier.
Today, Lee knows little more about his daughter's killing than he did then. No arrests have been made.
He can at least take some solace in the knowledge that authorities think his daughter's life ended quickly - likely from a gunshot to her head.
``The hardest part is not knowing what happened, not knowing the details and the police not having arrested someone for it,'' her father said in a recent interview at his Norfolk home. ``You never get over that. . . . You just always wonder.''
With the arrival of another anniversary, Lee must again face the painful reality. Around him, his home is immaculate, a thick carpet of grass outside, beautiful rooms in rich greens and blues. On a table nearby are smiling family photographs. But his face reflects sadness, the weight of his loss.
``Each day that passes, it gets more difficult to secure the evidence they need,'' he said. ``Unless someone comes forward with some information, I don't hold out much hope that someone will be arrested.''
But the soft-spoken Lee clings to that hope nevertheless, knowing that police have precious little to go on.
Chesapeake police initiated the case because Lee lived and disappeared from that city. But Portsmouth police took over when her body was found. Authorities still suspect that she was killed in Chesapeake, however.
Last year, the main investigator who worked the case for Portsmouth retired, and others have taken over the quest for evidence.
Retired Portsmouth Police Sgt. Allen R. Harvey, once the lead investigator and now a police officer with Norfolk's division of forensic science, is optimistic that Lee's murder will be solved.
``It's one of the cases that sticks with me,'' he said in a recent interview. ``There are three or four cases like this that are on the cusp of being solved. . . . We just need that one break.''
Harvey said the investigation netted substantial circumstantial evidence through the years. ``Who's going to say at what point this guy isn't going to slip up and say something that's going to crack the case wide open?'' he said.
And the veteran homicide investigator has strong feelings about who is responsible. ``I feel like I know who did it, yes,'' he said.
``But that's just my belief. What I believe and what I can prove are two different things. . . . I would like to have solved it while I was there, but I didn't. Now I'd just like to see someone solve it.''
Lee, an advertising storage clerk for The Virginian-Pilot, was last seen after she had her hair done at a friend's home on Harbour Place in Chesapeake's Crestwood section on June 9.
Dale Moore, one of the last people to see Lee before she disappeared, has said Lee came to her apartment about 5:30 p.m. that Sunday, June 9. The two women talked, then visited a sick friend.
They returned to Moore's apartment in the early evening and watched a basketball game on television. Moore said she started giving Lee a perm and styling her hair about 9:30 p.m. and finished shortly after midnight. Lee left about 12:30 a.m.
Later that morning, after Lee's roommate contacted Moore to tell her that Lee had not come home to their Reid Street apartment, they reported Lee missing.
Through the years authorities have added a few more pieces to the puzzle.
Lee apparently left her friend's house and, due to a faulty gas gauge, ran out of gas. She walked to a gas station on Bainbridge Boulevard and filled two plastic gallon milk containers with gasoline sometime between 12:30 and 1 a.m.
Later, she drove back to the gas station. Someone was with her, but the gas station attendant was unable to identify the person when questioned by police.
Lee's torso was found in a plastic bag on June 12 by an employee at the SPSA plant on Victory Boulevard in Portsmouth. It had been decapitated and was severed at the waist.
Investigators originally had mistaken the torso for that of a white female, but later withdrew that conclusion because of body decomposition and the color of Lee's skin. She was a light-skinned black woman.
Her body was eventually identified on June 18 by examining X-rays taken of the torso and those taken of Lee in 1990 after an automobile accident.
Her car was found in the 800 block of Windward Place. Its passenger window had been broken out. Police found blood on the passenger door, the seat, the rear bumper and inside the trunk lid. The car was so clean that the blood had been overlooked when authorities first found the car, family members said.
The milk containers she had used to hold gasoline were later found in the trash at the gas station.
At the time she was missing, some of Lee's friends and co-workers said she had broken up with a boyfriend a month to two months before she disappeared. Police have questioned the former boyfriend.
Some close to Lee had said, however, that her friendship with the former boyfriend was a ``sore spot'' and that she had wanted to get out of the relationship.
Russell Lee spelled out his theory of what happened to his daughter. He was thoughtful and deliberate.
``I've thought about this a lot,'' he said. ``I think that someone was waiting for her in that complex where she got her hair done. Perhaps that person left his car at the complex and maybe even rode with (her). Sometime after that, he drove her car back and left in his car.''
Lee had no enemies, her father said. By all accounts, she was friendly, outgoing, had a quick smile, and was always willing to lend help to someone in need.
Daisy Lee, Janice's stepmother, considers the discovery of her remains a blessing. It would have been worse if she had simply disappeared forever.
``I just think that's the Lord's way of not having you walk around wondering,'' she told her husband softly. ``As painful as it may be and seem to others, it just seemed that everyone had their arms around us.''
At one point, more than 30 priests prayed for the family, Daisy Lee said. People sent cards sprinkled with holy water from a river in France. And co-workers collected money for Janice Lee's children.
``So out of all the pain, there was a lot of goodness,'' she said.
She is also thankful that the lead investigator shared his theory - that Lee's death was quick, most likely the result of a gunshot to the head.
``He thought it was instant,'' she said. ``Whatever else happened was not a vengeful act - it was just a means to commit the perfect crime - to never be found. They assured me that the act had nothing to do with vengeance.''
Somehow she finds that comforting. She likes to think that Janice Lee was spared the thoughts of wondering how her two sons would get along without her.
Lee had visited her father and stepmother about two weeks before she was killed. ``She had talked about getting her life together,'' her father said. ``She was very upbeat.''
She had also talked about getting married to Nathaniel, the boys' father, Russell Lee said. Her two sons Eric, now 15, and Troy, 16, live with their father and paternal grandmother.
Pauline Cherry, the boys' grandmother, and Nathaniel, had seen Lee the night she disappeared before she left to get her hair done. Lee had stopped by to say hello and told them she wouldn't be back that night.
Cherry remembers Lee laughing with her son, telling him they were going to get married the next year, then running down the stairs and out of the house.
``That was the end,'' she said. ``I never saw her again.''
Most troubling for Cherry is watching her grandchildren grow up with no mother. ``There's something missing,'' she said.
``I know it's missing. I'm trying to be that missing part, and you can't. But you just try.''
For months after his mother's death, Troy did not want to go outside - afraid that he or someone else might disappear, Cherry said.
Her theory is that more than one person was involved.
``I don't think one person could have done it,'' she said. ``I'm just speculating. I'm just grabbing for straws. I don't have anything else.''
She, too, prays that the crime will be solved.
``If the detectives can't get them, maybe their conscience will,'' she said. ``Or maybe someone will come forward who knows something.''
For Russell Lee, it was a letter from Father Thomas Quinlan, a former priest at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Norfolk - the church the family attends - that brought the perspective he needed to move on.
``You take away all the horror, even though it was a heinous crime, she passed away,'' Russell Lee said, paraphrasing the letter. ``She was 30. People die at 30. They die at birth. I thought about that, and it helped me tremendously.''
Nevertheless, his daughter is never far from his thoughts.
``I think about her every day,'' Lee said. ``There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of her. She's in my prayers every night.''
It has taken time, but Lee said he has successfully worked through the anger.
``From a Christian perspective, you try to get over the hate factor,'' he said. ``At first, you think I'd like to have the same thing done to them. But I think this person has to give a full accounting. God has to be the ultimate judge. Even if the police never arrest him. This person has to account for what he or she has done.'' MEMO: Anyone with information about this case should call the Portsmouth
Detective Bureau at 393-8536 or Crime Line at 488-7777. ILLUSTRATION: Janice Lee disappeared on June 10, 1991. Her mutilated
body was found at an SPSA facility two days later.
JIM WALKER
The Virginian-Pilot
Retired Portsmouth Police Sgt. Allen R. Harvey, once the lead
investigator in Lee's murder and now an officer with Norfolk's
division of forensic science, is optimistic the murder will be
solved.
KEYWORDS: INTERVIEW UNSOLVED MURDER by CNB