Clinton Avenue Five

The Newark boys murders occured on August 20, 1978 in Newark, New Jersey when the two suspects Lee Evans and Philander Hampton accused five schoolboys of stealing their marijuana. Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor, both 17, and Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson and McDowell, all 16 — were last seen on a busy street near a park where they had played basketball on August 20, 1978. The case became a cold case and was labelled a disappearance as non of the boys was heard of again. The arrests came after three decades of investigating the teens' disappearance, with detectives looking as far as Atlanta, where a serial killer murdered more than 20 children in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Jonestown, where more than 900 people died in a mass suicide in 1978. The two men confessed that they on August 20 took the boys to an abadoned house and tied and gagged all five of them and set the house on fire, as revenge for the stolen drugs. The case remained until it was solved the longest unsolved crime case in New Jerseys history.

The case unfolded when Lee Evans in early 2009 confessed to one of the boys mother about his involvement in the murders in 1978.

A third man also considered a suspect in the case died of natural causes in 2008, all the three suspects are cousins.