Post Mortem | When Selonia Reed Never Came Home

0:07Welcome back to 48 Hours Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today we're talking to CBS News national correspondent Vladimir Duthiers about the murder of Salonia Reid 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.

0:54And 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?

1:35There 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.

2:20So 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. 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.

3:02And 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?

3:55In 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, I 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.

4:44And that became a huge complication in figuring out who was ultimately the responsible party for that Winston cigarette that was found in the car. 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. What is really kind of unique, I think, about this 48 Hours episode is that so much of it is told through the lens of Reggie Jr., who was a child, a small child. He was only six years old, and watching him in the police video is just heartbreaking.

5:36I 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. 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, 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.

6:24And 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.

7:12maybe you're tense too and so your kid is tense but you're tense and you know that you want that you want the child to uh 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 while they try to get answers from from your kid because maybe you think that hugging the child or might be seen as somehow coaching or prodding um the child to do something so maybe i don't know these are yeah this is just me watching the video the same way you did in the same way our audience did. I'd be very curious to see what the audience says.

7:47I 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 you go into an interrogation room with the 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.

8:35They'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.

9:21So we'll talk a little bit about Hammond, right? It's a town in the South. Yeah, about 22 ,000 residents, a 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 when we 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.

10:14And 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 Reid'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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12:53Welcome 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. They sit in their office. Police present the evidence to them and they say thumbs up or thumbs down or go out and get more evidence. But they don't go out. How unusual was this? I thought it was incredibly unusual for the prosecutor to go on a road trip like the one Anthony and Ward took to Atlanta.

13:43But, you know, the case would not have been solved if they hadn't had this sense of purpose, this sense of mission. 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 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. 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. They do not get Jimmy Ray Barnes to agree, though.

14:35They can't convince him. 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. 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. Yeah, I mean, when they come knocking the first time around, that's probably the best deal you're going to get.

15:24So Reginald Reed's trial, murder trial, begins November 14th, 2022. It is more than 30 years after Salonia's murder. He was defended by a mother-daughter team, Vanessa Williams, very memorable name, and Latoya Williams-Simon. I don't think I've ever seen a mother-daughter defense duo before. What were they like? 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? With her daughter? Yep. Yeah. I don't remember how old she was, but she would take classes with her young daughter there.

16:10Okay, I see. Okay, at first I thought they went to law school at the same time. But she's got a little kid doing her little kid homework and she's doing her law school homework. Exactly. 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. Did you get the sense from them that they felt this is a bad case, like a poor case against him, or this guy didn't do it? He's being railroaded.

16:50I 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. 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. So they say there was a lot of evidence that they just couldn't present, that the jury didn't hear. Like what? So Vanessa and LaToya explained to me how completely not credible Jimmy Ray Barnes was.

17:38That 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. Right. So something that the jury did hear about, though, from Taylor Anthony, the prosecutor, was about the life insurance policies. $700 ,000. He said$700 ,000 worth of reasons to kill this woman. There you go. So that's a lot of money today. It was a lot more money, you know, 30 years ago. So what happened with that money? So we do know that with the money that Reginald Reed Sr. received, he was able to open up a nightclub.

18:29He 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. Reginald. He never got the money. Never got the money. 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.

19:14He 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 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? Have you asked him? Yeah. And what does he say? I don't know. And he sort of hems and haws as to what his father answers. His dad is convicted, right? A jury finds Reginald Reed guilty on November 18th, 2022.

19:55He's guilty of second degree murder. And here's the thing, that he remains connected to his father, but he is not connected to his mother's family. um, Celonia's sister, Gwen Smith says she's worried about him. Why does he not have a connection to his mother's side? This is, this part of the story is incredibly murky, even for us to understand. It goes into family dynamics. The family of Celonia Reed believes that Reginald Sr. killed Celonia Reed. There's no doubt in their minds that, that he did it. And because of that, and because Reggie himself has questions that linger, it has led to this tension.

20:50And so for Reggie, it's hard. 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. Yeah. You know, we want to believe often as humans that people can be all one thing, that we can put them in a box. And for Reginald, you know, his father is not all one thing. And whether he believes that he killed his mother or not, that's not all he is to Reginald. and you can see that this will be you know a lifelong struggle for him wrestling with this you're right he named his daughter selonia which i thought was beautiful um and i found it fascinating that he was willing to share as much as he shared with me and to not be to not be definitive about what he believes or what he doesn't believe or 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 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 perspective.

22:16And then you have Taylor Anthony, the assistant district attorney who believes fervently that in 1987, 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 Selenia Reed is resting easier today because he put behind bars the man he believes killed her. Wow. It's a great hour, Vlad. It's an incredible story and you did an excellent job. It was really an incredible experience.

23:01This 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 much as as long as I need to do them. And that's what we were able to do here. Spend a lot of time with the attorney, spend a lot of time 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.

23:46Absolutely. So thank you for joining us. Thanks, Anne-Marie. And I want to remind the listeners that if you like this series, Postmortem, please rate and review 48 Hours on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow 48 Hours wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen ad free with a 48 Hours Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. Thanks again for listening.