23. Misdemeanor Murder

Previously On Ice Cold Case

Detective Cruz.
Hi, this is Madison.

Cause they listening to everything I’m saying on this phone right now. All this shit being recorded and you know what I'm saying? Shit like that. You know what I mean?

I was advised you have a podcast. I don’t want to be on your podcast or get recorded or anything.

I mean, I'm a family member first. 

So, what we’re doing now is digging up everything we can on the youngest cold case we have in Belmont County, and that’s the J.C. McGhee from 2002. 

So we're working on on that and resubmitting some things to the lab, because, you know, technologies have changed.

We want to talk to Omar again. Do you ever talk to him? Do you know him? 

The exposé starts now.

Part 0: A Town of Snitches

The longer I stare at the details of this case, the more it feels like theories pop up out of nowhere. A whack a mole of suspects and possibilities. I’m sure that’s inevitable after years of staring at the same puzzle pieces, turning them over, trying to make them fit. Eventually your brain starts drawing connections between dots you swore you’d already crossed off. I’ve been spiraling down this rabbit hole for years now, chasing shadows and possibilities. And still, even with my head spinning and the information feeling like it’s been shoved through a meat grinder, a few theories cling tighter than others.

When I first started down this road, I was given advice that sounded simple at the time: “Go for the low-hanging fruit.” Don’t overcomplicate it. Look for the obvious theory and start there. Occam’s razor became the principle I kept going back to; which is the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the best one. And in my dad’s case, there’s one explanation that’s hard to ignore: the possibility that he was killed because he was a confidential informant.

Now, if you’ve ever lived in a small town, you know how fast secrets spread. But in Belmont County, it’s not just gossip about who’s dating who or who bought a new truck… it’s much deeper. People whisper about drug deals and dirty money. In a place where everyone seems to know everyone else’s business, the label “snitch” is more than just an insult. It’s a target. It’s dangerous. Being called a snitch here isn’t just about losing friends or respect. Sure, snitches get stitches, but in my dad’s case… Did it get him killed?

Part 1: No Humans Involved 

It’s no secret that some people “matter less” in this country — that’s always been the case, especially when it comes to our institutions of power. I don’t feel crazy when I assume that my father’s case was taken less seriously because he was a Black man, and more specifically a Black man involved with drugs. There’s just so much proof that this case was not investigated well. I won’t rehash it all again but to summarize: the crime scene was not properly taped off, witnesses weren’t interviewed, and ultimately their attempts to solve the case were underwhelming.

But even beyond the specific facts of what happened to J.C. McGhee, there are undeniable patterns of behavior when it comes to victims like my dad. The insulation drug-related violence has is strong because police departments keep their distance. They’re the first to target drug dealers for arrest, but often the last to care if the violence turns deadly.

After the brutal, caught-on-camera beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, the LAPD was under a microscope. What the public learned in the aftermath was chilling: officers had an unofficial code for certain victims. They called them “NHI” cases. NHI stands for “No Humans Involved.” If you were a victim who fell into that category – people of color, sex workers, gang members, drug users – police literally labeled you as nonhuman.

Think about that. Your murder file could be reduced to three letters that meant, in essence: not worth our time.

Los Angeles is far from the only city where this kind of dismissive dehumanization occurred; another famous instance where police’s perception of the victim impacted the outcome of anyone even pretending to do their jobs actually let a serial killer get away with a multi-decade crime spree. Samuel Little, who some experts later regarded as the most prolific murderer in American history, has confessed to 93 murders according to the FBI. Many of Little’s victims were sex workers and women of color – he later told investigators he chose who to kill based on who he knew police cared about the least. 

In New York, police also used the term NHI; filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s Netflix documentary “Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer” looks at how the NYPD’s dismissal of the murders of people using and selling drugs and involved in sex work let killers run amok.  

Our friend Paul Wiegartner, the retired FBI agent, also had another term for the killings of people police considered ‘undesirable’: Misdemeanor homicides. 

When they had 3000 murders a year in New York, many, many, many, many, many of which remained unsolved. There was a term used to call 'em sometimes misdemeanor homicides, just one drug dealer killing another. they killed so many of each other that, some evidence that that actually is responsible for the, subsequent decrease in crime rate. it really wasn't the law enforcement that did it. a lot of 'em were killed off. I don't, I don't know if that's completely accurate, but unfortunately it's human nature. So if, if you have an innocent child that was murdered, that people are gonna be a lot more interested in, in pulling out all the stops to, to do that than if they think someone is a bad guy.

I can’t say for sure if the detectives who arrived on the scene of my father’s murder had this exact mindset — it is hard to get into their thinking when Belmont County Sheriff’s Office is still dodging my questions. But when you look at the context of his killing in 2002, it’s hard not to draw some assumptions about the culture in rural Ohio at the time. 

They’re gonna, you know, probably say, you know, fuck the sheriff’s department. They ain’t done nothing. They look at it, you know. You know, in this day and age the probably say, you know, oh, they look at another black man off the street and all that. Which is not true. Not true. It doesn’t matter if that person’s black, white, green, yellow, whatever. I look at it the same, okay, they’re probably gonna tell you we ain’t done nothing.

According to the 2000 US Census, in Belmont County there were 66,698 white people and 2,553 Black people; respectively accounting for 94% and 4% of the total population. Those numbers were relatively similar in 2010 and 2020. So already, we know that John was killed in a predominantly white area — but there’s another detail about that data that is even more important. Of the Black people living in Belmont County in 2000, half of those people were incarcerated. That’s right, of the 2,553 Black residents, 1,222 were in jail or prison, compared to the 891 white people incarcerated from the 66,698 residents. 

This means that half the Black people that Belmont County law enforcement is interacting with are already incarcerated in the Belmont Correctional Institution or the Belmont County Jail. Did police arrive at my dad’s crime scene, and as Paul so plainly put it, think this was another case of just one drug dealer killing another?

I mean we already somewhat know what the cops assumed about the case, based on Detective DeVaul’s own words.

And again that’s what they were all doing. Drug dealers, rolling other drug dealers, knowing the victim wasn’t gonna call.

Part 2: Your Bias is Showing

Bunk Moreland: True that. You can go a long way in this country killin’ black folk. Young males especially. Misdemeanor homicides.
Jimmy McNulty: If Marlo was killin’ white women…
Lester Freamon: White children.
Bunk Moreland: Tourists.

That clip you just heard is from Season Five, Episode 2, of The Wire. And if you know anything about that show, you know it was fiction, but it was fiction rooted in ugly truth. Watching that scene in 2008, the characters are talking about Baltimore. But listening to it now, it feels uncomfortably close to home for me and to J.C. McGhee’s case. Those fictional characters are really talking about what gets attention, and what doesn’t in the real world. Whose life is worth the paperwork, and whose isn’t.

Before my podcast, there was basically no media coverage about my dad’s case – to put it bluntly, nobody gave a fuck. But when you strip away the details – don’t mention Belmont County, don’t mention race – the story is shocking. It’s a jaw-dropping plot line: A father, shot in his own home, while his kid is home, in the daylight of a summer morning, in front of witnesses. There’s a crime scene with traceable evidence. This case should not have been hard to solve. But once you look back at the reality – a Black man, with a history of drug involvement, in a predominantly white county – suddenly the indifference makes sense. But don’t just take it from me and my own personal experience. This is a common theme across homicide investigations.

You know, we're cold cases and shit, like. They're cold for a reason. The detective work. I like that the Stem author. Either was faulty. When you have all this coming from Omar. They didn't follow up on it. You know why? It's just another nigga.

I know it’s a big topic and nobody wants to hear me ramble about racial injustice for any longer. I’m not trying to tackle the systemic racism in Belmont County in just this little podcast, but the reality is you can’t talk about the J.C. McGhee case and ignore the reality of the circumstances surrounding his murder, and the handling of this investigation.

This is the bias that shapes investigations, and it’s not always written in the report. People refer to it as bias induced data. You let your own bias impact how you report or research and it impacts the data to make it affirm your own ideas. Sometimes the negative impact is in what gets ignored. I’ve started thinking of it as “vibe-based data” – because when you look at the paper trail, you can see it. Cases get sorted based on what the investigator believes was their vibe – who the victim was, how they looked, what they did, and whether the people in power could imagine themselves in their shoes.

Representation matters. It always has. We trust people more easily when we see ourselves in them. If you’re a prosecutor or a detective, and the victim looks like you, has kids the same age as yours, lives in a neighborhood like yours, you lean in. You care more. Belmont County’s current entire prosecutorial team has no Black members. Zero. So when a case touches the Black community, the only people in positions of power to fight for justice are people who don’t share that lived experience. That doesn’t automatically make them malicious, but it does make it harder to empathize.

And this isn’t just about Belmont County. Bias is everywhere –  in the shrug when someone brings up racial injustice, in the roots of policing itself, in the way cases get worked. Sometimes the bias is so strong it shapes what investigators even think is possible. Racial bias has saturated every aspect of law enforcement; and not just for victims, but even for the perpetrators of crime. 

Listen to how insane this is – For a very long time the FBI did not think that black men were sophisticated enough to be serial killers. Black people were more likely to get away with it solely because they were underestimated. Anyone can be a serial killer. Look at the previous example, Samuel Little, who as I mentioned is now considered one of the most prolific serial killers, was able to get away with killing so many people because yes, his victims were not highly regarded by society but he, too, was a black man. For a long time police were not looking at him as someone capable of “pulling that off.”

In an article from the Root, a news outlet that offers news, commentary, and cultural analysis from a variety of Black perspectives, Lynette Holloway dissects this absolutely wild phenomenon in her article “Of Course There Are Black Serial Killers.” I’d recommend just reading the article but I will summarize it for you. 

She starts out talking about Lonnie Franklin Jr. You might know him as the “Grim Sleeper,” a serial killer charged with ten murders in Los Angeles. An interesting angle it made her consider: how people usually picture serial killers as these smart, white men. The media paints them like masterminds. But the article pointed out that that stereotype isn’t necessarily true.

The FBI doesn’t even keep statistics on serial killers by race, and they’ve said that serial killers exist across every racial group in about the same proportions as the overall population. But experts say the media tends to underreport cases involving Black serial killers, which creates this myth that they’re somehow rare or don’t exist.

And in all the ways that black people are notably treated differently in the criminal justice system, here’s a weird fact that Louis B. Schlesinger, a forensic psychologist, said flat-out: that idea is a total myth. Black serial killers have always existed – they’ve just been ignored by coverage. Paul Ciolino, a longtime Chicago-area private investigator, noted that racism definitely plays into it, because the media hasn’t historically viewed Black people as “clever enough” to be serial killers, instead pushing the stereotype of Black communities only being tied to street and gang violence.

That’s another myth: that serial killers are highly intelligent. Most actually fall in the average or low-average IQ range. The ones who avoid capture for a long time get labeled as “geniuses,” when in fact the reality is they’re just often targeting people who are vulnerable, like sex workers or people struggling with addiction and that makes it harder for law enforcement to connect the dots and their social status makes the police to feel compelled to do something – you know, those are considered misdemeanor murders.

And in Lonnie Franklin Jr.’s case, that’s exactly what happened. For more than two decades, he lived in the community, came off like a friendly neighbor, and at the same time was killing women who weren’t closely connected to him. He blended into society, which is pretty common for serial killers.

So the big takeaway for me confirmed what we all were speculating but now we have a larger sample size: the stereotypes in true crime are deadly. The theory of the brilliant white male serial killer is both inaccurate and rooted in bias. Serial killers exist across all races, and the ones we don’t hear about, like Franklin, say as much about our blind spots as they do about the crimes themselves. And that bias is only amplified when it comes to victims of crime. 

Part 3: The County Filled With Federal Informants 

Beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the standard you need in a courtroom to convict someone of murder. But for me, it’s also the standard I wrestle with in my head every time I circle back to my dad’s case. Because the truth is, it’s almost impossible to reach that kind of certainty when so many different theories are still on the table.

One theory that’s always hovered near the surface is that my dad was targeted because he was a confidential informant. On paper, it makes sense: he was working with law enforcement, and in communities like Belmont County, that’s enough to put a target on your back. But here’s the complicating part – those closest to the game, the ones who’ve lived it, will tell you that being a CI isn’t all that rare. In fact, it’s practically built into the system.

The drug world runs on deals. Get caught? Flip. Trade names for leniency. Stay out of jail by putting someone else in. It’s a vicious cycle, and it means that a lot of dealers — more than the average person would ever imagine – end up cooperating with police at some point. Which raises the question: if so many people are informants, why would being one automatically lead to my dad’s murder?

Because Belmont County isn’t just some quiet, rural stretch of Ohio. It sits at the crossroads of major highways, with easy access to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and down into West Virginia. Drugs don’t just trickle through here – they move in volume. And where there are large drug flows, there are deals being made in backrooms, courthouses, and sheriff’s offices. Some people get breaks. Some people get burned. And unless you’re on the inside, it’s impossible to know who’s playing which side.

My cousin Rico, who’s spent much of his life locked up or entangled in this very system, knows that reality better than most.

You feel me? Like, like I said, man, 97 percent of that town work for the federal government.

Now, he doesn’t literally mean everyone in town has a government badge. What he’s saying is: that’s how saturated the informant culture is. Nearly everyone touched by the drug trade has some kind of tie to law enforcement. You can’t tell who’s loyal to whom, because almost everyone’s working angles. And in that environment, trust is a fragile, dangerous thing.

Before we zoom out to the bigger picture, let’s sit with the question: why does someone become a confidential informant in the first place?

I think primarily it is because they get in trouble themselves and they’re looking for a way to help their own situation. Someone gets busted with drugs, and police say, ‘We want to know who your supplier is.’ That’s how it starts. Talk to the DA, make a deal, and maybe you get a break. We’ll talk to the attorney.

Sometimes it’s survival. Sometimes it’s self-preservation. And sometimes, it’s money.

A lot of law enforcement agencies pay confidential informants. FBI informants are paid upwards of $20 million a year.

And then there’s the more complicated side: personal grudges, rivalries, or even revenge. Paul pointed to the infamous Whitey Bulger case in Boston — an Irish mobster who acted as an FBI informant for years. Bulger used his CI status not to help clean up crime, but to rat out his competition while continuing his own murders and rackets. In the end, it wasn’t justice; it was corruption that stained the entire bureau.

Paul’s point is clear: there’s no one reason someone becomes a CI. It can be desperation, self-interest, money, or manipulation. But what all those roads lead to is the same destination: a system where truth, loyalty, and safety are all negotiable.

Part 4: Broken System

The system that relies on informants is broken. And it’s broken in ways that make people like my dad incredibly vulnerable. The American Civil Liberties Union has documented this for years. Their research shows that police often exploit informants – dangling deals, threatening charges, or promising leniency to get what they want. The problem? There’s rarely oversight. Informants can lie, exaggerate, or invent details to save themselves, and the police don’t always require proof before acting on it. The incentives are stacked: if you’re facing prison, why wouldn’t you tell officers exactly what they want to hear – true or not?

It gets darker. The ACLU warns that when informants are struggling with drug addiction or mental illness, they’re even more easily manipulated. Police can push them back into unsafe situations, even criminal activity, because the system values information more than the informant’s life. In some cases, departments have literally fabricated informants who never existed at all. Think about that: the state inventing a snitch to justify an arrest.

This isn’t just theory. It’s documented practice.

Harvard Law Professor Alexandra Natapoff has written extensively on this, and she puts it bluntly: “Justice is a negotiation.” Ninety-five percent of convictions in the U.S. come from plea deals, not trials. Everything is up for grabs. Anything can be bargained. As Natapoff says, “It is an all-bets-are-off space where the most serious crimes can be worked off. And conversely, where the most vulnerable people can be pressured into risking their lives.”

The state can promise almost anything: money, immigration benefits, better prison conditions, or – most famously – leniency. They can let an informant keep committing crimes in exchange for cooperation. They can even make what’s called a “wired plea,” where you cooperate to help a family member or partner get a deal. There are virtually no limits.

That’s what makes this system so corrosive. It tells entire communities – often Black and low-income communities – that justice isn’t about fairness. It’s about what you can bargain for. If you have something useful, everything’s on the table. If you don’t, you’re disposable.

And that’s exactly the environment men like my dad, Daryl, and Rico were living in. Communities over-policed for drugs, flooded with informants, and treated as if their lives were a bargaining chip.

Natapoff calls this the “terrible, cynical, hypocritical message” that law enforcement sends: we will punish you harshly when you commit a crime, but we will turn around and say your suffering is negotiable if you can help us catch someone else.

This isn’t a big-city issue. This isn’t even just a Belmont County issue. Throw a rock in this country and you’ll likely hit a police department that runs on confidential informants. Every time that system is abused, it creates more injustice, more violence, and more vulnerability.

For me, that’s the bitter pill: even if I prove my dad was killed because he was an informant, that doesn’t make him unique. It makes him one more casualty of a system that asks people to risk their lives for the state, without ever guaranteeing their safety in return.

Being a drug dealer meant they could shrug at the murder of J.C. McGhee and file it away as “just another statistic.” And being a snitch? That’s the trifecta. As Daryl explained it to me, the streets have their own code. 

The street code. Anybody that violates that code of ethics, if he was in the streets and shit and you turn snitch, they don't give a fuck about you. You just a rat.

Snitches don’t get sympathy – not from the streets, not from law enforcement, not even from the wider community – which leaves people like my dad caught in the middle, vulnerable on all sides, and ultimately disposable.

And that’s where I was stuck for so long – staring at a police department that didn’t care, witnesses who wouldn’t talk, and a case that seemed permanently frozen. But then, for the first time in years, something shifted. I got a call from the Belmont County Sheriff’s Department letting me know that a new detective was assigned to my dad’s case: fresh eyes, new energy. For the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe the wall of silence could start to crack. It was a rare moment of relief, like something was going to change. Maybe all the years of waiting for someone to finally care were about to have a significant impact because this was a person who could actually do something.

Part 5: Is Late Better Than Never?

As I mentioned earlier, they finally assigned Detective Cruse to my dad’s case. But I refuse to let that be the end of the conversation — or the conclusion. Because the real questions are: Why now? Why wait more than 20 years? And is this new interest genuine, or just damage control?

When I saw the article from local outlet Lede News titled “Revisiting Cold Cases in Belmont County – Part 2”, my gut twisted. On one hand, it’s the kind of media attention this case desperately needed. On the other hand, why did it take this much public pressure for anything to stir? That article feels more like a public defense of the Belmont County Sheriff’s Department than an urgency to solve the case.

Sheriff James Zusack directed us to dig into our cold case files when we have time … putting a modern eye on them to see what facts and evidence we might be able to turn up. 

“When we have time.” That phrase leapt off the page. It suggests these cold cases were background noise until someone called attention. It tells me this was never a priority, not until I began making noise. Even though Detective DeVaul claims he thinks about this case at least once a week.

And tell you this, in my career, this case here is one I want to solve. I have done everything I can with this. I want to find the man who murdered your dad. That is part of what I want to do in my career. When I retired, I solved this case.

They mention another high profile case, the double murder of a local couple in 2021, that they spent three and a half years working on and eventually solved. 

We spent three-and-a-half years working on the Strussion case … the heavy lifting is finally finished, and that means we do have time on some days to dig in. 

The implication is: “We were busy, now we’re less busy.” But if your workload is the barrier to justice, that’s a failure of resource allocation. A county that can spend 3.5 years on one case but can’t commit to others sends a message about what it values.

And then this about my dad’s case:

We’ve started examining the file from the very beginning, and we’ll continue to the end, and we’ve already contacted the investigators who worked the case back then. They’re all retired, but they’ve agreed to meet with us so they can give us their opinions on the case.

I want those conversations to happen. I want them to comb through the file, dig for anything new, speak with the old officers. That’s why I did all of this, and made this podcast, and spent all of life’s savings, and begged you to care.

Like clockwork, once there was national exposure – once someone said, “Hey, this case hasn’t gotten attention.” Suddenly the sheriff’s office is “putting a modern eye” on things. Suddenly the cold case unit has time. Suddenly they agreed to revisit the 2002 file. Suddenly they reach out to retired investigators.

That sequence tells me one thing loud and clear: they felt pressure. And you know what? Good.

But I’m not naïve. I know institutions protect themselves first. I’ve seen it before. A fresh detective might be exactly what the case needed — but they might also be a shield, a smoke screen, or a gesture to deflect criticism. The timing is suspicious.

Let me pull in a few other names from Lede News to show you the pattern. Belmont County has more than 20 cold-case homicides on record. Some of those names are no longer household names, but each represents a family still waiting. The piece mentions that detectives are now “working to reduce that number in the near future.” If that’s the plan, waiting until someone with a microphone says your name should never be the trigger for cops to take action.

Is late better than never when time is the most important resource in investigations? And who is holding anyone accountable?

Next Time on Ice Cold Case

I seen the shoes, but you know what I mean? You just second guessed yourself, you know, you don't really wanna believe it.

I know the FBI maintains a shoe database, shoe database. And they might even be able to tell you what model it was.

At that time DNA was all new.

Credits:

Thanks for listening to Ice Cold Case a Yes! Podcast
Recorded in Los Angeles at Spotify Studios
This episode was written, hosted, produced, and edited by Madison McGhee
Produced, copy edited, and additional research by Opheli Garcia Lawler
Sound engineering and sound design by Sian McMullen
Graphic design by AJ Christianson

All outside sources are linked in the show notes.

A video version of this episode is available on our YouTube Channel and a transcript is available at ice cold case dot com
To submit any tips or information please email us at icecoldcasepodcast@gmail.com