Tony Crabtree pulled into his mother’s driveway on Chambers Road in Rougemont at about 6:30 a.m. He came about the same time every morning – Rosa Lee Crabtree had been lonely since her husband died a year before and living alone made her nervous. She would rise shortly before Tony arrived to prepare some breakfast for him to take with him to work.
On November 7, 2005, Rosa Crabtree didn’t come to the door.
As Tony walked through the side door off of the carport he laughed under his breath that his mom overslept. She never overslept.
Rosa Lee Crabtree went to church every Sunday night, and November 6 was no different. Her nephew followed her five miles down the road to her home on Chambers Road, made sure she got inside safely, and said goodnight.
It would be the last time he saw her alive.
Walking through the small house, Tony began to worry when he saw his mother’s room ransacked and the bed still made. He found her lying between the coffee table and the couch. Blood was everywhere and a pair of scissors lay on the coffee table beside her Bible. She had been stabbed five times.
The next couple of weeks were a blur.
“Why would someone do something like that?” Tony asked. “She wouldn’t have hurt a fly.”
Durham County Sheriff’s deputies are just as baffled at why someone would kill Rosa, who weighed less than 100 pounds and was less than 5 feet tall.
Whoever killed her got what they came for. Two televisions, a DVD player and jewelry were missing, some of which family members found strewn in the front yard a day after it happened, Tony said.
Months have passed without an arrest, and during that time Tony and other family members have grappled with theories of who would kill his mother and why it happened. He has little doubt she knew her murderer, and that idea sickens him.
“I kind of feel like I can’t trust anybody,” he said. “I meet someone in town and I think, ‘Could it be him?’”
Rosa Crabtree always kept the door locked. It was a practice from which she never strayed, especially since her husband died. The door was unlocked the morning Tony found his mother, and there was no sign of forced entry.
Police aren’t so sure she let the assailant in that night, noting that Rosa had not put the cover over her station wagon when she was killed. Maybe she left the door unlocked, and was moments away from putting the cover on her car. She was not yet in her pajamas, leading investigators to think she was killed sometime between 8:30 p.m. and midnight. Because of the amount and bulk of the items taken from the house, police say they are relatively sure more than one person was involved.
According to earlier media reports, investigators processed the crime scene and found DNA evidence, which the sheriff’s office sent to DNA Security, an Alamance County laboratory run by Dr. Brian Meehan, who received national media attention for his involvement with the Durham County District Attorney’s office in the Duke Lacrosse case.
There are “persons of interest” in the case, Capt. Paul Martin said, but the evidence has not been able to eliminate them as suspects or establish probable cause for an arrest.
“Sometimes evidence is not of the nature of … a one-to-one relationship,” Capt. Martin said. “You have a suspect and you have this evidence. Sometimes the evidence that we get is not like that.”
Despite the fact that the discovery of DNA evidence and its subsequent analysis by DNA Security was widely reported on by local media, Capt. Martin refused to confirm even that the evidence gathered was DNA.
“We have physical evidence that can help us secure, that can help us clear the case,” he said. “We do have that kind of evidence. But we don’t want to say what that evidence is right now.”
Instead, Capt. Martin insists the state legislature is creating an environment where people who habitually break into homes are allowed to roam free. First-time offenders typically don’t receive jail time, he said, and remarked that he has seen probation handed down to people with five, even six prior burglary convictions.
But Tony Crabtree isn’t concerned with the finer points of structured sentencing guidelines. He just wants to see his mother’s murderer behind bars.
He stills owns the house his mother was killed in, even scrubbed blood off the walls and cleaned the carpet himself in the weeks after her death. He keeps the house as it was, and resisted any urge he may have had to sell it. He grew up there and hopes one day to see his daughter move in.
Some evenings, he rides over to check on things. Every so often, he’ll sit on the back porch in silence, looking out on the idyllic fields of his youth.
“She should be sitting with me,” he said. “There’s no justice.”
