When she heard the popping sounds, Addie Belle Creasy at first guessed that some neighborhood kids were setting off fireworks a little early. Then her boyfriend tumbled over, but she thought he was staging the fall as a joke.
This was no prank, though. It was gunfire. One bullet hit Creasy's leg. A few struck the side of a car she ducked beneath. When the shooting stopped, her boyfriend and co-worker, Jamie Beale, was dead.
The killing 20 years ago outside an Essex apartment complex as Beale and Creasy were walking home from work was never solved. But Baltimore County police say their new cold-case squad is closer than ever to proving Beale's death was a case of murder for hire.
Baltimore County police say they are still looking for information about the killing, which took place about dawn on June 4, 1982. Two veteran homicide detectives, Philip G. Marll and James W. Tincher, each of whom has spent 16 years working murder cases, have been assigned to reinvestigate Beale's killing and dozens of others in which leads have dried up.
Until the department re-established the cold-case squad a few months ago, those cases were divided among 15 homicide investigators. Since 1916, Baltimore County has had 202 unsolved homicides, police said.
"We're trying to solve the cases that may not have been solvable yesterday but are today," said county police Chief Terrence B. Sheridan.
Baltimore County's is one of many police departments -- including Baltimore City, Anne Arundel County and the Maryland State Police -- with cold-case squads.
Beale, a 28-year-old factory worker, seemed an unlikely candidate for such a violent end. He wasn't involved in drugs or gambling. He wasn't in trouble with police -- never had been. The most scandalous thing about his life was that he was married when he started dating Creasy.
Creasy, who now goes by her married name, Tindle, said she always suspected that the killing was racially motivated, the act of a person who didn't like to see a white woman like her with a black man. The theory might prove to be correct, but Tindle, now 59 and living in Middle River, said police believe she knew the man who paid for the killing.
"The detective told me someone came forward and said he had been approached ... about [a killing] and wouldn't do it but that someone else was hired who would," she said.
When killings aren't solved immediately, it's often years before someone steps forward to tell police what they heard or saw, homicide detectives say. Other times, DNA evidence that couldn't connect anyone at the time the crime was committed later proves helpful in identifying a suspect.
Caught off-guard
The renewed police interest caught Beale's wife a little off-guard. She never expected to hear about the case again.
Sabina Beale, 46, of eastern Baltimore County, says she didn't know until the morning he was killed that her husband was having an affair. "It still hurts," said Beale, who never remarried. "But I have more good memories than bad."
She can remember their trips to the Bahamas, to the mountains, to the racetrack. Her husband was a huge football fan. "He had me watch one game from beginning to end," she said. "He was determined to teach me about football. It didn't work."
His collection of R&B; recordings was well-known among their friends. He was a frequent disc jockey at parties. Just before he was killed, they had been planning to start a family. He loved children, she said.
"We bought the house, the children were next," said Beale, who met her husband when she was in high school. He was a few years older than her.
Details forgotten
Both she and Tindle have difficulty recalling much of what happened the day Jamie Beale was killed -- details such as the name of the officer who told them he was dead and what leads police initially followed.
But, said Tindle, "I remember how I screamed. It seemed like it was forever. ... There are some things you never forget when you've been through something like this."
"A murder is a murder," she added. "No matter how many years it's been."