2 push police to find a fugitive

RALEIGH -- Edith A. McCullough had watched enough crime dramas to learn a few sleuthing tactics.

Her mind raced when she heard Faye Benjamin, her downstairs neighbor, say that her husband vanished 27 years ago after shooting her between the eyes. Surely, she thought, an old man wouldn't hide from his Social Security checks.

That's how McCullough, 63, and Benjamin, 60 -- two boisterous, straight-talking women now so close they finish each other's sentences -- ended up at the Social Security office one day last June trying to sweet-talk an administrator into slipping them the address of Charles Edward Benjamin.

Their tactic didn't work, but McCullough's curiosity cracked open a 27-year-old cold case. The two women set aside bingo games and planning meetings for birthdays at Parkview Manor, the Raleigh apartment complex for older people where they live. Instead, they bore down on police near and far in a quest for justice.

Their prodding inspired a young detective to pick up a case that had petered out in the hands of veterans decades before and enlisted a team of marshals hundreds of miles away to launch a manhunt.

"I knew I had to do something," McCullough said. "He took her life away. I listened, and I heard her. I saw the pain of 27 years of injustice."

Their friendship began in the most usual of ways. A few years ago, McCullough had moved back to Raleigh and secured a spot in Parkview Manor. A friend told her to look up Benjamin, who lived downstairs.

The two became fast friends, and one afternoon last year, Benjamin lifted her eyeglasses above the ridged scar snaking past the bridge of her nose and told her neighbor how she nearly died 27 years before.

Benjamin met her husband, a newly discharged Army veteran, in the 1970s when he came to Raleigh one summer to visit relatives. The two courted briefly and married in 1974. By the end of 1979, their marriage had soured, and Faye Benjamin asked him to move out. They were civil, though, when he stopped by a few nights a week to visit their 3-year-old daughter.

Faye Benjamin has no idea why he brought a handgun when he stopped by the night of May 26, 1980. It was late; she told him their daughter had gone to bed. That was the last thing she recalled before she went down.

Faye Benjamin hasn't seen her husband since.

Raleigh police detectives drew up a warrant for his arrest, but they never caught him. As the years passed, Faye Benjamin learned to walk and talk again. She managed the throbbing pain in her head around the bullet lodged deep in her. She raised their daughter alone.

Faye Benjamin called Raleigh police now and again; she said they urged her to call if her husband came back around. Eventually, she lost hope he'd ever be brought to trial.

Hearing the story, McCullough grew angry. She couldn't imagine such an attack could be forgotten.

But in June, after their fruitless trip to the Social Security office, McCullough devised a new plan. She rummaged for the toll-free number she'd jotted down one night after catching an episode of "NC Wanted," a WRAL program featuring unsolved crimes. A sweet young woman took the call and said she'd have a detective be in touch.

Raleigh Detective J.G. Hobby checked his voice mail one day in June. His supervisor had forwarded the message from a producer at "NC Wanted." The case didn't sound familiar; he was a sophomore in high school in 1980. He scratched Benjamin's name on a pad and fired up his computer. He couldn't find a trace of Charles Benjamin in the department's system. No assault charge in court records, let alone the national crime database. He sent an intern to the department's microfilm machine.

Within a week, they hit pay dirt: a seven-page report recounting the shooting. But that's where the paper trail ended. Court records from those years have long been destroyed. While the former detective mentioned drawing a warrant and entering it in a national database, Hobby couldn't find any record of it.

"I hate it slipped through the cracks," Hobby said. "If it had been me, I'd have been screaming all these many years."

The case warms up

Hobby started from scratch. He tracked down a half-dozen retired officers who'd had a hand in the case. He dug up Faye Benjamin's hospital records from 1980. He interviewed a friend of Faye Benjamin's who witnessed the shooting.

Hobby searched for Charles Benjamin in some people-locator programs; he got a hit at an apartment in Brooklyn, though little else to link him there. He snipped a picture of Charles Benjamin out of a 30-year-old family photo.

In October, U.S. marshals staked out Benjamin's apartment building. On Oct. 4, they knocked.

Charles Benjamin, now 70, didn't fuss. His attorney, Scott Wilkinson, said he had been living in the same apartment all these years. Now, he's in the Wake County jail awaiting trial.

Hobby said that when marshals came, Benjamin shrugged and said, "Guess I been waiting on you guys for a while."

Faye Benjamin has been waiting, too. She's eager to watch him face a judge. McCullough will be there, too, watching the real-life courtroom drama that she stirred up.