LITTLE ROCK — Third in a series
The morning 12-year-old Carmeletta Green disappeared, Kenneth Cooney agreed to let Little Rock police detective Larry Dunnington search his car.
Carmeletta’s mother, Jackie Cooney, believed that Kenneth,who was her ex-husband and Carmeletta’s stepfather, had abducted her daughter to punish Jackie for divorcing him.
Jackie also knew that her little girl, who had endured her classmates’ teasing for being “cross-eyed,” had grown into a strong-willed adolescent.
This is part 3 of a 6-part series. View all stories here as they become available.
Carmeletta had made it clear to Kenneth that she disliked him.
As Dunnington poked his head into the back of the car that morning in 1982, he noticed what appeared to be a small spot of blood. He also found a bent and muddy car jack in the trunk, which he confiscated.
The detective, who handled everything from assaults to murders back then, collected samples of the bloodlike substance to send to the state Crime Laboratory.
Four days later, Kenneth and his nephew, Larry Cooney, agreed to take lie-detector tests. Though the tests were not admissible in court, detectives still used them as investigative tools.
Dunnington hoped the tests would help him narrow the list of suspects from two to one.
They didn’t.
Before the tests, each man sat down for separate interviews with Arkansas State Police investigator Dave Dillinger. Both admitted going to Jackie’s house in the early evening of Sept. 10, 1982.
How we got this story
As part of a six-month investigation, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette interviewed 38 people and reviewed dozens of court and police documents to tell Carmeletta Green’s story.
Information about the evidence collected in Kenneth Cooney’s car came from interviews with Little Rock police detective Larry Dunnington, who retired from the Police Department and now works as an investigator at the state attorney general’s office.
Information about lie-detector tests administered to Kenneth and Larry Cooney and the police interviews with them came from an Arkansas State Police file that had been in storage until the newspaper asked for it.
Information about the inmate who told police that Larry Cooney boasted about Carmeletta’s abduction camefrom interviews with police officers involved in the case as well as from a file provided by the Pulaski County sheriff’s office. The Little Rock police file that would have contained the inmate’s statement has been misplaced.
They both said Larry dropped Kenneth off at his girlfriend’s house at 11:30 p.m. and that Larry borrowed Kenneth’s car for the night.
Kenneth told the state police agent that when Larry returned the car the next morning, he noticed what appeared to be blood and the damaged car jack.
During the lie-detector exams, both men denied any involvement in Carmeletta’s disappearance and said theyknew nothing about the blood-like substance in the car.
Dillinger concluded that both men’s answers were “not completely truthful.”
But with no body, no confession, no blood analysis back from the Crime Lab and no witness confirming Dunnington’s suspicions of Larry and Kenneth, the Little Rock detective made no arrest.
ABOUT MISSING CHILDREN
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 800,000 children a year are abducted or disappear. Most are taken by relatives and are found alive, the agency says.
On average, 115 children a year are taken by strangers who hold them overnight, demand ransom or kill them.
The Justice Department notes that the murder of an abducted child is rare, with about 100 cases in the United States each year. Seventy-six percent of those children are killed within three hours after they disappear.
Federal law defines a juvenile as anyone younger than 21.
Carmeletta Green is among more than 2,000 children reported missing nationally since 1982 who are still unaccounted for, according to a National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s database.
The Arkansas Crime Information Center lists five missing and “endangered” juveniles in the state.
In Arkansas only one other child has been missing longer than Carmeletta.
Tony Allen, 16, was reported missing from Fort Smith in October 1978.
Recently published articles about Allen and other Arkansas missing-person cases can be found at www.arkansasonline.com/news/previousfeatures/missing/.
“We [were] pretty close,” remembers Dunnington. “[But] you don’t want to jump the gun. I’ve seen cases where the gun was jumped, and they were found not guilty.
“Just a little more evidence would have been enough to charge [them].”
Police, fearing that Carmeletta had been killed, issued calls for information from the public, but nothing substantial surfaced. The little publicity that her case received in the city’s two competing newspapers also faded.
Jackie steadily fell apart.
She spent hours crying, with 2-year-old Jonathan in her lap. He stared up at his mother as tears streamed down her full cheeks.
Carmeletta gone? he’d ask Jackie in the singsongy voice of a toddler who had no idea what his question really meant.
Yes, Carmeletta gone, baby. Carmeletta gone.
Dunnington eventually transferred to another police division, and the case of the missing 12-year-old slipped into obscurity.
Then in 1988 - when Carmeletta would have been a high school senior - an inmate contacted Little Rock police, according to a detective’s notes.
The inmate, who was serving time in the same prison as convicted child rapist Larry Cooney, claimed that Larry had bragged about abducting, raping and killing a girl named Carmeletta with the help of his uncle Kenneth.
The inmate told investigators that Larry said he had buried Carmeletta in an old cemetery.
All police had to do was find it.
Tomorrow: Police investigate new leads.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/08/2009