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D.C. Police Silent on Murder of Former White House Intern

On July 6, 1997, a brutal triple murder took place at a Starbucks restaurant in an upscale Georgetown neighborhood. The victims were Aaron Goodrich, 18; Emory Evans, 25; and Mary Caitrin Mahoney, 25. According to a July 13 Washington Post story, ballistics test indicated that 10 shots were fired from two different guns, sometime after 9:15 p.m. The Post story characterized the crime as an "execution-style" murder.
The murders were strange for several reasons. First, the restaurant's doors were locked when the victims were found. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, although nearly $4,000 was in the store at the time. Police initially discounted robbery as a motive. Second, the restaurant was in a neighborhood that has a very strong neighborhood watch program. None of Washington D.C.'s 397 murders in the previous year had occurred in or near Georgetown, which is rated safer than many other American cities such as Palm Springs and Oceanside, California and Boulder, Colorado. Third, neighbors heard no gunfire, indicating that the assailants might have used silencers. Finally, multiple murders are rare even in violent areas of Washington D.C.

Making the story particularly interesting is the fact that Mary Mahoney was shot as many as five times, according to some press reports. As the Washington Post reported: She was almost unrecognizable. Caity, the coffee shop assistant manager, was first shot in the chest, police said. She had raised her hands to her face, possibly to protect herself. A bullet pierced her hands and hit her face. Then she was shot in the back of the head.

Ms. Mahoney had been heavily involved in presidential politics, working on Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992. She served as a White House intern for a while in the first Clinton Administration, arranging White House tours. After finishing a degree in Women's Studies at Towson State University in Baltimore in 1995, she moved to Washington permanently, taking a job as an assistant manager at the Starbucks restaurant. There Ms. Mahoney's path seems to have crossed that of another White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. George Stephanopoulos said last week that Lewinsky used to hang out at the Starbucks where he lived.

These connections to Lewinsky and the White House have raised eyebrows in many quarters. The January 23, 1998 Strategic Weekly Briefings contained the following account attributed to anonymous sources:

When Monica Lewinsky first met with Vernon Jordan in November 1997 she told him she didn't want to end up like Caity Mahoney. Jordan professed not to know whom Lewinsky was referring to until she identified Mahoney as the former White House intern who was murdered last summer in a Starbucks. . . .

Police are apparently no nearer to solving the crime than they were in July of 1997. In a December 6 story the Washington Post reported that a police informant in the case had been beaten to death outside a row house in Southwest Washington. Police sent the informant into a crack house to purchase cocaine, hoping to find grounds to search the house and question the occupants about the Starbucks case. Three men were arrested in the beating death, but police found no connection to the Starbucks murders.

Efforts by the Washington Weekly to gain information from the D.C. police have been unsuccessful. The following exchange occurred on Thursday of last week with D.C. police detective Tony Patterson, who is in charge of the case:

QUESTION: May I ask you some questions?
PATTERSON: It depends. Which case?
QUESTION: About the Starbucks murder. May I ask you some questions?
PATTERSON: No, no. I can't discuss that case.
QUESTION: You can't discuss that case?
PATTERSON: Not right now.
QUESTION: Can you discuss it off the record?
PATTERSON: No.
QUESTION: You can't discuss your informant who was beaten to death?
PATTERSON: No, that's what I said. Too much has been released to the press already.
QUESTION: Can you discuss aspects of the case that would not affect your investigation?
PATTERSON: No sir.
QUESTION: You can't discuss anything? You can't describe the murder scene?
PATTERSON: That's already known.
QUESTION: It's known from press accounts, but what is not known so well is what you have to say.
PATTERSON: I have nothing else to say about it.

Efforts to contact Starbucks management were somewhat more fruitful. The Washington Weekly talked to Kenny Fried, a Starbucks spokesman on Friday.

QUESTION: I would like to get a statement from you about where the Washington D.C. murder case is at this point.
FRIED: We're working on getting the store reopened at this point.
QUESTION: What is the status of the case with the police?
FRIED: They're definitely working on it. They've not closed it. It's a high profile thing here. But, unfortunately, the people--we've never sent any statements out or anything like that. We're trying to open our store at this point, that's our concern. The store will reopen February 20th. In Washington this was the biggest story for two weeks. It was on the front page of every paper and on the newscasts morning till evening, so it was very heavily on the minds of the media here.
QUESTION: Do you know at this point if the police have a suspect or suspects in the case?
FRIED: We don't know anything about that.
QUESTION: I take it this was very unusual for the store. It was located in a very nice neighborhood in Georgetown, is that correct?
FRIED: Yes, it's a nice area with a national retailer and Starbucks never had anything like this happen in their history. And so it's just unusual and three young people were killed and so these factors together created a lot of attention.
QUESTION: The Washington Post characterized this as an execution-style murder. Do you have any comment on that?
FRIED: I'm dealing mostly with the reopening of the store, so I won't comment on that. We have not talked to media because we just want to get the store reopened. I can tell you that our CEO has announced that all future net profits for the life span of the store will go to a designated anti-violence organization. The particular organization will be announced when the store opens.
QUESTION: There is a lot of speculation going around on the internet about who could have had a motive for this killing. And this is being connected to the fact that this young lady was a former White House intern, and that rumors were circulating in Washington at this time that an intern was going to come forward with information about the President's activities in the White House. Have you heard stories like that?
FRIED: No, I haven't.
QUESTION: Do you have any comment on that?
FRIED: I'm not the right person to comment on that. I can see if there is anyone at headquarters who could comment on that.
QUESTION: Do you know of any apparent motive in this slaying?
FRIED: No, we don't, nothing. There was speculation that it was robbery.
QUESTION: Was there any indication from the crime scene that it was an attempted robbery?
FRIED: That's all a police matter.

The Washington Weekly continues to investigate this case. Anyone with information on the case is encouraged to contact the Washington Weekly by email at: editor@dolphin.gulf.net . Confidentiality is assured.

Published in the Feb. 9, 1998 issue of The Washington Weekly. Copyright © 1998 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)

Friday, February 11, 2000

Amnesty International USA Appeals to President Clinton and Attorney General Reno to Rescind Decision to Seek Death Penalty in "Starbucks" Case

WASHINGTON, DC -- Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) today urged President Clinton to instruct Attorney General Janet Reno to reverse her decision mandating that prosecutors seek the death penalty against Carl Derek Cooper, the alleged gunman in the 1997 triple murder at a Georgetown Starbucks. The human rights watchdog made the request in a letter to the President and copied to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.

AIUSA charged that the decision demonstrated an offensive disregard for the will of the citizens of the District of Columbia, who as recently as 1992 resoundingly rejected restoring capital punishment in the city. In his letter, AIUSA Executive Director William F. Schulz urged President Clinton and Attorney General Reno to "pursue prosecutorial strategies that do not offend the ethical and moral standards chosen by the people of the District of Columbia."

Deputy Attorney General Holder's announcement Thursday that the Justice Department was reviewing whether there are racial disparities in the federal death penalty system directly affects the proceedings in the Starbucks case. "We would urge you to suspend all federal executions and capital indictments pending the completion of these inquiries," Dr. Schulz wrote the President.

Schulz said in the letter that comparing the Starbucks case with the 1995 McDonald's shooting in which three employees were killed illustrates the "arbitrariness and race-based factors driving capital litigation. The contrast between the two cases confirms the findings of Amnesty International's recent report, Killing With Prejudice: Race and the Death Penalty in the USA, which documents the general suspension of equitable treatment by prosecutors and the courts when race issues are factors. We concluded that the odds for the application of the death penalty increase significantly when the victim is white and the accused is black or brown."

According to the Amnesty report, of the 500 prisoners executed between 1977 and 1998, more than 81 percent were convicted of the murder of a white, even though blacks and whites are the victims of homicide in almost equal numbers nationwide. The report also noted the odds of a death sentence in cases in which blacks killed whites has been shown to be as much as 11 times higher than in the murder of a black victim by a white person.

"To preserve respect for the law, citizens must have confidence that the scales of justice won't tip against any individual for any arbitrary reason ( especially the color of one's skin," Schulz said on the release of the letter. "Capital punishment erases the distinction between the criminal and a society purportedly guided by moral principles. A just society would abolish it."