Town note
Largo is named after the Largo Plantation, which was owned by the Beal family and is believed to have been named after Largo Bay in Scotland.
about 0:06:23The story
Largo, Maryland, is a leafy, upper-middle-class suburb in Prince George's County, about half an hour from Washington, forty five minutes from Baltimore and half an hour from Bethesda. In 2008 it had a population of 12,003, a median age of 39.8 and a median household income of $88,799, well above the national figure of about $69,000. Its streets were the sort of place where children played in cul-de-sacs and neighbours judged one another by how neatly the lawn was kept.
Vilma Artis Butler was 46 in 2008. Divorced from a man named Timothy, she was raising three children, Christopher, Christina and Nicholas, and worked as a nurse; at one point she also worked as a business development manager for Toner Express USA. Neighbours described her as friendly, always waving, and as someone who kept her garden neat. On 24 June 2008 neighbours heard popping noises shortly before 4 a.m., and at 4.45 a.m. firefighters were called to her burning house. There was no sign of forced entry. The house had been ransacked selectively rather than in a frenzy: particular things were missing, and the fire had been set deliberately.
From the autumn of 2008, burglaries spread through Largo and Upper Marlboro. The intruder came between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., while families slept, and went through drawers and photo albums for hours. Alongside televisions and electronics he took car keys and personal photographs, items with no resale value. Through the winter the burglaries turned into home invasions: a masked man would wake a family at gunpoint, demand debit cards and PIN numbers, send an accomplice to withdraw cash and drive away in the family car. In January 2009 the killings began.
On the night of 25 January 2009, Karen Lofton and her 16-year-old daughter Carissa came home from church and from Carissa's shift at the Golden Corral. Karen was a school nurse, separated from her husband Kirk Lofton Sr, who had moved to Georgia; Carissa, born in 1992, had survived open heart surgery as a toddler and was planning to follow her father south to college. At 2.36 a.m. on 26 January the alarm system at their house in the 10,800 block of Southall Drive was disengaged. Carissa called 911 and told the operator, 'Ma'am, I've been shot. My mother has been shot. I'm bleeding to death. Police arrived within five minutes. The front door was locked and a side window was closed but unlocked; an officer climbed through it. Karen was found crouched in the corner of her bedroom, shot dead; Carissa was found in her bed under the covers, shot dead. Six spent shell casings from a Glock 17 lay scattered through the house. Karen's ex-husband was in Georgia.
Twelve days earlier, about five miles away, Eunice Ba, 36, and Seth Idu, 40, had been killed in their home in a gated community of million-dollar houses in Upper Marlboro. Idu had been stabbed and Ba shot in the head. A $25,000 reward, door-to-door DNA swabs and about 200 pieces of evidence produced nothing; an FBI profiler told investigators the Lofton and Dewitt killers were different people, and the similarities of two nurses in their forties killed with their teenage daughters were coincidence.
On 15 March 2009 Deloris Smith Dewitt, 42, and her daughters were at home in the 9,700 block of Cedar Hollow Lane. Deloris, born on 8 September 1966 in North Carolina, had worked her way from licensed practical nurse to a bachelor's degree in nursing and had spent nine years at Bradford Oaks nursing and rehabilitation centre in Clinton. Ebony, 19, had graduated from Largo High in 2007, worked at Comcast and had just earned a medical assistant's certificate; Courtney, 17, was the youngest. The family had been burgled in December 2008, when a Wii, a new television and another electronic item were taken. That Sunday Courtney was staying with a friend. She arrived at the Largo Metro station just after 10 p.m., texted her mother for a lift, got no answer and walked home. The lights were on, Ebony's jacket was by the door and her mother's car was in the driveway, but nobody was there. Upstairs she found two bleach spots on the rug in Ebony's room, and she ran to her boyfriend's house. At 3.45 a.m. she called the police to report them missing.
At 3.39 a.m., a few streets away, Sibyl Felton had called the police from her driveway to report that her 2005 Nissan Maxima had been stolen while she ran an errand. While she was on the line she saw the car drive past her house, screamed and hung up. Fifteen minutes later a car fire was reported two blocks away. Firefighters found the Maxima burning in the driveway of a vacant house on a dead-end street; in the boot were two bodies, burned beyond recognition. Dental records identified Deloris and Ebony Dewitt. Autopsies showed both had been strangled before the fire. Their blood, mixed with bleach, was in the house; beech leaves were embedded in their clothing, and there were no beech trees near Felton's home. The women's purses were missing. The house had been cleaned, the bodies moved, the car stolen and burned, all within a few hours.
The breakthrough came from a gun shop. On 26 May 2009 JC Arms in Woodbine was burgled and 39 firearms, silencers and ammunition were taken. The ATF was tipped off that stolen weapons were being sold in a UPS car park, and an undercover agent bought four assault weapons there. A search of his home found 16 more stolen guns, a burglary kit of bolt cutters, screwdrivers, pry bars, ski masks, black clothing, flex cuffs and a police scanner, a so-called rape kit of gloves, condoms, lighter fluid and a camera, night vision gear, body armour and hard drives holding hundreds of hours of footage of other people's homes.
The ATF handed the rest to the local police. His partner Hunter, facing the scale of it, agreed to cooperate and mentioned the 'spooky house', an abandoned mansion in Upper Marlboro used as a staging post. There investigators found the charred remains of a blue sweater matching Ebony's, burned fabric from the Seven jeans Deloris wore, beech leaves matching those in the victims' clothing and blood from the victims.
The state then prepared to try him for the Dewitt murders, where the physical evidence was strongest.
He would serve 80 per cent of the state term and 85 per cent of the federal term, about 160 years. The judge called him 'a tsunami of crime' and said he could not understand the cruel, cold-blooded nature of his acts. Deloris Dewitt's family were relieved; the Lofton and Butler families felt betrayed, having waited four years only to be told the murders would never be prosecuted. Keon Lofton said there was still an empty void.
His earliest possible release has been calculated at around the age of 140. The case is now taught to police and criminal justice students as an example of an offender who studied forensic science, changed his method deliberately and fooled an FBI profiler.