Charlotte, NC – It was summer 1989, and Chrystal Taylor was sixteen. Not your normal sixteen, mind you.  ChrystalChrystal reviews was thirty-five in a sixteen year old’s body.  She was living on the streets that summer – crashing with friends, dancing topless at a strip club in Charlotte, doing a little parking lot duty for extra cash. Her parents hadn’t seen her all summer when they called the police to report Chrystal missing on AugustAugust reviews 18, 1989. By then, Chrystal Taylor had been dead for almost two weeks. Apathy is the best word to describe it, I think, the total lack of concern that followed Chrystal Taylor’s disappearance. Her parents hadn’t seen her in ages. When she disappeared, her friends didn’t worry too much. Granted, they were teenagers, but they knew Chrystal. They figured she’d found some man to keep her for awhile, or was sleeping it off somewhere, or had left town. As teenagers do, they assumed that Chrystal was immortal, like they were, right? Wrong. On August 7, 1989, Chrystal left the strip club where she worked as a dancer. “Dancer” means “stripper”, and in 1989, Chrystal’s age wasn’t much of a deterrent to club owners or potential johns. Chrystal had been an active prostitute for several years by then.

That night, Chrystal left the club with a cab driver named Timothy Street. She had been dancing for a bachelor party for a couple of hours, and the party was moving to a private house. Chrystal had already made quite a bit of money and had been promised more. Street wasn’t just a cabbie – he was a patron of the club, and had seen Chrystal dance. When he picked her up for the party, Chrystal probably felt pretty safe. What’s really sad is that nobody knows whether Chrystal ever even made it to the frat house. She was that easily forgotten.

On August 18, Chrystal’s parents called police. Her father said she’d run away and “gotten in with the wrong crowd”, so a search wasn’t done. Everyone thought she’d come home, or wouldn’t. Either way, nobody seemed too worried about it. As summer turned to autumn, life went on. And Chrystal Taylor didn’t come home. On November 9, 1989, Chrystal’s family called again and made a formal report. Two days later, utility workers in Charlotte found a human skeleton, which was unidentified until May of 1990, when a stab wound to the skeleton’s rib cage matched up with X-rays taken a few years before, when Chrystal Taylor had been in a fight and been stabbed. She’d nearly died.

Morbid remembers seeing her at Eastland Mall, showing off the patch over the knife wound that would later identify her broken little body. There was nothing else left, really, except a little hair. That little hair would be Timothy Street’s undoing. When Chrystal’s body was found and identified, police started asking questions of her friends and eventually nailed down the night of August 7 as the last time Chrystal had been seen alive. They put an article in the paper looking for cabbies who might have seen Chrystal that night, but nobody came forward.

Morbid has said that being questioned was a surreal experience. Parents were appalled at the nonchalance of their children. “What I didn’t understand then, but what I understand now, is why detectives and our parents looked at us like we were crazy when we matter-of-factly talked about our 15-year-old prostitute friend as if we were telling them about her favorite color,” he said. The name Timothy Street popped up a couple of times, and detectives decided to go talk to him, but he was gone. He’d left town in NovemberNovember reviews ‘89, right after Chrystal’s body had been found. But without a clear cause of death (the body was too far gone to make a determination) and with their only clear suspect off the radar, the case went cold.

A year after her body was found, Charlotte police said they’d exhausted all their leads. Until 2003, when the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department rolled out their Cold Case Division. The Cold Case squad was immediately saddled with about 300 unsolved homicides dating back to the 1960s. One of the first cases the squad chose to investigate was Chrystal Taylor’s. A single hair found on Chrystal’s remains was the key. It was analyzed for DNA, which was sent through CODIS for comparison with the DNA of criminals already in the justice system in other states. They got a hit. The hair matched Timothy Street, who was by then in his fifties and serving a sentence in Florida for larceny.

On January 1, 2005, Timothy Street walked out of jail in Florida right into the waiting arms of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Chrystal’s case was one of the first murders ever solved by the Charlotte Cold Case Division. Street was charged with Chrystal’s murder and immediately cut a deal. Because the murder occurred in 1989, Street could only be sentenced under 1989 guidelines. Timothy Street took an Alford plea to second-degree murder. That meant that he did not admit guilt, but acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him. Because of the Fair Sentencing Law that kept him from facing a 2005 sentence for a 1989 crime, Street got only nine years. He started serving his sentence on MarchMarch reviews 22, 2006. And on May 2, 2008, he walked out of prison on parole, after serving two years and five weeks for the death of Chrystal Taylor.

Is that justice, really? I bet the detectives who worked to solve Chrystal Taylor’s murder don’t think so.

Imp’s note: This week I guest-blogged an article on the murders of Tasha Lopes and Raylynn Chelton for Investigation Discovery: The Criminal Report Daily. While I was working on that piece, Morbid told me about this case, one of the first ever solved by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Cold Case Division. I don’t have a picture of Chrystal – not many people do, it turns out. But she deserves to be remembered. Thanks to David Lohr, who was kind enough to ask me to blog at his site. And thanks to Morbid, who told me about his friend Chrystal.