Suspect in girl’s 1982 killing tells police dead uncle did it

LITTLE ROCK — The only living suspect in the 1982 death of 12-year-old Carmeletta Green has told Little Rock police that he believes his late uncle killed the girl and dumped her body in the woods.

Though convicted sex offender Larry Cooney, 56, did not confess to any involvement in Carmeletta’s death, Lt. Terry Hastings said Friday that detectives handling the nearly 30-year-old case still want him charged with murder.

Investigators turned the case file over to the Pulaski County prosecuting attorney’s office this week.

“That’s what they’re asking ... to see if there are enough grounds there to file murder charges,” Hastings said.

Police said Larry Cooney told detectives that his uncle, Kenneth Cooney, who was Carmeletta’s former stepfather, was the only person involved in her death. Kenneth Cooney died of cancer in 2007.

Someone took Carmeletta from her family’s home in the early hours of Sept. 11, 1982, while her mother was working the late shift at a pizza restaurant.

Larry and Kenneth Cooney were almost immediately suspects in her disappearance, according to police, but for years authorities didn’t know whether she was dead.

Police finally classified the case as a homicide in late 2009 after long-unidentified remains were determined to be those of Carmeletta.

Hastings said Larry Cooney showed up at the Police Department for an interview Monday because of a Dec. 27 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette story saying that police wanted to question him about the case.

“He basically said he was with his uncle [the night Car-meletta disappeared], and his uncle dropped him off,” Hastings said.

Larry Cooney told detectives that when Kenneth Cooney returned for him later that night, Kenneth Cooney asked him if he saw blood on the car, Hastings said.

Larry Cooney could not be located Friday for comment. A telephone message left at the home of his father, who is Kenneth Cooney’s brother, was not returned.

Pulaski County Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Johnson said Friday that the case file will be reviewed by several attorneys, which is standard for homicide cases.

“We want to give it a thorough and fair review, especially in a case like this,” Johnson said. “We want all parties involved to have faith in the conclusions we’ve drawn.”

Johnson said each attorney who reviews the case will take “a fresh look” at the evidence to draw their own conclusions about how to proceed.

That means that prosecutors won’t merely consider the charges that police want to file, and they won’t look only at suspects police believe are involved, Johnson said.

He also said prosecutors will look at the case “without regard to a suspect being alive or dead.”

Carmeletta’s brother, Orlando Green, said Friday that he is glad police finally interviewed Larry Cooney because it has been more than a year since his sister’s body was identified.

“I’ll feel better when they’re in the courtroom,” said Green, who was 11 when Carmeletta disappeared and is now a police officer. “But it’s something - better than what [the police have] been doing all these years.”

Still, Green said he doesn’t believe Larry Cooney’s assertion that he had nothing to do with his sister’s death.

Some of the information Larry Cooney provided detectives Monday reportedly contradicts what he told police in 1982.

Four days after Carmeletta disappeared, police interviewed Larry and Kenneth Cooney separately, and both men took lie-detector tests.

Records show that both told an investigator that the night before Carmeletta disappeared, Larry Cooney borrowed his uncle’s car after dropping Kenneth Cooney off at a girlfriend’s house.

They said they knew nothing about Carmeletta’s disappearance or blood that Little Rock police detectives found in the back of the car the day she disappeared, according to the records on the interviews.

The investigator who conducted the lie-detector tests found the men’s answers “not completely truthful,” his report shows.

Green told investigators as a child that Larry and Kenneth Cooney had stopped by the house before Carmeletta disappeared.

When the two left, Green said, he discovered that the lock on the front door had been jimmied so that the children, who were home alone, couldn’t shut the door.

When police searched Kenneth Cooney’s car and discovered blood, they also confiscated a bent and muddy tire iron.

The tire iron was among items mistakenly destroyed by Little Rock police trying to clear evidence storage space, authorities have said.

DNA tests were unheard of back then, so the blood in the back seat was never tested to see if it belonged to Carmeletta.

At the request of the Democrat-Gazette in 2009, the state Crime Laboratory retrieved from storage Carmeletta’s original case file, which included the blood found in the car.

Police haven’t released information about what additional tests, if any, the laboratory conducted.

Several years after Carmeletta disappeared, Larry Cooney was convicted and sent to prison for molesting three children. A fellow prison inmate told a detective in 1988 that Larry Cooney bragged about abducting, raping and killing a girl named Carmeletta with the help of his “Uncle Kenneth,” police records show.

But police could not find her body.

Then in 1991, cable workers discovered skeletal remains off Arch Street Pike in Pulaski County. The bones were about 4 miles from Carmeletta’s house and 2 miles from the house where Larry Cooney lived in 1982.

The bones remained in a cardboard box until DNA tests could be done in 2002. The tests indicated that the skeleton was not Carmeletta’s, and the remains were once again put in storage at the Crime Lab.

After the Democrat-Gazette questioned the test results in 2009, Crime Lab officials ran the DNA test again, and that test confirmed that the bones belonged to Carmeletta.

Carmeletta’s family held a memorial service for her in mid-December 2009 and have since been waiting for police to make an arrest in the case.