Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 20

4B DETROIT FREE PRESSSUNDAY, DEC. 28, 1980 The families and friends tell about the murder victims MURDERS, from Page 1B In 1979, returned to make the identification and to take Patricia to Arkansas for burial. It was the end of a hard life of which little record was left. Mrs. McClaln said Real dropped out of school as soon as she was old enought to do so, in the 10th grade, and married a man Three of the victims are pictured at right.

Arlette McQueen, a supermarket worker, was killed on her way home. Hazel Conniff was on her way to a friend's house after a class when she was slain. Denise Dun-more, a singer, was killed after a concert. Pi I 'Us, -itt'-i-imtimsislm Oil mn ir rnnwmimrniiiimij 1 Win i Arlette McQueen Denise Dunmore Hazel Conniff Warren was a divorced mother of two children. By the time she was killed, at age 23, her mother, Mrs.

Willieola McDaniel, had lost touch with her. "I don't know where she was living," said Mrs. McDaniel. "She would just get in touch with me from time to time. As far more, a divorcee who supported them with a job at the Internal Revenue Service office in Detroit.

Denise Dunmore breezed through Pershing High School, where she showed a skill for singing and creative writing, so it was a shock when she flunked out of Highland Park Junior College after her first semester. For weeks before her death, Dunmore's attention was centered on preparations to sing at Detroit's Masonic Auditorium in the ninth annual spring concert of the Larry Robinson Concert Chorale. During the concert at the Masonic Auditorium that Sunday night, however, Dunmore's voice faltered on a solo, and she signalled to a friend in the choir to help her finish. Afterwards, when the young women were having dinner at a Big Boy restaurant on E. Jefferson, Denise seemed subdued.

At their apartment on Santa Clara, Carol Cobb waited up for Dunmore until about 1 a.m., then fell asleep. She was awakened by policemen knocking on the door at 4:15 a.m. to tell her of Dunmore's death. She had been strangled outside in the parking lot. BETTY JEAN REMBERT Myrtlewood is a rural Alabama town of 334 persons, too small and intimate for its inhabitants to get in much trouble.

Betty Jean Rembert, 26, who was born and grew up there, managed to make up ground fast once she moved to Detroit. In Detroit, she made a bad marriage and was arrested for carrying a gun that she told a judge she needed to protect her from her estranged husband. She soon built up a minor crime record two other weapons charges, theft, breaking and entering and drifted into prostitution, police said. She also bore a son and two daughters who ended up staying with various relatives. Then, on Oct.

8, police answering a call found Rembert's body under some hedges on a vacant lot on E. Boston Boulevard. She died of "crushing injuries" to the head and a stab wound of the neck. David Payton's confession, read in court, said he picked her up on Woodward Avenue, offered her $15 for oral sex, and killed her afterwards in an argument over the money. Rembert's father, Bennie Rembert, a disabled longshoreman from Mobile, knew nothing of her life in Detroit, nor did the aunt who raised her in Myrtlewood, Mrs.

Martha Mcintosh. Betty Rembert told them she worked in a restaurant. Mrs. Mcintosh said Rembert was a cheerleader and did well in school, but she dropped out before graduating and went to Selma to stay with relatives, then on to Detroit. the aunt said was murdered.

Police said Real, 27, was a prostitute. Needle tracks on her forearms, wrists, hands and thighs marked her as a heavy drug user. Her murder is unsolved. PAULETTE WOODARD Paulette Woodard finished her classes at the Detroit Business Institute about 5 p.m. the afternoon of Sept.

29 and called her mother to say she was on her way home. "That was the last I heard from her," said Woodard's mother, Mrs. Lula Honeycutt. "The detectives called me the next day and said they had her body." Woodard, 19, was studying at the Detroit Business Institute to be a legal secretary. A native of Detroit, she grew up on the city's near west side, the fourth of seven children.

Her parents separated in 1968, and Woodard stayed with her mother. After graduating from Cody High in 1978, Woodard worked at clerical jobs, took an apartment, then moved back in with her mother, taking along her son, born out of wedlock last December. She was going to school full-time when she was killed. A man living on Atkinson found her body in an alley beside his garage. Fully clothed, she apparently had not been sexually assaulted, but she had suffered a beating and had died of strangulation.

The medical examiner said some of the injuries appeared to have been suffered resisting her attacker. "I don't know why anybody would want to do that," her mother said, ETTA JEAN FRAZIER Etta Jean Frazier, 20, was born in Winona, and moved to Detroit with her mother after her parents separated when she was three. Frazier's sister, Mary Ann, said the family moved frequently, and Etta Frazier attended public schools on both sides of town. She dropped out of Mumford High in the 1 1 th grade and moved back to Winona, but she soon returned to Detroit. Although Etta Frazier was never married, she had a son.

In July 1979, she was arrested for neglecting him, fined $100 and sentenced to 10 days in the Salvation Army Evangeline Center, Burks was supposed to be on her way to see Williams at Detroit Mt. Carmel Hospital, where he was recovering from injuries suffered in a traffic accident, when she was killed last June 14. A man who was walking his dog found her body the next' morning In a fenced-in easement off Strathmoor that is popular as a lovers' lane. Her hands were bound behind her back, and she was nude except for panties and slacks pulled down almost to her knees. Her purse was missing.

She had been strangled with an intertwined chain and telephone wire. ROSEMARY FRAZIER "She wasn't a street girl," said Mrs. Clara M. Frazier, trying to articulate the hurt from her daughter's murder and the news stories describing her as a prostitute. The body of Rosemary Frazier, 28, was found the morning of May 30, nude, battered and strangled, in a grassy spot at the rear of the Rosedale Park Community House, near Grand River and the Southfleld Freeway.

Later, David Payton would confess to Frazier's murder. Clara Frazier, wife of a minister but widowed since 1973, said her daughter was "a mental patient" who had suffered epileptic seizures all her life. "I had her in and out of the Jiospital," the mother said. "I took her to old Receiving (Hospital), and they always put her in a state (mental) hospital. She wasn't well, either, and I know she was on drugs." An autopsy performed on the body disclosed that Frazier had been taking barbiturates before her death.

Mrs. Frazier said her daughter was born in Detroit's Herman Kiefer Hospital, dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and left two children, aged 6 and 12, when she died. Rosemary Frazier's sister, Mrs. Marscena Mundy, is bitter about the "untrue gossip" about her sister. "My father was a minister, and my mother is a good woman," Mrs.

Mundy said. "Rosemary was one of the singers in the church choir "My sister was a human being." JEANETTE WOODS At least twice before she was murdered last April, Jeanette Woods, 24, was hospitalized for beatings. But afterwards, police said, she returned to prostitution. She was born in Detroit on March 31, 1956, the daughter of James and Jessie Woods. By the time she was 20, she had a three-year-old son, but no husband.

She also had her first arrest for prostitution. Woods was admitted to the Detroit Osteopathic Hospital for treatment after beatings twice within two days last September. On Friday, April 18, she left her mother's house on Hill Street at about 9 p.m. on foot, saying she was going to meet her boyfriend. About 1:30 the next morning, a passerby found her body on the sidewalk on Melrose near the Chrysler Freeway.

I begged her to come back home, Mrs. Mcintosh said. "She promised me she was coming back home, to live. But she didn't." CASSANDRA ANN JOHNSON Cassandra Ann Johnson, at 17 the youngest of the victims, was born in Kannapolis, N.C., but had lived in Detroit with her grandmother since she was six months old. Her mother, epileptic and sickly, abandoned by her husband, died two years ago, said the grandmother, Mrs.

Rosia Smith. Managing the girl was too much for Mrs. Smith. The child as I could get it, she was living in one of those hotels I think the Crestwood Hotel." It was another of a string of temporary addresses for Warren as detailed in her police record going back to 1977. During one seven-month period between June 3, 1978, and Jan.

9, 1979, she was arrested three times on prostitution charges at the old Willis Show Bar in Detroit and gave a different address each time. A passerby saw Warren's legs protruding from some bushes on Prest, about a half mile south of Eight Mile near Greenfield, and hailed a passing police squad car. Detroit police said she was bludgeoned to death by her last customer. They have charged Donald Murphy, who lives on Schaefer, with her murder. CECILIA MARIE KNOTT Donald Murphy also is charged with murder in the strangulation and stabbing of Cecilia Marie Knott, whose body was found in a yard on Littlefield, about a mile east of where Cynthia Warren was found.

Knott, 24, grew up in a church-going Catholic family on Detroit's far northwest side, one of four children of a hardworking tool shop grinder and his wife, John and Mary Knott. Cecilia Knott attended Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church, where she sometimes managed the church nursery during mass. As recently as five years ago, she was still active in the Girl Scouts. The Knott family went camping on family outings, Mary Knott said, and Cecilia Knott came to like hunting and fishing. But she never settled into a steady job after she quit Edsel Ford High School in the 11th grade.

At the time Knott was killed, her mother did not know where she was working or where she lived. Knott told her mother she was working nights as a waitress, but according to police, she was a prostitute. She had visited her parents for dinner on her 24th birthday Oct. 27, and again dropped by briefly on Nov. 4.

"She kissed us goodby and went out," her mother said, "and that was the last we saw of her." Knott was killed three days later and her body, nude except for a sweater tied around her neck by the killer, was found in a yard three blocks from the prostitution strip on W. Eight Mile where Cecilia really worked. DENISE MICHELE DUNMORE Carol Cobb believes that the murder of her roommate, Denise Dunmore, was a case of mistaken identity. Cobb places Importance on the fact that Dunmore drove home that morning, March 31, in a car borrowed from a friend. "Denise was not raped, was not robbed, was not beaten," Cobb said.

A gold chain that belonged to me was around her neck a very expensive gold chain and this was not taken, (nor) another gold chain, nor a diamond and ruby ring on her small finger. Her purse was still there, with a couple of dollars in it Nothing was taken." Dunmore, 26, and her brother, now in the Navy, grew up on Detroit's northeast side with their mother, Mrs. Louise Dun- a halfway house from which she walked away the next day. Etta Frazier also was arrested on June 8, 1979, for disorderly conduct. Early on the morning of May 2, 1980, a construction worker entered a vacant garage behind a burned-out house at 9143 Stoepel, near Livernois and West Chicago, and saw feet sticking out from a pile of rubbish on the floor.

It was Frazier. She was nude, her hands and legs were bound, and she had been beaten in the face? burned repeatedly with cigarets and sexually abused. She was covered with dirt from being dragged. Death came from strangulation. DIANE BURKS According to Detroit police, Diane Burks, 22, came to Detroit about four years ago from Chicago, became involved in prostitution and paid with her life.

Burks is one of four prostitutes David Payton has been charged with murdering. In his confession to homicide detective James R. Harris, Payton said he argued with her over payment for an oral sex act and choked her to death with a cord. Little is known about her background before she came to Detroit. Her life in Detroit is recorded in documents on file at the Detroit Police Department, Recorder's Court and Wayne County morgue.

Burks' criminal record is small time r- mostly shoplifting. quit school in about the sixth grade. "She Just quit, big-headed, because she was grown," Mrs. Smith said. "I ran around trying to get her in different schools after she dropped out, but they wouldn't take her did fine in school until she got in with the wrong crowd." The grandmother said Johnson was still living with her on Blaine when she was killed last Police, however, identified Cassandra as a prostitute living at a Tuller address.

A 14-year-old girl walking in a field at Cloverlawn and Chalfonte, west of Livernois, found Johnson's body shortly before noon on July 2. She had been bludgeoned over the head. LOIS MARIANA JOHNSON The first of the 1980 victims was Lois Mariana Johnson, 31, whose frozen body was found by the truck driver near the RenCen on Jan. 12. Johnson, the next to oldest child in a family of eight children, had grown up in Detroit, where her father, George Glass, came from Georgia in 1946 to find work as an auto worker, DSR bus driver and city sanitation worker.

Lois Johnson went to a half dozen schools, mostly in southwest Detroit. She dropped out of Northern High in the 10th grade. "She worked at several bars as a barmaid," said her mother, Mrs. Annie Elizabeth Glass, and did "day work" as a maid. "She was always in trouble," said her mother.

"She would have a bad habit of picking up things that didn't belong to her, and I think she had gotten caught in a couple of raids somewhere Lois had a problem. She had a drinking problem, which caused her not to visit (her family) too much." Johnson broke up with her husband about eight years ago, Mrs. Glass said. She had two daughters, ages 13 and 14. An autopsy on her body showed she had been stabbed 17 times in the upper chest, seven times in' the neck and twice in the abdomen.

The alcohol level in her blood was Zl2 times what is considered legally drunk. Her murder is unsolved. She had been beaten, strangled, sexually abused and her throat was slashed. Seven months later, David Payton was arrested and charged with her murder. CYNTHIA ANGELA WARREN Cynthia Warren's body was found the morning of Oct.

23 only a few blocks from the Eight Mile Road strip where she worked as a prostitute. Less than a mile away on Eight Mile is the Crestwood Motor Hotel, her last known address. According to her probation officer, Sheila Sheets, Burks started living with a man on Montrose on Detroit's west side who "got her into heroin use and was responsible for her getting into prostitution activity." Sheets said that when that man went to prison, Burks moved in with another man across the street, an auto worker named Anthony Williams. She also got a job as a secretary and receptionist with a small company but quit after becoming pregnant, Sheets said. Genetic engineering: A new industry in '81 Space The hopes of the American space program in '81 rest on the space shuttle Columbia, scheduled for a 54-hour orbital flight in March.

The Columbia was originally supposed to fly in 1979, but was delayed by engineering setbacks and budget cuts. NASA's 1981 budget, $5.7 billion, is the first yet to top the peak DIANE CARTER The last of the murders occurred Dec. 17. Diane Carter, identified by police as a prostitute, was found shortly after 11 a.m. lying in bushes in a vacant lot off the Jeffries Freeway at Cortland, a single bullet wound in her back at the base of the neck.

Her mother, Mrs. Jean Carter, 63, of Detroit, had last seen her daughter five days earlier, but the family had filed a missing persons report with police shortly before she was found. Carter, 30, was born in Newark, N.J. She was unmarried. Homicide investigators said Diane was last seen entering a Cadillac at about 2:55 a.m.

the day she was found slain. CECILIA LEMAE JACOBS Cecilia Jacobs, 20, was born in Detroit, the daughter of Cecilia and John Jacobs. She grew up on the city's east side, one of eight children. During her junior year at Northern High School, she quit, and had a son when she was 16. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter.

Her mother said Jacobs was never married. "She wasn't a prostitute," said her mother, reacting to news articles describing some of the murder victims as prostitutes. "As far as I know, she wasn't ever arrested for anything like that." She had an apartment with a girlfriend at the time she was killed. Her body, fully clothed in sweater, jacket, slacks and high-heel shoes, was found shortly before 7 a.m. on March 13 lying face-up in an alley at the rear of the Riverside Storage and Cartage Co.

on Mack, just west of Van Dyke. She had been strangled. ARLETTE ANITA MCQUEEN In the four months that Arlette McQueen had been working at a Farmer Jack supermarket in Oak Park, she had never ridden the bus to her home in Detroit until the night of April 9 when she was killed. She did so then because none of her four brothers was home to come get her. She was strangled and her body left between some houses a block from her parents' home, halfway between the house and the bus stop on' 12th Street.

McQueen, 21, had been attending Lawrence Institute of budget of the moon program $5.25 billion in 1 966. But inflation makes the money worth much less. Voyager 2, the companion to Voyager 1 that visited Saturn in November, is streaking for a rendezvous with the ringed planet next Aug. 25, and will then fly on to a first-ever visit to Uranus. Physics Physicists in 1981 will be searching for several elusive treasures.

Among them, says Dr. Leon Lederman, director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, 111., are: The "top" quark: This would be the sixth SCIENCE, from Page 1B next 12 months whether interferon will be something that will be with us or not in future cancer treatment." Interferon has shrunk or cured some cancers in animals. But the natural anti-viral substance has often been disappointing in trials against human cancer, including a $5 million series of studies run by the Cancer Society. The big hope for interferon this year is that the burgeoning new science of genetic engineering will make it cheap and plentiful. In this science, microbiologists take the gene for some desired product interferon, for example and insert it into the genetic material of common bacteria.

The bacteria then are grown cheaply in big vats and the product is harvested from the brew. Interferon made by this process will go into human trials for the first time at M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute in Houston in January. The drug is produced in a collaboration between the drug firm Hoffmann-La Roche and Genentech a leader in biotechnology. MEANWHILE, the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company is testing its bacterial-made Insulin in diabetics.

Drug industry analyst Nelson Schneider, of E.F. Hutton Co. says he expects that product in 1981 to be the first genetic engineering drug to reach the market in Europe a scant eight years after the science was invented. Commercial excitement over the new industry was reflected in the mad scramble for Genentech's stock when it was first offered Oct. 14.

But there may be a fly in the ointment for the genetic engineering boom. The U.S. Patent office in December awarded Stanford University, where the first gene-splice was performed, a patent on the basic processes used in the new science. The university also is seeking sweeping patent rights to arty products of the method. If that patent is granted, it could set off a tangled legal battle that would throw the Industry into turmoil.

Free Press Photo Surgeons at work during a heart operation. Will the first successful heart-lung transplant be accomplished in 1981? of these particles, believed to be among the most elemental bits of matter. Quarks tend to come in pairs, and the fifth quark to be discovered was named "bottom," hence the name "top." However, suggest neutrinos may have 'a tiny bit of weight. If so, the combined gravity of the swarms of neutrinos around galaxies would be enough to "close" the universe that is, for gravity to overcome the rushing apart of the galaxies and cause them to crash together billions of years from now. A "closed" universe may also imply a cyclic universe.

Creation may periodically blow itself apart in a gigantic Big Bang, then, after a time, fall back together, preparatory to another Big Bang. Despite the vast time scales, the finding would have "a profound effect on the way people think and feel about the world, just as there was a philosophic shock when we learned that the earth was not at the center of the universe," says Lederman. universe eventually will turn into pure energy. Of course, this won't happen for a trillion trillion trillion years or so. But scientists from the DOE and the universities of California and Michigan plan to find out by seaching for decaying protons in a tank of distilled water located deep in the Morton Salt Co.

mine at Fairport Harbor, Ohio. The depth is needed to avoid interference from cosmic rays. It's one of a number of similar experiments now planned. The weight of the neutrino: This discovery, which Lederman says may well come in 1981, could be one of the most exciting physics events of the year. The neutrino is a "ghost particle" produced by many nuclear reactions.

It is conventionally assumed to have no mass. But now some preliminary experiments Technology before she got the part-time job as a bagger at the supermarket at 10 Mile and Coolidge. She lived on Virginia Park in Detroit with her parents, David and Margaret Yancy. After attending Lawrence Tech for one year on scholarship, Arlette "just didn't go back," her mother said. "She just wanted a job, said her mother, "bhe just wanted an intense search at a West German accelerator in 1980 failed to show evidence of "top." And if the missing quark isn't found this year, some quark theories may need to be revamped.

Proton decay: Some physicists are predicting that the proton, one of the basic constituents of atoms, may not be the fundamentally stable particle we have assumed. If protons decay, it would mean that all matter in the to be, as she said, independent, and to be her own self. That's what she said." "I've got four boys here," said Mrs. Yancy, "and someone always picked her up Not this time. Oh, my goodness.

I stand and I look out the window. Oh, my goodness.".