Once I was convinced I knew who had killed Jorell, I called the detective in charge of Jorell’s case, Ryan Wojciuch. I was excited to discuss the news, and see if he thought my insight into the case—particularly Chauncey James’s possible motive—could help bring James to justice.
I left him a message. He never called back. I later found out that both Wojciuch and the original lead detective on the case, Jason Rodesiler, had been transferred to different departments. Neither worked in homicide anymore. It wasn’t clear who, if anyone, was now covering Jorell’s case.
It was officially on the back burner.
This was frustrating, but I was soon able to make inroads with a different St. Louis County detective. At the suggestion of a journalist friend, I reached out to Joe Burgoon, a cold case investigator with the St. Louis County Police. Burgoon, who had recently turned eighty, spent more than forty years with the St. Louis city police department, as an officer and a sergeant. Since he began working cold cases for the county in 2005, he’d solved four murders and dozens of sexual assaults.
He was the real deal. Other detectives I’d spoken with had been curt, but Burgoon didn’t rush. In preparation for our phone call he’d gone through Jorell’s files, including infractions Jorell committed before he turned eighteen, records I didn’t have access to. Burgoon found that he’d been arrested for receiving stolen property, and also for possessing marijuana, though the charges didn’t amount to much. Burgoon listened as I described the ins and outs of Jorell’s daily life.
“He sounds like a good kid,” Burgoon said. “He had a job and a girlfriend.”
We spoke about Chauncey James. Beyond Jorell’s case, James had been arrested a half dozen times, on gun, drug, and DUI charges. He’d never been convicted of a felony, but he continued having issues with law enforcement in the years after Jorell’s killing, including for possessing a controlled substance. After his divorce he moved out of Ferguson.
I believed James had killed Jorell, I told Burgoon. But I could only speculate why the assistant county prosecutor didn’t charge him.
When I finished, I expected Burgoon to say he couldn’t help me, that we were out of luck. But he didn’t.
“If the witness or witnesses can be convinced to talk, then maybe we can get the prosecutor to bring it to the grand jury,” he said. “But that’s a big if. They don’t want to be known as a snitch.”
Burgoon said he himself likely couldn’t get the job done—that he’d probably fail like the other detectives before him. “They don’t know me from Adam,” he said, of the witnesses.
But Joe Cleveland and I could try to appeal to the witnesses, as people who knew and loved Jorell, Burgoon went on. This personal touch might be more effective at swaying them to testify.
This seemed like good advice. I thanked Burgoon and said goodbye.
I talked with my mother about the situation. She’d received bad news in early 2020, when she was diagnosed with ALS, the neurodegenerative disorder known as Lou Gehrig’s disease that causes one’s muscles to waste away. She’d always been supportive of my journalism career, even when it took me in dangerous directions. But this case scared her. “What if the perp gets wind of this and comes for retribution?” she asked. “What are you trying to accomplish?”
“If this guy has killed once, he could kill again,” I said. “He should be off the streets. And Jorell’s family may want closure.”
“I can certainly understand that. But I’m concerned about your safety. Think of your own family, your boys and Anna.”
The last thing I wanted was for my mother to be filled with dread and concern for me during her short time left. Yet at the same time, letting a killer go free seemed like a poor moral choice.
I felt a strong urge to understand Chauncey James. Really, to me he was just a name on a police report, a character in a rap video. I’d never spoken to him, and neither had Joe or anyone else in the Cleveland family. This despite the fact that, at the time of Jorell’s killing, he lived just a few blocks away.
He was like a black box to me, a mystery. This made it difficult to contemplate bringing a case against him. I had the strong urge to simply be in his presence, to see his face, to see what kind of man he was, as if just by breathing his air I could comprehend how he could do such a thing.
I planned to visit one of his hearings. I could take my pick: he was regularly in court, for offenses ranging from traffic violations to drug charges.
But then COVID-19 descended, and hearings moved online, with the public barred.
There was another possibility: from public records, I had his address. My first instinct as a journalist was to simply drop in on him. I could have gone over to his home at any time. But after much consideration, I decided not to meet him face-to-face. Sure, I would have learned something from the experience, and may have even acquired new information to share with Joe Cleveland.
But it was just too unsafe. I couldn’t abandon my responsibility to my family—to stay safe, to stay alive. Meeting Jorell’s killer in person could have compromised that. This value needed to stand above all others. I had to draw a line.
If anyone would have clear, unambiguous feelings about Chauncey James, I figured, it would be Joe Cleveland.
And yet, I was surprised to hear notes of sympathy in Joe’s voice when we talked about the man we both believed murdered his son, whom he called “Mr. James.” He had many questions for the man, including, most importantly:
“Did you really fear my son like that?”
Ultimately, Joe came to believe that James had good reason to fear Jorell, considering Jorell had already allegedly assaulted his wife and shot at him.
“If a person was shooting at me, then yeah I’d keep an eye on them,” Joe said. “Maybe I would try to hurt them before they hurt me.”
He added: “But to lay and ambush a person, I don’t think that’s right.”
We kept coming back to the subject of justice, and what it meant in this context. I was focused on justice through the court system, but Joe mused on street justice.
“I don’t think I could say, ‘I want to see him murdered,’” he said. “I wouldn’t say I want to see his life taken. I’d be damned if I wanna spend the rest of my life in prison. Two wrongs don’t make no right.” Joe speculated that, if he hired someone else to take James out, that person might later tell the cops, leading to Joe’s conviction.
I emphasized my strong preference for rolling the dice, yet again, on the criminal justice system, noting that any retribution could perpetuate an endless cycle of violence.
“Exactly,” Joe said. “Right, let the justice system work. I agree.”
We spoke about my conversation with Joe Burgoon, the cold case detective, who believed we could potentially get the case brought to trial.
“I want to see him on the stand,” Joe said of James. “I would like to hear him say something. Maybe he might have sense to say, ‘Well, that was a bad decision.’ He might just admit to it.”
Getting James to the stand, however, would likely require the testimony of witnesses. And there was one who mattered above all others—Lemarcus Winston, the guy riding his bike through Kinloch the afternoon of Jorell’s death. Winston passed the perpetrator standing near his “suspicious” white Ford, partially hidden by overgrown vegetation, and then saw Jorell. Winston continued on his way for a few more moments and then, when he heard the gunshot, backtracked and saw the perpetrator and the van gone, and Jorell lying dead.
Winston was the only person who’d seen the killer in the vicinity at the time of the killing. He’d only reluctantly told police what he’d seen, and he seemed to have absolutely no interest in testifying. He declined to pick the perpetrator out of a photo lineup.
He was thirty-two at the time Jorell was killed, and lived in Berkeley, about a mile north of the crime scene. I didn’t know him, but from his Facebook page he seemed like a good guy, posting pictures of his kids, and promoting a charitable organization benefiting Kinloch children.
But that’s about all I knew.
“I wouldn’t know him from a can of paint either,” Joe said.
Certainly, I could understand Winston’s state of mind; cooperating with police could potentially lead to violent retribution. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating. Here was someone who had the power to get Jorell’s killer off the streets, and he wasn’t interested.
The cold case detective believed Joe and I, the victim’s loving father and longtime mentor, could potentially persuade Winston to testify, more so than a random police detective. I asked Joe for his thoughts on this.
“I don’t know what kind of heart he might have,” Joe said of Winston. “Would this guy be putting himself in any danger?”
I suspected he would. If this case went to trial, and he testified, he could potentially face deadly blowback from people sympathetic to Chauncey James. Joe concurred. “He sends this guy to jail, then [James’s hypothetical] cousin…might want to retaliate on him.”
I also considered the possibility that Winston already knew James, and might try to protect him. Potentially, if we contacted him, he could even tell James that we were on his tail.
The thought made Joe weary.
“I’m gettin’ old,” he said. “All I want to do right now is try to enjoy my younger kids that I’m trying to raise, and the rest of my life. I don’t want any kind of beef, no kind of drama, nothin’ as far as these streets. I done got too old for that.”
Whatever Joe decided, I would follow his lead, I told him.
There was no doubt that he and the rest of the Clevelands would bear most of the brunt of the emotional cost of a trial. They were the ones who would face any blowback in the neighborhood.
“If you want justice for Jorell through the legal system,” I said, “I will put my full efforts into that.”
“You have a dangerous enough job as it is, doing some of the things that you do,” Joe said. “I wouldn’t want to see you jeopardize your life or your family.”
Undoubtedly, the detectives with the St. Louis County Police did a poor job communicating with the Cleveland family.
They never told them they’d tried to bring a suspect to trial. That stuck in my craw. After all, as Joe had noted, a conviction wasn’t the most important thing to him. More than anything, he wanted to know who had done it, and why.
Sharing at least some of their information with the Clevelands would have been an act of human decency. I’d imagine they could have done it without compromising the case.
One thing surprised me, however. It’s clear the detectives put in real effort. My impression was that the murders of young African American men often rank very low on the priority lists of law enforcement, but in this case the detectives seemed to have done much of the critical police work.
The problem wasn’t the detectives—it was the justice system itself.
“If we can persuade the law to get justice, I would like to see that because that’s what we pay tax dollars for,” Joe said. “They supposed to work for us.”
In Joe’s ideal world, James would be tried for killing Jorell, and he and I wouldn’t have to risk our lives to make it happen. “I couldn’t live with me knowing you did something to get you harmed,” Joe said. “I wouldn’t want to see you go and put yourself in harm’s way. I love you and care more about you than that.”
I felt the same way about him.
Unfortunately, as Detective Burgoon noted, in cases like this, police often have a difficult time getting witnesses to testify.
This owed, I knew, to the well-earned African American distrust of the justice system. It was a problem going back decades, even centuries. Joe and I agreed that it would not be easy to get the witness, Lemarcus Winston, to testify. He might face repercussions from James’s friends or family. Or, if his testimony wasn’t sufficient to convict James, James himself might go after Winston.
“We already know he’s tightened his lips up,” Joe said of Winston. “I don’t know much you can do behind that. It’s just a shame the way people do, but I guess he got a life and stuff that he got to try to protect.
“Maybe he might get a conscience one day and decide that he wants to talk,” Joe added.
I noted that we didn’t have to make any decisions now. The case was cold, and would stay that way. We pledged to keep the lines of communication open.
Just then Joe grew ruminative. He speculated that Chauncey James might one day do the right thing, perhaps if he was incarcerated for another crime, and found religion.
“I don’t know this guy Mr. James,” he said. “But maybe if he goes to prison, he might confess. This world is funny. I know people that have done that; admitted to other murders before they got out of prison.”
To my surprise, I eventually did get a meeting with the St. Louis County detectives. It happened after an influential friend of mine—Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state senator—hit up an influential friend of his, Chris King, the public information officer for the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
After Smith talked up my project, King got in touch with me immediately. He said the prosecutor’s office had declined to prosecute Jorell’s case owing to the lack of witness cooperation, which cold case detective Joe Burgoon had suspected.
He also said he’d get me in a room with the detectives, so I could share my findings.
This was an exciting development, but it said a lot about the way things worked in St. Louis. Going through the official channels had gotten me nowhere; I’d needed to utilize insider connections.
It’s always intimidating to enter a police station—What if they know about that time I shoplifted in tenth grade?—yet I was cautiously optimistic as I entered the county police headquarters in Clayton in June 2021. The detectives who’d originally worked on Jorell’s case had long ago moved to other departments, so they weren’t in attendance, but in a conference room I met with three detectives with knowledge of the case, Robert Bates, Andrew Hammel, and Matt Levy. All three were new to me, and they looked similar—white and probably in their thirties, with solid physiques and closely cropped hair.
Bates was now leading Jorell’s investigation, and he displayed a good knowledge of the case. In a room full of alphas, he was the most alpha, and Hammel described him as their department’s best and most experienced investigator.
I felt mixed emotions during our conversation. I maintained some animosity against the department, for not communicating with the Cleveland family about Jorell’s case. Yet I also knew that these specific detectives weren’t necessarily responsible, and further that acting rude wouldn’t get me anywhere.
The four of us gathered around a comically large conference table. They were surprised to hear how I’d gotten Jorell’s case file, but bore no ill will for my methods. They spoke candidly about the intricacies of his case, and about what would be required for a successful prosecution.
As a journalist, I was sure I had all I needed to convince my readers of Chauncey James’s guilt—a strong motive, cell phone tower records placing him near the crime scene, and a matching physical description from a witness, for starters. And, indeed, all three detectives believed James was the killer. Further, they gave tremendous credit to the witness Lemarcus Winston for offering so much insight into the case.
But when it came to convicting James in court, Winston’s interview was all but worthless, they lamented.
For starters, he hadn’t consented to be recorded. But even if he had, that recording couldn’t be used at a trial, because the defense has a right to cross-examine, and you can’t cross-examine a recording.
That was something I’d never thought of. Chris King, the public information officer for the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, had put it even more bluntly in an email to me: “Without an eyewitness or other definitive evidence, knowing someone is guilty is of no use in a criminal court.”
Was it possible, I asked Bates, that Winston might by now have changed his mind and agree to take the stand? Bates conceded that was possible, and that he would go back and ask Winston again.
I appreciated the gesture. But even that might not be enough, the detectives conceded. They imagined a defense lawyer’s version: James hadn’t actually been lying in wait for Jorell in Kinloch. Rather, his car simply broke down there. And then Jorell arrived—someone who’d shot at him before, and was now even brandishing a gun.
The killing was nothing but self-defense.
We went through more details, and discussed the peripheral players, but ultimately it became clear the case wasn’t going anywhere. The detectives stuck out their hands as we stood up and said our goodbyes, all of us vowing to stay in touch. As I left I felt more dispirited than ever about Jorell’s case.