Host Anne-Marie Green and CBS News National Correspondent Vladimir Duthiers discuss the 1987 murder of Selonia Reed that went unsolved for over thirty years. They discuss how Selonia's son, Reggie Jr., grappled with learning his father, Reginald, was the prime suspect years later, the life insurance policies Reginald took out on Selonia leading up to her death, and the twins with identical DNA who complicated the investigation. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who was Selonia Reed and what happened to her in 1987?
Welcome back to 48 Hours Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today we're talking to CBS News national correspondent, Vladimir Dutier, about the murder of Salonia Reed in Hammond, Louisiana, in 1987. Salonia's husband, Reginald, said that she went out to a local bar with a girlfriend and that she never came back home.
Reginald filed a missing persons report the next day and gave a description of the car that she drove. Well, shortly after that, a patrol officer discovered Salonia's car parked at a nearby grocery store. Inside, they found her body. She had been stabbed 16 times. Salonia's son, Reggie Jr., was only six years old at the time, and for over three decades, her murder went unsolved.
And then in 2012, 25 years after the murder, Reggie was shocked to learn that his own father was a prime suspect in the case. So, Vlad, thanks for joining us today.
It's great to be here. Thanks, Anne-Marie.
We want to remind everyone that if you haven't checked out this episode of 48 Hours, head on over to the podcast feed and look right before this, and you'll see the episode. Go over and listen, and then come on back, and we're going to talk a little bit more about it. All right, Vlad, let's get into this. Back in 1987—
There were actually already a couple of pieces of evidence that pointed to Reginald Sr., right? There was a witness. A witness that came forward spotted Reginald and spotted his friend, Jimmy Ray Barnes, at the crime scene that night that she was murdered. The witness wrote down his license plate.
Investigators also discovered that Reginald had taken out several life insurance policies on her leading up to the murder. If you watch 48 Hours, you know, life insurance policies like that's always, you know, that's always a little suspect. That's a red flag. Why wasn't he charged in the very beginning?
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.
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Chapter 2: Why was Reginald Sr. initially not charged despite evidence?
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.
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.
But again, this was all speculation because the district attorney in 1987 has long died.
You flash forward, right? And then there's new evidence that's discovered. At the crime scene, police found Winston cigarettes or a cigarette. In 2012, Lieutenant Ward was finally able to test what he found. And they get a match, right, in CODIS. which is the FBI's national DNA database. There is a twist, though, because the match is to Billy Ray Barnes, the twin brother of Jimmy Ray Barnes.
And, of course, the witness identified Jimmy. So when I saw that in the hour, I thought this is where the twist is going to come in to tell you the truth, because I knew with identical twins, they have the same DNA, and that could be quite complicated.
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.
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.
Mm hmm. So then was Billy Ray Barnes ever suspect in this case?
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.
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Chapter 3: How did DNA evidence involving twins complicate the investigation?
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
It just blew me away. It really was a moment where I had to pause in the interview while watching that.
He is leaning on his father, right, to show him some sort of tenderness because that's his safe island. And I just found myself sort of reading everything into his father's body language, internally yelling at the screen, saying, hug him, hold him, protect him, do something.
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.
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,
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.
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?
And when they start to whine and then they start to cry, what do you do in that situation? I don't know.
So you fast forward to 2012, right? And Reggie Jr., he's 31 years old. He's living in Texas. Out of the blue, Texas Rangers come to his door and they tell him something he has never considered in his life. That his father is a suspect, the main suspect in his mother's murder. They're from a small town. We know, I mean, people talk. Reggie Jr. had never heard this at all?
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Chapter 4: What was the impact of the case on Selonia's son, Reggie Jr.?
So we'll talk a little bit about Hammond, right? It's a town in the South.
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.
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.
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.
Right. Sort of the pros and cons of kind of a small town community, right? You love that familiarity. And then sort of on the flip side, though, here you have the situation where this... insurance agent probably risked his own license. I mean, because you're not supposed to do that. People are supposed to know when someone's taken out a life insurance policy on them.
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Welcome back. So Lieutenant Ward's investigation really did a lot to push the case forward. But he still could not get a DA to actually charge Reginald Reed until prosecutor Taylor Anthony got on the case. And this is in 2018 now. And he actually went with Lieutenant Ward to Atlanta to offer Jimmy Ray Barnes a deal to testify in court. Now, just so people know, DAs don't do that.
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Chapter 5: How did the small town community and life insurance policies affect the case?
Chapter 6: What new developments occurred in 2012 regarding the case?
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?
And when they start to whine and then they start to cry, what do you do in that situation? I don't know.
So you fast forward to 2012, right? And Reggie Jr., he's 31 years old. He's living in Texas. Out of the blue, Texas Rangers come to his door and they tell him something he has never considered in his life. That his father is a suspect, the main suspect in his mother's murder. They're from a small town. We know, I mean, people talk. Reggie Jr. had never heard this at all?
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.
And his father actually sort of, in a way, kind of rearranged his life. Like, he moved into another school and everything, right?
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.
So we'll talk a little bit about Hammond, right? It's a town in the South.
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.
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.
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