Osmond Malcom has heard his mother loved to cook and loved helping people. He’s heard his 7-year-old sister Lucretia was looking forward to summer and barbeques that were just days away. But that’s all second-hand knowledge since they were both murdered when he was just 2-years-old. Now, 41-year-old Osmond is hoping to finally get some justice for his beloved family by putting their case in the public spotlight through the Chicago Police Department’s new Cold Case video series.
The series began on Monday with Lizzie and Lucretia, and will continue every week. Each episode will focus on a cold case killing, and will feature testimonials from the victim’s family members as well as a CPD detective who recounts the specifics of the case.
“I think the families’ participation in the video series is really what’s going to, in my opinion, engage potential witnesses to come forward,” Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown told WGN. “You see the passion. It’s like it happened yesterday for these families.”
That is certainly evident in the first CPD: Cold Case video that begins with Osmond remembering what he can about his mother and sister—which unfortunately is not a lot.
“Lizzie Lee was a mother that I’ve never had the honor and privilege of knowing,” says Osmond.
Despite being 2-years-old at the time, he does remember the day she and Lucretia were murdered. On July 2, 1981, Linda—a woman Osmond and his siblings were afraid—placed the boy and his 4-year-old sister Nicole in the bathroom of their family apartment and threatened them not to come out. To protect her brother, Nicole put Osmond under the bathroom sink and instructed him to be quiet. Eventually, they emerged from the bathroom only to find 7-year-old Lucretia lying on the bedroom floor, unresponsive.
Nicole ran to her grandmother’s house a block away for help. After rushing Lucretia to the hospital where she was pronounced deceased, the family realized Lizzie was unaccounted for. When CPD returned to the apartment, they found Lizzie’s body in the closet on the second floor of the house—bound, gagged and with a telephone cord around her neck. The cause of death for both Lizzie and Lucretia was ruled homicide by strangulation.
Witnesses place Linda inside the family apartment before fleeing in a vehicle. At the time, CPD was able to ascertain her identify, but “due to circumstances beyond the control of the Chicago Police Department as well as the Cook County State’s Attorney office, Linda could not be arrested or charged with the murders of Lizzie and Lucretia,” explains William Svilar, a lieutenant in the homicide division.
“We need information to bring a prosecution in this terrible double murder,” Svilar says in the video. “No detail is too small. No piece of information is insignificant.”
Osmond also urges anyone with information to call the Chicago Police Department. “Help us solve this case. Help me heal my family and help me put my mom and my sister to rest,” he says.
DNA and Witnesses
While investigators have always been committed to solving their department’s cold cases, in recent years, these cases have become a bigger focus as advances in DNA analysis technology—including forensic genetic genealogy—are opening the door to more investigative leads than ever before.
In addition to DNA, cold case investigators find witnesses are key to solving cases that have gone cold—which is why gaining public attention through videos like CPD’s Cold Case series is so important.
“Over time, we know that fear subsides and priorities change. A person may reexamine his conscious. People may have had information about these cases that, for whatever reason, they did not share before,” said Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher Mason, whose Unresolved Cases Unit recently created a deck of cards featuring 52 of the state’s cold cases.
In summer 2020, the Phoenix Police Department had a similar idea, launching "Hot Desert, Cold Cases," a video series that highlighted a different cold case every week.
According to WGN, the CPD currently has about 1,100 detectives, 40 of whom are assigned to investigate cold cases. Superintendent Brown said he expects to ask for more money in the CPD budget to expand the ranks of the Detectives Division in an effort to lower each investigator’s case load and, hopefully, improve the department’s clearance rate.