Tamara Greene’s stage name was Strawberry and the rumour goes that she danced for the wrong people at a party at the mayor’s mansion and was executed because she knew too much. The case went cold but when the Mayor got into trouble, Greene’s case came resurfaced.
A former homicide investigator claims that he is convinced that the disgraced mayor and his cronies in the Police Department are crooks and killers.
The case of Greene’s death was resurrected when that investigator, former Detroit Police Lt. Alvin Bowman, claimed that police brass squelched his inquiry into the supposed party at the Manoogian Mansion in late fall 2002 and Greene’s murder in April 2003 because he got too close to making a connection. The Detroit Police Department has reopened the case as has the Wayne County prosecutor.
“I suspect that the shooter was a law enforcement officer, and more specifically, a Detroit Police Department officer,” Bowman said in an affidavit. “She wanted money to stay quiet and they wouldn’t give it to her.”
And yet no evidence from the early-morning crime scene suggests that any police officers were involved. According to police reports, the medical examiner’s findings and investigators, it is most likely that Greene was killed in Detroit’s wild streets.
In early April, two weeks before her murder, Greene had danced at a party held at the Residence Inn in Southfield. The party was attended by known drug dealers, hooligans, and other all-stars of city life, authorities say. Greene got into an altercation with a small man — 5 1/2 feet tall — with a big ego and a record for trafficking cocaine. He wanted sex. She refused. He punched her once in the eye, then punched her once in the other eye.
That’s when Greene’s boyfriend, Eric “Big E” Mitchell, stepped in, according to statements that both Mitchell and a stripper named Taquela Anjema Bates gave police. The two men had an altercation and the bigger man won. The Southfield police responded to the fight, but by then, the principals had left. Nevertheless, the glove had been thrown. Disrespect had been committed.
Bowman, the former Detroit police lieutenant, insisted that Greene’s murder was a professional police job. He pointed to the fact that .40-caliber ammunition was used. “I stand by what I said. Police-issued Glocks use .40-caliber ammunition,” he said in a rambling telephone interview. Glock does, in fact, manufacture handguns that fire .40-caliber ammunition, but so does Smith and Wesson and other gun manufacturers. Bowman said he did not remember if ballistic tests were completed on the casings to determine the specific brand of gun. In fact, they have not.
Greene was struck 18 times from a moving vehicle, Bowman said. Yet the medical examiner’s report shows she was struck just three times and only 12 bullets casings were found at the scene, according to the police report from that morning. With all the discrepancies, is it not possible that Bowman could be wrong? But also consider the opposite, what if he is right? Read more here.