GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Investigators have learned what happened to a man who was mistakenly released from prison after raping multiple children in the Grand Rapids area and elsewhere in the country in the 1960s and 1970s.
“When Erma (Shaw) was 12 years old, in 1978, she was the victim of a sex crime. A heinous crime,” Grand Rapids Police Department Chief Eric Winstrom said during a Monday afternoon press conference.
GRPD Officer Joe Garrett, who is assigned to the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force, said Tommie Lee Hill began raping children in the 1960s. While in prison in Terra Haute, Indiana, in 1976 and 1977, his wife would bring his stepdaughters to visit and he had sex with them in the prison yard, police said.
In 1978 in Grand Rapids, he raped Shaw, his stepdaughter, and impregnated her. Police said it was Shaw’s testimony that helped convict Hill of sex crimes.
“If it wasn’t 12-year-old Erma being a brave, amazing 12-year-old, there’s an excellent chance we could be talking double or triple the number of victims,” Winstrom said.
On Jan. 31, 1979, the day of his conviction, Hill escaped custody.
“He said he was thirsty and went into the women’s bathroom and then from there escaped authorities during sentencing. He had a getaway car and was gone for the foreseeable future,” Garrett said.
Hill was later picked up in Mississippi and sentenced back to prison in Terre Haute. But Garrett said there was a paperwork error and Hill was let go. Authorities have been looking for him ever since. Authorities have been looking for him ever since.
In 2017, Shaw’s case was transferred from the FBI to the US Marshal Service. Garrett began working with Shaw to find Hill. At one point, Shaw sent police a detailed genealogy report.
“We ran a story then and got one tip — a Silent Observer tip — at that point, but not a lot of help on this,” Garrett said.
Garrett said they finally caught a break with a genealogy trail that led them to Pittsburgh, where they knocked on doors. Garrett also cited facial recognition and social media as helping in the search.
“We finally met one contact that gave us a timeline. This gentleman had changed his name to Abdualla Muhammad. He was a serial rapist,” Garrett said, adding that Hill had multiple identities including four social security numbers.
That led them to Pittsburgh police archives on April 23. Garrett said they found pictures of Muhammad. Garrett showed the photos to Shaw, and she confirmed it was Hill.
“He was shot in the back of the head, Dec. 4, 1983, by a man named Vernon Phipps after he touched Vernon’s sister,” Garrett said.
Garrett said that Hill was fingerprinted on Dec. 5, 1983, but no record for him populated at the time.
Shaw joined Garrett and Winstrom at the news conference.
“The fact that Tommie had gotten away for so many years, on my heart, I knew that if he was still alive, he would still be victimizing children. And because of social media, I thought that I would create and write my own book (called “Truth Tella $7,000 REWARD”),” Shaw said.
She thought the $7,000 reward would be an incentive for anyone who knew where Hill was dead or alive to contact law enforcement.
“What is so unique is on page 75, I said ‘He can change his name, but what he can’t change his DNA.’ And what if he left the evidence many years ago before technology was created that would lead to the capture or the right information about his death? So, I consider that to be very prophetic for me to have written that in 2018 as that was definitely part of the catalyst of why we are here today…” Shaw said.
“… Forty-six years it may have taken us to really identify where he was, but the justice was served, and in a lot of ways he did it to himself,” she said.
If Hill was still alive today, Shaw knows what she would have said to him:
“When I was a child, I was weak,” she said. “You were able to take advantage of me. But I’m no longer a victim here. I am triumphant because I’ve overcome this. In many ways, my test, and that’s what you put me through, is my testimony.”
