Cassandra Evans, a 35-year-old Black woman from Detroit, vanished from daily life in early October 2010, after last being seen at home on Woodingham Street on October 10. The silence alarmed family members who expected a call every day, and the worry quickly turned into a search that brought police back to the house more than once.
At first, nothing obvious surfaced.
Investigators searched, then later returned with a search dog, and this time the house yielded the kind of discovery that changes a neighborhood forever: Evans’ body was found in the attic, concealed beneath garbage bags. While the identification process moved through the medical examiner’s office, police attention narrowed on a close family member—Evans’ 44-year-old brother—who was being questioned as the case unfolded and was described as in custody on unrelated charges even as detectives treated him as central to what happened inside the home.
As the investigation deepened, officers also revisited troubling events nearby, including a fire at the house next door where a relative of Evans had been found dead, to determine whether the scenes were connected. The case did not stay in the realm of rumor for long, though; prosecutors later named Evans’ brother, James Evans, as the accused and filed a first-degree murder charge, tying the killing to October 10, 2010, at the Woodingham address. In the prosecutor’s account, Evans was discovered dead within a wall of the home, and the case moved into the court system with a preliminary examination scheduled for October 26, 2011.
