After nearly two decades, a now-former officer has been caught in a case involving the gruesome slayings of two women. The now-former officer Edward T. Carter, 43, is being charged with two counts of murder.
The charges stem from the 1994 killings of Candace Belt, 22, and Gloria Ross, 18, both of whom worked at the New Life Massage Parlor when the killings occurred, according to reports.
The women’s employer, Tammy Papler, shocked the town of Oak Grove in 1997 when she boldly declared that the police were behind the murders. Town residents became aware of the suspicions at that point, but the case was not cracked until now.
Both women were shot in the head, and their throats were slashed, Papler said.
“It was devastating to us… One woman was breastfeeding her baby. It was just a few weeks old,” she added.
Officer Carter did not act alone — he was reportedly assisted by another (now former) officer, Leslie Duncan, who helped by covering their tracks.
Duncan is already serving three years after pleading guilty to tampering with the evidence in the case, according to reports. Now, after 19 years, he is also being charged with two counts of complicity to murder.
Duncan was a detective at the time who was present at the crime scene to “investigate the killings.” Former police officer Bob Combs worked with Duncan at the time and had suspicions that Duncan was involved in covering for Carter. In an interview with CNN Combs recalled what happened when he arrived at the scene:
“Once Duncan got there, he was the detective, so it became his scene.”
“Duncan ran in there and messed up the scene. The phone was off the hook when I arrived, but then after Duncan was in there, the phone was back on the receiver,” Combs said. “No one had ever asked me — the first officer on the scene — anything about this case. No one ever asked me anything until the state police took over — years after it happened
It turns out that the investigation is still ongoing and may involve more officers.
“I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think there are more arrests coming,” said Dan Potter, the town’s mayor. “Wouldn’t the other police officers know?”
Patty Balew, who also worked at New Life at the time, said that she and the other women were forced to give police officers sexual favors when the officers visited.
“If they were police officers, that’s what we had to do whether we wanted to or not, which we didn’t like,” Balew told CNN in 1997.
In addition to ongoing sexual coercion, police officers also extorted money from the women, according to reports.
“I did what they told me to do. If they needed new police lights, I bought new police lights. If they needed birthday money, I gave them birthday money. If they needed money for a trailer to be moved … basically anything they told me they needed, I gave them the money for it,” said Papler.
The women eventually decided to stop putting up with the police abuse, and that’s when the murders began.
“They weren’t getting any more money from us, and they knew we had stuff on them. The only way to keep us quiet was to kill the girls and put us in jail,” added Papler.
Carter is currently being held in lieu of a $1m bail, and Duncan’s attorney is attempting to defend him against the charges of complicity to murder.