The Errand Jada Lambert Did Not Finish
On the last day of April 1998, Jada Denita Lambert rode a bus downtown with her friend Jamere Davon Gilliam. The two went to Charles Center so that Lambert could obtain an Age and Majority card, the paperwork of turning eighteen, and Gilliam later told detectives about the trip because by the time anyone asked her, she was the last person known to have seen Jada Lambert alive. Gilliam told them something else, too. Lambert had a plan for the next stop. After visiting the MVA, she intended to go to Owings Mills Mall and buy her mother shoes.
Her mother was Rita Lambert. Jada was eighteen, from Woodlawn, five feet one inch tall, and she lived with her family. The plan Gilliam remembered was small and specific, the kind of plan a person makes on a bus: identification first, then the mall, then shoes for her mother.
She kept a diary. In it she recorded a night at Dave and Buster's with her friend Ryan Luster, and the names in its pages were the ordinary names of a young woman's life. Dexter Douglas appeared in it several times. Carlos Drayton would later call himself a good friend of hers. Thomas Bowman knew her through his wife and had seen her at a Christmas party the past December. Ryan Luster had gone into the Army, the way people her age were going out into their lives, and was serving at Fort Polk, Louisiana. None of these people knew it yet, but within a year each of them would sit across from a Baltimore homicide detective and account for himself, because the diary would become a map, and detectives would walk it entry by entry.
The last documented business of her life was proving who she was. Gilliam's account has the two friends at Charles Center for the Age and Majority card. The last confirmed sighting of Jada Lambert has her leaving the Motor Vehicle Administration office at Mondawmin Mall, where she had obtained a state identification card, a photo card bearing her name. Two offices, two documents, one message: Jada Denita Lambert, an adult, entitled to say so. Then she walked out of the MVA, and she was last seen alive after leaving it.
What happened next was never established by anyone. It is worth being plain about how thin the record of her last errand is, and where it comes from: a friend, remembering a bus ride and a plan for detectives after the fact. Who Jada Lambert met after the MVA, how she traveled, where the afternoon went: no witness ever supplied it, and no detective ever reconstructed it. The people who could account for pieces of her spring, and there were several, could account for none of this. One friend had last spoken with her in early April. Another had seen her at Christmas. The gap begins at the door of a state office and it has never closed. Gilliam's account ends with a plan; the plan's next stop was the mall, and the shoes were for Rita. Whether Jada Lambert ever got there, nobody who knew her could say.
There is one more thing worth knowing about her before the rest of this is told, and it comes from the neighborhood rather than the case. She and her mother had their hair styled by the same woman, a wife who lived nearby. Hair is a standing appointment and a running conversation; two women in one stylist's chairs occupy the same small world. The stylist's husband will enter this story later. Jada Lambert never knew his name would be attached to hers, and for four years, neither did anyone else.
So the picture of that last stretch of April is this: a bus, a friend, the paperwork of adulthood, and an errand pointed at her mother. The next fixed point anyone would ever establish is a stranger's voice on a telephone, and between the two there is nothing at all. An eighteen-year-old left an MVA office with the mall still ahead of her, and the account of her life, the one kept by the people who loved her and the diary she wrote in, simply stops. What replaced it was a case number, opened on the first day of May.
What Was Found at Herring Run Park
On May 1, 1998, an anonymous man called Baltimore City 911. "I'm only gonna say this one time. The body is at Belair Road and Park Drive. It's down there by the water," he told the dispatcher. That was the message in its entirety: a location, an ultimatum about repetition, and no name. The call came from a payphone in the 3900 block of Edmondson Avenue. There is no crossing of Belair Road and Park Drive. The streets that meet there are Belair Road and Parkside Drive. Whoever he was, he knew where the body was and was one street name short of saying so correctly.
The directions were wrong by one word and right enough to work. Northeastern District officers went into Herring Run Park on the caller's information and found the body of a Black woman near the water's edge of Herring Run stream, her face partially submerged. It was a mild, wet day in Northeast Baltimore, a high of 65 with a fifth of an inch of rain. Sergeant Hall pronounced her dead at 11:27.
The reports do not agree on exactly how she lay. One recorded her fully clothed and face down, her face submerged in approximately one foot of water. Another recorded her supine near the stream bed, her face partially submerged in approximately six inches. On the essentials the accounts are one: she was at the edge of Herring Run stream, and her face was in the water.
The spot was an isolated, unilluminated part of the park, not easily accessible to vehicles. She was wearing blue pants, a blue blouse, brown shoes, and a jacket, and her clothing appeared undisturbed. A jean jacket was draped neatly across her upper back, "as if to keep her warm." No identification and no personal effects were found on or near her. No evidence of a struggle was noted in the area, and officers observed a small blunt-force wound to the left side of her head and no other trauma.
A woman named Mrs. McFarland told police that she had heard what sounded like a woman screaming, and that the scream came from under a bridge in the park. That is the whole of what she gave them: a sound, and a direction.
Officers sealed the scene and notified Homicide, and Unit 5824 of the Mobile Crime Lab processed the ground while the investigation waited on the medical examiner. A glass alcohol bottle was turned over into evidence that same day; six years later it, too, would be signed out for court. Her family identified the woman found at the stream: Jada Denita Lambert.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that she died of manual strangulation. The medical examiner recorded injuries to her face and scalp consistent with blunt force blows, and abrasions across her chest, abdomen, and upper thighs consistent with her body being dragged over a rough surface after death.
The crime lab worked through her clothing and reported what it found, item by item. The scarf was damp. The brassiere was damp, with a light greenish stain on the left breast section and a dark green grass-like substance on an inside edge. The pants were damp, dried vegetation and soil particles heavily embedded on their front surfaces from waistband to hem, and the shirt carried the same embedding from neckline to hem. The jacket held soil on its upper left exterior and its interior front left. The shoes showed no unusual damage at all. Every item tested negative for blood and semen. The medical examiner had described a body dragged over a rough surface after death. The lab described clothing that carried the ground on its front, waistband to hem, neckline to hem.
The body carried what the clothing did not. The medical examiner recorded four abrasions to the posterior vaginal fornix and one to the posterior labia minora, and a vaginal swab revealed spermatozoa, some with tails and some without.
The samples went into the system built to keep them. A vial of her blood and three swabs from the victim were turned over to the evidence control section the day after she was found. The laboratory received her blood sample and retained it, collected hairs from her pubic combings, ran no analysis on her head hair or pubic hair samples, and referred the results for the swabs to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In the first week of May the swabs traveled to the Trace Lab for work and came back; by mid-month they were on a shelf. The case had no identified offender to set beside them. The swabs sat on hold, and the machinery that logged them had no further instructions.
The Names in Her Diary
Jada Lambert's diary recorded the night at Dave and Buster's with Ryan Luster, and it recorded that she met a friend of Luster's there, a man in his thirties. The diary held a single name for him, a first name, and it noted one possession: he owned a purple Probe automobile. For detectives, the diary was the census of her acquaintance, and through the year after her death they worked through it, one person at a time.
Thomas Bundy Bowman Sr. contacted the Homicide Office himself, and a detective set the interview. Bowman knew Jada through his wife. He told detectives he had last seen her on December 29, 1997, at a Christmas party, and his taped statement provided no new information about a suspect. He had called, he had answered, and he had nothing.
Dexter Oscar Douglas was interviewed in the summer of 1999 because his name appeared in the diary several times. He told detectives that he and Jada were friends, that there had been mild touching between them but never sex, because she was a virgin, and that he had not contacted her since early April 1998. On May 1, he said, he was in Arbutus, Maryland, selling cellular phones.
Carlos Armon Drayton told a detective that he and Jada were good friends and that they had never had sex. He learned she was dead from his grandmother. That detail did no investigative work at all, and it says more about the size of the loss than anything else a witness offered: the news of her death traveled the way family news travels, from a grandmother to a grandson.
The diary kept giving. In July 1999, a detective called a phone number listed in it and reached a friend Jada had gone to school with. The interviews came more than a year after her death, in ones and twos across a summer, each one scheduled, taped, and typed, and each one a door that opened onto an ordinary life and nothing else.
The man in his thirties was harder. A detective's notes placed him somewhere near Security Mall, and the point of a whole round of interviews was to determine who he was. Ryan Luster, who could have simply said, was in the Army, stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and away from the area when Jada died. In May 1999, his father, Leon Lusters, told a detective that he had met the man exactly once, that a first name was the only name he knew for him, and that he would try to reach his son for the rest of it. A special agent with the Criminal Investigation Division at Fort Polk told the detective that Ryan Luster would call the Baltimore Homicide Unit with the name. What Luster gave Army investigators was a description: the man owned a purple Ford Probe and lived in the Dogwood Road area. Security Mall, Dogwood Road, a purple car: the geography of the man was all approximation, a mall he lived near, a road he lived off, a color he drove. If his full name ever reached the Homicide Unit, no detective wrote it down.
In August 1999, a detective and Detective Sergeant Lehman went looking for a vehicle belonging to an individual named in the diary. They did not find it. A purple car is not a hard thing to notice, and they came back without one.
That was the shape of the first investigation. Everyone the diary named had been found, and everyone found had answered, and every answer described a friend somewhere else, a virgin, a soldier in Louisiana, a man known by one name and one car. Nobody the detectives reached could put a person beside Jada Lambert in her final hours, and no interview produced the name of anyone who could. The medical examiner had said what happened to her; the swab in the evidence control section held who; and nothing in a diary, a taped statement, or a description of a purple car could read it. The interviews closed no distance at all. In 2002, a Baltimore Police progress report described the matter the only way it could be described: an unsolved 1998 rape/homicide. No arrest had been made. The case was four years old, and the swabs were still on hold.
The Match in a Prison Database
On November 12, 2002, a search of the Maryland DNA Database returned a match: a 13-loci STR match between a Maryland convicted offender and DNA evidence from the case. The search was recorded under CODIS Spec ID BCPD02(1)-052/VAG, and the sample on the case side of the match was a swab taken from Jada Lambert's body, evidence that had been sitting on hold since the spring of 1998.
CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, is the national DNA database created and maintained by the FBI, with indexes for convicted offenders, for forensic samples collected from crime scenes, and for missing persons. Before 2017, the national level required a known offender profile to carry thirteen loci, the CODIS core. A profile in the system carries no name and no personal identifying information. When a sample produces a hit, the agency that uploaded the profile is notified, and it falls to that agency, under the applicable laws, to put a person to the profile.
The convicted offender identified in the report was Roy Sharonnie Davis. He was incarcerated at Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, serving a ten-year sentence for an armed robbery charge he had received in 1999. That conviction had required him to submit a DNA sample to the state. The robbery had cost him ten years; it had also put his profile in the database where an unsolved 1998 case was waiting.
The name, once attached, was not a stranger's. Davis and Jada Lambert had previously lived a block from each other on Woodgreen Circle. He had reported living at two addresses on Shamrock Avenue, one street north of Parkside Drive, and he had lived with his wife in the same neighborhood where Jada lived with her family. After moving away, he reported, he returned to visit his daughter there. And his then-wife styled hair: Jada's, and Rita Lambert's. The man the database produced had been a block over, a street up, and a standing appointment away the entire time.
A department progress report stated that Davis had numerous arrests for rapes and robberies and an extensive criminal record with Baltimore County and Baltimore City. The same report noted his release date: 2007.
The database hit was investigative information, not proof, and Detective John T. Brown, who led the reopened investigation, went to get proof. On November 19, 2002, Judge Karasic of the District Court of Maryland issued a search-and-seizure warrant for blood and hairs from Roy Sharonnie Davis. The next day, Brown and Detective Sergeant Roger Nolan executed it at Roxbury. Presented with the court order and the warrant, Nurse Linda Tritsch drew Davis's blood and placed the samples on a blood card, and Brown recovered them and submitted them for testing. The blood sample confirmed the match between the evidence from Jada Lambert's body and Roy Sharonnie Davis.
Word went to Mark Profili and Rosalyn Bowman of the Crime Lab's Trace Unit that blood samples seized from Roy Davis would be submitted for DNA testing. Bowman would carry that work all the way to a witness stand.
In a custodial interview, Davis denied knowing Jada Lambert and denied having an extramarital affair with her. A taped recorded statement of Roy S. Davis, dated December 19, 2002, was booked into evidence the following day. That December, the reopened case gathered its objects onto the shelves: the 911 tape, a phone message from Jada Lambert, a brown envelope, and a Maryland identification photo card bearing her name.
The old evidence was made to answer for itself one more time. In February 2004, latent-print requests went in listing Roy S. Davis for comparison. A pair of ladies' shoes was processed for latent prints, with negative results; the person listed for comparison came back negative as well, and on one form an examiner recorded that no further comparison was made to the listed known prints because of their quality. The fingerprints gave the case nothing. What the case had was the swab.
Roy S. Davis was indicted on murder and rape charges in connection with the strangulation death of the eighteen-year-old found in a Northeast Baltimore stream. The charges included first-degree murder and first-degree rape, and the State filed for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In February 2004, Detectives John T. Brown and Tyrone S. Francis sat down with Assistant State's Attorney Sharon May to prepare for trial. By July 2004, a supplemental report could state the thing that six years of interviews had never produced: the suspect had been arrested and charged. The case was going to a courtroom.
What the Jury Decided
The trial began on July 20, 2004, before Judge Roger Brown in courtroom 231 of the Mitchell Courthouse. The charges submitted to the jury were first- and second-degree murder, felony murder, and first- and second-degree rape. The day after opening, the stored history of the case moved to the courthouse: the three swabs, the 911 tape, Davis's taped statement, a telephone receiver, the identification card with Jada Lambert's name on it, six years of held evidence signed out for court.
Sharon A. H. May, the special prosecutor, was trying her last case after more than twenty years with the city state's attorney's office; she was leaving for the public defender's office. Her theory, as she argued it: Davis selected Jada Lambert randomly, because he did not recognize her; Lambert recognized him; and he killed her because she could identify him. May also contended that Davis was the anonymous voice on the 911 tape, and that the caller's "Park Drive," a street that does not meet Belair Road there, was a slip by a man who had previously lived on Park Drive.
Dr. David Fowler, the Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland, testified that Jada Lambert had been dead between eight and twelve hours when her body was found, and that spermatozoa can be expected to lose their tails within twenty-four hours of being deposited. The swab from her body had held spermatozoa with tails and without. He testified that the abrasions to her posterior labia minora and vaginal fornix were caused by something inserted into her vagina, that the bruising, swelling, and abrasions on her head, scalp, and face were caused by blunt force, and that hemorrhaging on the outside of her brain was caused by a blow of substantial force from either a fist or an open hand. On the stand he gave the defense its inches: abrasions occurring during sexual intercourse were not uncommon, he testified, and he did not exclude the possibility that she had been raped.
Rosalyn Bowman, a Baltimore City Police Department DNA analyst and the State's DNA expert, testified that the probability of the DNA profile match in the Caucasian-American population was one in 3.2 trillion. A records custodian from Orchid Cellmark, the private DNA-testing laboratory, appeared for the paperwork, and a laboratory report noted no irregularities or flaws in the procedures used to collect or test the samples. Detective John Brown testified to the geography: Davis had reported living at two addresses on Shamrock Avenue, one street north of Parkside Drive, where the body was found, and Davis had reported returning to the neighborhood to visit his daughter after moving away. Rita Lambert testified to something only a mother would be asked about. Her daughter typically wore underpants. She was not wearing them when her body was discovered.
Michael E. Kaminkow defended Davis. At the close of the State's case, the defense moved for judgment of acquittal on all counts; asked by the court whether counsel wished to be heard, the answer was, "No, Your Honor." At the end of all the evidence: "We'll move for judgment of acquittal at the end of all evidence, your Honor; and once again, submit." The grounds were never stated with particularity, and that silence would follow the case into its appeal. Davis's position, pressed there, was that the State had proved only that his semen was in Ms. Lambert's vagina and that the abrasions were consistent with consensual sexual activity rather than rape.
On July 26, 2004, the jury returned a unanimous verdict: Roy Sharonnie Davis was guilty of felony murder and second-degree rape. "I'm disappointed but not surprised," Kaminkow said afterward. "The DNA evidence, if accepted by the jury, was compelling."
Sentencing was set for September 13, and Judge Roger W. Brown imposed life in prison without the possibility of parole, a term to begin after Davis completed the ten-year robbery sentence, the same sentence that had put his DNA within reach of a database search. The appellate court held that the bare acquittal motions had not preserved the sufficiency claims, reached them anyway, found the evidence sufficient for a reasonable jury to infer that Davis had intercourse with Jada Lambert by force or threat of force and without her consent, found it sufficient to support the felony-murder conviction, and affirmed the judgment of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City.
The objects that had made the case went back where objects go. In the first days of August, the 911 tape, the taped statement, and the three swabs came back from court to the hold area. Years later, in the spring of 2013, the swabs were moved again, to a warehouse shelf, their status still recorded as hold: long after the verdict, long after the sentence, the physical remainder of Jada Lambert's case was still being kept.
In the courtroom when it ended, Sharon May cried and embraced Rita Lambert. "I think the jury came definitely to the right conclusion," May said, and of the years before the database spoke: "They didn't have a clue as to who did this." Rita Lambert had waited six years to hear a jury say a name over her daughter's case, the daughter who had left an MVA office one spring afternoon meaning to buy her shoes. When the verdict was read, she said, "Thank the Lord."
The Documents
Baltimore Police case file 98H0109 runs to 94 pages, released under the Maryland Public Information Act. Three pages are reproduced here: the incident narrative written the morning she was found, the progress reports that closed the last lead of the original investigation in August 1999, and the report recording the database match in November 2002. The remainder is withheld because the release carries personal information about people who are not part of this story.