The Clinton Avenue Five

Melvin Pittman, 17, Ernest Taylor, 17, Alvin Turner, 16, Randy Johnson, 16, and Michael McDowell, 16 — five teenagers known as the Clinton Avenue Five — vanished together in Newark, New Jersey on August 20, 1978, after playing basketball and getting into a pickup truck driven by Lee Anthony Evans, a local handyman who paid them in odd jobs. The case went cold as a missing-persons file for three decades until 2008, when Evans's cousin Philander Hampton, in police custody on an unrelated charge, confessed after a 13-hour interrogation that Evans had lured the boys to a vacant house, locked them in a closet at gunpoint over a stolen-marijuana dispute, and set the building on fire, killing all five. Hampton pleaded guilty and received a 10-year sentence plus $15,000 in relocation money in exchange for testifying against Evans. At Evans's 2011 trial, where he represented himself, a jury acquitted him of all ten murder-related charges, finding the prosecution's case — built almost entirely on Hampton's confession, with no bodies or physical evidence ever recovered — insufficient. No one has ever been convicted of killing the five boys, whose remains have never been found.

Newark, NJ · Essex County

• 1978: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• The five teenagers' identities, ages, and the August 20, 1978 disappearance after boarding Evans's pickup truck, per Wikipedia's sourced case history and contemporaneous reporting.
• In November 2008, Philander Hampton confessed after a 13-hour police interrogation that he and his cousin, Lee Anthony Evans, lured the boys to a vacant house at 256 Camden Street, locked them in a third-floor closet at gunpoint, and burned the building down with them inside.
• Sonar searches of the fire site, conducted after Hampton's confession, found no human remains.
• Evans and Hampton were arrested and charged with felony murder and arson in March 2010.
• Hampton pleaded guilty and received a 10-year prison sentence and $15,000 in relocation money in exchange for testifying against Evans.
• A jury acquitted Evans, who represented himself at trial, of all ten murder-related charges in November 2011, finding the prosecution had not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
• Evans later filed a federal civil suit against the Essex County prosecutor's office and Newark police alleging his confession-based prosecution relied on coerced testimony and fabricated evidence; a federal appeals panel ruled in 2025 that the detectives involved were not entitled to qualified immunity from that suit.

• Whether Evans was in fact responsible for the boys' deaths, as Hampton's confession described, has never been established beyond that single confession — the jury found it insufficient, and no physical evidence or remains have ever corroborated it.
• The specific details of what led two Newark detectives to reopen the case in 2008 after three decades, and what led to Hampton's 13-hour interrogation, have been disputed in Evans's later civil litigation.
• The extent to which coercion may have shaped Hampton's confession, as alleged in Evans's civil suit, remains an open legal question as of the 2025 appellate ruling.

• Wikipedia — “Clinton Avenue Five” (sourced case history)
• CBS News — “Lee Evans Acquitted Of Murdering 5 Newark Teens In 1978”
• Local Talk Weekly — “Federal Judges: Detectives' Immunity Lifted In Clinton Avenue Five Case”
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs