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There’s a buzz this evening in the Original Pancake House. Amateur sleuths and researchers — members of the Fort Worth Cold Case Club — have convened at the Cowtown eatery for a monthly meeting to chitchat and debate their latest cases over medium-roasted coffee and bacon and eggs. The serious dispositions of those in attendance and weighty conversations suggest these members aren’t just doing this for fun — true-crime enthusiasts simply fawning over evidence — no, no, they have every intention to solve the cases they’re working on.
In attendance is Weatherford’s Lori Cates, who, since joining the group a year ago, has been consumed by the gruesome 1983 murder case of Fred and Karen Cremean. She’s spent countless hours poring over documents, discussing the crimes with family members of the victims, and visiting libraries to track down more information.
Cates may not be a formally trained investigator, but she believes her efforts might make a difference.
The crime
The Mayfair Street neighborhood in west Fort Worth was a blue-collar area in the 1980s. It was a nice place to live for a young couple looking for a starter home or a retiree looking to downsize. Fred, 29, and Karen, 27, rented a small white home on Mayfair and lived there for three years. Fred worked for his brother’s textile and roofing business, as well as in the concrete and construction industry, and Karen worked as an assistant manager in the automotive section at a Kmart in nearby White Settlement.
On Sept. 20, 1983, their home became the location of a crime scene. A brutal murder left Fred and Karen dead and friends and family wondering who would commit such a vicious act. It had been a warm, rainy Sunday night, and Monday morning, employees at Kmart were concerned that Karen hadn’t shown up for work without contacting the store. After phone calls yielded only busy signals, a coworker visited the house to check up on her.
She noticed the front door slightly ajar but blocked, with blood visible inside the home. After contacting her manager, he and another employee were able to enter through the back door and discovered the Cremeans dead in the living room. Karen had been shot twice, and Fred, three times — all bullets had been fired into their heads. It was a gruesome scene and shocked those in the neighborhood. Police believed the couple had been killed sometime late the night before or in the early morning hours, the same day the victims were discovered.
Law enforcement described the murders as an execution. About $2,000 in cash was found lying around the house, and police concluded robbery wasn’t a motive. There were no signs of forced entry.
“There were other things at the scene — guns — that would have been taken [during a robbery],” Det. Ben Dumas told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
An added element to the case was the suspicion drugs may have been part of the motive. Police found cocaine in the home, as well as scales and other paraphernalia believed to be used for drug sales. Detectives told the media they had a couple suspects, but no one was ever arrested and the case has remained cold.
The investigation
Copies of case notes, interviews, and police reports cover Lori Cates’ desk. She discusses various conversations with family members and witnesses. Karen’s father, Jesse Covin, has given her numerous documents and interviews he’s conducted through the years. The case has led to years of conjecture and innuendo. Rumors swirled among friends and family about who might have been responsible. There have been several persons of interest, but investigators have yet to nail anyone down as the killer.
Picking through the mounds of speculations and rumor to form a coherent hypothesis isn’t easy, but Cates believes the case can still be solved. She believes the added scrutiny from the club’s investigation and additional media coverage might bring about some tips or information that might eventually lead to an arrest.
A case like this leads to numerous questions and “what ifs.” Family members say Karen had planned to attend a family reunion the weekend of the murder but stayed home instead. That weekend, a white Camaro had been seen in the area that hadn’t been seen there before.
“There are some things in this case that just make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Cates says. “We just need some new information.”
Fred and Karen first met at Brewer High School. In 1975, they showed up at her parents’ home one day when she was 19 and told Jesse and his wife Peggy that they were going to get married. In the coming years, Jesse believed Fred may have been involved with drugs and offered to move his daughter to another state.
Neighbors described the Cremeans as a nice couple who never caused problems in the neighborhood. A combination of money and drugs may have been what led to the couple’s demise, but neighbors didn’t report seeing much traffic at the home or anything out of the ordinary while the Cremeans lived there. Police interviewed more than 100 people in an effort to find the killer.
At the time of the murders, the Cremeans had been married eight years. Family members say Karen dreamed of becoming a mother but had undergone a stillbirth a year before her death after the umbilical cord wrapped around her baby’s neck.
For Cates, the investigation has become personal.
“I have a son, and I guess I connect on that level with Karen,” Cates says. “All she wanted to do was be a mom.”
The victims
The Cremean murders had a massive impact on two families. Karen left behind two sisters, Cathy Powell and Lindy Dean, and a brother, Michael Paul Covin. Lindy was only 12 years old at the time her sister was murdered. In seventh grade at the time, her sister-in-law picked her up from school while she was in PE class.
“That was weird,” Lindy says. “In the car, she didn’t tell me anything, and I kept thinking about my mom and dad. Maybe something happened to them? Maybe something happened to my brother? I thought of everybody but Karen. And that’s the sad part. So when I walked in, everybody was crying. By then, I think cousins were coming over, and everybody was pretty much in shock.
“I do know that some of the people that we thought were suspects were at the funeral. And that’s kind of creepy because a lot of times, the killers go to the funeral.”
Lindy and her family remember Karen as a sweet, young woman who was responsible and close to her family. She was quiet and loved doing crochet, embroidery, and other crafts at home. Her young sister believes she and Karen are a lot more alike than others in her family. They both enjoyed flowers and working in their yards to keep them manicured. They also both kept a diary describing each day’s events, and Karen also enjoyed writing poetry.
After the marriage, Lindy says Karen didn’t come around as much and remembers Fred had a quick temper. However, the Cremean family remembers him as “Friendly Freddy,” who was always smiling.
“He was the most friendly, helpful, lovable, funny person you’d ever want to meet,” his brother, Larry Cremean, says. “He wasn’t someone you wanted to have mad at you, but he was known as Friendly Freddy. You never saw him without a smile. Karen was a very lovely, sweet girl.”
Larry believes more than one person was involved in the murders and believes he knows who committed the crime, but that it can’t be proven. Fred was involved in a cocaine deal financed by a third party, Larry says, which led to the unfortunate events that night in their home. The cocaine turned out to be a kind of sulfate, and the bad deal cost his backers money.
“He’d never done anything like this,” Larry says. “He knew a little bit about speed, a little bit about pot, but he didn’t know anything about cocaine in big numbers like that. He was just small time. He worked every day, seven days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day. He just got in over his head.
“I know my brother was in the drug business, but he wasn’t really in the drug business. In the ’80s, there were a lot of people doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”
Kerry Cremean hadn’t spoken with his brother Fred in over a year at the time of his death. He’s a religious man who’d tried to get his younger brother to go to church with him. Fred told him to “stop preaching to him,” Kerry says, and the two lost touch after that. He echoes his older brother Larry’s view of Fred as a hard worker and friendly person.
The case could be solved, Kerry says, but his family doesn’t get together too much anymore and has little discussion about it. He vividly remembers helping his mother clean up the bloody scene at the home. Hopes of arresting those responsible have faded through the years.
“When it happens, you’re looking for any shred of information in your mind to try to piece something together,” he says. “The murders affected the whole family. We were looking over our shoulders for years. It took its toll on me.”
Like Jesse Covin, Larry says he’s spent years working to uncover what happened that night. His family was devastated by the murders, and he wasted years single-mindedly focusing on the murders. It would mean a lot for the Cremeans if someone came forward to help make an arrest, but he doesn’t hold out much hope.
“It’ll take a deathbed confession,” he says.
The families
Looking through photo albums is difficult for the Cremean family. Lindy sees her father changed through the years after Karen’s death with each turn of the page. A man who had been fun-loving and goofy at times went through a drastic change.
“It just floored me when it happened, and I’ve carried it almost 30 years,” he told the Star-Telegram in 2013. “I haven’t got much longer to go. Neither does my wife. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get somebody arrested and to confess to what they did.”
Now in their late-80s, the Covins recently divorced after more than 60 years of marriage. Lindy says her mother accepted Karen’s death and turned to her belief in God for solace. However, her father’s inability to move past his daughter’s death was a major cause of their split so late in life. Lindy says his sense of humor vanished after Karen’s death.
There were fewer family outings and camping trips, and Jesse became more withdrawn. The case consumed him for decades as he chased every lead in his pursuit of the person who took his daughter away. Not only does Lindy feel she missed out on a relationship with her sister, but the relationship with her father also suffered.
“Their murder didn’t just affect two people,” she says. “It affected the whole family. It basically ruined our family. My dad was so eaten up with looking into this and talking about it to everybody that he ran away all my mom’s friends. They didn’t want to hear about Karen every time they came over. He would cry, and then he would go down to church and talk in front of everybody and cry.”
Retired Fort Worth detective Manny Reyes was one of the officers on the cold case unit assigned to the Cremean case. He was assigned to the unit from 2005 to 2011, and the brutality of the murders still sticks out in his mind. He re-interviewed old witnesses as part of his review of the case but was still never able to make an arrest. Police face some challenges in determining a culprit.
“The age of the case for one,” he says. “Plus, when this occurred, we were not aware of DNA. Thus, our crime scene officers were not looking for or aware what DNA was. People came and went from this location. Fingerprints were found, but they belonged to people who had been there and were accounted for.”
The precision of the murder left many at the time to believe they were on the right track suspecting a drug connection. The Covin family says that an autopsy report showed that Fred had cocaine and some other drugs in his system. Karen did not have any drugs in her system, and family members say she didn’t use drugs. They’re happy the Cold Case Club is keeping the case alive, and further research gives them at least a semblance of hope.
Whatever led to the murders, Lindy Dean just hopes the Cremeans’ killer knows the great pain and sadness her family still experiences more than three decades later.
“I would love to find out who did it because I think they got away with it too long,” she says. “And I’m hoping that their conscience is eating at them. I know they’re never going to confess, but I would like them to know the damage that they’ve caused to so many people, whether it was over drugs or over money.”
The club
The Fort Worth Cold Case Club has more than 800 members, but a core group of about 50 members research the cases. Like Cates, many have had a long interest in true crime. Along with monthly meetings, club members even attend crime investigation conventions with appearances and presentations by television crime investigator Nancy Grace and “Dateline” reporter Keith Morrison. In recent years, as true crime stories have become more popular, amateur detectives have played a role in aiding police in solving cases.
One of the most recent examples comes from California, where comedian and actor Patton Oswald’s wife, Michelle McNamara, spent years researching the Golden State Killer, who is believed to be responsible for at least a dozen murders and 45 rapes throughout California in the ’70s and ’80s, before her unexpected death in 2016. After the posthumous publication of her book, I’ll be Gone in the Dark, police arrested 72-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo in Sacramento for the murders.
In September, the student-run Oklahoma City University Law School Fight Club helped free a man convicted of murder 17 years ago after working on the case since 2011. In 2017, Georgia law enforcement credited the “Up and Vanished” podcast with helping solve a 12-year cold case. Police were able to make an arrest in the murder of Tara Grinstead, who disappeared in the small town of Ocilla.
With the internet and the power of crowdsourcing, the public has played an ever-increasing role in criminal investigations. Some police departments have even embraced this crime club technique by starting Facebook groups to help gather evidence. Cold case clubs like Fort Worth’s have also had an impact in fleshing out new leads.
“Clubs like these do help,” former detective Manny Reyes says. “They keep the case alive. There is no telling when someone might remember something or someone just decides to come forward. We just need someone to come forward with any type of information.”
Fort Worth Cold Case Club founder Dianne Kuykendall, a retired postal employee, hopes her group can help solve even a few of the hundreds of cold cases in the area. Families have even brought their cases of murdered loved ones to the club. Group members are regulars at the Fort Worth Library, where they scour archives for information.
“We want to help the families, and we’d like to be able to help law enforcement,” Kuykendall says. “This is what we enjoy doing. My end goal is to have some of us volunteer our time to help because I know they have monetary issues and time issues. I know they have issues like that. We’d just like to be able to help them.”
Cold case officers didn’t comment on this story, but they do request any new information from the public on any of the unsolved murders listed on the police department’s website.
For Cates, it would be great to see someone eventually charged in the murders of Fred and Karen Cremean. The families could receive some closure and at least know why the couple was gunned down. After three decades of questions and rumors, Cates hopes her club’s research will at least lead to Fort Worth police meeting with her and other members to take a fresh look at the case.
That hasn’t happened yet, but Cates remains optimistic it could happen. She notes simply, “At this point, what have you got to lose?”
