WASHINGTON — Prince George’s County police have determined a suspect and possible motive in the 2012 murder of 17-year-old honors student Amber Stanley, who was shot and killed by a masked intruder in her Kettering, Maryland, home.
It hadn’t been reported previously, but police homicide detectives have developed a theory about why Stanley was killed in her home in the 100 block of Chartsey Street in the Kettering area of the county on Aug. 22, 2012.
In his new book, “A Good Month for Murder,” former Washington Post reporter Del Quentin Wilber reveals new information he gleaned about the Stanley murder, while spending six months embedded with the department’s homicide unit between November 2012 and June 2013.
“In August of 2012, someone kicked down her door, shot her in the arm, chased her upstairs to her bedroom, and shot her in the head and killed her,” said Wilber. Earlier, police had only disclosed she had been shot in her bed.
The murder shocked the community and was the homicide unit’s most confounding case at the time.
“They frantically tried to figure it out,” said Wilber, whose previous book, “Rawhide Down,” on the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan was a New York Times’ best-seller.
“They looked for boyfriends; there were no spurned lovers. They looked for family connections, but the family’s wonderful; they didn’t have anything to do with it,” said Wilber.
Police had said the person who shot Stanley seemed to have done so with purpose, heading straight upstairs to her bedroom, after breaking into the home.
Wilber said during his research, homicide detectives developed a working theory of why someone may have killed Stanley.
“As they were digging into it, they realized Amber had a foster sister, who I have to give a fake name to in the book,” said Wilber. “The foster sister was a prostitute in the neighborhood and had been raped five days before the murder.”
Wilber said detectives believed Stanley was shot by mistake, as the intruder intended to kill Stanley’s foster sister, who was home at the time.
Their working theory was “whoever raped [the foster sister] noticed she was on social media complaining about him and had reported it to police,” said Wilber. “So their theory was [that] this guy came back to silence her.”
Police uncovered the suspect’s name.
“They eventually pegged a neighborhood drug thug guy as the potential killer, because they had an informant talk about him and his cellphone put him in the neighborhood at the time of the murder,” said Wilber.
Homicide detectives questioned the suspect, believing they were on the right track.
“They get the guy in, they get his DNA — I call him Jeff Buck in the book,” said Wilber. “They question him; he won’t break.”
After spending most of February 2013 working the case against the man, police waited for the forensic link to nail down the case.
“Near the end of the month, they get the DNA results back,” said Wilber. “It’s not him — they have to start all over again.”
Wilber said the setback didn’t last long.
“The very next day a DNA hit comes back to a serial rapist, who’s now pleaded guilty to two other rapes,” said Wilber.
Detectives tried to get the suspect to admit his relationship to Stanley’s murder.
“They pull him in the last day of February, and they question him for 12 hours, relentlessly, but they can’t crack him. And so the case remains open today,” said Wilber.
Contacted by WTOP, Prince George’s County police Lt. David Coleman confirmed that the man remains a suspect in Stanley’s murder and says he has not yet been charged in connection with the rape of Stanley’s foster sister.
Coleman declined to name the suspect and left open the possibility that other suspects may be involved.
“A Good Month for Murder” comes out June 7.
