Ernest Taylor was 17 when he vanished from Newark, New Jersey, in August 1978. He disappeared along with four friends — Randy Johnson, Michael McDowell, Melvin Pittman, and Alvin Turner — after they were last seen together following a basketball game in a local park. The group became known as the Clinton Avenue Five.

Witnesses reported the teens were offered odd jobs by a local carpenter, Lee Anthony Evans, and seen getting into his pickup truck. Evans later told police he had dropped them off. The boys never used their Social Security numbers, never applied for driver’s licenses, and were never heard from again. Decades passed with few leads and the families rejected an early theory that they had run away.

A 2008 witness statement led to arrests in 2010: Evans and his cousin Philander Hampton were charged with murder and arson. Authorities alleged the teens were lured to an empty house, restrained at gunpoint and left inside as the building was set on fire; Hampton later pleaded guilty to felony murder and agreed to testify against Evans, who was acquitted at trial. A third suspect died before charges were filed. The remains of Ernest Taylor and the other four boys have never been found.

Did anyone in the Clinton Avenue or Newark neighborhoods in 1978 have contact with the boys or recall seeing them get into a pickup truck that evening?