On Thanksgiving Day in 2003, Marion Fye had an argument with her boyfriend in their Northeast apartment. Her children told police they heard a gunshot and then a thump. She hasn’t been seen since.
Earlier this month, a D.C. Superior Court judge sentenced the boyfriend, Harold “Devine” Austin, to 42 years in prison for Fye’s murder. It was only the second time in District history that authorities had obtained a murder conviction without a body.
Last week, the two men most responsible for putting 33-year-old Austin behind bars — D.C. police Sgt. Christopher Kaufman and Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas A. “Tad” DiBiase — sat down to discuss the historic case with The Examiner.
Examiner: How did you get involved in this case?
Christopher Kaufman: I had been detailed to the Major Narcotics Task Force for a year before that and I was just coming back to the [homicide] squad, when the night before, [Fye’s] family came into the Seventh District to complain that nobody was working on their missing mother’s case.
My partner, Bob Alder, was working midnights and he got the call. The next day, I’m in court and Bob says, “You’re not going to believe all this” and he started going through the story with me. I said, “Just give me the case and if it’s a [bogus] case, then I’ll take care of it.” That’s what we all thought.
That day, I called Harold [Austin] and asked him to come and talk to me. He comes down and he’s just trying to be the player, the smooth guy, and it was quite obvious to me after spending five minutes with the guy that something was really wrong. So then I asked him I could meet him up at his house with the crime scene unit. He said, “Yeah, no problem.”
We went around and … flipped the mattress over and it had [blood] stains on it. At that point, we were like, “Uh-oh.” And Harold looks at me and says, “I’ve got to go.”
This wasn’t the Tuesday night murder mystery of the week. I mean, something happened to this lady — and he did it. There was no “sleuthy” police work that took place here. Now it was just a matter of building the case.
Tad DiBiase: And proving that she was dead, because the blood certainly helped but it wasn’t enough. It was one of the questions at trial.
Examiner: So at what stage did you decide that you guys should go ahead and prosecute the case without a body?
Tad DiBiase: I’ve said this all along — that despite not having a body, it was the strongest case I ever took to trial. The evidence was just so overwhelming.
But the first step was bringing in [Fye’s] kids. The kids had kind of told different stories. When they were around [Austin], they had wisely clammed up and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My mom’s gone away before.” Once they got him away from the kids then they started to tell the story.
Then we were waiting for the blood. We had the blood on the mattress, but we didn’t know [officially] whose it was.
Kaufman: … We need our own DNA lab. Part of the reason the case took a year and a half to put together was that we waited on the FBI to get our blood [analysis.]
DiBiase: And we didn’t have any [of Fye’s] DNA to compare it to. We had to go get DNA from her mother because … we weren’t even able to get it from her hairbrush.
Kaufman: The tests came back as “a female offspring” of [Fye’s] mother.
DiBiase: And [Fye’s mother] died before trial, so we were lucky to get the DNA.
Kaufman: Right. That was the thing Tad talked about in his closing argument, that the mother died without ever knowing what happened to her daughter.
