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Yvonne Pointer made one last heartbreaking promise to her daughter.
As she gazed at 14-year-old Gloria Pointer’s broken and battered body, Yvonne promised to find the killer who’d attacked her child on the way to school in Cleveland, Ohio.
It would take nearly 30 years, countless letters to convicted criminals, and a relentless spirit before Yvonne, along with a dedicated group of detectives and prosecutors, would finally be able to deliver on that vow, according to the “A Promise to Gloria” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
Who was Gloria Pointer?
The morning of December 6, 1984 was supposed to be special for Gloria. The bubbly teen was expected to receive a special award at school for perfect attendance.
“Gloria was the type of daughter that every mother wished she could have had, very obedient, just a caring, loving person,” her mom, Yvonne, told Dateline. “A child that the school loved and the teachers loved and everybody. I know I probably make it sound like she was so perfect, but she was.”
That morning, Gloria, a popular cheerleader, called her best friend to ask if she could borrow a special comb to try out a new hairstyle for the awards ceremony. She planned to stop by her friend’s house that morning on the way to school, according to Dateline.
But Gloria would never arrive.
The morning Gloria Pointer was killed
Gloria’s mom Yvonne, stepdad and brother — who were out in their car delivering newspapers — spotted her on that snowy morning in Cleveland, as she was walking to school.
Yvonne remembers seeing her daughter walking toward an alleyway known among kids as “the cut,” a shortcut to the junior high school that Gloria attended that ran through a back alley. Yvonne called out to her daughter to ask why she was walking in that direction.
“I didn’t like the road because she was going through the back way,” Yvonne told Dateline.
Although Gloria heard her mom, she didn’t change her route. Gloria’s classmate Lamar Thomas also spotted Gloria walking behind him near the school with another person, who he assumed was a friend.
“They went up a side of a house and it seemed like they was just goofing off and about to come, you know, a few minutes later they would be in the school,” Thomas told Dateline.
But Gloria never made it to the school or attended the ceremony where she was due to receive an award. When the school realized she was absent, they called her mother.
“They just said, ‘Is Gloria there?’ Because they called her name to get this award and she didn’t respond,” Yvonne remembered.
After the school principal made an announcement over the intercom, and it was determined that no one had seen the 14-year-old at school that day, he instructed Yvonne to “call the police.”
Gloria Pointer’s body found
What Gloria’s mother and school administrators didn’t know at the time, was that members of the Cleveland Division of Police had already made a grisly discovery after someone called authorities to report suspicious activity behind an apartment building near the school.
Jack Bornfeld, who was then a homicide detective in Cleveland, recalled going to the back of the building and finding a metal fire escape that led down to the basement level of the building. It was down there that Gloria’s body was found.
“When they first went down there, they observed the victim. She was laying on her stomach at the foot of the stairs,” Bornfeld told Dateline.
What happened to Gloria Pointer?
Gloria had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death. Her school identification and backpack were found lying next to her body.
“It was very hard to sit there and look at this 14-year-old innocent child that was on her way to school to be the victim of such a horrendous crime,” Janice Abernathy, then a Cleveland detective, told Dateline.
When Yvonne heard the devastating news about her daughter, she collapsed to the floor.
“I remember them saying, ‘We found a body,’” she said. “I was having an out-of-body experience. It’s almost like you go to a place of comfort, of denial.”
Yvonne Pointer makes a promise to her daughter
Yvonne said she spent those first few days after her daughter’s death “trying to adjust to the emptiness,” but she also had to plan a funeral.
At the funeral home, she asked to have a private moment with her daughter, whose battered body was now covered by a sheet.
“I pulled the cover back and I just looked at her from head to toe and I said, ‘Gloria, don’t worry, I’ll find out who did this,'” Yvonne told Dateline. “I made a promise to her and grief took a backseat at that moment, because we needed to find the killer.”
Detectives quickly got to work trying to do just that.
Police narrow down suspects in Gloria Pointer case
A female teacher driving to school also reported seeing Gloria walking with a man wearing “heavy clothing” that morning, but given the near white-out conditions of the snow storm, none of the witnesses were able to provide a very good description of the man.
“This case rested on good old-fashioned police work, pounding the pavement and knocking on doors,” Bornfeld said.
Detectives took a hard look at Gloria’s stepfather and her boyfriend at school, but her stepfather had still been out delivering papers at the time of the murder and classmates reported seeing her boyfriend at the school.
Yvonne suspected a “strange” neighbor who was “always talking about female body parts.” Her suspicions only grew when the man bent down and kissed Gloria on the lips during the wake.
“Not too many people kiss a corpse, except for maybe a loved one,” Abernathy said.
Detectives called the man in for questioning, but he didn’t say or do anything that made them think he was involved.
Law enforcement officers also knew that in the months before Gloria died, three other 14-year-old girls had been killed in Cleveland. On the very same day Gloria was killed, another young girl was attacked at around 6:30 p.m., not far from her school.
The girl managed to escape and a man named Romell Broom was arrested. Broom was also linked to one of the earlier murders, that of 14-year-old Tryna Middleton. Detectives believed he could have also been responsible for Gloria’s killing.
“He had a record of previous rapes, there’s some detectives at the time that said this got to be the guy,” Abernathy said.
Broom was convicted and sentenced to death in Middleton’s case, but no evidence ever linked him to Gloria’s murder.
Yvonne Pointer advocates for her daughter
For years, Yvonne wrote letters to Broom, asking if he’d killed her daughter. The determined mom also wrote to other convicted criminals in the hopes that one of them had overheard something in prison about her daughter.
As the years passed without answers, she became a passionate anti-crime advocate, starting a midnight basketball league in Cleveland to keep kids off the streets, serving as a surrogate mom to kids who needed extra encouragement, and speaking out about her daughter’s death across the country.
She also continued to press investigators, meeting with each new chief of police over the years, to keep her daughter’s case at the front of their minds.
Judge Richard Bell was working as an assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County at the time, and was instrumental in starting a special cold case unit at the district attorney’s office. Gloria’s case was one of the first the unit tackled. Using advancing DNA technology, they were able to get a profile of the killer, but still had no one to match it to.
They compared the sample to samples from those in Gloria’s life at the time of her killing, including her boyfriend, as well as Broom, but none matched.
Who killed Gloria Pointer?
In 2013, nearly 30 years after Gloria’s murder, the DNA profile of her killer was entered into a state DNA database and authorities finally got the break they’d been waiting for. The profile matched to 58-year-old Hernandez Warren, a man who had spent 16 years behind bars for felonious assault and rape.
Warren, who was 29 years old at the time of Gloria’s murder, was brought in for questioning. Although he initially denied having any involvement in the crime, he seemed haunted by photos detectives showed him of Gloria and eventually confessed.
“Why did I do it?” he asked. “How could I do something like that?”
Warren told authorities that he’d spotted Gloria on her way to school, grabbed her by the elbow and forced her to the bottom of the stairs at the apartment where her body was later found, where he attacked her and beat her to death.
He was arrested and later pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and rape in Gloria’s killing. He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
Gloria’s death was devastating for her mother, but Yvonne used her grief to speak out and help others.
“Her homicide gave me the option that I could lay down and die or I can rise up and live,” Yvonne told Dateline. “And, along the way, I became the person who I was looking for.”
