Episode 155: Lillita Clark – Bite-Sized Crime

When a woman goes missing in the spring of 2001, the investigation uncovers a dark truth about her family. What happened to Lillita Clark?

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Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a case that I came across a few months ago, one that has stuck with me ever since. It’s the story of a woman whose life was shaped by tragedy not of her own making, but brought upon her by those she loved. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.

Lillita Maria Clark was born in 1957. A bright young woman from Nigeria, Lillita had big dreams for herself. In the mid-1970s, she enrolled in the pre-med program at United States International University in San Diego, California. There, she met a handsome exchange student named Newman Augustine Osebor. He was also from Nigeria, and his dreams included making the Nigerian Olympic team and competing in the long jump at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. He had received an athletic scholarship to USIU where was training under Olympic gold medalist Bob Beamon.

Lillita and Newman started a relationship, and in October of 1978, Lillita learned she was pregnant. She wanted to bring her baby into the world and hoped that she and Newman would get married. But over the following months, Lillita began to notice changes in Newman. He struggled with bouts of depression, and the heavy workload of school and training seemed to be wearing on him. Lillita told United Press International, “He was trying to run track, trying to go to class, and, with me pregnant, it just put him under a lot of pressure… There were a lot of things that would bother him, I know, but he would never sit down and talk to me about them. Never did.”

Then, Lillita was hit with a bombshell: Newman had been having an affair.

When Newman Osebor first arrived in the United States, he lived with Dr. Richard Townsend, a San Diego psychologist, and his wife Suzanne. The Townsend family took Newman under their wing, cooking for him and mentoring him as he pursued his Olympic dreams. But before long, Newman and Suzanne began a relationship behind Richard’s back. Even after Newman moved out, he and Suzanne continued to see each other. According to friends, Newman felt torn between Suzanne and Lillita – two women he claimed to love, one who was carrying his child.

But by February of 1979, Lillita had had enough of Newman’s behavior and the emotional toll it had taken on her. She dropped out of school and moved to Washington, D.C., hoping for a fresh start for herself and her unborn child.

After Lillita left, Newman’s mental state went into a tailspin. In March, he was dropped from the track team because of his low grades, and his relationship with Suzanne was on the rocks. Although Suzanne had left her husband, the affair had cooled, and she seemed ready to move on with her life just as Lillita had.

On April 13, 1979, Newman showed up at Suzanne’s apartment and held her at knifepoint, forcing her to drive to the bank and withdraw money for him. However, it was Good Friday, and the banks were closed. In anger, Newman struck Suzanne. She later filed a battery complaint against him, which resulted in a misdemeanor charge.

Not long after the assault, Richard Townsend discovered that a .45 caliber pistol was missing from his house. On April 25th, he and Suzanne went to the police station to report it missing. Later that day, an officer went to the Townsend home to follow up on the report, but no one answered the door. He had no idea the tragedy that was beginning to unfold.

A few hours earlier, Newman had shown up at the Townsend home with the pistol in hand. At gunpoint, he forced Richard into his car and made him drive to a local bank, threatening to harm his children if he didn’t comply. At the bank, Newman waited in the car while Richard went inside to withdraw $800. But Richard was smart – he told the bank teller what was happening and asked for help. The teller gave him the money, but triggered the silent alarm that would call the police.

As patrol cars surrounded the bank, Newman took off with Richard in the car. A chase ensued, with dozens of cops chasing the small white Porsche for nearly 5 miles onto Interstate 8. Law enforcement blocked off the freeway in both directions, trapping Newman on an empty road. For three and a half hours, Newman sat in the car with the pistol pointed at Richard’s chest, making demands of the police and chain-smoking cigarettes.

Eventually, Newman appeared to give up. He threw his coat and shoes out of the car, hugged Richard and shook his hand, then backed out of the passenger seat. Suddenly, he spun around, pointing the pistol at the police. He was taken down by a volley of gunfire, 15 bullets to the chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Sadly, the day’s tragedy was not over. Earlier that morning, the Townsends had hired a private investigator to help protect them from Newman Osebor. When the investigator arrived at the house to check things out, he felt unsettled. He told The Star News, “It was a weird, weird feeling. We checked the backyard and asked police if anyone had checked the cellar.”

No one had checked the cellar, so the investigator headed down the stairs. He noticed a small door that led to a crawl space under the house. When he opened it, his flashlight illuminated a horrible scene: the bodies of a woman and a young girl, partially buried in the dirt. Police would later identify them as 24-year-old Candelaria Puentes, the Townsends’ maid, and her 4-year-old daughter Norma. Authorities believed that before he had abducted Richard Townsend, Newman had gone to the house and unexpectedly encountered Candelaria, who cleaned the home once a week. He then stabbed her once in the heart before strangling the little girl and dumping their bodies in the crawl space.

The investigation into Newman Osebor led detectives to Lillita Clark, who by now had settled in the Washington, D.C. area and was just a few months away from giving birth. She told them about the events of the last year, about Newman’s struggles with his depression and his declining mental state, about her unexpected pregnancy and his affair with Suzanne Townsend. Lillita was heartbroken by the news of Newman’s death; part of her had still hoped they could work things out. But now he was gone, and the case was closed.

In the summer of 1979, Lillita gave birth to a baby boy. She named him after his father, Osebor Kreem Clark, and she loved him more than anything. Over the next two decades, Lillita worked hard to give her son a good life, but it wasn’t easy. Osebor seemed to have inherited some of his father’s mental health issues, and Lillita struggled to get him help. When Osebor was 14, Lillita fought in court to get him an emergency mental competency evaluation. Of course, those records are sealed, so it’s unclear what the results were, but it’s obvious that Lillita was worried about her son.

Osebor eventually graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. He continued to live at home, but he and Lillita often argued about some of the trouble he got into. Lillita worked full-time as a laboratory technician at Fort Meade, and she was frustrated by her son’s lack of ambition and direction.

By the spring of 2001, things at home had reached a boiling point. On the morning of May 9th, Lillita spoke to her mother on the phone, venting her frustrations. She said that Osebor was a troublemaker and that she wanted him to move out of the apartment and find a place of his own. He was 21 years old, it was time for him to make his own way in the world.

The next day, May 10th, one of Lillita’s coworkers reached out to her family. Lillita hadn’t shown up to work for the past two days, and no one at the laboratory had heard from her. The news spread quickly through Lillita’s family, and everyone was immediately concerned. Her brother decided to stop by her apartment and see if she was there.

But when he entered the apartment, he found it in disarray. The furniture had been rearranged – not at all like Lillita usually kept it – and there were dark, wet stains on the carpet that smelled like bleach. Lillita’s brother also noticed that her clothing and jewelry were missing from her bedroom. All of these strange things together prompted him to call the Montgomery County Police and report Lillita missing.

When officers arrived at the apartment, they immediately noticed signs that someone had tried to clean up the scene. There was a steam cleaner in the living room, an indication that the carpet had recently been shampooed. There were dark red stains on the wheels and base of the steam cleaner, as if it had been rolled through pools of wet blood.

In Lillita’s bedroom, officers found more carpet stains, dark red marks that appeared to be in the shape of a human head. They also found stains on the bathroom floor and toilet. Forensic investigators confirmed that these stains were blood.

Montgomery Police put out a missing persons alert for Lillita Clark and a police bulletin for her red 1992 Toyota Corolla with D.C. license plates. Then, they set out to interview all of Lillita’s friends and family.

It was in these conversations that investigators learned about Lillita’s troubles with her son. Osebor had been difficult to deal with for a long time, and in recent months, he had begun leveling threats at his mother, blaming her for screwing up his life. According to family members, Lillita was afraid of her son.

Police managed to track down Osebor on May 14th and questioned him at Lillita’s apartment. Osebor told investigators that he had last seen his mother on the morning of May 9th just before he had taken a bus to New York. When he returned, his mother was gone, and all her clothing and jewelry were gone too. He recalled that Lillita had made plans to travel to Richmond that weekend, so he assumed she had left early. When he realized she was missing, he made flyers and hung them up around the neighborhood.

But something about Osebor’s story didn’t sit right with investigators. As they dug into his activity over the past week, a disturbing picture emerged.

Around 1:30pm on May 9th – hours after he claimed he had left for New York – Osebor was seen on surveillance cameras at a Target store in Greenbelt, Maryland. He purchased a steam cleaner, stain-remover spray, bottles of bleach, and trash bags, and he paid for it all with his mother’s credit card.

On the morning of May 14th, not long before being questioned by investigators, Osebor visited a pawn shop where he sold a .22 caliber automatic pistol. According to court documents, investigators had found a matching bullet hole in the wall of Lillita’s apartment.

On May 16th, police found Lillita’s car abandoned not far from her apartment. It was further confirmation that Lillita hadn’t just left town, but that something terrible had happened to her.

Two days later, Osebor Clark was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the death of his mother, Lillita Clark. His bail was set at $1 million dollars.

In the charging documents, police acknowledged that although Lillita’s body had not been found, they believed there was enough evidence at the scene to conclude that she was indeed deceased. “A violent assault occurred in [Lillita Clark’s] bedroom, which resulted in heavy blood loss and death.”

While Osebor sat in jail, his grandmother came to visit. He admitted to her that he had done a terrible thing. He said that he had argued with Lillita on the morning of May 9th, and in his anger, he had shot her. He had then placed her body in trash bags and thrown her in a dumpster. Investigators knew that finding Lillita would be next to impossible.

In court, Osebor entered a plea of guilty but not criminally responsible, claiming that his mental illness affected his decision-making and that he lacked the capacity to understand that what he had done was wrong. Osebor was taking multiple antipsychotic drugs and told the court that he was hearing voices and couldn’t control himself. However, in June of 2002, Osebor withdrew his original plea and agreed to a plea deal with a sentence of 40 years in prison. He is currently incarcerated at North Branch Correctional Institution in Maryland.

Sadly, Lillita Clark’s story didn’t get the attention it deserved. The same week she disappeared, another missing woman was making headlines – Chandra Levy vanished just a few miles south of Lillita’s apartment, but her case was national news. The disappearance of a beautiful young white woman held the nation’s attention, while the disappearance of a young Black mother didn’t even garner a mention in the local papers until it was too late.

There are no pictures of Lillita Clark on the internet, no blog posts about her life or her decades of work as a public servant, no national outcry over her death. But her life was important – she was important – and she was loved by her family and friends. She deserves to be remembered.