In May 2004, John Ray, a 32-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran and paralegal, failed to show up for work or to return calls.

Police made a welfare call at his Lakewood Heights home, where there were obvious signs of a struggle. “John Ray was in the dining room on his stomach in a hogtied fashion,” said Nicole Esquilin, a detective with the Atlanta Police Department.

“He appeared to have been stabbed,” she told The Real Murders of Atlanta, airing Fridays at 9/8c on Oxygen.

Who murdered John Ray?

The medical examiner determined Ray had been stabbed numerous times, once so violently that the blade broke off and stuck in his body. “He had been laying there for at least three days,” said Ab Calhoun, a former detective with the Atlanta Police Department.

The crime scene was processed but it had been scrubbed down. “We could smell the bleach,” said Esquilin.

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Investigators surveyed the scene, finding what appeared to be the killer’s bloody shirt in the washing machine, which was bagged as evidence. Two glasses on the table suggested Ray was having drinks with someone. Further inspection turned up a broken vodka bottle. But a TV, DVD player, watch, briefcase and other valuables were all missing, indicating a robbery.

Was John Ray’s murder a robbery gone bad?

“It appeared that John and this person were maybe having cocktails and then suddenly there’s a burst of violence,” said Esquilin.

Although Ray had no security camera, he did have an alarm system that had been turned off. It suggested that Ray likely knew who he’d let in.

Investigators dug deeper to find out more about Ray. Members of his inner circle described him as a “great guy” who was “bright” and driven by an ambition to be a lawyer. He was on the path as a paralegal.

But the investigators also uncovered a secret. “Speaking with friends, we did learn that John was gay,” said Esquilin. “That wasn’t something that he wanted everybody to know.”

Police determined that Ray’s car was missing and issued nationwide APB. To their surprise, they get a hit right away. The vehicle had been in an accident three days earlier and was impounded, per investigators.

A clue to the killer from Jay Ray’s stolen car

The traffic infraction had occurred close to Ray’s home. Investigators learned that in the early morning hours of May 16, 2004, officers attempted to pull over a Black male for running a red light, said Calhoun.

The suspect sped away and crashed the car into a power pole before fleeing on foot, according to Adriane Love, Chief Deputy District Attorney for Fulton County DA’s Office.

Ray’s car became a key piece of evidence. Items stolen from his house were in the vehicle.

Numerous Burglaries in John Ray’s Home Puzzle Police

“Whoever killed John and took these items left all those items in the car so probably the person who fled from the car is our killer,” said Esquilin.

In addition, the driver’s blood was on the airbag, which had inflated on impact. Evidence was sent to the crime lab to create a DNA profile. The profile wasn’t a match for anyone in the database of offenders.

Detectives focused on the scene of the murder. They learned that Ray had been burglarized a number of times. “We started to lean more towards thinking that this was a burglary gone bad,” said Esquilin.

John Ray’s case goes cold for nearly 7 years

Considering the repeated break-ins, police asked Ray’s friends who might be targeting him. They learned there was bad blood between Ray and his landlord. Ray was led to believe he was in a “rent to buy” arrangement, but the house was actually in foreclosure.

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Police investigated this avenue thoroughly. Between the landlord’s airtight alibi and DNA sample, he was cleared as a suspect.

“DNA doesn’t lie,” said Esquilin. “So you just eliminate people one by one.”

Back at square one, detectives reached out to the media with a news blast to help rustle up leads.

One tipster told police that Ray had been dating a man named Grant. The relationship soured when Ray refused to loan him $500, said Esquilin.

Investigators learned that Grant and Ray broke up two weeks before the murder and that Grant moved out of state after their split. He agreed to give a DNA sample, which cleared him as a suspect.

The case idled for weeks, and then months. A painstaking and time-consuming search of online gay dating sites proved to be yet another dead end for investigators. A year went by and investigators were no closer to catching Ray’s killer.

“The case of the murder of John Ray sat on the shelf in the Atlanta homicide division for six years,” said Marcus Garner, a former reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Torico Jackson named a suspect in John Ray’s murder

In 2010, there was a glimmer of hope. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office created the Complex and Cold Case task force, which began investigating the case.  

DNA evidence from Ray’s car was fed back into the CODIS database. This time, the profile came up with a match to Torico Jackson.

Detectives learned that Jackson was “a career criminal. He had done a lot of armed robberies,” said Esquilin.

At the time, it turned out that Jackson was behind bars for a similar charge. Investigators confronted Jackson about why his blood was inside Ray’s car.

Jackson repeatedly denied any knowledge of Ray. Convinced they weren’t getting a confession out of Jackson, they obtained a DNA swab sample. As they did, they took note of the scar on Jackson’s nose, which they believed may have come from crashing Ray’s car.

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Going through photos of Jackson before and after the car crash, police observed that he didn’t have the mark on his nose prior to the accident. Jackson denied injuring his nose in the crash, even though Jackson’s DNA sample matched the blood inside Ray’s car.

Investigators still faced a hurdle. They had to show that Jackson had been inside Ray’s house.

Detectives looked at John Ray’s phone records and they observed numerous phone calls made from the residence around the time of John Ray’s death, according to Esquilin. Investigators reached out to people who had been called from Ray’s house. A number of them reported that they didn’t know Ray but did know Jackson.

The phone records were damning, but then investigators found more evidence he was inside the house. They turned up a photo of Jackson wearing the same shirt that had been found in Ray’s washing machine and collected as evidence.

Torico Jackson arrested for John Ray’s murder

In September 2011, Jackson was indicted for murder. Investigators theorized that Jackson targeted Ray, perhaps suggesting he was interested in dating. But he was really interested in robbing him. The confrontation, detectives believed, turned deadly.

Jackson’s defense team argued self-defense. But in the end, Jackson was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without the chance of parole.

To learn more about the case, watch The Real Murders of Atlanta, airing Fridays at 9/8c on Oxygen.

A Missouri man is accused of killing his estranged wife, then sending disturbing messages about the act to his sister and friend.

John Wonder, 31, was arrested Sept. 22 in connection with the death of his wife, Ashli Erhardt, who was found unresponsive and suffering puncture wounds in the couple’s basement laundry room. Wonder was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action, according to the arrest warrant.  

Wonder and Erhardt both worked at the same place and earlier that day, their boss called 911 to request a welfare check on the couple’s home when they did not show up for work, per the probable cause statement. The employer  knew that the couple were getting a divorce but were still living together.  

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Kansas City police met Erhardt’s parents and Wonder’s mother at the couple’s residence around 10:30 a.m. Friday after informing them of the welfare check.

According to court documents, police heard Erhardt’s father tell his wife to “go upstairs” after finding an unidentified female lying on the basement laundry room floor.

How was Ashlii Erhardt Killed?

After entering the basement, officers found what appeared to be a dead woman, later identified as Erhardt, with what appeared to be a belt wrapped around her neck,” per the probable cause statement. “She was nude from the waist down. ‘Wonder’ was written in blood on her leg. There was what appeared to be several puncture wounds to her left side with blood coming from the wounds. There was a large butcher knife and meat clever located just to the northwest of her body.”

Wonder was nowhere to be found. His sister informed police that she received a cryptic message from her brother the same day.

“Hey kiddo, sorry about the mess. For the record: it’s way easier and much more satisfying than you can imagine,” the message allegedly read.

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A friend of Wonder’s also received a series of messages via Facebook, which detailed Wonder’s plan to discard his phone and drive North to Fargo, according to the probable cause statement.

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About an hour later, he wrote, “Now depleted, in anger I placed her gemstones set next to her body. Her third­eye shakra, her moonstone, blah blah blah – a lot of good they did you, hun.”

He told his friend he thought he would be caught that same day. “I keep thinking about how she never screamed. Just took it like a champ,” he allegedly wrote. “What a gal. To honor her. I will not go out by gunshot (suicide by cop) but by, hopefully a similar fate as Ashli.”

Wonder was arrested later Friday in Valentine, Nebraska, according to The Kansas City Star. He was roughly 500 miles away from Kansas City.

He is being held on a $1 million cash bond.

According to Wonder’s mother, the couple began dating sometime in 2016 or early 2017 and have two children together. The two started seeing a marriage counselor about a year ago, but ultimately decided to get a divorce. Erhardt was supposed to move out of the couple’s shared residence on Oct. 1.

“My heart is completely shattered,” Erhardt’s mother wrote on Facebook. “She is the beautiful young woman that gave us our beloved grandbabies, who are safe and in our care.”

“This little tiny boy, was told today that he would never see his mommy again,” she added about her grandchild, Erhardt’s son. “We will make sure she is remembered in our home every single minute of every single day.”

The family of Deundrea Lakelsia Ford — a 21-year-old mom who disappeared on September 22 — believes she was abducted and is asking for the public’s help to locate her.

The young Houston resident was last seen on video footage walking out of her workplace with an unidentified man near the 11900 block of the East Freeway between 1:00 a.m. and 1:20 a.m., the Houston Police reported in a press release on Tuesday. There has been no trace of her since.

Ford had just started a new job as a dancer at Diva’s Bikini Sports Bar & Grill two weeks before her disappearance, said her family. According to her relative who spoke with Oxygen.com, she had been dropped off at work on September 21 and was waiting for a ride from a family friend to take her home. She and her 4-year-old son, who her family described as her “pride and joy,” lived with her grandmother about 40 minutes away.

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“Her son is her best friend, and she takes really good care of him. She just taught him how to ride a bike and loves racing around with him,” her relative told Oxygen.com.

According to her family member who asked to not be identified by name, another dancer was the last person to see Ford as she exited the club with a male customer, and video footage captured Ford and the unidentified man getting into a white GMC Savana 3-door van. Her family told Oxygen.com that Ford called her ride — a friend of her grandmother — to inform them that someone else would take her home. But the family friend told her not to leave. Authorities believe the white van sat in the parking lot for more than an hour.

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“Her ride pulled up just when she was taking off with the van. The van took off with both the headlights and taillights off,” said the relative. “There’s video footage of a New Jersey license plate, but you can’t see the whole license. It’s not a passenger van; it’s a worker van.”

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At the time of her disappearance, police say Ford was wearing tan pants and a black tank top. She is 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 170 pounds. “An important detail is that her hair had just been braided that day, brand new and fresh, with really long braided extensions,” her relative noted.

Her family member also told Oxygen.com that another unidentified woman was seen on video inside the club sitting next to Ford before she left, and she believes a manager was present at the club. The family hopes customers and employees who were there that night and saw Ford can provide clues about the man’s identity.

“Our family really wants to get her home. We have lost so many nights of sleep. I’m at a loss for words because it’s a lot right now.”

Anyone with information about her whereabouts is asked to contact the Houston police or the Black and Missing Foundation.

One of the last living witnesses to the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur has been arrested in the Las Vegas-area, a long-awaited breakthrough in a case that has frustrated investigators and fascinated the public ever since the hip-hop icon was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip 27 years ago.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis was taken into custody early Friday morning, on suspicion of murder, according to two officials with first-hand knowledge of the arrest. They were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of an expected indictment later Friday.

It wasn’t immediately clear from court records if Davis has an attorney who can comment on his behalf. Davis hasn’t responded to multiple phone and text messages from The Associated Press seeking comment or an interview in the more than two months since police raided his wife’s home July 17 in nearby Henderson. Documents said police were looking for items “concerning the murder of Tupac Shakur.”

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Police reported collecting multiple computers, a cellphone and hard drive, a Vibe magazine that featured Shakur, several .40-caliber bullets, two “tubs containing photographs” and a copy of Davis’ 2019 tell-all memoir, “Compton Street Legend.”

Davis has long been known to investigators and has himself admitted in interviews and in his 2019 memoir that he was in the Cadillac from which the gunfire erupted during the September 1996 drive-by shooting.

Shakur was gunned down when he was 25. He was in a BMW driven by Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight and they waiting at a red light when the Cadillac pulled up next to them.

The rapper’s death came as his fourth solo album, “All Eyez on Me,” remained on the charts, with some 5 million copies sold. Nominated six times for a Grammy Award, Shakur is still largely considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time.

In his memoir, Davis said he was in the front passenger seat of the Cadillac and had slipped the weapon used in the killing into the backseat, from where he said the shots were fired.

Davis implicated his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, saying he was one of two people in the backseat. Anderson, a known rival of Shakur, had been involved in a casino brawl with the rapper shortly before the shooting.

Anderson died two years later. He denied any involved in Shakur’s death.

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Davis revealed in his memoir that he first broke his silence in 2010 during a closed-door meeting with federal and local authorities. At the time, he was 46 and facing life in prison on drug charges when he agreed to speak with them about Tupac’s killing, as well as the fatal shooting six months later of Tupac’s rap rival, Biggie Smalls, also known as the Notorious B.I.G.,

“They offered to let me go for running a ‘criminal enterprise’ and numerous alleged murders for the truth about the Tupac and Biggie murders,” he wrote. “They promised they would shred the indictment and stop the grand jury if I helped them out.”

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Davis has described himself as one of the last living witnesses to the shooting.

Shakur was feuding at the time with rap rival Biggie Smalls, who was fatally shot in March 1997. At the time, both rappers were in the middle of an East Coast-West Coast rivalry that primarily defined the hip-hop scene during the mid-1990s.

Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police detective who spent years investigating the Shakur killing and wrote a book about it, said he was not surprised by Davis’ indictment and arrest.

“It’s so long overdue,” Kading told The Associated Press during a recent interview. “People have been yearning for him to be arrested for a long time. It’s never been unsolved in our minds. It’s been unprosecuted.”

Kading said he interviewed Davis in 2008 and 2009, during Los Angeles police investigations of the killings of Shakur in Las Vegas and the slaying of Biggie Smalls.

Kading said also that he talked with a Las Vegas police detective about the case, including after the SWAT raid in July at the home in Henderson.

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The former Los Angeles police detective said he believed the investigation gained new momentum in recent years following Davis’ public descriptions of his role in the killing, including his 2019 memoir.

“It’s those events that have given Las Vegas the ammunition and the leverage to move forward,” Kading said. “Prior to Keffe D’s public declarations, the cases were unprosecutable as they stood.”

“He put himself squarely in the middle of the conspiracy,” Kading said of Davis and the Shakur slaying. “He had acquired the gun, he had given the gun to the shooter and he had been present in the vehicle when they hunted down and located both Tupac and Suge (Knight).”

Kading noted that Davis is the last living person among the four people who were in the vehicle from which shots were fired at Shakur and Knight. Others were Anderson, Davis’ nephew; Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown; and DeAndre “Freaky” Smith.

“It’s a concerted effort of conspirators,” Kading said, adding that he believed that because the killing was premeditated Davis could face a first-degree murder charge.

“All the other direct conspirators or participants are all dead,” Kading said. “Keffe D is the last man standing among the individuals that conspired to kill Tupac.”