What if finding the missing person didn't answer the mystery what if it only ...
In a new audio-check limited series, the truth about Natalie, Hoseong-Cyping bestigates
“the disappearance and death of 27-year-old Natalie Jones.”
What starts as a missing person's case uncovers allegations of abuse, hidden secrets, conflicting evidence, and one haunting question was Natalie the victim of a tragic accident, or did someone have a reason to silence her? Listen to the truth about Natalie now, wherever you get your podcasts. Our card this week is Terrence Konomi Plummer, the Ace of Spades from North Carolina.
We talk a lot about what it takes to solve a murder, the lucky breaks, the dead ends,
new evidence, but sometimes solving a case isn't about finding something new.
It's about finally understanding something that was there all along, as was the case here. It was Memorial Day Weekend in 2010 and hot as Hades in North Carolina when 22-year-old Terrence
“Konomi Plummer was found murdered in a crime so brutal and so deliberate that it stayed”
with everyone who touched the case, especially Lieutenant Jeff Lockler. But began as another homicide investigation became the one case he could never shake. His white whale. More than a decade later, the answer would come from something investigators had possessed
all along, and information they never knew existed, finally solving Plummer's murder
and giving Lockler something that he had spent years chasing. Closure, I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. On May 31, 2010, Lieutenant Jeff Lockler was just a young homicide detective with the Fayetteville Police Department, on his way to a training program, and that's when his phone ran in the early morning hours.
On the other end was his sergeant with some instructions, turn around and head south in the opposite direction toward Rue Street in the Bonnie do Neighborhood of Fayetteville. There had been a murder and they needed Lockler on the job. He had been told that someone had found a body in an abandoned duplex and it was who local officers knew as Terrence or Konomi Plummer.
They were a sex worker in the Neighborhood, and while their identity was known by officers, how they identified themselves as a person was not as clear, so I'll use Plummer in this episode.
“Lockler didn't get many details in his first call out, but honestly, even if he had,”
it wouldn't have prepared him for what he was walking into. Lockler explained it to our reporter as if it had just happened yesterday. This was in May, and it was about 95 degrees that day, and there's no power at this place, so it was really hot, really human, and the place was covered in trash, and it's got a lot of beer bottles, and that kind of stuff in the place, and it's just filthy.
You go into that room, and one of the things that you learned real early, as a homicide cop, is death as a smell, and that was readily evident, and only 24 hours because of the heat. That smell was permeated at Permanid the whole room. The other things you smell is blood, and there's a lot of it in this case, and the best
way I can describe that to you is to put a penny in your mouth, that sensation you get from that copper taste is kind of when you go into a really bloody crime scene, that's kind of what you're dealing with. As Lieutenant Lockler stepped into the stifling room, his eyes fell to the victim's body, laying face down, wig displaced, and bra still on, but naked from the waist down, and
positioned a few feet from a mattress that was on the bedroom floor. As we walked over a little closer to his victim's body, the amount of injury even before we moved the victim was evident. There's cutting slash marks throughout legs, hands, arms, face, and again, I don't want
The crime scene folks yelling at me.
I don't want to move anything around, but I'm trying to really take a look at what I have. Part of what he had right from the top was what he suspected could have been the murder weapon, a bloody knife laying next to the body. Trying to paint you a picture, and this is common what we see, and what we describe as a trap
house or a flop house, there's a mattress on the floor. It's not in a bed frame, it's just a mattress on the floor, the comforter was covered in blood. A lot of clothing and stuff laying around, a lot of cigarette boats, and again it's 95 degrees in there.
So we hadn't been working 30 minutes and we were already soaking wet with sweat. That becomes an issue too, because you don't want to drip sweat or contaminate your evidence or whatever, and then you got three or four people in a room working, so that adds the heat.
“It starts building up even more, so I don't remember the exact number of pieces of”
evidence, but we collected a significant amount. Along with the blood soaked bedding and cigarette butts, there were a number of condoms and beer cans around the room, along with something that ruled out at least one motive. It was actually some money on the floor in the bathroom, might have been over a hundred books, total, which kind of made me think, "Okay, well, this won't a robbery."
The money might have confirmed that this wasn't a robbery, but I don't think anyone really believed at any point that that was the motive here.
It appeared to law clear that the attack started in the bathroom where Plumber was first
stabbed in the upper thigh, and you could tell that because of the arterial blood that had been sprayed on the bathroom wall, it then seemed that Plumber moved or was moved to the bedroom, and that's where the rest of the attack took place. When I say attack, I am not just talking about a frenzy knife attack. This was torture, and this next part, it's a lot to take in, mostly because it reads
more like a horror movie than a crime scene, but it is also important.
“I believe it speaks to the killer's MO, their state of mind, and what they are capable”
of doing. Plumber had multiple stab wounds, including one between the collar bones to the top of both lungs. According to law enforcement, this made it so that Plumber couldn't scream. There are killies tendons where severed so that Plumber couldn't run, and their eyelids
had been completely cut off so that Plumber likely had to watch everything that was happening.
Ultimately, the cause of death was determined to be exanguation, as in Plumber bled to death
from the multiple injuries inflicted by the very knife that was found near their body. The sheer brutality of this case only fueled lock there to get out on the streets and talk to anyone that he could. If it will stand still long enough, I'll have that conversation. But talking to someone and getting someone to give you information are two very different
things. And lock there a new that in order to solve this case, earning the trust of the community
“was the only way to get people to speak with him.”
I even tried several times, stopped by early in the morning with some McDonald's coffee and some breakfast. I went out there several times like that, and I would just show up in the neighborhood, stopped by McDonald's, get 10 or 15 biscuits, a couple of cups of coffee, parked my car, set that stuff on the trunk, and the people in the neighborhood would swing by.
My last name is Lockleer, so for sure they call me Lock. It's detective Lock. What's up, man? You know, you pass out the stuff to see if anybody had the information or whatever. They knew I went out there to shake them down for what they did, or, you know, pat them
down for any drug paraphernal, whatever. I'm trying to solve a murder here. I don't have time for those kinds of crimes, right, any care. The Mickey D's worked. It drew a woman, two Lockleer, who knew a whole lot about the room that Plumber was founded,
because she said it was kind of a shared space with a bit of a, if you know, you know, kind of secret. So, she's sitting there just kind of leaning against the seat, just talking to him and everything. And she opened up real quick as far as information goes. She said, "Hey, my DNA isn't that room, you're going to find my fingerprints in that room."
She said, "I was just in there two nights ago, there's probably some condoms in there." And she's the one that initially brought up the knife, and she said, "Hey, there's a knife
in there that we always kept here underneath the mattress and everybody that used the room
knew that knife was in there if you had a, a date go bad, you know, and somebody's trying to be weird with you trying to hurt you, whatever you know, there's a knife in there." So I had to describe it to me. I even showed her a picture of it and she was like, "Yep, that's it, that's a knife."
Their murder weapon was something shared, but who knows by how many people?
That plus all the condoms, beer bottles, and cigarette butts in that room that was used
“by so many people, was going to make for a real game of DNA whack-a-mole.”
So we're loading that database up, right, and everybody I talked to, I tried to stick a cutip in their mouth and get them to give me their fingerprints. We identified a lot of other sex workers in the room as well with fingerprints. Long-lear was depending on this community of sex workers to explain who might want to do this to plumber.
Did someone have it out for them, in particular? Were there any violent clients that they knew of? Well it turned out Lieutenant Locklear had a lot to learn. It didn't take long for us to start talking to some of the other folks in the neighborhood who were sex workers, and immediately, you know, we start asking them, "Can you guys
think of someone who stands out that you've dealt with, who's rough or who's in the twisted stuff, who has tried to hurt people in the past, can you guys point any of those out?"
“And they kind of looked at us funny, and I remember some of them, I was like, "Well,”
you're looking at me funny. Why is that?" And they're like, "Man, we deal with that every day, multiple times a day." And I was like, "Oh, okay. Well, all right, rank them then, right, who should I go look for, who was the victim we had?"
But the problem wasn't narrowing people down. The problem was that there were too many people to count, and again, while we don't know how plumber identified, transgender people are targets for violence in outsized numbers. The human rights campaign foundation found that since 2013, 84% of known transgender homicide victims in the United States were people of color, and nearly 74% were black trans
women. Things get a whole lot murkier when it comes to trans sex workers near military bases. But a ram study found that certain military installations were, quote-unquote, "hot spots" for sexual assault, with some bases reporting more than 500 assaults in a single year. If you heard our recent episode about Jimmy Jamie Riddle, then you know that this level
of violence near a military base is not uncommon, but even still, there were a few specific people that came unlock theirs radar. There's a guy who, he wouldn't dress like a cop, but he was in a security guard uniform, and he would kind of portray himself as a cop, they would come up there all the time, and especially with the less experienced sex workers, you know, he would stop them, you
know, until they get to the wall and he would pat him down and really roll for whatever, just a kind of a weird, weirdo guy, and I told my partner at the time, "We're literally going to start every name that they give us, we're going to start writing that name down when we find them." And that's exactly what Lockleard did.
He ran down every name he'd been given, including a man that Plummer had, according to witnesses, had an argument with the night before the murder, someone who was historically known to be rough with sex workers, and while Lockleard was knocking on all these people's
doors getting fingerprints and DNA swabs, he got his first piece of good news.
They actually had something that they could compare those things to, or at least the print. A bloody palm print was recovered from the scene in Plummer's blood. Luckily, that palm print was on the sink, which was a very smooth surface, almost glass-like soaps perfect, and it was in blood, so my initial concerns were that that palm print belonged to my victim.
He tried to, after he was injured, he put his hand over it, or whatever got some blood on his hand, and he deposited that palm print. So that's the first thing that I had, I late in the exam at a check, "Hey, make sure that doesn't belong to the victim." It didn't.
Which meant that no matter who else came and went from that place and went, this had to be their killers. Hearing that the palm print didn't belong to the victim, and it was in the victim's blood,
“was almost like an early Christmas gift, because I knew that that's the key piece of”
evidence in this case. In a small town, unsolved stories don't fade away.
They remain in the places people know by heart, and in the lives of those who never
Stopped looking for answers.
I'm Kylie Lowe, and on my podcast, Dark Down East, I cover true crime cases from my home
“state of Maine and New England with care, context, and the people impacted at the center”
of the story. These cases shaped communities, even when the rest of the world moved on. Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts. In the mind of then detective Jeff Lockler, once he heard that he had the killer's palm print, in the victim's blood, he was sure it was going to be case closed in no time.
Lockler may have been just seven years into his career, but by then he had already had a reputation for getting results.
Up until this point in my career, I'd never had an unsolved case, and that was a, it was
a point of pride for me, I guess, right? And I kind of walked around like I was 10 feet tall and bulletproof, and I was a concerned at all, at this crime scene, I'm like, this thing figured out, you know, we'll be done by the end of the week, we'll have this thing figured out the sink. There's a blooty palm print, that's solid gold right there for me, I'm like, I thought
I had it, right? We brought that blooty palm print back, and we ran it through our databases and I didn't get a hit. Well, shit, that was the first moment that Lockler felt not so tall and not quite so bulletproof. So now we're months into the investigation, and nobody that I had talked with so far,
and all of those folks palm print matched the palm print that was taken from the sink.
We didn't have any other crimes that mirror that crime, nothing else to make us believe that we had somebody was going around chasing down six workers to murder them. So it's a little frustrating, you get a little depressed about it, because you got this
“key piece of evidence here, that's a, what better evidence than a print?”
And I couldn't match it, it weren't hitting in any other of our databases. There's no way Lockler could forget about this case, because even if he tried, the community wasn't going to let him. That was the weeks and days went on, if I was just driving through and I stopped at a stop light, and one of those folks saw me from that neighborhood, they would scream it out.
You told us you were going to solve it, don't lie, don't be a liar.
That also became a burn, my saddle, if you will, because I had made my mind up, that
just to show his grits his grocery, I was going to solve this case. This was my white wheel case. Plumber's family was knocking down Lockler's door, too. We reached out to Terrence Plumber's senior, and he didn't want to be interviewed at this time, so Lockler told us about his calls with the Plumber family.
“Every time I talk with them, they always just wanted to remind me, "Look, don't forget”
about this." This is a human being, and regardless of where that person was at in their life, and it made some mistakes, got on the wrong road, but they loved that person, and they reminded me of that. Lockler didn't forget about this case, and even though this was his white wheel, he
had other murders that landed on his desk, other murders that demanded his time, pulling him away from the one case that he couldn't solve. I don't know that a day went by, and I didn't think about it, and the guy's in the office every chance they got reminded me that I had that unsolved, and it was really frustrating to know that I had one of the most solid after identifiers in the case, and it hadn't
identified anyone, that was tough. Whenever he had a moment to revisit the Plumber case, Lockler did, he was turning over every possibility that he could think of, throwing out theories chasing leads, seeing what might stick. He was even calling other military installations to see if maybe they had similar cases.
He presented the case at conferences. He reached out to homicide detectives outside of his department, hoping that someone might see what he couldn't. At one point, Lockler even asked the latent print examiner if he could be totally mixed up, questioning his own investigation, but the latent examiner assured him that
the palm print is exactly what they needed to nail their guy, and she became nearly as obsessed with this as him. She said that she had actually dreamed about that palm print. She could literally, the ridge detail and everything was ingrained into her brain. She could identify that print, not even looking at it.
It was just burned into her mind that way. She wanted it solved, as almost as much as I do.
As years went by, Plumber's case would have, should have been in a new home, ...
case room, but Lockler refused to move it, not even when he switched desks and got a promotion to sergeant in 2019. Plumber's big old box remained in front of him the entire time. And as it turns out, Lockler's relationship with Homicide was a lot like his relationship
with Plumber's case, no matter how far he wondered, he always found his way back.
By 2022, he was in his old stomping grounds again. I eventually found myself back in charge of the Homicide Unit, and the first week, the first day, I'm back up in the Homicide Unit, of course, my mind immediately goes back to this case. Now that I'm back up in Homicide, I'm going to solve this case.
For Plumber's case, Lockler was a dog with a bone. And just as he was settling back into the Homicide Unit, one of the detectives mentioned the mid-Atlantic cold case Homicide Investigators Association meeting. He said, "Hey, why don't you go and present this case?"
“And at this point, Lockler was willing to do anything, so why not?”
Now the folks at this conference are the best of the best. They are retired FBI agents,
Homicide detectives, FBI agents, DNA experts, you get the picture. And all at one meeting for Lockler to shoot his shot, again. And I presented the case to them, they, you know, wrote some notes down through some ideas at me. In a friend of mine, who is actually in charge of a big chunk of CCBI and Rally, the
Security County Bureau of Identification's names Andy Parker, catches me in the hallway after I presented the case and makes a suggestion. Blinken, you'll miss it, because that was it, just one moment in a hallway that changed the trajectory of this case. And he was like, "Look, I'm not trying to insult you here, but he was like, when you put
that print in, every night, it's consistently comparing other prints automatically." He said, "You put that in in 2010," and he said, "But he, you might want to go back and check because the systems have all changed since then, and now they communicate." "I'm sorry, what?" Back then, all that was in its infancy, especially with Palm Prints, but he said, "You
want to make sure that your print's just not querying against just the prints that's in your local area."
And I said, "Well, I didn't know that, I had never thought of that," so he said, "Just simply
take it out. We'll have you late and the examiner take the print out and then reenter it and then that way it'll go nationwide. It won't just query against prints from your region." Take a beat here, and make sure what he just said, fully sinks in, especially for anyone
in law enforcement listening, because I didn't know this. Block Lair, the bulletproof homicide detective with a stellar solve rate didn't know this, the latent print examiner that he worked with didn't mention this to him. So I have to think that other people out there don't know this too, and I get why, because trying to get to the bottom of this has been super confusing and complicated.
The question I went around asking everyone, "Is does A-Face continually run unidentified prints against new ones or not?"
“And the answer, I think I'm getting back, at least from the Fayetteville PD and Kristen”
Slapper, a forensic scientist, is no. Question mark? And the question mark is only coming from me, because when I look at state agency websites, some of them very clearly say that queries are continually being rerun. So I get why everyone's confused.
Seems like there is a difference in the state and national databases, and even state to state that don't treat rerunning prints the same. I am determined to try and get a source of truth on this and be able to explain it in a way that a novice like me can like wrap my head around. But I need a little more time, stay tuned.
Until then, to be safe, if you have a cold case, take Lock Lair's advice. You run your prints. There is a chance that when you ran your prints, they were only compared to your local database, not a national one. And even if it was run against a national database, at some point, if that was more than
like a day ago, there are likely new prints to compare it to. Re-run your old prints.
“That might be the only thing standing between one of your cold cases becoming solved or”
not. Because guess what happened when Lock Lair rerun his? Well, like the examiner calls me, asked me if I'm in the office, I tell her I am.
She comes in to my office and she said I got some information, and I was like...
me with it.
“And she said, "She slides this piece of paper over on my desk," and she said, "That's”
the person that murdered Terrence Plummer." In a small town, unsolved stories don't fade away.
They remain in the places people know by heart, and in the lives of those who never
stopped looking for answers. I'm Kylie Lowe, and on my podcast, Dark Down East, I cover true crime cases from my home state of Maine and New England with care, context, and the people impacted at the center of the story. These cases shaped communities, even when the rest of the world moved on.
Listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. After more than 13 years, Lockler finally had the answers that he'd been searching for, a name, and his late and print examiner took it one step further and included a photo. And I actually got to look at that person by knew what he looked like now. You always think you got some idea of what the bad guy looks like, and in this case I didn't
“think that's not what I expected, it's just a normal looking dude, nothing special, nothing”
over the top, and just look like another Joe. We're sitting there looking at one another, and there was a moment we're just kind of like this dude has haunted us for all of these years. And now we're sitting here looking at him. We know who he is, we know what his name is, we know where he's from.
The man's name was Joshua Aaron Richardson. In 2010, he was a 28-year-old soldier at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville. But shortly after the murder took place, he had been shattered out of the military, or disciplinary reasons. He went on to have a significant criminal history.
Records revealed six arrests for charges related to drugs, trespassing, and assault. Most of which took place after he'd gone back home to Texas. By the time Lieutenant Lockler was looking at his photo, in 2022, Richardson was living in unhoused camp for veterans. Lockler told our reporter Annie Rodderd Jones that it took until 2023 for the Fayetteville
PD and the Houston PD to solidify a plan of action. But when they got Richardson in for an interview, he admitted to being a soldier at Fort Bragg during the time of Plumber's murder, even said that he'd been to some strip clubs around the Bonnie Dune area. He said that he didn't know the victim.
His palm print is in my victims' blood in that bathroom, so that story went out to win there really quickly. And then what did he do when you told him that you had the evidence to show that he was the one? Comment was made almost like, "Well, I guess you got me.
Do what you got to do." So at that point, the decision was made to go ahead and swear toward a warrant, back here in North Carolina, which we did, and then he was taken in the custody in Houston and in the extradition process started. Richardson was indicted, and instead of going to trial, they offered him a plea deal.
He was charged at first degree murder, and they took a plea for second degree. He is now in the custody of the Department of Corrections for the State of North Carolina. Richardson went to prison in 2024, and according to his inmate detail page, the minimum term of his sentence is 14 years and 11 months, and the maximum term is 18 years and the eight months.
His projected release date is February 4th, 2038. This wild to me is that in all the time since his arrest and incarceration, Joshua Aaron
Richardson has never been connected to any other murders.
“One of the reasons I felt it was important to include the details of what happened to Plummer”
is because I find that so hard to believe. That was Richardson's first and last murder? Richardson never gave a statement or a motive, even when a different detective interviewed him. But Lockler says that he feels pretty confident that there aren't any other victims of Richardson
out there. But who knows? Maybe someone out there listening will rerun some old Prince one day, and get the same shock that Lieutenant Lockler did. So here's your reminder again, rerun those prints.
Lockler is constantly on the receiving end of calls, not just from law enforcement, but from families.
From Christmas, Thanksgiving, he always picks up the phone when they call about their loved
ones. And over 12 years after Plummer's life was taken, he was the one to make the bittersweet
Phone call to their father.
Mr. Plummer, I'm calling you to let you know that we have the person in custody who took your son's life. And to that, Mr. Plummer replied, I'm glad you didn't give up on my son's case, I'm glad
that you didn't forget that was always our concern the family's concern.
Thank you for never forgetting. Lieutenant Lockler held Plummer's card in his hand during the interview with our reporter Annie. And he told her this, if I lived to be 100 years old, the crime scene and this kid's picture, I would probably remember them even if I lived to be an old old man.
Anything next for this case or is it case closed? Case closed, this case file actually is already being put in storage. I had to get pulled out of storage to do this interview with you. This podcast is called the deck and it's called the deck for a reason.
“This deck of cards, some people can look at it as a deck of, there's a deck of losses, right?”
Those are cases that you didn't solve. But I try to tell these young detectives it's coming up now, it's a deck of possibilities because you can take one of the cards out of this deck and possibly put some new out-fresh eyes on it and solve it. And then you can take that card out and you can do what I'm about to do.
What Lockler did was take out Plummer's card, the ace of spades. He's scrolled one word across it, diagonally in thick black marker, solved. Well Plummer's father didn't want to be interviewed for this podcast. He did have a message for families out there dealing with the same thing. He said, keep checking in with law enforcement, ask about retesting, ask about science,
be diligent because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
“He also provided our reporter with a heartfelt statement about Plummer that I'd like to read.”
Losing my son to murder is a pain that words can never fully describe.
For a long time I carried hurt, anger, and questions that seem impossible to answer. But I realized that if I held on to hate, it would only destroy me from the inside. I made the decision to give it to God because I could not carry that burden alone. Through prayer, God has helped me find peace, even in the midst of unimaginable loss. I pray for the person who took my son's life.
I pray that somehow he will find his way to God, seek forgiveness, and allow God to change his heart. That is not erased the pain, but it frees me from being consumed by bitterness. There are still days when I wonder what my son's life would have been like if it had not been cut short.
When I see the accomplishments of my friends, children, I'm genuinely proud of them and celebrate their success, yet I cannot help but think about what my son might have accomplished. What dreams would he have fulfilled? Whose life would he have touched? What kind of man would he have become?
“How many people would he have helped along his journey?”
Those questions will always remain in my heart.
While I may never know the answers, I thank God for the time I had with him and for the memories that can never be taken away. I trust that God has my son and his care, and I look forward to the day when I will see him again. Until then, I choose faith over bitterness, love over hate, and trust in God's plan even
when I do not understand it. The deck is an audio-truck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis, to learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. I think chocolate a proof. Every story has layers, and sometimes the truth hides in plain sight.
I'm Josh Dean, host of Camelion, the podcast about people who transform, deceive and survive. From con artists to unbelievable yet true occurrences, we dive into stories where nothing is ever quite as it seems. Because to understand the world, you sometimes have to change the way you see it. Listen to Camelion wherever you get your podcasts.
