October 13th, 1994, a little after 10:00 at night, a 32-year-old mother of three is standing outside her house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans talking to a neighbor on the corner. A police car is rolling through the neighborhood slow. The officer inside is not looking for a suspect. He is looking for her.
He has her hairstyle. He has the color of the clothes she is wearing, and he is reading all of it into his police radio. A few blocks away a man’s pager goes off. He calls the number back. The officer on the other end describes the woman one more time. The man says three words, “On the way.
” She had less than 1 hour to live. Her name was Kim Marie Groves. The man who set her up to die was a New Orleans police officer, and the most disturbing part of this entire story is not that it happened. It is that Kim had seen it coming. She had walked into a police station and said it out loud in writing the day before. She did everything the system tells you to do, and the system is exactly what killed her.
This is a story you have heard before, but you have never heard it like this because every documentary about the crack era is told from the same chair, the kingpin’s chair, the man with the cars, the cash, the empire, the body count. We have made him the main character a hundred times over, but there were people standing on the edges of those stories the whole time watching it build, seeing exactly where it was going, trying to stop it, and almost every one of them was a woman, a mother, a sister, a wife, and almost every one of them was told to sit down and be
quiet. This is the crack epidemic told from their side of the room starting with the woman a cop had murdered for filing a single complaint. We are going to spend most of our time with Kim Groves because her story is the clearest proof of the pattern. Then we are going to Harlem and to Washington, D.C. to meet three more women who saw it all coming and got ignored.
Let’s get into it. To understand what happened to Kim Groves, you first have to understand the block that built the man who killed her. Because the same thing that made Lynn Davis trusted, a badge, a uniform, the authority of the state, was the exact thing that let him hunt a woman through her own neighborhood and call it police work. Hold on to that.
The charm and the danger were the same thing wearing the same clothes. In the early 1990s, New Orleans was the most dangerous city in America. In 1994, the year Kim died, the city recorded 424 murders. That is the highest number in its modern history. The crack trade had turned entire blocks into war zones, and the projects, Desire Florida, the Lower Ninth, took the worst of it.
Now, the people in those neighborhoods needed protection more than anyone in the city. What they got instead was a police department that the federal government would later call one of the most corrupt in the entire country. Officers were robbing dealers. Officers were running protection for dealers. Some were committing murders themselves.
And in the Desire Project, the most feared man with a badge was an officer named Lynn Davis. The people in the project had a name for him. They called him Robocop. Federal investigators later had a different name for him. They called him the Desire Terrorist. Davis had a file at Internal Affairs that one fellow officer described as being as thick as a phone book.
Complaint after complaint after complaint, and nothing ever happened to him. His supervisors swept it under the rug for so long that, in that officer’s own words, it was coming back to haunt them. Here is the part most people never learn. By the fall of 1994, Lynn Davis was already under federal surveillance. The FBI had been running an undercover operation on him since that March.
They believed he was protecting a cocaine ring. They had a wiretap on the phone and on his police radio. They were listening to almost everything he did. Now, here is where Kim Groves walks into history. On October 11th, 1994, a 17-year-old kid in the neighborhood named Nathan Norwood got beaten by police.
The officers had mistaken him for someone else, a suspect in the shooting of a cop. Davis and his partner, an officer named Sammy Williams, pistol-whipped the teenager. Williams hit him in the head with the butt of his gun. The beating put the kid in the hospital. But, watch closely because right here is the first warning sign. Kim Groves saw it.
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She knew that boy, and she did the thing the system tells every citizen to do. She did not pull a gun. She did not retaliate. The very next day, October 12th, she walked into the New Orleans Police Department’s Internal Affairs Office and filed a formal complaint in writing. She described what she saw, a police officer brutally beating a kid in her neighborhood.
She believed in the process. She believed that if you reported a bad cop to the people whose job is to police bad cops, something would happen. Think about the courage that took. She lived in a project that this man patrolled every single day, and she still walked in and put her name on paper.
But, the system she trusted had a leak in it. Another officer tipped Lynn Davis off about the complaint almost immediately. Within a day, Davis knew that Kim Groves had reported him, and he was, in the words of the federal court that later reviewed the case, enraged. This is the moment everything turns. A woman uses the official channel, and the official channel hands her name straight to the man she was reporting.
What makes the Kim Groves case unlike almost any other police corruption case in American history is that the FBI recorded the murder being planned as it happened in real time on a wiretap. Lynn Davis did not know the federal government was listening to his phone, so he spoke freely. And what those tapes captured is one of the coldest things you will ever hear described.
On October 13th, Davis got on the phone with a drug dealer and hitman he worked with named Paul Hardy. The two of them traded favors all the time. Davis protected Hardy. Hardy handled problems for Davis. And Kim Groves had just become a problem. The plan was almost business-like. Davis would help set it up and then use his position as a police officer to cover Hardy’s tracks at the scene afterward.
That afternoon, Davis even invited Hardy and another accomplice down to the police station to look at homicide photos. Then Davis got into his patrol car, the taxpayers’ car, the one with the city seal on the door, and he drove to Kim’s neighborhood to hunt for her. And pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything.
On the tape, there is no hatred in his voice, no rage you can hear. He talks about a living, breathing mother of three the way you would talk about a delivery, a description, a location, a time. That is the part the powerless always saw, and the rest of the country never did. To this officer, Kim Groves was not a person with a name and three kids and a birthday to plan.
She was a problem on a list. That is what dehumanization actually sounds like, calm. Around 10:00 that night, Davis spotted her near her home. He paged Hardy. Hardy called back. And on the FBI tape, you can hear Davis calmly giving the description, what she was wearing, how she had her hair. Hardy says he is on his way.
A short time later, Paul Hardy walked up to Kim Groves and shot her in the head right there near her own home. She died on the street she lived on in front of the neighbors she had been trying to protect. She was killed the day before her daughter Jasmine’s 13th birthday. Now, sit with the timeline for 1 second. She filed the complaint on October 12th.
She was dead on October 13th, less than 24 hours. That is how long it took the system to turn her own words into a death sentence. But, here is the twist that makes this case historic. The same federal wiretap that Davis didn’t know about, it captured afterward celebrating. Investigators said Davis and his crew plotted and then celebrated the murder over those tapped phone lines.
He thought he had gotten away with the perfect crime, killing a witness with a hired gun while he sat in a patrol car. He had no idea the FBI had it all on tape. In December 1994, the federal government moved in. Lynn Davis was arrested. So was Paul Hardy. And when prosecutors started pulling the thread, what they found was bigger than one murder.
Davis had led a crew of corrupt officers protecting a cocaine operation. Nine New Orleans officers were indicted in the federal drug case. And federal authorities said Davis had been connected to a string of other killings of people who had complicit against him. Let that land for a second. Kim Groves was not even the only person this officer was suspected of silencing.
She was just the one the FBI happened to catch on tape. Now, this video is called she filed a missing person report six times. And some of you were watching closely. Kim Groves was not reported missing. Kim was murdered less than a day after she filed her complaint. So, why that title? Because Kim Groves is the clearest single example of a much larger pattern.
A pattern where women in these neighborhoods saw the danger first, reported it through the proper channels, and were ignored or worse until the worst thing imaginable happened. Kim filed one complaint and was dead in a day. But, all across the country in the same years, there were mothers filing report after report six times, 10 times more about children who had disappeared into the same crack era violence, and getting the same response Kim got, nothing.
Think about what a missing person report meant in a project in 1990. A mother walks into a precinct, her teenage son hasn’t come home in two days, and the look she gets across that desk tells her everything before the officer says a word. Another one, another kid from the projects, probably ran off, probably in the game.
Come back in a few days. She files the report anyway, and then she comes back and files it again, and again, because to her that is not a statistic, that is her baby. The system saw a number, she saw a face. And the gap between those two things is where so many of these kids vanish for good. That was the unspoken rule of the era.
If you came from the right neighborhood, a missing child triggered a manhunt. If you came from the projects, it triggered a shrug. You think someone would have said something. Somebody would have looked at a stack of the same mother’s reports and asked a question. Nobody did. The mothers knew it, they filed anyway. Six times, because what else is a mother supposed to do? The system did not fail Kim Groves by accident, it failed her by design.
The internal affairs office that was supposed to protect her leaked her name to the man she reported. The supervisors who could have stopped Lynn Davis years earlier looked the other way through a file as thick as a phone book. The murder rate that should have made her neighborhood the most protected place in the city instead made it the most disposable.
And here is what the women in these neighborhoods understood that the rest of the country did not. They were not waiting for the system to save them because they already knew it wouldn’t. They reported anyway. They filed anyway. They walked into those offices anyway, knowing the odds. Kim Groves did the brave thing and the right thing, and it cost her everything.
If you want more stories that got buried like this one, the ones told from the side nobody points the camera at, subscribe to the channel. We are just getting started. Now, let’s go to Harlem, because there was another family in another city where the women saw the danger coming and the men told them to wait.
If you follow this niche at all, you know the name Rich Porter, Harlem’s golden boy, the young kingpin who supposedly never wore the same outfit twice and kept a garage full of luxury cars in Manhattan. He came up in the same crack era and his story got told in movies, in songs, and a hundred videos, including the ones that romanticize him.
And that’s getting ahead of the story because the part everyone skips is the part that matters most. The part of the Porter story that nobody centers is the woman in it. So, let’s center her. In December 1989, Rich Porter was at the top of the Harlem drug world and then the violence he was living inside of reached past him and grabbed the most innocent person in his life, his little brother.
A 12-year-old boy, Donnell, was kidnapped on his way to school. The kidnappers wanted half a million dollars and to prove they were serious, they cut off one of the boy’s fingers. They directed the family to a McDonald’s bathroom on 125th and Broadway where the family found the boy’s finger, two of his rings, and an audio cassette. On that tape was the 12-year-old’s voice pleading with his big brother, “Get the money. I love you, Mommy.
” Now, here is the part that matters for our story. When that family sat down to decide what to do, there was an argument. Rich Porter did not want to go to the police. Think about why. He was a drug dealer at the top of his game and the police were the last people he wanted in his business.
That hesitation, that instinct to handle it in-house, was a warning sign all by itself and he ignored it. But, his sister, Pat, did not wait for permission. Against Rich’s wishes, Pat Porter contacted the FBI. She was the one who said out loud that this had gone too far, that a 12-year-old child with a missing finger was more important than the family secrets or her brother’s pride.
The FBI directed her to the NYPD who put taps on the family’s phone line. She saw the danger for exactly what it was, and she acted. While the man at the center of the story hesitated, it wasn’t enough to save them. Then one wintry night, the thing everyone feared finally happened. Fast and quiet, the way it always does.
On January 3rd, 1990, Rich Porter himself was murdered. His former partner, Alpo Martinez, was later convicted of killing him. A betrayal by his own business partner over a money dispute. Rich went out to handle business with a man he trusted, and Rich never came home. And the little brother, Donnell, his body was found later that month in the Bronx, stuffed in garbage bags.
The person eventually revealed to be behind the kidnapping was the boy’s own uncle. The whole family was destroyed. The kingpin got the movies and the songs. His sister, Pat, the one who actually tried to pull in help, the one who saw it clearly, is a footnote. If she’s mentioned at all. That is the pattern again. The woman saw it, the woman acted, and history gave the credit and the camera to the man who didn’t listen.
Now, let’s go to Washington, D.C., where the crack era produced the biggest name of them all, Rayful Edmond. At the height of his operation in the late 1980s, prosecutors say Edmond controlled around 60% of the cocaine market in the entire city. Moving as much as 200 kg a week through a direct pipeline to the Cali Cartel, he turned D.C.
into the murder capital of America. And standing right next to him the entire time was his mother, Constance Perry. Everybody called her Bootsie. Now, Bootsie Perry’s story is different from Kim Groves and Pat Porter. And I want to be honest with you about that, because this channel does not sugarcoat. Bootsie was not an outsider trying to stop the violence.
Before her son got famous, Bootsie Perry was a working woman with a government job at Health and Human Services. The family was in a lot of ways like many families in Washington, but as her son’s empire grew, Boosie got pulled inside it. Prosecutors said she shared in the fortune, and the most damaging piece of evidence in the entire case against Raeford Edmond was a secretly recorded conversation, her own voice.
On that tape, Boosie Perry told an associate that her son has started off small, but then just got too big and went out on his own. Her own words helped send her son to prison for life, and then they sent her to prison, too. In March 1990, Constance Boosie Perry was convicted of drug conspiracy.
So were around a dozen members of the Edmond family. The mother got 14 years. So why is she in a video about the women the system ignored? Because Boosie Perry is the other side of the same coin. Kim Groves and Pat Porter are the women who tried to fight the violence from the outside. Boosie Perry is the woman the violence swallowed from the inside.
Same epidemic. Same neighborhoods. The crack era did not give these women clean choices. It gave them a world where a mother with a steady government job could end up counting her son’s drug money, and then end up testifying about it in federal court, and then end up in a cell. And here is the detail that ties the whole thing in a knot.
Years later, when Raeford Edmond agreed to become a government informant from inside prison, the deal he cut wasn’t to help himself. He was already serving life. The bargain was that any benefit would go to his mother. Boosie’s sentence was eventually reduced, and she was released. A son selling information to the government to try to buy back the years his own empire had cost his mother.
You want a story that should be a movie? That’s a movie. Now, let’s come back to New Orleans, where we started. Because Kim Groves was not the only woman in that city who tried to use the system against the men who were abusing their power. Everything was in place by now. The corruption, the fear, the bodies, the silence.
The women in these neighborhoods were standing in the middle of it. They just didn’t know yet what all of it was building toward. Remember, the same year that cracks tearing through New Orleans, the police department itself was so corrupt that the federal government had to step in. The Lin Davis case blew the lid off it.
And when those federal corruption cases went to trial, the people who walked into those courtrooms to testify, the people who named names and pointed at officers who had badges and guns and the full weight of the state behind them were very often women from the projects. Think about what that takes.
You live in a housing project. The man you are about to testify against is a police officer. You have already watched what happened to Kim Groves. You know exactly what filing a complaint against a New Orleans officer can cost. The last woman who did it was dead within a day and they testified anyway.
And here is the thing you have to understand about the timing. By the time those corruption trials happened, the murder of Kim Groves was not a secret anymore. It had been front page news in the Times-Picayune. Everybody in those neighborhoods knew the story. They knew a woman had filed a complaint and been executed for it inside of a day.
So when other women still came forward, still testified, still pointed at officers in open court, they were not doing it out of ignorance. They were doing it knowing the worst case scenario by name. Her name was Kim. These women do not have Wikipedia pages. Most of them don’t have names that anyone outside their families would recognize. They are not in the songs.
There are no movies about them. But the corruption that the Lin Davis scandal exposed, the federal scrutiny it triggered, the cleanup that eventually forced reform on one of the worst police departments in the country does not happen without ordinary women from Calliope and the desire in Florida deciding that the truth was worth the risk.
And there is a cruel piece of math buried in this. When Kim Groves was killed in 1994, there were officers on that force who stayed on the job for decades afterward. Years later, reporters found that more than 200 New Orleans police employees were still on the roster who had been there back when Kim was murdered. The department she trusted with her complaint did not vanish. It kept going.
Some of the same people who let Linda Davis run wild kept their pensions while Kim’s kids grew up without a mother. That is the through line of this entire video. In every one of these cities, in every one of these stories, there were women who saw the danger before anyone else, who reported it, who testified, who picked up the phone and called the FBI when the men around them said don’t.
And almost none of them got remembered for it. So, where did all of this end up? Linda Davis was convicted in federal court in 1996 of violating Kim Groves’ civil rights by ordering her murder. He was sentenced to death. As of today, he still sits on federal death row at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, more than 30 years after the night he hunted Kim through her own neighborhood on his police radio.
Paul Hardy, the hit man who pulled the trigger, was also originally sentenced to death, later resentenced to life in prison. And Kim’s children, it took 24 years. In 2018, the city of New Orleans finally agreed to pay $1.5 million to the three children Kim left behind. The family of the woman a city employee had murdered for filing a complaint.
Her daughter Jasmine, the one whose 13th birthday came the day after her mother was killed, has spent years holding memorial services for her mother and speaking out about police corruption. She held the 30th and final memorial for her mother in 2024, 30 years after the murder. 30 years of a daughter making sure her mother’s name did not disappear.
In Washington, Constance Boozer Perry was released from prison after her son’s cooperation. Raeford Edmond himself was eventually released after decades of informing the government and died in 2024. In Harlem, Alpo Martinez, the partner who murdered Rich Porter, lived for years in witness protection after informing before he himself was shot and killed on a Harlem street in 2021.
Pat Porter, the sister who called the FBI when her brother wouldn’t, the one who actually tried to save that family, remains exactly where history left her, on the edge of someone else’s story. Four cities, four women. A mother who filed one complaint and was dead in a day. A sister who called for help against her brother’s wishes and lost him anyway.
A mother swallowed by an empire she watched her own son build. And a courtroom full of women from the projects who told the truth about men with badges knowing exactly what it could cost them. We have told the kingpin story a hundred times. The cars, the cash, the empire, the body count. We made him the main character and we let the women fade into the background of his legend.
But the warning signs everyone says nobody saw, somebody saw them. These women saw them. They saw them early, they saw them clearly, and they said something out loud, on the record. The system just decided they weren’t worth listening to. Remember that police car at the start rolling slow past a porch light in the Lower Ninth Ward? For years the story of that night belonged to the man in the car, the officer, the hunter.
But that porch light belonged to her, to a 32-year-old mother who had done everything right and was standing on her own street with less than an hour to live. The same street where the day before she had decided that a beaten kid was worth speaking up for. Kim Groves walked into a police station and did everything right.
Tell me in the comments, if the people whose job is to protect you are the same people you need protection from, what is a person supposed to do? If this is the first time you’ve heard any of these women’s names, that’s the whole problem. Subscribe and we’ll keep digging up the ones they left out.
