Hey y’all, it’s Julie Mattson, and this week’s episode of Pushing Up Lilies is one that is incredibly difficult to talk about. It’s a case out of Cleveland, Ohio that has left an entire community shaken and searching for answers. Authorities say a 28-year-old mother, Aliyah Henderson, is now facing two felony counts of aggravated murder in connection with the deaths of two young girls. The victims, 8-year-old Mila Chatman and 10-year-old Amor Wilson, were discovered inside suitcases, a detail that has stunned investigators and devastated the families who loved them. According to the Cleveland Division of Police, Henderson was charged Thursday, and a Cleveland Municipal Court judge set her bond at $2 million. In this episode, I walk through the timeline of what has been reported so far, from the discovery that launched the investigation to the charges now filed in court. We’ll look at the questions investigators are trying to answer, the heartbreaking reality of crimes involving children, and how communities process tragedies that are almost impossible to comprehend. Most importantly, we remember Mila and Amor, two young girls whose lives mattered and whose names deserve to be spoken with care and dignity. Behind every headline is a story of love, loss, and families left trying to make sense of the unimaginable. * Listener discretion is advised.
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00:06
Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I'm your host, Julie Mattson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
00:24
Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. Just want to say again how much I enjoyed our event last weekend. The True Crime Club was held at the McCart Street Mercantile in Crumb, and it was so fun, and it was so amazing.
00:50
For those of you who came and have been asking about my CrimeCon merch, that has been ordered. So, if you're interested in that, let me know because it'll be available soon. We also had the True Crime Panel at the Bearded Monk on the 28th, and that was a lot of fun.
01:08
I gave away bookmarks, and those are actually available for free at the Mercantile. So, if you go up there, you can grab you one and they're no charge. On the 19th, I again am participating in the 16th global webinar on forensic science, and that's a virtual event.
01:28
And then Beyond the Crime is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 11th through 12th. I'll be there on the live podcasting stage. And then don't forget the women in podcasting cruise from Catalina Island to Ensenada.
01:46
And that is May 18th through May 22nd. And then I'll be home a week before I go to Crime Con in Vegas. And that takes place May 29th through May 31st. And then my next event is not going to be until Crime Cruise, which is November 18th through 22nd.
02:06
So boy, busy first part of the year, but it's exciting. I've been contacted by multiple people to come and do presentations about the podcast. I love getting the word out and I love answering questions and educating on forensics.
02:24
If you know anybody that's interested in that, I'm definitely available. I want to talk a little this week about the Cleveland suitcase murders. This happened in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was a quiet evening.
02:38
There was a man walking his dog in a field near East 162nd Street and Midland Avenue. And he'd taken this walk many times before. The neighborhood was calm. The field was just an open space. People passed through on their way home.
02:55
It was commonly traveled. But that evening, his dog kept stopping. And so, the animal kind of circled the same patch of grass over and over and just refused to walk forward with the owner. At first, you know, when you're walking your dog, they stop multiple times and they have to pee on everything.
03:17
So, the owner assumed that it had caught the scent maybe of another animal. And then he noticed something lying in the grass and it was a suitcase. So, it looked weathered and a little out of place. And he later told police that he believed it had been sitting there for several days, possibly even a week, but he had walked past it before and just assumed it was trash.
03:41
Because I don't know. I mean, not everybody's curious. Me, if I'd have seen the suitcase, I probably would have opened it, but not everyone is that way. I think we talked about that last week, how we drive past a trash bag on the side of the highway and secretly hope that it's a missing person that we can say that we helped locate.
04:01
But anyway, that evening, his dog would not leave the suitcase alone. Eventually, curiosity did take over, and he walked closer and unzipped the suitcase. Inside was the body of a child. Now, moments later, police would discover something even more disturbing because that suitcase was not the only suitcase in the field.
04:28
And what investigators found next would turn a quiet Cleveland neighborhood into the center of a homicide investigation that literally shocked the city. When Cleveland police arrived shortly after 6 o'clock on the evening of March 5th, they confirmed the horrifying discovery inside the suitcase.
04:47
But as investigators searched the surrounding area, they found something else just a short distance away. The other item that they found was another suitcase, and inside it was another young girl. Both children had been placed inside suitcases and buried in shallow areas of the field.
05:08
The quiet neighborhood quickly became an active crime scene, and police secured the area and started obviously documenting all the evidence. And at that moment, investigators didn't know who the girls were.
05:23
They didn't know how long the bodies had been there. They had no idea who was responsible. But within the next 48 hours, detectives would actually make an arrest. And when the identity of the suspect became public, it left the community stunned because the person accused of killing the girls was someone who should have been protecting them.
05:46
Now, before detectives could understand what happened to the children, they first needed to answer a crucial question. Who were they? Because once investigators identified the victims, the entire direction of the case would change, and it would lead them straight to someone very close to the girls.
06:08
And I know we've talked about this before when someone's decomposed at this point. We don't know how long they had been in the suitcases, but I mean, I don't know the weather in Cleveland, but they were out in the weather.
06:21
And that makes identification harder. I think I've told y'all before here and probably in most places, we bring all people who are unidentified and can't be identified by looking at the body and the driver's license and knowing for sure 100% without a doubt that it's that person.
06:42
Now, in the case of children, they normally haven't gotten an ID yet. Some of them have a school ID, but that's not a government issued form of identification, so we're not able to use those. But in cases like this, because these two girls were found together or in the same area, I believe they had a good idea of who they were.
07:06
Now, DNA testing and forensics examination actually helped to determine that the girls were related and they were half sisters. Their names were Amor Wilson and Mila Chatman. Amora was 10 and Mila was eight, and both girls were from Cleveland.
07:29
So, as investigators really started tracing their lives, the focus of this investigation quickly shifted towards the people closest to them. And within less than 48 hours of the discovery, detectives executed a search warrant at a residence in the 700 block of East 162nd Street.
07:50
The home was located near the field where the suitcases were actually found. And inside the house, investigators actually discovered another child who appeared to be unharmed. This child was placed into protective custody by the Department of Children and Family Services.
08:10
And while there, detectives also recovered some evidence connected to the case. The investigation soon led them to believe that the girl's mother was responsible. When police announced the arrest, many people in the community were shocked.
08:28
But the real question investigators were trying to answer was even more troubling. What exactly had happened inside the home before the girls' bodies ended up in suitcases in this field? Now, the girl's mother, 28-year-old Aliyah Henderson, was arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated murder.
08:48
And a few days later, she appeared in Cleveland Municipal Court. During the hearing, prosecutors formally presented the charges connected to the deaths of her daughters, and the judge set her bond at $2 million.
09:03
Henderson actually spoke very little during the proceedings. Outside the courtroom, however, the grief and anger felt by family members was impossible to ignore. One of the most emotional voices to emerge after Mila was found was her father, Deshaun Chatman.
09:25
Standing near the growing memorial where the girls were discovered, he spoke about the loss of his daughter. He said that he'd been trying for years to gain custody of Mila and had actually not been able to see her in several years.
09:41
So, he said memories of the sisters building blanket forts and spending nights laughing during sleepovers were in the back of his mind. And moments that should have been part of a normal childhood now only exist in memory.
09:58
But even with an arrest, investigators were still facing one of the most difficult questions in the entire case, which is, how did the girls die? And the answer to that question would depend on the careful work of the forensic specialist and the pathologist at the medical examiner's office.
10:17
The way investigators handle the evidence from the beginning is actually critically important. As part of the forensic investigation, when human remains are discovered inside containers like suitcases, we treat this scene as a trace evidence case, which really refers to microscopic materials that can be found on the body or even in the suitcase or on the suitcase that may link people, objects, or locations to a specific crime.
10:51
Any certain color of dirt or texture of dirt on the suitcase would indicate that it had been moved, you know, from one area to another, outdoors. Fingerprints on the suitcase handle, fingerprints on the suitcase locks, and then fibers, hairs, or whatnot actually found on the body, which is inside the suitcase.
11:18
There is so much evidence just in and around the suitcase itself that this is considered a trace case. So those materials that can be in there, you know, soil particles, fibers, hair, paint fragments, dust, or even someone else's skin cells can really help.
11:39
Now, because this trace evidence can easily be destroyed, our job as investigators is to avoid disturbing the scene whenever possible. This was always hard because many times at our scenes, you know, we're all curious.
11:54
We're like, let's open it. Let's see what's in there. Well, number one, you have to make sure that it's actually a person. We don't just send every suitcase we find to the medical examiner's office without opening it, right?
12:04
But once that's determined and determined that the remains are human, we don't really want to touch anything. I mean, minimal disturbance, minimal disturbance. Now, I have had cases where kids were fishing and came across like a yeti cooler and it had deer bones and tissue in it and was very similar to this, decomposing, and it was taped shut.
12:33
It was found by a passerby who then called the police, and the police came out with as little disturbance as possible. They sent me photos of what was inside the cooler and then our forensic anthropologist was able to determine that the remains were that of a deer.
12:52
So obviously we did not bring that cooler to the medical examiner's office. But in cases like this, we want to avoid removing the remains from the suitcase at the discovery site. So, the containers and their contents are preserved exactly as they're found.
13:11
The children would remain inside the suitcase during transport, and that is to prevent the destruction of evidence. That allows investigators to preserve the fibers and the soil pattern, the fingerprints, or any other microscopic materials that can provide clues about where the victims were before they were discovered and who committed this crime.
13:37
As forensic nurses, we often work alongside the medical examiners and the police in cases involving violence and suspicious deaths. Our role typically is, you know, documenting injuries, preserving evidence, helping interpret medical findings that may explain how injuries occurred, but documentation is so important.
14:03
But in this case, there would be very little because we would document, of course, all the details of the case as far as who found it and where it was and when they found it and, you know, the times that everything occurred, when did they find it versus when did they call the police?
14:22
We would really document that very little manipulation occurred, only enough to confirm that the remains were human. And then the case was reclosed and sent to the medical examiner's office as is. So, in this case, their deaths, we don't even know what happened to them yet.
14:46
We have not been advised what their injuries were and how they died. We don't know why. We don't know why the mom did this, but Mila's dad had been trying to see her for years. Now, for residents in the neighborhood where the suitcases were discovered, that area is never going to feel the same.
15:08
These two sisters, 10 and 8, they should have had decades of life to live ahead of them. So, as the legal case continues, investigators are going to continue working to piece together every detail of exactly what happened.
15:26
But even after the court proceedings end, this memory of this case is going to remain in the community. You know, every quiet evening walk. I mean, just that poor man discovering this tragedy hidden in plain sight.
15:43
And it just reminds us that every victim deserves to be remembered, not for the way their life ended, but for the life that they should have had. So, we often hear about bodies being put in suitcases.
15:57
There have been a lot of cases, not so much recently, and we know that primarily the bodies were put in these suitcases to conceal them and also maybe to make it easier for the murderer to move them because these suitcases have handles on them, but also possibly delay their bodies being discovered.
16:22
It gives the perpetrator time to escape, maybe a little bit of extra time to establish an alibi. And a lot of times when someone is concealed in a suitcase like this, it's a last minute decision because the killer is in a panic.
16:40
A suitcase acts as a barrier, so basically hides the body from animals and passerbys who wouldn't be able to visualize them instantly. And it just provides valuable time for the killer. Now, it's not a permanent solution, but a clothes suitcase can also contain the smell of decomposition somewhat.
17:01
So that can also delay the discovery. If she would have put them, just out in the field, or just buried them, and not put them in a suitcase, the smell would have been more obvious. Containers are also going to create a limited access environment, which can delay or alter the decomposition process by limiting access for insects like blowflies.
17:26
And that complicates the work of the forensic entomologist in accurately estimating the time of death or determining if the body had been moved. Because suitcases are common household items, they're readily available to most people, and most of them are large enough to fit a body in.
17:46
I mean, a lot of the cases that we've heard of the body's been dismembered. And I cannot tell you in this case if they had, or not, but it makes it a convenient kind of spur of the moment choice to dispose of that body.
18:02
Despite the advantages of the criminal, using the suitcase really leaves a significant amount of forensic evidence in the suitcase itself, and that ultimately ends up helping law enforcement solve the crime because they've touched it and they've put the body in there and chances are they're not wearing gloves.
18:22
I mean, the mom's skin cells are going to be all over these kids because they live together. So that doesn't always prove anything. But if they can get prints off the suitcase, I mean, there's so much trace evidence in cases like this that it would almost be fun to just like walk around the suitcase and swab everything and print everything.
18:46
It'd be kind of fun to actually be the one to find the evidence. But we have had cases like this where bags washed up from the lake and the body is left in there. That's the hard part because we're all curious.
19:00
We're like, oh, open it up. Let's see who's in there. But we can't. Sometimes we know, you know, if someone is reported missing, we have an idea who it might be. But until they get that body out and at autopsy, they don't always know who it is.
19:17
Sometimes we're surprised. It's not who we think it is. So, this concealment is a tactic that a lot of people use to hide the smell and make the body less discoverable. Many times, they'll put them just like in a trash bag and we all know that's not really going to hide the smell.
19:36
So, something closed like this that seals makes it a little less obvious if you were to walk past it as far as the smell. So yeah, it's like you always think about people dismembering people and put them in suitcases.
19:51
And that is why, you know, it's got a handle. So, it's super easy to move. And it's closed. So, no one's really going to be able to smell it as much. And not everybody's going to walk over and open it.
20:05
So, it's going to probably cause at least a little bit of a delay in the body being found or discovered. But she put them both right here in this same field, actually, just not far from where she lived.
20:19
So that's the crazy thing. And she put them both in separate suitcases. These will have sisters, bless their hearts. I need some more information too about this other child found in the house. I have not heard anything about who that is, assuming that it's another one of her children, but I'm not sure.
20:39
These two girls, Mila and Amor, had different fathers. And so, there's a chance that this third child had a different father as well. I'm not sure, can't confirm that, but for some reason, she spared the life of that child and we don't know why.
20:55
So, we don't know anything about that. As this story breaks, we will continue working to piece everything together and try to get details of exactly what happened. I always found it interesting to, like after events like this where a body's found, is to go to the residence.
21:14
And it's not something that we do a lot as investigators for the medical examiner's office. I mean, we do, but we don't go through things there like we would if the death had occurred there. So, we don't get to be quite as nosy.
21:31
The police do that without us because the body wasn't in the home. Our only reason for going to the home would be to notify the parents of a death or, you know, a lot of times in baby deaths, if they die at the hospital, we still go to the home.
21:47
A lot of times we didn't get to go to the home if the death didn't occur there, except to notify family, but then we can get information that's found in the home from the police and add that to our report so that the medical examiner has that additional information to add to the story that will definitely probably help lead to who the perpetrator is, especially based on what's found.
22:12
And then the police many times will take photos at that time, and we can send those to the medical examiner as well. So, we can give them as much information as they want. And that's our goal is to provide as much as we can to them so that they can accurately determine the cause and manner of death.
22:32
And so that's our job as investigators. We try to do that and try to help in any way we can. Being nosy is something that many of us love to do and it's really cool to get paid for it because you can ask all the questions that you want to and no one's going to get mad at you because it's actually part of your job.
22:51
That was one of my favorite things because I get to ask the questions that I always wanted to ask but couldn't. Working again still really hard on the book and also on the forensic training program. And I'm super excited to roll that out to y'all.
23:07
And there's some really exciting stuff going on coming up for CrimeCon as well. So, trying to get all my merch ordered. I think I'm going to have some lapel pins, tumblers, bags, poker chips, T-shirts, and hoodies.
23:22
So those are kind of going to be the objects that are going to be available. Super exciting. Those will be on my website as soon as they are ready to be ordered. And I'm excited for y'all to let me know what you think about them.
23:35
I hope that y'all have an amazing week. It feels weird. Today is actually my birthday. And it feels weird because I don't have a whole lot to do. I mean, there's always a lot to do, but I just don't want to do it.
23:46
I feel like on our birthday, we shouldn't have to work, but such is life, right? Anyway, I hope y'all have a great rest of your week. And I look forward to talking to y'all next week. Bye, y'all. Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
24:02
If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast. This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public. Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplies.com for merchandise in past episodes.