Sergeant John Elliott
speaker
81 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Sergeant John Elliott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I wanted to just be extremely non-confrontational and start off with a polite conversation with him, explain to him I was there, and give him an explanation and explain what happened. It was his time to be able to provide a story. It was a normal conversation. We never yelled or screamed at each other. It was very cordial.
I said, look, she was murdered. Your DNA, I was very specific and direct. I wasn't trying to play tricks or anything. I said, look, there has to be some explanation. We didn't pick you out of the blue randomly or anything like that. Your DNA specifically was identified on her dress, and she was found in Charles County, Maryland, deceased, where you hadn't lived four miles away at the time.
He started providing or what he believed to be reasons of why his DNA may have been there.
Went from a complete denial to one point in the interview, he says, well, if I had sex with her, I don't remember. That was a little bit of a turning point.
The social circles and lifestyle of Andre Taylor did not match up or would have even come close to Vicki. Andre Taylor was a career criminal, a lot of drug history, whereas Vicki Belk was college educated, established government worker with a good life.
My partner and I continue to talk to him, ask him specifically, like, you can't get around it. Then he stops for a second, pauses and says, yeah, we had sex with that girl.
Yeah. Oh, sorry. But then he goes on to explain that one of his friends pulls up in a car. Vicky's inside the car. He gets in and his friend directs Vicky to have sex with him. And he says that he believes that she had sex with him out of fear that she knew he'd get hurt. And that's why she had sex with him.
I think he even says, I didn't rape her, but technically by letter of law, yes, that's a rape. Out of fear, she complies and has sex unwillingly. But he says that occurred in Washington, D.C. He got out of the car and he doesn't know what happened to her afterwards.
He got to the point where he says, I'm done, I'm not going to provide any more information. So we stopped talking at that point.
A lot of times, you know, in any case, especially a cold case, sometimes the arrests are easy. It's the trials where the hard work begins.
They were very confident in their passion for the case. There were a lot of legal challenges. The chain of custody evidence, the maintenance of it, who's put their hands on it, where has it been, how has it been stored? These witnesses that we can find, can we find the original investigators?
One of the many challenges I had was trying to find somebody that saw her that day that she was last known alive.
One of the last people that she was known to be alive with that day was one of her co-workers who she had lunch with. And I just had a first and last name, no date of birth, no address, nothing, just said, had lunch with the victim that day. That was it.
I was just trying to do open source searches for a Mary Hickson. I thought I found one, so I just made a letter to her saying, hey, did you work at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. in 1979? Please contact me.
A week later, my phone rings, look down, and I see her call her ID, Mary Hickson. I answer the phone. She said, hi, this is Mary Hickson. I said, yes, ma'am, I talked to you last week. She's like, no, you talked to my sister-in-law. We have the same name. You talked to her last week. I worked with Vicki back in 1979. I remember having lunch with her that day.
She had very good memories. She's like, I remember having lunch with Vicki that day. We always had lunch together every day. And Vicki was giving me a hard time because we had switched chairs. But it's the small details like that that reflects on people's memory. The small details.
The jury came back with a verdict very quick because it's very unpredictable. They could take an hour. They could take five days. We just don't know. Late afternoon, all the family was still there. And then they read the verdict off and everybody was ecstatic.
She was definitely at work, and we confirmed that she did leave work after getting James Hill's vehicle keys. We believe she got on the Metro, returned to the parking lot at RFK, and that's where Andre Taylor encountered her, an abductor, and then that's when he drove her to Charles County. And then he subsequently raped and shot her where she was found.
Any of these cold case detectives, we pick these cases up and we just don't forget about them. Especially when there's evidence there and we go through it and we keep on going back to our lab analysts, like, can you just test this? Can you just do this? It's just looking for that needle in the haystack. This is one of those cases where... It came through for us, especially 45 years later.
You know, the combination of the lab work, the lab personnel, the detectives, not just me, but, you know, people that assisted. And even going back to the original investigators, there's a lot of moving parts there. But to have it all come together with a successful prosecution with somebody that is still alive and then ultimately get them a life sentence in prison, we're beating the odds.
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