Vladimir Duthiers
Appearances
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
So Vanessa and Latoya explained to me how completely not credible Jimmy Ray Barnes was. that Barnes had been arrested for a number of violent crimes. In fact, some of the crimes that he had been arrested for and that he had served time for were assault, battery with deadly weapons,
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
There you go. So that's a lot of money today.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
So we do know that with the money that Reginald Reed Sr. received, he was able to open up a nightclub. He bought a car. He was able to send Reggie Jr. to private school. The insurance company set up a trust fund for Reginald Jr., $248,000 that he could access when he turned 18. He says he never got the money. He never got the money. Never got the money.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Says he paid his own way to college, according to Detective Ward. Reggie says that the day that he turned 18, his father woke him up, got him out of bed, made him sign some papers or asked him to sign some papers. We don't know what those are. Reggie doesn't remember, but he never got the money. Vanessa and Latoya Williams told me he took out insurance policies on everybody.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
He took out a life insurance policy on Reginald Jr. They say that he took out life insurance policies on family members. But I still think if you're a juror and you're hearing that, you would think it's suspicious. And I think that what was fascinating to me is when I asked Reggie Jr., The questions that I'm asking you, where's that money? Why do you take out a life insurance policy on you?
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Have you asked him? Yeah. And what does he say? And he sort of hems and haws as to what his father answers.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
This is, this part of the story is incredibly murky, even for us to understand. It goes into family dynamics. The family of Salonia Reed believes that Reginald Sr. killed Salonia Reed. There's no doubt in their minds that, that he did it. And, uh, because of that, and because Reggie himself has questions that linger It has led to this tension. And so for Reggie, it's hard.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
You've got this enormously large family and everybody's got an idea of what they think happened or what they think didn't happen. So I can imagine the turmoil that he feels.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
You're right. He named his daughter Salonia, which I thought was beautiful. And I found it fascinating that he was willing to share as much as he shared with me and to not to not be definitive about what he believes or what he doesn't believe. You know what I mean? Like, he didn't say, my dad didn't do it. Right. He was just sort of like, what you think that you would say to a reporter, right?
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
No, my dad could never do that. He raised me. He's a great guy. He didn't say that to me. He just said, you know... I don't know, man. And I just found that to be really interesting from just a journalist's perspective. And then you have Taylor Anthony, the assistant district attorney, who believes fervently that in 1987...
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
This young Black woman was brutally murdered and no one did anything about it, at least the way he sees it. And he was going to do something about it. And if people don't like it, if people who are family members don't like it, he sympathizes. But in his mind, he believes that Sonia Reid is resting easier today because he put behind bars the man he believes killed her.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
It was really an incredible experience. This is only my second 48 Hours hour, and I always appreciate the opportunity to do a story like this where I can spend a lot of time digging into the details, conducting long interviews with people as long as I need to do them. And that's what we were able to do here. Spend a lot of time with this attorney, spend a lot of time
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
with the cops on the case and with Reginald Jr. himself. I'm appreciative that he was so willing to open up to us. And, you know, we spent hours and hours together, like hanging out. And it's like we've developed this relationship now. You know, he expressed to me in the interviews that we did, the hours of interviews that we did, I think how he truly, truly feels.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
It's probably one of the most confounding questions of this investigation that we did. First of all, the DA from back in 1987 has died. So we can't understand or know why he didn't charge Reginald. But we do know that Lieutenant Barry Ward, who helped solve the case... admits that even with the evidence that you just cited, there was really no smoking gun back in 1987.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
And the lawyers who represented Reginald explained that they thought that the eyewitness who wrote down the license plate number of the car that she thought was a suspicious vehicle the night of the murder might have been coached. There was something in the way that the notes were written by this eyewitness that were suspicious, according to them. So there was that.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
And also something that we all found incredibly fascinating is when there was a photo array, a photo lineup of the potential suspects, all of the photos that were used were pictures of either Reginald Reed Sr. 's brothers or the Barnes twins' siblings. And somehow this eyewitness picked out Reginald. So we don't know why in 1987 there were no charges brought.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
But again, this was all speculation because the district attorney in 1987 has long died.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
So first of all, until I, and I've been a reporter now for over a decade, this was the first that I knew that identical twins shared identical DNA. I didn't know that. And so when I discovered that, that was sort of a moment for me, you know, head explode moment.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
And that became a huge complication in figuring out who was ultimately the responsible party for that Winston cigarette that was found in the car.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
No, he was not. Detective Ward told us that they questioned Billy. He cooperated. He was in the photo lineup. But in the end, to your question, he was never identified or classified as a suspect.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
I put myself in his shoes at six years old. I thought of my daughter, who's only two, but I could imagine, just like any parent could, what it would be like to have an adult that you've never met before asking you questions. And even though they're perfectly nice, you know that children, even if an adult is nice, they are reticent.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
They cling to their parents until there's a level of comfortability. And when you hear him start to cry for his mother, Or his father.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
It just blew me away. It really was a moment where I had to pause in the interview while watching that.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Yeah, that is... Another mystery. His father was a Marine and they're tough. They're known to be tough. A lot of the lessons that Reginald Sr. imparted on Reggie Jr. were based on his experience and the lessons that Reggie Sr. learned in the Marine Corps, according to Reggie. And remember, Reginald Sr. was also still a fairly young man.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
And, you know, if you're not used to dealing with something like this, look, everybody's afraid in the face of police officers. maybe you're tense too. And so your kid is tense, but you're tense and you know that you want the child to be able to answer the questions that the police officials are asking. So you'd sort of,
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
leave them out there on that branch alone while they try to get answers from your kid. Because maybe you think that hugging the child might be seen as somehow coaching or prodding the child to do something. So maybe, I don't know. This is just me watching the video the same way you did and the same way our audience did. I'd be very curious to see what the audience says.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
I know that 48 Hours has a lot of people who chat on Reddit and who chat on social media about an episode, what it would be like to have kids You go into an interrogation room with a six-year-old child, your six-year-old child, and have them be interrogated. Even the child knows nothing. What would they do? How would they react?
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
And when they start to whine and then they start to cry, what do you do in that situation? I don't know.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
I thought it was odd as well, Anne-Marie. You're in a small town. You know, this is a family that people know. People talk. Reggie Jr. maintains that he never heard anyone saying that his dad was involved in the murder of his mother.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Yeah, he moved into a Catholic school. Now, he later wondered if this was intentional. Perhaps they wanted to remove him from neighborhood gossip regarding his mother.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Yeah, about 22,000 residents. Small town. Reginald had 16 siblings. Well, it's a big family. Big family. Didn't come from money. They weren't wealthy. But perhaps by some standards in that small town, as an African-American family, they were perhaps... social mobility-wise, a step above some of the other folks in the community.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
The other thing that is sort of interesting, these questions around whether the family was quote-unquote connected or not, or whether they had connections, when Reginald Sr., took out life insurance policies on Salonia. He didn't get any signature from his wife, Salonia Reed. And the insurance guy objected at first, but because he knew the Reed family, He let it go. Right.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
And he later testified in court that he knew that he had messed up, that he'd made a mistake, a grave error, by not getting Salonia Reed's signature on those life insurance policies.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
I thought it was incredibly unusual for the prosecutor to go on a road trip like the one Anthony and Ward took to Atlanta. But. You know, the case would not have been solved if they hadn't had this sense of purpose, this sense of mission.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Taylor Anthony, the way that he spoke about it to me, the way he spoke about justice for Salonia, he struck me as somebody who was on a mission and ultimately he wanted justice. this young mother to have a sense of justice. And he talked about how this was also for Reggie Jr. That's how he feels, Taylor Anthony.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
But yeah, it also speaks to the fact that Taylor Anthony was able to get Ward to agree with his sense of purpose and his sense of mission to take the trip.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Yeah. He ended up refusing to testify. He was scared. He talked about, you know, instances where he felt his life had been threatened by Reginald Reed Sr. And for those reasons, he was afraid of testifying. So he said at the time— And after Jimmy Ray was was ultimately arrested, he cut a plea deal with assistant district attorney Anthony.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
That was actually ultimately it turned out to be worse than the deal that they originally offered him in this new deal. Jimmy Ray was sentenced to five years in prison in exchange for for testifying against Reginald Reed.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
An incredible duo, these two women. I told them, I told my producers, these women need their own reality show. The mother went to law school with her daughter. Like, can you imagine, Anne-Marie?
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Yeah. I don't remember how old she was, but she would take classes with her young daughter there.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Exactly right. Exactly right. They were just so... interesting and captivating and charismatic as defense attorneys, but also incredibly buttoned up. They came with reams and reams and reams of documents that they were willing to spend hours with me going through if I wanted to.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
Yeah. I don't know whether they believe or don't believe that Reginald Reed committed this crime. I just know that they passionately, fervently believe that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Reginald Reed killed Salonia.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | The Day My Mother Never Came Home
What they said over and over again is every time the prosecution put something out there for the jury to absorb, there was evidence that they uncovered that would lead a normal person to have some reasonable doubt.