My sister’s cold case

I am staring at the man accused of raping and murdering my sister, Vickie, in August 1979. She was 28.

I can see him, but he can’t see me. We are connected by video. He is dressed in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a Maryland jailhouse holding room waiting for his bail hearing to begin. I am alone in a hotel room, on a business trip to New York.

I am taken aback by his appearance. He was 18 in 1979. Now 62, he looks years older, agitated, eyes darting. He is Black — like me, like Vickie.

I can feel my chest tightening, sweat accumulating on my forehead. Vickie’s death left me with my own boogeyman. A faceless presence never far from my side. I saw real and imagined threats everywhere. My life was bifurcated into the before and the after. I lugged around survivor’s baggage — sorrow, guilt and fear.

And now there he is: The boogeyman has a face and a name: Andre Taylor. And, most important, genetic markers. He left behind DNA when he brutally raped Vickie, shot her in the head and left her body alongside a rural road in Charles County, Md. For four decades, the police made no arrests. Her killing added to the shocking number of unsolved murdered or missing Black women and girls in the U.S.

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My younger sister, Kay, now a retired California deputy sheriff, kept pushing for answers. I chose instead to focus on supporting Vickie’s son, who was 8 at the time of her death, on raising money for the Vickie Belk Scholarship Foundation launched by our family church and on speaking out against gun violence.

Then in mid-2023, the combination of enhanced DNA technology, Kay’s determination and new leadership in the Charles County Sheriff’s Department and the Maryland state attorney’s office, there was a major break in the case.

A DNA sample lifted from Vickie’s clothing matched a profile in the national database. At the time, Taylor was living in a Washington, D.C., convalescent home. One of his legs had been amputated and he was using a wheelchair. He had no known relationship with Vickie. What he did have was a long, violent criminal record, and jail time. When the DNA match was confirmed, he was indicted and arrested.

Which brought us to the bail hearing.

Memories rush back. The last time I saw Vickie was on my wedding day. She was standing next to me at the altar in a blue maid-of-honor dress and matching hat. Three weeks later, I would be back at the same altar, sobbing over her lifeless body lying in a casket. She was wearing the same blue dress. For weeks, unopened wedding presents stayed stacked in the corner of our house.

I listen as the public defender explains why the judge should grant Taylor bail. A flicker of compassion moves me. I spent years working for criminal justice reform. I know the system often fails poor people, especially those with disabilities and communities of color. I’ve been a strong public advocate of restorative justice and a critic of mass incarceration.

“Judge, look at him,” the public defender says. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s not a flight risk.”

I push aside any thoughts of compassion when the prosecutor shares Taylor’s version of how his DNA got on Vickie’s clothing.

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He claimed that a friend named Mikey showed up at his house with a hysterical Vickie in the backseat of his car. Taylor’s story was that she begged for her life, offering to have sex if they would just let her go. He said Mikey left with Vickie, alive, and when he asked later, Mikey told him: “Well man, you know I had to do what I had to do.”

I start to weep.

The prosecutor jumps in, noting the defensive wounds on Vickie’s body as she fought for her life and lost, the presence of Taylor’s DNA on her panties. And then this: When Taylor was arrested, the prosecutor says, he told officers he would have enlisted his brothers to help him flee if he’d known the police were coming for him.

“He is a flight risk and should be held without bail,” the prosecutor insists.

“Bail denied!” the judge thunders.

::

A year and half later, in summer 2024, I travel east from California again, this time for Taylor’s trial. Every day our family and friends from the old neighborhood and beyond are in the Maryland courtroom or Zooming in. But all their love and support isn’t enough to lessen my dread of what will come.

Jury selection is a reminder of how much violence is ingrained in American life. The judge asks the diverse pool of nearly 100 prospective jurors to stand if they know someone who was wounded or killed by gun violence. Only five remained seated. When he asks about sexual violence, a majority of the women stand. Many accept the judge’s offer to be excused if they feel they can’t be impartial. I begin to worry if there will be any women left to serve. Finally, the prosecution and defense agree on four women and nine men (including one alternate). They are mostly folks of color.

The hallways are cleared each morning as Taylor is wheeled into court. In person, he seems small, innocuous. I find myself wishing I knew how to hate better, but I come up empty. All I can muster is curiosity, loss and pain, wondering what had happened to him in his first 18 years of life.

Kay is one of the first called to the witness stand by the prosecutor. She must formally identify Vickie in the crime scene photos. Several family members choose to leave the courtroom. I stay and watch as jurors gasp at the images or look away. Taylor sits motionless, as if the evidence has nothing to do with him.

We hear emotional testimony from the man who‘d found Vickie in the woods. Now a grandfather, he was 15, riding his bike near his home, when he saw her body. He had shared with the family how the image haunted him for years.

When the defense begins, I start directing my bitterness less at Taylor and more at his lawyers. It’s a two-person team headed by the chief public defender, a Black woman, with a white woman in the second chair. I know they are doing their jobs, but their competency turns my stomach and heart inside out.

Taylor’s lawyer asks the medical examiner who did the original autopsy if it is possible that Vickie committed suicide or if her blunt vaginal injuries could be from consensual sex. Absolutely not, the medical examiner says. She stands by her assessment that Vickie’s death was a homicide, and that she was violently sexually assaulted.

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Next Taylor’s lawyers take a page from the O.J. Simpson playbook and spend hours trying to dispute the collection and validity of the DNA evidence.

But in the end, Taylor’s own words convict him. The prosecution plays the entire two-hour video of his arrest interview. For almost 60 minutes, he denies having any contact with Vickie, and then he admits to what the prosecutors will call “actions that amounted to rape.”

“I had sex with her to quiet her down. She was nicely dressed with nice expensive shoes. I remember those shoes. Dressed like she worked in an office or something.”

He deadpans, “She was alive when I was done with her.”

In the closing argument, the prosecutor connects the dots. There was no Mikey. All the evidence points to the fact that Vickie was abducted, taken to the woods a few miles from where Taylor lived, sexually assaulted and murdered. The DNA implicates Taylor and Taylor alone.

It takes the jury two hours to come back with a verdict: guilty. As they file out of the courtroom, several of them make eye contact. I silently mouth “thank you.”

::

A month later, I return to the courtroom for Taylor’s sentencing. Family members are given the opportunity to make statements.

We are instructed to direct our comments to the judge, not Taylor. Vickie’s son speaks first. I keep my remarks short, reminding the court of the brutality of the crime, how scared Vickie must have been, and how Taylor had shown no remorse for his actions.

When it is my youngest sister’s turn, she first apologizes to the judge for ignoring his instructions, then turns to Taylor, and says what I wish I had had the nerve to say: “ You are a piece of trash.” She accepts the judge’s reprimand and leaves the courtroom.

Taylor is sentenced to life in prison. “My actions today won’t bring Vickie back,” the judge says. “It probably won’t even provide closure. But I hope it will bring you some sense of justice and peace.”

Maybe one day it will. But not this day. I leave the courtroom feeling the loss of a sister — no justice, no peace.

Judy Belk, former president and chief executive of the California Wellness Foundation, is a frequent contributor to The Times. She is at work on a book of personal essays about racial justice and social change.