Stripper’s murder to get fresh look
Detroit — City police are moving the investigation of slain exotic dancer Tamara “Strawberry” Greene to a multi-jurisdictional violent crimes task force, giving it greater priority in a bid to solve the 6-year-old case.
“Most people don’t feel that it was closed because there were no other leads, but for political reasons,” Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans said Thursday. “The job of the department is to make sure the public knows we’re going to do what we do, when we need to do it. That’s the right thing to do.”
Evans couldn’t immediately say how many officers would be assigned to the case, or what methods the task force, which includes representatives from the FBI, Michigan State Police and other agencies, might pursue to expand an investigation.
But he said moving the case to the task force would “give fresh eyes” to the case.
Controversy has raged over the investigation into Greene’s death in a drive-by shooting in Detroit on April 30, 2003. Greene was linked to a rumored, but never proven, party at the Manoogian Mansion when Kwame Kilpatrick was mayor.
Greene’s family sued top city officials, including Kilpatrick, and police officials in 2005, alleging they obstructed the investigation of her unsolved killing for political reasons. That case, in which tens of thousands of text messages sent and received by Kilpatrick and other city officials were subpoenaed for private review by federal magistrate judges, could go to trial next year.
Norman Yatooma, an attorney representing Greene’s family in the lawsuit, welcomed the move. He said if the task force “begets justice for Tammy Greene’s killers and answers for Tammy Greene’s family, then all of the toil and all of the text messages — all of the effort and all of the affidavits — will be well worth it.”
Maria Miller, a spokeswoman for Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, said her office’s investigation of Greene’s murder is “ongoing,” but declined to say whether the task force would affect it.
Lawyers for the city couldn’t be reached for comment.
Mayer Morganroth, an attorney representing former Kilpatrick Chief of Staff Christine Beatty, who is named in the Greene family suit, said he was “in favor of anything that could be done to find the guilty party.”
Kilpatrick and other top city and police officials have denied the allegations.
There have been other actions involving the investigation:
• Last week, Odell Godbold, a former sergeant in charge of the Detroit Police Department’s “cold case” unit, filed a lawsuit in Wayne Circuit Court against the city and three of his former supervisors, alleging they “protect(ed) an elected official by covering up information regarding the official’s connection to Greene.”
Godbold alleges he learned that Greene and an off-duty Detroit police officer who moonlighted as a stripper performed at a 2002 party at the Manoogian Mansion. It was the officer, not Greene, who was assaulted at the party and received a three-week leave of absence to recover from her injuries, the lawsuit alleges.
• In June, an Oakland County judge set aside a default judgment she had granted to Cenobio Chapa, a former Detroit emergency medical technician who claimed he lost his job after coming forward with information related to Greene’s case. In an affidavit, Chapa said he saw an injured woman at Detroit Receiving Hospital in fall 2002 who said she had been assaulted by Carlita Kilpatrick, Kwame Kilpatrick’s wife.
• A civil lawsuit filed by Douglas Bayer, another former city paramedic who lost his job after he said he witnessed a disturbance outside the hospital related to the rumored Manoogian party, is pending in Macomb Circuit Court. The federal lawsuit was expected to go to trial later this year.
Bayer told investigators he saw a large crowd outside the hospital when he arrived for a call, and a man he later concluded was a member of the mayor’s executive protection unit attempted to prevent him from taking his patient to the emergency room.
• A former homicide detective, retired Lt. Alvin Bowman, alleged in a lawsuit that he was transferred out of the homicide department for attempting to investigate Greene’s killing. Bowman said in an affidavit filed in the Greene case that he believed Greene was killed by a Detroit police officer. Besides the caliber of handgun used, Bowman has not revealed what evidence he has to back up that claim.
