Transcription
On this episode of Black Girl Gone, I tell the story of two women who were brutally murdered less than 2 months apart. On December 6th, 2002, the body of 27-year-old Tama Taylor was found. She had been stabbed to death in her Leonia, Georgia home. Less than 2 months later, on January 27th, 2003, 32-year-old Jennifer Cummings was also stabbed to death in her home, 6 miles away in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Both victims had been killed with knives from their own kitchens. The multiple similarities in these murders led investigators to believe that perhaps these murders were possibly connected. Are the similarities coincidental or the work of a serial killer? This is Tama and Jennifer's story.
At the beginning of this year, I received an email from the niece of Jennifer Cummings, asking if I would re-release the episode about the unsolved murder of her aunt, Jennifer, and Tama Taylor. When I first covered this story in November 2021, our audience was a lot smaller, and in the two years since the episode was released, the show has grown tremendously and now includes a growing YouTube audience as well. And so, for these reasons, I'm re-recording this episode in hopes that we can continue to bring attention to the unsolved murders of these two women.
Tama Taylor grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. As a child, her father, Matthew, said that Tamika, "Mik" for short, was always very ambitious. She was a very serious student, and getting good grades was very important to her. After graduating high school, she attended the University of South Carolina, and while there, she majored in English. After graduation, however, she started working in mortgage banking and found a lot of success. She was eventually hired by Wachovia Bank in Atlanta and was a star at work. According to her father, she had always been a perfectionist, and so it's no wonder that she excelled in such a competitive environment.
Tama wasn't all about business, though. She had a very active social life. She had a very large group of friends and associates, and she often spent her weekends at upscale parties and events. Tama was very outgoing, not someone people would describe as shy by any means. At 27, she was doing very well. Her career had given her the ability to purchase a home, and after working at Wachovia, Tamika was hired by Chase Bank in Atlanta. She really had everything you could want at that age: a very active social life where she often found herself at parties with celebrities, and a very successful career. T had accomplished so much in her young life and had so much more to look forward to.
In December 2002, Tama was getting in the holiday spirit and had been invited to a holiday party hosted by a local radio personality that she had become friends with. On December 4th, 2002, M was preparing for the holiday party that was taking place that night. She spent the afternoon at the mall and she made a purchase from Victoria's Secret. And then, at around 5:00 p.m., she called the host of the party to ask if it was okay for her to bring a guest. The host told Tama that it was okay for her to bring someone with her, but she never told the host who the person was or whether it was a male guest or a female.
Now, that night, before heading to the party, Tama also called her friend Rochelle. And her friend recalled in an interview with True Crime Daily back in 2018 the conversation she had with Tama that evening. Rochelle said that when she spoke to her, she told her that she was going to a Christmas party and was really excited about it. She told Rochelle that she was planning to wear a red dress for the festive occasion, and Rochelle said that she told her to have a good time. And Tama told her that she would call her later on, but Rochelle never heard from Tama again, and she never made it to the party that evening either.
On Saturday, December 6th, it had been 2 days since anyone had spoken to Tama. Her last contact had been on the fourth, the night of the holiday party. Now, Tama's sister had not heard from her either, but she had been calling her sister for the previous two days, but she wasn't getting an answer. Now, it was not like Tamika to not answer the phone, and so her sister decided to go over to her house to check on her. And when her sister arrived, she again tried to call Tamika, but again, she didn't answer. And so her sister let herself into Tama's house. She checked around the home, and then she made her way upstairs, and there she made a shockingly gruesome discovery. Lying on the floor of her master bedroom was the body of Tama. She was lying in a puddle of blood. She had been stabbed 57 times.
To describe her sister as shocked is probably an understatement. She was hysterical, but she managed to call 911. When police arrived at Tama's home, they found her sister inconsolable and in shock. They went upstairs to the bedroom and found a very bloody scene. Tama was dead on the floor, and there was blood all over the walls and in the carpet. She was lying next to the bed with her hands tied in front of her. The scene was bloody, but police got lucky early on because the killer was sloppy. As they began to process the scene, they were able to recover both fingerprints and bloody footprints. Whoever had murdered Tama was brutal, and she had most likely suffered. And when her body was found, she was also nude. She had been sexually assaulted before being stabbed to death. A used condom was found on her bed, and police were able to get a partial DNA sample from it. The killer had also left behind DNA when he raped Tamika, and so investigators were able to recover DNA from her body too.
As for the crime scene itself, police discovered that there were no signs of forced entry, which led them to believe that Tamika possibly knew her killer. They believe that not long after Tama arrived home and hung up with her friend, she unknowingly let her killer enter her home. There was also no sign of a struggle in the downstairs area of the home, and the security alarm had been disarmed shortly after 5:00 p.m. The investigators believed that Tama opened the door and then was forced to go upstairs, where she was raped and then ultimately murdered. But who would want to kill Tama? There was nothing about her life that would lead police to any motive. She was successful and well-liked. The initial feeling from the detectives was that this was someone that she knew. The fact that there was no forced entry, paired with the fact that she had been stabbed so many times, led them to believe that this was personal.
As police continued their investigation, they questioned people in Tama's life. They questioned two men that she had previously dated, one of whom had expressed to people he knew that he was upset that Tama didn't want to be more than friends with him. But after being questioned by detectives and submitting a DNA sample, he was ruled out as a possible suspect, and so was the other man. They took DNA from multiple people as well to compare with the DNA at the crime scene, but none of the people detectives spoke to were a match, and everyone was cleared. The DNA that had been collected at the scene was also run through police databases, but it didn't match anyone in the system, and neither did the fingerprints, which meant whoever did this was not someone known to law enforcement.
So, at that point in the investigation, police were convinced that Tama's murder was a crime of passion. They believed that she could have been murdered by someone who had been rejected by her and then decided to kill her. There was also another important detail from the crime scene that made police think that this was a crime of passion, and that was that the killer stabbed Tama with knives from her own kitchen. But with no DNA match and no possible suspects, police were hitting a dead end in Tama's case. No one could imagine who would do something so horrible to her.
The crime scene indicated that perhaps the person who came over to Tama's home may have been a consensual sexual partner. Investigators looked at the fact that she had gone to Victoria's Secret that day, and that around 5:39 p.m., she disabled the security alarm to let someone inside. She had also asked the party host if she could bring someone with her, and there were bloody footprints at the scene as well, but they didn't belong to Tama. They belonged to her killer, which also indicated that the killer was barefoot during the attack and had stepped in Tama's blood. Another sign that this person had possibly been invited into the home where he felt comfortable enough to take off his shoes.
There was also a theory, however, that the consensual sexual partner and the killer were not the same. That perhaps she invited someone over, and they had sex, and then Tama was killed after that person had left. But no one ever came forward to say that they were at Tama's home and had a consensual sexual encounter with her, and no one linked to Tama romantically could ever be matched to the DNA from the condom found at the scene. Also, no one ever came forward to say that they were the guests that Tama planned to bring to the party, which is very strange.
Now, nothing had been stolen, but the killer had gone through Tama's personal papers. They were strewn all over her room and they were covered in blood. But what were they looking for? I mean, why would a random killer want to look through Tama's personal information if he was just there to rape and kill her? But despite the amount of evidence the killer left behind, police really had nothing. Nothing about Tama's life or lifestyle gave them any leads or any reason why someone would want her dead. She was a normal, single, 27-year-old woman. She had male friends that she dated, and she had an active social life, but she was a professional woman who had high standards for the men she dated.
But as investigators began to run out of leads about who killed Tama, 6 weeks later and 6 miles away from where she was murdered, Jennifer Cummings would meet the same fate under very similar circumstances. On January 26th, 2003, 32-year-old Jennifer Cummings was found stabbed to death inside her home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, 6 miles away from where Tama Taylor lived. And it doesn't take long for police to see the similarities in these two cases. 6 weeks after Tama Taylor was brutally murdered in her home in Leonia, Georgia, investigators were no closer to finding out who killed her than they were when they began their investigation. The killer had left behind a lot of DNA, but whoever had murdered Tama was someone whose DNA was not in the system, and none of the people in Tama's life matched the DNA profile. Both investigators and Tama's family were completely stuck. Neither had answers. But while investigators searched for answers, their attention would soon have to be split between two murders.
On the evening of January 27th, 2003, Jennifer Cummings was at home. Like Tama, she was a single, successful woman who lived alone. At around 8:00 p.m. that night, Jennifer placed a call to a friend of hers, but the friend didn't pick up, and so it went to voicemail, and Jennifer left a message. The friend she called had been home that evening with her husband. Now, from what I could gather, she had been using the computer in her home. This was 2003, and so most people were still using dial-up internet to connect, and so if someone called while you were online, they would hear a busy signal unless you had voicemail. And so, when Jennifer called her friend, the phone went straight to voicemail.
When Jennifer's friend got off the computer, she checked her messages, and on her voicemail was a very disturbing interaction between Jennifer and an unknown man. At the beginning of the call, you can hear the sound of Jennifer's phone hitting the floor. The only audio I could find of the call was really hard to hear, and so you kind of have to read the subtitles to fully understand what's being said. But the message only lasts 30 seconds, but in that recording, you can hear a frightened Jennifer and an unknown male voice. The male voice is heard telling Jennifer, "Don't play." To which Jennifer responds and says, "I'm not playing. I done told you. I done told you." The male voice then says, "Just sit on the floor. I'm not going to hurt you." And Jennifer responds, "Okay." Jennifer's then heard telling the man that she is going to pay him the money that she owed him. She says, "Do you want your money?" And he says, "Just sit on the floor. I won't hurt you." As the recording ends, you can hear Jennifer saying a prayer, and you can hear in her voice that she is absolutely terrified and knows something bad is getting ready to happen to her.
When Jennifer's friend heard the voicemail, she immediately called the police. She could tell that something bad was happening to her friend, and she was clearly calling her for help. She explained to police what she had heard and that they needed to go to Jennifer's house because something was happening to her. But Jennifer's friend and her husband then got in their car and headed over to her house themselves. They didn't want to just sit around and wait for police. They were going to make sure that Jennifer was okay. But when the couple arrived at her home, the police were already there.
When police arrived at the house after receiving the call from Jennifer's friend, they found the front door to the home was unlocked, and so police entered the house and went to the master bedroom upstairs, and there, lying on the floor dead, was Jennifer. Her hands and her feet had been bound, and she had been stabbed 20 times. Jennifer was nude, and she had been sexually assaulted. The detectives at the scene could almost immediately recognize similarities between the crime scene in Jennifer's home and the crime scene just 6 miles away at Tama's house.
Now, like Tama, Jennifer was a single, successful woman who lived by herself. Jennifer and her family had moved from Jamaica to the United States in the 1980s. Here in America, they settled in Michigan. Jennifer was the youngest of five girls. At New Buffalo High School in Michigan, Jennifer was a very active student. She was a cheer, and she played basketball and ran track. After graduating from high school, Jennifer went to Ferris State University and majored in international business. After college, in the early '90s, Jennifer moved to the Atlanta area. At the time, her mother and sisters were still living in Michigan, but about 2 years after Jennifer moved to the area, her mother and one of her sisters moved there as well, and they lived a few miles from Jennifer. In a 2003 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, her sister Jackie said that Jennifer was a "fun person who you couldn't be around and be sad."
Jennifer soon found success in the Atlanta area as a rep for Mary Kay cosmetics. She rose in the ranks at Mary Kay, and her hard work had earned her the position of an independent senior sales executive. As a senior sales exec, Jennifer had 56 other sales people under her, and she had also earned a car from Mary Kay, given to top performers, which, if you know anything about Mary Kay cosmetics back in the day, the car was major. And Jackie said that Jennifer had a drive to succeed, and she carried it everywhere she went. But on top of her success, Jennifer was also a loving sister and aunt to her nieces and nephews. Her sister told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Jennifer would help her out and fill in for her at events when Jackie couldn't make it. She also used her success to try and help others. She would give jobs to people and donate to charities, but she also had plans to start a nonprofit for women. Jennifer was a loving person and was loved by many.
As police began to process the scene at Jennifer's house, they saw a scene eerily similar to the one at Tamika's 6 weeks earlier. Jennifer had been bound and sexually assaulted, and the knife used to murder her had come from her own kitchen. But unlike in Tamika's case, the investigators were unable to get any DNA. There was no sign of forced entry, and so police believed that Jennifer possibly knew her attacker and had let him in. Although there were multiple similarities in these cases, the absence of DNA profiles in Jennifer's murder meant that there was nothing to compare in these cases besides what they could see.
Investigators looked into Jennifer's personal life to see if anyone she knew would have wanted her dead, but no one they spoke to gave them any reason to believe that they were involved in Jennifer's case. All investigators really had was the voicemail with the killer's voice. Investigators played the recording to Jennifer's family and friends in hopes that someone would be able to recognize the voice on the recording, but no one knew who it was. Detectives now had two single, successful women who lived alone who were murdered just 6 weeks and 6 miles apart in their homes with knives from their own kitchens. The similarities in these cases were very hard to ignore. However, in Jennifer's case, police seemed to have a clear motive, and it was captured on that voicemail. The male voice, believed to be the killer, is heard demanding money, and Jennifer is heard promising to pay. And so, police believe that the killer's intended reason for being at Jennifer's home was money, and therefore, this was someone that Jennifer knew and had some kind of relationship with.
Now, the women also lived very close to each other, and so investigators began to look into the possibility that maybe someone doing work in the neighborhood had been responsible. Perhaps Tama and Jennifer had both hired someone to do work at their home, and that person was responsible for their murders. Police did speak to several day laborers in the community, but none of them were ever considered suspects. As the investigation continued, detectives working on the two cases were getting nowhere, and despite the glaring similarities, investigators began to believe that the murders of Tamika and Jennifer were not related. In Jennifer's case, they believed that she was murdered by someone who she owed money to who had done work for her. But in Tama's case, they had no motive. There was nothing that had come up during the investigation that had led them to any reason why Tama was killed.
Because of the nature of these two murders, police have been reluctant to release too many details about the crimes, but as the months and years went on, both cases went cold. The DNA collected from Tamika's home was never matched to anyone, and the voice on the message left by Jennifer that night has never been identified. In 2018, Tama and Jennifer's story was featured on True Crime Daily, and during that episode, the investigator that worked both cases reiterated that they do not believe that the two murders were perpetrated by the same person. At that time, they believed that renewed attention to the cases would help solve them, but even with the national attention, no new information came in.
Again, in 2020, however, an Oxygen show called "The DNA of Murder" would introduce a new theory, which reignited the idea that Tama and Jennifer were, in fact, killed by the same person, and that person is potentially a serial killer. On the show, they explore the possibility that the two women were killed by admitted serial killer Charles Lindell Carter. Carter is currently in prison, serving three life sentences for murdering three women in the Atlanta area in 2004, 2005, and 2006. The women that Carter had murdered had been killed in their homes, except one who had been murdered at a friend's apartment. Two of the victims were stabbed to death, and at least one of them had been sexually assaulted by Carter. However, in the case of these three women, they had all been connected to Carter in some way and knew him prior to their murders. Carter admitted to killing the three women, as well as the murder of a man in 1992, but he never admitted to killing Tama or Jennifer.
Investigators were well aware of Carter and his crimes, and they had his DNA, but it was never matched to the DNA in Tamika's home. Detectives were never able to make a connection to Carter and Tama or Jennifer. Also, the women Charles admitted to killing fit a different victimology than Tama and Jennifer. None of them lived alone, and they were all mothers. The host of "The DNA of Murder," however, speaks to a profiler who is also convinced that Jennifer and Tama's murders are connected. But as of today, there's been nothing. The show, however, does conclude by saying that they believe that Tamika and Jennifer's murders are connected, despite the investigator saying otherwise. And so, the only thing that we can do is wait.
Investigators believe that whoever killed Jennifer told someone, and so they are hoping that eventually, someone will come forward. Tama's case is going to come down to the DNA and who it belonged to. We have seen it happen time and time again, as DNA testing advances, investigators' ability to solve cold cases becomes more and more possible. The murders of both Tamika and Jennifer are baffling. Two women who were successful and well-liked, both murdered inside their homes, stabbed with knives from their own kitchens. But for as many reasons as there are to believe that these murders are connected, there are some that also lead to the possibility that they were not. There are obviously things about these cases and about these crime scenes that we, as the public, just don't know. But I do believe that attention to these cases are what the investigations need, because the detectives are right, someone probably knows something.
There are so many lingering questions in these stories. Who was Tama intending to bring to that Christmas party, and why has that person never come forward? Who was the man heard on the voicemail from Jennifer, and why did she owe him money, and what for? I also personally wonder why Jennifer called her friend that night instead of 911. But if these murders are just a coincidence, it's a hell of a coincidence.
Years after Tama and Jennifer were murdered, investigators still don't know who killed them. Like I said, they don't believe their murders are connected and claim that they have evidence that leads them to that conclusion. But despite what investigators claim, many still believe that these murders are connected. The fact that two women were murdered under such similar circumstances is a real mystery, almost unbelievable. But the murders of Tamika and Jennifer, like investigators said, can be solved. Each case is really just missing one major piece that would help them be solved, and that is frustrating because investigators are so close to the answers, yet so far away. Usually, in cases that remain unsolved for so long, it's partially because so little evidence exists. But in both Tamika and Jennifer's case, there's a ton of evidence, they just can't link it to anyone. And so, at this point, detectives need someone to come forward. Even the smallest detail could lead them down a new path that may lead to solving one or both of these murders.
The murder of Tama Taylor and Jennifer Cummings are officially cold. And so, unless investigators are able to get a match for the DNA or someone comes forward, all investigators can do is wait. The families of these women need justice for their loved ones. And so, if anyone knows or remembers anything, investigators need your help. Let's continue to share these women's stories. Hopefully, we can bring closure to their families. May Tama Taylor and Jennifer Cummings rest in peace. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Threads.