Is There Justice For Chrystal Taylor?
Filed under: Child Murder, Cold Case, Crime, Juvenile, Murder, News, Pedophile, Rape, Robbery, Sexual Assault
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.
Timothy Street
Charlotte, NC - It was summer 1989, and Chrystal Taylor was sixteen. Not your normal sixteen, mind you. Chrystal 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 August 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.Â
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 November ‘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 March 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.
Thanks for posting this, Imp. I am a bit shocked at the terms of his sentence, but then again, kinda not. As I stated here, this case has always stuck with me and in all honesty, Chrystal Taylor is why this site even exists in the first place.
The thing is a lot of us could have turned a life similar to Chrystal…only chance or fate made a turn and things played out differently. It saddens me that this 15yr. old girl was not nurtured and guided by her parents. It was their responsibility to make sure Chrystal lived a happy childhood. Instead she got a rotten life that turned her up dead by a POS bastard.
Rest in peace Chrystal Taylor, you will not be forgotten.
So where is this slime ball now? If he is on parole does that mean they keep tabs on him. I of course worry about what he will do next..
Oh my god Morbid, I can’t believe you were connected to this. She was only 15 years old. How awful. And this guy is walking free???? I’ll take a wild guess and say he’s still in Florida. I bet he blends in with all the other sickos around here.
I worry about what he’s doing now and what he did in all the years he was free before Charlotte LE nailed his ass. Hopefully LE in FL and anywhere else he lived in those years will check to see he isn’t connected to any of their cold cases.
Couldn’t agree more Silvahalo.
I think we’re lucky there was any kind of conviction on this one - sounds like the evidence was this slime was the last one seen with Chrystal and the hair. NOT alot to convict with and easily explained so yeah, its a shame but any time basically better than nothing had it gone to the expense of a trial with no conviction at all, I think.
My interest in true crime pre-dates my personal experience with a murder case, oddly enough. But I DO know how creepy the experience makes you feel Morbid. The entire time was surreal and out of body, and gets even moreso as time passes.
Should have proofread better . . . looks like I was a bit eager to get the word “SLIME” in there! lol
You get the gist.
Wow, just…. wow. At least she will never be forgotten.
And no, I don’t she got justice, from anyone.
I dreamed about Chrystal last night. Which is weird since I don’t even know what she looked like. Morbid’s trying to find us a picture, but it involves calling people who knew her and seeing if they have one he can use.
I really hope that someday, some kind of karma is waiting to bitchslap Timothy Street.
Such an incredibly sad, short life. I don’t know about the justice in it, but the memorial Morbid has made her is very fitting. At least she will not be forgotten.
I will remember Chrystal. I hope you can find a picture of her
wow Morbid
Do they take DNA samples for laceny charges ?
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26 months !!!! Thats Crap….
This girl’s whole life is a sad story.
Like I just said.
So is someone going to take him out? Before he does this to yet another tragic child?
wow, talk about a slap on the wrist, incredible!
All i can say is,at “least”,be thankful that single damn hair was HIS and NOT hers…But still…2yrs for a Murder?,because of “1989 laws”…Has the law not learned ANYTHING from george w. bush and his fancy,middle of the night “Law,What,You mean that thing i just rewrote and changed in an instant without anyone knowing”…LOL…j/k…but…seriously!…