[unsettling music playing]
[wind chimes tinkling]
[crow cawing]
[Helen speaking]
[eerie music playing]
[tension in music increasing]
[theme music playing]
♪ La, la, la, la, la, la, la ♪
-[suspenseful music playing] -[birds chirping]
It was the 23rd of December, 1997.
I worked as a detective in the Homicide
Special Assignment Section.
You know, you never know what you're in for
when you get to work, so you hope it's slow
because it's Christmas time.
I was looking forward to spending Christmas
with my family, you know, a ton of food, visiting,
opening presents and things of that nature.
-[distorted voice on radio] -[sirens wailing]
[Det. Littlejohn] But the call came in.
And we were dispatched out to Elm Street.
Elm Street was a neighborhood that stood out by itself,
like its own little peninsula.
It wasn't a lot of crime or any action.
[indistinct police chatter]
[Det. Littlejohn] As I got out the vehicle,
you can see a guy standing in the front of the house.
He had a hook on one arm,
and that was just really odd to see someone
with a hook on their arm.
He said his name was Gerry Drury.
He wanted us to, you know, go in the house.
He was very, very frantic.
[deep, suspenseful music playing]
As I walk in the house, you can smell the blood.
Blood,
a Christmas tree.
Those two things don't go together at all.
[floorboard creaking]
There were footprints leading down to the basement.
Just like, "What am I gonna see when I get down there?"
[stifled scream]
[Det. Littlejohn] In the basement,
there was a pile of clothes.
But it really wasn't an ordinary pile of clothes.
There was something wrong.
As I pulled back the clothes...
[stifled scream]
...there's a body.
All you seen was the plastic bag over their head
with the duct tape around their neck.
There was so much blood,
you couldn't see a face.
I mean, I've not seen anything like that
since I've been at Homicide.
On the left side of the basement,
there was another body,
and in the same manner, with a bag over the head,
duct tape around the bag.
When I went down and saw the second body,
there was a tube sticking out of the bag.
They were elderly ladies.
I had elderly parents, and I just couldn't imagine
having to come home to something that gruesome.
It was just really, really horrific.
[sirens wailing in the distance]
[indistinct police radio chatter]
I was working for the Detroit Police Department
in the Homicide Section.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
When I arrived, we found out that Gerry's wife, Mary Lou,
was 57 years old.
And his mother-in-law, Dorothy Gilbert,
was 74 years old, on oxygen, and more or less disabled.
[camera shutter clicks]
When you first enter a house, the evidence starts writing
the picture for you.
[camera shutter clicks]
In this case, there was blood and drag marks.
[camera shutter clicks]
It looked as if there may have been a fight or a struggle.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Insp. Rice] So, it is my belief that they were alive
when they were taken to the basement.
[camera shutter clicks]
I would say that whoever done this
preyed on them.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Insp. Rice] The murder itself was brutal,
and they left a trail behind them, which means
that we weren't looking at a professional criminal.
What really actually stood out is that there were like
claw marks on the desk.
I remember it like yesterday.
That was strange because Gerry, he had a hook on his arm.
[Insp. Rice] And the fact that instead of completing a search
for his wife, he went and got someone to go
into the basement of the house.
So maybe he was involved in it himself.
[rhythmic, suspenseful music]
I was 20 years old in 1997.
I lived on Elm Street since I was five years old.
And we knew everybody, like, even if we didn't
know your name, we knew your face.
The moment I seen my mom, my heart, it was in my stomach.
My mom said, "They killed Mary Lou and Dorothy."
And she was hysterical, she was bawling and crying
and Gerry's in the back of a cop car.
And I'm just,
I'm just as shocked as everybody else.
[Christina] I moved into the neighborhood when I was like five.
Even as a kid,
he came across as cold.
Like, he didn't really look at me.
It was like he gave me an eeriness about him,
but it could be because he just didn't speak.
[Lee] Gerry stayed in that cop car for a long time.
And I don't know, like, what was going on.
I don't know.
I think we all, like, everybody was actually scared.
[Insp. Rice] Gerry, he said he had left
about 9:30 in the morning,
he had a plumbing job that he went to,
and that he arrived back at the house
approximately around 12:30.
And then he saw the blood trails.
We asked Mr. Drury what may possibly --
may have been missing.
And during the search of the house,
Mr. Drury discovered there was a bloody jewelry box
that was empty.
Four hundred dollars in cash was missing,
and credit cards were missing
from the Drury home.
[Insp. Rice] The checkbook was missing.
And the nickel-plated .38 revolver
that had been taken out of the house.
So, based on the evidence that we saw,
we knew it was a robbery.
And then we found out that Gerry had
a business partner,
and it turned out that he was working.
So we were able to eliminate him as a suspect.
When the murders happened, none of us slept
in our house that day. My mom, my dad, me,
my uncle, none of us.
I was actually scared for the first time.
After it had happened, I was scared.
[Insp. Rice] Because of the severity of the crime,
the bags over the head with the duct tape,
it's a horrible death when you're gasping for air
and you can't get it.
[Det. Littlejohn] It made me feel like,
"I gotta get this case closed.
"I gotta find out who did this and get them off the street
before they do it again."
-[suspenseful music playing] -[indistinct chattering]
[Det. Littlejohn] It was Christmas time,
and we had a double homicide,
items missing,
weapons missing, and a perpetrator that was
out there that was armed and dangerous.
The crime itself was horrific.
The victim was Mary Lou Drury and Dorothy Gilbert.
What I saw in that house, it was like a nightmare.
I can't forget this case.
Elm Street, it was not a crime-ridden area.
So everyone was scared.
[Christina] Everybody was talking about it,
and we really did not think it was somebody
from our neighborhood.
Everybody was coming up with somebody try to rob them,
but how could this happen
with the neighbors right like that?
The houses were very close.
It was an eeriness in the air.
[uneasy piano music playing]
It kind of shook me to the core.
Like, it was -
it was one of the most heinous things
that I've ever...
Like, this was Elm Street.
You didn't litter.
You didn't bust the glass
like you did on the other blocks.
Like, all the kids played together.
It was just -- it was nice.
And I just could not believe that this happened to them.
Like, oh my God!
I loved Mary Lou just as well as my mom.
[camera shutter clicks]
She never corrected you.
She kinda let you learn your own way.
She was super nice to me.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Lee] And her mother, Dorothy, was more nice than Mary Lou.
They were like family.
Back then in Detroit,
murders didn't get put on the news.
And we got news crews out there.
We got Channel 4, 7, everybody out here now.
[reporter] Two elderly women have been found murdered
in their Detroit home.
[reporter #2] Police are still searching for any witnesses.
[reporter #3] Residents are on edge after a brutal attack
the day before Christmas on Elm Street.
[Suzi] At the time, I was working as the crime reporter
for the Detroit Free Press.
I get a call from my editor.
"We got a breaking story, we got a double murder,
you gotta go out."
Detroit was cold, so I bundled up
and waddled my way out to the scene.
At that time, there had been a rash of home invasions
and murders in the surrounding neighborhood.
Just a few weeks before, there had been a triple murder
just a few blocks away.
[floorboard creaking]
[ominous, eerie music]
Two elderly sisters and a husband who was in his 80s
had been stabbed to death.
[Det. Littlejohn] 12 Days later, before the Elm Street case,
about four miles away from Elm Street,
a mother, a daughter, and a grandson
was actually shot to death.
In this case, the home was also ransacked.
[Det. Littlejohn] Then, in all three cases, there was no forced entry.
So, based on the similarities, the general public would say,
"Oh, my God, is there a murder spree going on
in the City of Detroit?"
The first thought that you have is,
"Could I be in danger?"
Like, you've seen people get jagged, people get robbed.
But this was, like, different-different.
This was like movie stuff.
[Lee] We never locked our door on Elm Street.
And we was in the middle of Detroit.
That's how safe we thought we were.
It was a different feeling, with Mary Lou and Dorothy gone.
Like, it wasn't the same.
They was our neighbors and it was family.
I was on day shift
when we got a call from the medical examiner
with, uh, autopsy reports.
Based on Mary Lou's injuries, she was still alive
during the time that they were putting the plastic bag
around her neck.
And the killer or killers decided to do
the same thing to Dorothy.
Dorothy had emphysema, and it was just really horrific
that, you know, that you would just stick a rag in her mouth...
[camera shutter clicks]
...duct-tape her...
[camera shutter clicks]
...knowing that it had an oxygen tank.
[camera shutter clicks]
The brutality of the killings...
[camera shutter clicks]
...and also the fact that the body was
partially covered was just a true indicator
that maybe it was somebody that knew them
prior to the death.
When somebody covers their body,
it's not to hide the body.
It's to remove them from their vision.
[Det. Littlejohn] So at that time,
we went back to the vicinity
of the other murders to see, are they connected?
We had to see if there's any similarities
with the Elm Street case,
where we could say, "OK, this perpetrator was
over here as well."
[Insp. Rice] Well, what you do a lot of times
is you have to look for what we call a modus operandi.
We look for things that are similar to other crimes
that have already occurred.
None of that was present at the time
of our investigation.
[Det. Littlejohn] One house, the person was stabbed.
The other person was shot.
We discovered the only thing that actually connected them
was that there was no forced entry.
There was never a correlation between them.
[Det. Littlejohn] Based on Dorothy's
and Mary Lou's injuries,
the perpetrator just really had a vengeance against them.
[Insp. Rice] It was a well-knit, close community.
And the more that we looked
and the more that we investigated,
it definitely felt as if they knew
their assailants.
The evidence led us directly to Elm Street.
And that's where we started concentrating our energies.
[Lee] The day after Mary Lou and Dorothy was killed,
it was Christmas Eve.
I don't even remember Christmas in 1997.
Like, we would rather not have Christmas that year.
You can't celebrate during that.
Like, nothing as brutal as that ever happened.
[creepy piano music playing]
[Lee] But we went to the house. I was with my mom.
It was horrible, like, because we was helping clean up
and stuff like that.
Mind you, I'm 20 and I'm just --
I honestly --
I was scared.
The lights, presents, everything like that
was still there.
There was, like, splats of blood in places
that they didn't clean up off the floor, like the walls.
You could see where the trail of blood has been.
And like Gerry, he cried a lot.
I -- I --
I can't forget, like, I have a picture in my head.
And why did this happen?
That was one thing I've never understood.
[tense, uneasy music playing]
We had to find out who had a motive
to actually commit the crime.
So we went and did a survey of the neighborhood.
During the canvas, we discovered
that the Drury family pretty much owned the block.
Mary Lou was in the business of renting the homes out.
She pretty much picked her own neighbors.
In this instance here, Mary Lou knew everybody.
Mary Lou was the landlady, and, like, she gave me
big-boss energy without flamboyance.
Like, she didn't have furs, and she could've --
she wasn't flashy. She was about her business.
You knew not to play with her, like you knew to respect her.
That's the energy she gave me.
[Det. Littlejohn] She had the office in the front
that she would conduct her business.
People would come in and out to drop their rent off.
They really didn't lock the doors,
so anyone in that neighborhood had an opportunity
to be able to enter the Drury home.
The family, they were pretty much vulnerable.
[Christina] She was fair.
She rented with people who are on welfare.
If you didn't have your rent money,
she wasn't the type to be like, "You got 30 days
and you're out of here."
[Suzi] I think Mary Lou was perhaps too trusting.
We all know what it's like to have a landlord.
It's not usually a loving and friendly relationship.
December 23rd was the day the homicides took place.
That was close to the time that people would come in
and pay rent to the Drury family.
During the search of the house, I discovered that there was
some weapons missing.
[Mary Lou gasps]
Mary Lou kept the gun at her desk.
You know, a fight could escalate at any moment.
Where we started asking people whether or not they'd seen
anything remarkable
at the time Gerry was at work
from 9:30 AM up until 12:45 PM.
[unsettling music playing]
[Det. Littlejohn] And that's when we discovered that one of the neighbors
had heard something.
Hazel Johnson, who's sort of the next-door neighbor,
maybe a little bit of a nosy body,
she was good friends with Mary Lou,
and it was Christmas time, and so Hazel has
some holiday cards that she wants to drop off to her friend.
The family, they have five chihuahuas.
[dog cries]
The dogs knew the neighbor Hazel very well.
[dogs barking]
Hazel was the cat lady on the street.
She saved all the cats.
If you walk past Hazel's house, you might see her walking around
with them all, you know what I'm saying?
Cats everywhere.
Normally, the dogs would stop barking when they smelled her.
[dogs crying and barking]
Well, Hazel said that when she knocked on the door
and she could hear the dogs barking frantically.
[dogs continue crying]
[Suzi] The door was unlocked,
which was very unusual.
She's thinking that something's off,
but she wasn't sure.
If Hazel would have got inside that house that day,
she would have definitely came to the same fate
as Mary Lou and Dorothy.
Like, if you walk past, all you would hear is them dogs.
That's why everybody didn't understand
how this happened, is because all these dogs
would have been barking and nobody heard nothing.
When I talked to the police, I said, "I didn't hear
the dogs barking.
"But Pamela Vannoy was the tenant that lived
"above Mary Lou and Dorothy.
Maybe she had heard something."
-[barking and crying] -[heavy breathing]
My mom would take care of Dorothy all during the day,
and Pam moved in upstairs so she could be
available at night.
She was super nice to me. Like, she never yelled at me.
She never did nothing like that.
[Insp. Rice] She was there to take care of Dorothy.
Caregivers have a way of becoming endeared
to the person they're giving care to.
[Suzi] I would imagine that having a trusted person in their midst
to take care of their ailing mother
and treat her as a grandmother must have felt like a blessing.
And based on the information that we received,
Mary Lou and Dorothy got along great with Pamela.
She even called Dorothy "grandma."
The main problem was that Pamela Vannoy
was nowhere to be found.
The door was locked. Her vehicle was left outside.
[Insp. Rice] The question was, "Where was Pamela?
"Where is the caregiver? What time did she leave?
And where did she go? And why hadn't she returned?"
[Det. Littlejohn] We ended up getting a search warrant
for her apartment.
And looking at her apartment, it seemed like
she just disappeared.
If someone was going out of town,
there's certain things that would have been missing.
And those things were not missing at that time.
We were thinking that Pamela could be the third victim.
Pamela Vannoy could've walked in on the murderers in the act,
and they could have killed her, too.
So there could have been three victims that day
instead of two.
[intense, ominous music playing]
♪♪
[Suzi] The day after the murders
of Mary Lou Drury, who was Gerry's wife,
and Dorothy Gilbert, who was Mary Lou's mother,
everyone's talking, everybody's there,
trying to figure out who could it be?
But then the investigators started looking around
and asking who's supposed to be here and isn't here?
Guess who? It was Pamela Vannoy.
Pamela Vannoy was a caretaker and was really close
to the Drury family.
She lived right upstairs.
But at this point, she was nowhere to be found.
[Insp. Rice] This gave us even a higher intensity
on the search for her.
She too could have been a victim.
So we called in the first person that we talked to,
the homeowner, Gerry Drury.
He was thinking on what else he may have missed.
And he actually gave us information
that on the day of the murders,
he saw Pamela and Mary Lou talking for a long time.
He says she had a boyfriend who was living
with her on-and-off.
[Suzi] Pamela and Charles, their relationship,
sort of volatile.
Charles was around, did odd jobs.
Early on, the Drury family felt like he could help
with the house and the maintenance.
[Det. Littlejohn] Charles was a handyman,
but he had a violent past.
So Gerry thinks maybe something's off.
[Lee] From day-one,
it was always a feeling about Charles.
It was pretty bad. He never spoke to us much.
I was actually scared for Pam.
[Insp. Rice] Later that day, we found a witness
that Pamela came to her to use her telephone.
[Det. Littlejohn] She said the morning of the murders --
[knocking on window]
...on December 23rd, that Pamela Vannoy
and Charles Vaughn showed up at her house
and she was carrying plastic bags.
Pam had a lot of her personal belongings,
and she wanted to leave them at her house.
And Charles went straight to the bathroom.
She didn't think anything of it.
Until when Charles came back, he pulled a gun and said,
"Look, you didn't see us." And then they disappeared.
It was a nickel-plated .38 revolver.
It looked like the one that was missing.
At that moment, we suspected Charles killed
Mary Lou and Dorothy.
[Insp. Rice] He was armed and dangerous.
He actually threatened a witness.
So there was no telling if he would use that weapon
for something worse.
[Det. Littlejohn] I continued to canvass the neighborhood.
[Insp. Rice] We found a witness.
He made a statement that was revealing in several ways.
So the neighbor, Helen, had been drinking with Mary Lou
the night before.
You know, it was Christmas time.
My mother, she worked for Mary Lou like everybody else
throughout the neighborhood.
But Mary Lou took her to bingo every night,
five nights a week.
[Det. Littlejohn] That night, Mary Lou told Helen
that she had caught Pamela
stealing $15 from her bingo envelope.
And things went sour between the two.
We found out Mary Lou told Helen that they had been
trying to help her out
because Pamela was a drug addict.
[Insp. Rice] Pamela used heroin.
And heroin moves people into a different category,
because now they need drugs just to maintain
their own physical strength.
And they're more inclined to take something
that's not theirs.
Pamela Vannoy, she really, really messed up
her trust with Mary Lou.
Mary Lou, she wanted to be able to trust you.
But if you lose her trust, she didn't want you
inside her house no more.
[Det. Littlejohn] It was discovered
that Mary Lou was gonna evict Pamela the next day.
[Insp. Rice] Pam wanted to get an extension
and Mary Lou said, "No, because you stole.
You have to leave."
[Suzi] So Pamela Vannoy wasn't on the scene,
because she was supposed to be evicted that very day.
Why? Because she had
her sticky fingers in Mary Lou's bingo purse.
[Det. Littlejohn] It was too much of a coincidence
that she got evicted from the home
and the murders happened the same day?
Was Pam the victim or was she actually
the perpetrator of this particular crime?
[Suzi] The cops used to say at the time,
"Let's heat these people up."
And they started blasting that and pasting it
all over the news media, so their faces were on TV.
[Det. Littlejohn] We said, "Look, if you see these people,
they're armed and dangerous, please call."
[Christina] I'm, like, looking on the TV and could not believe
what I was seeing.
I knew exactly who they were talking about,
somebody that had access to her mother,
that was helping her.
It was just unbelievable. It was just unbelievable.
[Suzi] Turns out some clerk sees their pictures,
they just checked in,
calls 911.
[Det. Littlejohn] Christmas Eve, 1997,
someone recognized Charles Vaughn --
the manager, and gave us the information
that they checked in on December 23rd.
And we knew that Charles was armed and dangerous,
so we mobilized some units to go with us.
We had to be on high-alert.
There was a possibility that there could be shots fired.
This could escalate at any moment.
[Suzi] You know that these people are armed, they stole guns.
This is the single most dangerous thing
that any cop can ever do.
-[sirens wailing] -[police officer] Freeze!
♪♪
[Det. Littlejohn] After the murder...
someone recognized Charles Vaughn and Pamela Vannoy
at a hotel that was in Dearborn, Michigan.
We knew that Charles Vaughn had a weapon.
We saw movement by the vending machines.
It was Pamela Vannoy and Charles Vaughn.
[indistinct chattering]
We moved in abruptly.
-[sirens wailing] -[police officer] Freeze!
[Det. Littlejohn] We did take them into custody.
There was no fight, and they made the arrest.
-[somber music playing] -[crickets chirping]
[Det. Littlejohn] And we searched that hotel room.
I pulled back the heater.
There was money that was behind there, credit cards,
as well as a nickel-plated.38, and another weapon
was a.38 cobra, and it appeared to have dried-up blood
on the actual weapon itself.
When the forensics came back,
the blood belonged to Mary Lou.
-[suspenseful music playing] -[Pamela sobbing]
[Insp. Rice] Once Pamela and Charles were under arrest,
we talked to them separately.
Charles said, "Pamela is a drug addict.
"She's jonesing for heroin.
"And so she's the one coming up
with this concocted scheme to kill these people."
He said he had no idea what Pamela had planned
when he went upstairs to her apartment
and left her downstairs with Mary Lou and Dorothy.
-[objects falling] -[women struggling]
[Det. Littlejohn] He said, "A fight ensued downstairs."
[women struggling]
"And then everything just went quiet."
After 20 minutes of not hearing anything,
he went downstairs.
He saw Pamela standing over the bodies.
Charles said that he helped her move Dorothy's body
because he was afraid of what she was capable of doing.
[Suzi] Pamela has a different version of this story.
According to Pamela, Charles wanted to do a robbery.
He said, "They've used us long enough."
Somehow, this wonderful family who took them in,
gave them room and board and pocket money
and paid them for an honest day's work,
that somehow he was owed more.
[indistinct arguing]
They were gonna wait until Gerald went to work,
to go downstairs.
[Suzi] Coast is clear.
The plan was simple, tie him up and rob him.
No harm, no foul.
Little bit of harm, little bit of foul.
But certainly no bloodshed and murder.
But Pamela says once they go back inside,
some kind of switch went off
and Charles became violently angry.
[Mary Lou screams]
She said that Mary Lou was begging and pleading
before Charles did anything to her mother Dorothy,
but he didn't care.
Pamela said she tried to intervene and stop him
from what would become a murderous frenzy.
He turns the gun on his girlfriend
and says, "This [bleep] deserves it."
It wasn't a matter of who did it.
Both of them were there at the time.
Both of them became enraged because they had nowhere to go.
They had no money.
They had no family and friends that would take them in
at that particular time.
[Insp. Rice] Truthfully, I don't believe it.
I don't believe that one person did all of that.
It was a two-person job.
[gun shot]
[Insp. Rice] It's my belief that Dorothy heard the fight,
heard the struggle, heard the yelling,
and came to the assistance of her daughter,
who was fighting for her life.
And she too got caught up in the web
of the killing.
They were alive when they were taken to the basement,
and they died a horrible death.
They were both sentenced to life in prison,
which I think was well deserved.
[Det. Littlejohn] There's a sense of satisfaction
that you were able to close the case,
but the whole block was devastated by a homicide.
[Suzi] Whatever sense of safety that this tight-knit
Elm Street community had felt,
that was over forever.
Our life pivoted at that point. It didn't --
Like, that was a pivot point of all of our lives.
My mom didn't celebrate another Christmas
until my son came.
[Christina] December of 1997 just shows you
how sinister and evil people can be.
And it doesn't matter what time of year it is,
evil definitely doesn't take a holiday.
The address is no longer there.
As a matter of fact, it's now a parking garage.
But the memories of what happened on Elm Street
is still alive.