Todd sisters pray for justice | The Unsolved
Juanita Todd's daughters are on a decades-long mission to find their mother's killer.
If your life story started like Odetta and Tamu Todd's did, it may be hard to go on to live a life of faith.
The two women, now in their 50s, were raised by their grandparents after their mother's murder in 1972.
Juanita Todd was found in her apartment on Academy Street in Wilkes-Barre with 22 stab wounds. She had been dead for hours. Odetta, 18 months old, and Tamu, 5 months old, were in the room.
Still, somehow, the sisters found faith.
"My grandfather taught my sister and I how to pray. We didn't know. In 1978 when all of this was going on, he came into our room at night with this little black bible and taught us The Lord's Prayer. That was 1978, and from that night, I always prayed for justice. I always prayed. Even when we said grace, I'd say, 'Lord, help my mom, save my mom.' Whenever I could get it in, I'd get it in," Odetta said.
So, it only made sense that when Action 16 met Odetta, Tamu, and their family and friends in a hotel conference room near Wilkes-Barre, they started in prayer.
Odetta's Investigation here
Prayer and faith have fueled the Todd sisters in what's been a decades-long effort to find their mother's killer.
"When I was 21, when I stepped out on faith wanting to get justice for my mom, I had to go to the library; I had to gather the newspaper articles. I had to find out what was reported," Odetta said.
In 1994, the Luzerne County district attorney took another look at Juanita's case.
Here's what Odetta told Newswatch 16 back then:
"Been trying to get the people who are responsible for this and the police to do their job. That's all I can say."
The DA didn't get any closer to an arrest, but it was at that point that Odetta stepped up her own investigation, eventually getting her hands on the original case files from 1972.
"The narrative started to change when I got the police report, the deputy coroner's report, the autopsy report. There is something seriously wrong here. Because what I was reading in the reports was nothing like what was reported in the paper," Odetta told Action 16.
The Todd family long understood that Juanita's body was found after an anonymous phone call was made from a pay phone near the crime scene in Wilkes-Barre. But the police report never mentions that call.
That report also states that a knife was found protruding out of Juanita's body. But somewhere in the trail of documents the sisters have been following, the knife disappears.
"Then, when we get to the autopsy report, there's no knife," Odetta added.
They've never gotten a clear answer about what happened to the knife.
Headlines at the time said Odetta was found sitting next to her mother's body, covered in her blood. Police wrote in their report that both babies were asleep in a crib when the body was discovered.
These inconsistencies shattered Odetta and Tamu's understanding of a defining moment in their lives.
Is there a suspect?
The Todd sisters believe Wilkes-Barre police stopped looking for the killer when a man that Juanita knew left the city right before a planned lie-detector test with investigators. That man is currently serving time for an unrelated homicide in California.
Odetta wrote to him a few years back.
"In my investigation, I have been in touch with the man authorities led the public to believe was the suspect. He had shared information with me to go to the prime murder suspect who may have been framing him, and I believe him," Odetta said.
That man in the California prison is one of the only people still alive who remembers Juanita.
There's only so much her daughters can learn from these 50-year-old documents. The ink and the memories are fading.
Their best hope is that someone comes forward with new information. That is what they pray for.
"Those who did what they did thought they got away with something. But they didn't know that Juanita's daughters were praying daughters," Odetta said.
The Luzerne County district attorney says the Juanita Todd case has not been reviewed since 1994.
We reached out to the Wilkes-Barre Police Department to see if it has any plans to review it again; we have not heard back.