‘No new leads.’ Did a second killer get away in former York County mayor’s murder?

The story never added up.

If an assailant dragged Julia Phillips through wet, muddy grass on a dreary night before zip-tying her boyfriend’s neck and beating him to death, why were her clothes clean? Why was the tape around her head and hands neatly cut?

And if she spouted a bogus alibi to police , how did the 5-foot-tall, 100-pound woman single-handedly kill her boyfriend, a well-known former mayor, councilman and businessman, who was nearly double her size?

The questions still haunt Ronnie Roberts 14 years later as he stands outside his father’s largely unchanged home on Roberts Avenue in York. In the driveway on Feb. 4, 2010 , someone cracked Melvin Roberts, then 79, over the head with a pipe or something similar, shot at him and then choked him to death with a plastic cable tie, according to police and prosecutors. An autopsy determined he choked to death.

“Somebody did this to Dad, and whoever helped is a murderer,” Ronnie Roberts said. “If they would kill Dad, they will kill just about anybody... They need to be put away, forever.”

The murder shook the small city of several thousand, drew national attention and so enamored true crime buffs that there were three TV documentaries about the case. The motive was a simple one for Phillips, according to police and prosecutors: Greed.

Courts convicted Phillips of the murder in 2013, and she died in prison three years later at 72. A police investigator with fresh eyes has ended up with the same conclusion as all those years ago: “I can’t rule out there was a second suspect,” says York police officer Lt. Kevin Hoffman.

Melvin Roberts: An icon in York

Roberts was a lawyer , landlord, car dealer and a tough guy who never backed down from disagreements in courtrooms and boardrooms, say the people who knew him. He was mayor of York for a term in the early 1970s, served on the city council and ran cable TV businesses and gas stations. At age 79 he had a pacemaker, but was still physically active and strong.

And in the courtroom, he was still a force at an age when many are retired. In 2009, Roberts and legendary South Carolina defense lawyer Jack Swerling represented Antonio Mobley , a York man charged with murder. After a grueling jury trial, the man was found not guilty.

His personal life was not so public.

Roberts was long-divorced, and for many years had a relationship with Phillips. She lived with him for years. He took her on trips and bought her a building in Gaffney for her clothing business.

But that was coming to an end in early 2010.

Roberts was going to cut off Phillips money, take her out of his will and kick her out of the house where she had lived with him for years, police said.

Roberts’ death on a cold night in 2010

Phillips called 911 the cold, rainy February night Roberts died. She used a racist trope that a dark-skinned man with a foreign-type accent grabbed her as she came home from her clothing store in Gaffney, about 25 miles west. She claimed the assailant kept demanding money.

When the police showed up, she was sitting inside her SUV with her head and wrists tied with duct tape.

She described the alleged robbery to police and asked repeatedly: “Where’s Melvin?”

He was dead in the driveway.

Phillips told police the purported villain threatened and dragged her away from what would become a murder scene— through wet grass behind a 6-foot wall. Then she told police she heard a gunshot.

She told officers she waited until she thought she was safe then went back to her SUV parked in the driveway.

Police found Roberts dead with the plastic tie around his neck and a wound from the beating on his head.

Officers whisked Phillips off to the York Police Department station downtown. They videotaped her statement with duct tape still around her blond hair. Police said they needed to take pictures of her for the investigation, and she wondered aloud: would the pictures be in Playboy?

Police found two large footprints near the house and a wet track where it looked like a person slid down. But a K-9 couldn’t track a scent from the scene.

It didn’t add up from the beginning, say York police officers.

The wet, cold weather defied the relatively clean clothes Phillips was wearing. The duct tape wasn’t tight, and it looked cut, not torn.

Roberts’ wallet also wasn’t stolen and money wasn’t missing. The money bag Phillips brought home from her Gaffney store wasn’t missing money either.

Even that night, police believed the crime scene, the duct tape and the claim of robbery was staged.

Still, Phillips was allowed the night of the murder to return home to Gaffney, where she had a house from a previous marriage. The Roberts Avenue house and driveway remained a crime scene.

Police had only her statements. There was no security video at the house.

‘Last time I saw him alive’

David Roberts during an interview last month with The Herald sat in his father’s office building conference room on Liberty Street in York. It’s an old-fashioned, wood-paneled law office with rows of legal books that date back decades. He sat in the same chair where his father sat Feb 4, 2010.

The 2010 visit was a normal one, with David Roberts stopping to see Melvin Roberts after his dad returned from a car auction in Darlington. David Roberts told his father he loved him.

“That’s the last time I saw him alive,” David Roberts said last month. “I told him I would see him the next day and I went home.”

David Roberts continues to use his father’s law and real estate office. He ran the property rental business after his father died.

And he believes Julia Phillips did not act alone. It almost certainly was someone who knew his dad, David Roberts said.

“I’ve always felt there’s at least one more person involved,” he said.

Just as David Roberts frequently thinks about the killing, the supposed accomplice must do the same, he said. Whoever that person is, David Roberts has a message: “You are carrying a burden.”

David Roberts is asking that person to turn themselves into police — to “un-shoulder” the burden of murder.

“I’m hopeful you will decide to help both of us,” David Roberts said .

In the 14 years since the killing, Roberts’ death investigation has been the most extensive in the history of the York Police Department, said Police Chief Brian Trail. The department has spent thousands of hours on the case, Trail said.

The crime that stunned York — and America

For former York Mayor Eddie Lee, Roberts’ death was not just another case. Roberts was an institution, and among the city’s most prominent people.

Lee knew Roberts for decades. So news of the 2010 killing sent Lee to the house himself. Police were still there. So were Roberts’ two grown sons, who were at the end of the driveway.

“I remember walking up that long driveway from the road and thinking ‘Is this real?’” Lee said.

Immediately, Lee wondered who could have done it. Roberts was a landlord. There were plenty of court cases where people didn’t like the outcome.

“He had friends and he had enemies — everybody knew that,” Lee said.

But Lee and many others didn’t believe Julia Phillips’ robbery story from day one — especially that a Black or Hispanic man with an accent robbed her.

“For so long in the South, that has been a convenient excuse,” said Lee, a professor of Southern history at Winthrop University, about race-blaming.

The public asked Lee about the case from the day after the murder because he also was mayor.

“The public, the media, everyone wanted to know what happened and who did it,” Lee said.

Lee also knew Phillips, Roberts’ girlfriend, and had spoken to her many times over the years.

“She was such a small and slender person,” Lee said. “If she did it, how could she do it by herself?”

Police cast a wide net

While the police and public cast suspicions on Phillips’ story from the start, she started out as a victim.

York Police Department Lt. Billy Mumaw, now retired, was the lead investigator from the first night and spoke to the Herald in May .

Police and Phillips did a re-enactment at the 2010 murder scene days after the crime. She again claimed to have been dragged behind the wall by an assailant. She showed the spot behind the wall. But her clothes were not muddy despite the rainy, cold weather, Mumaw said.

Investigators took more than 80 DNA swabs of people to find a match on the plastic tie tightened around Roberts’ neck, but no match was ever found, Mumaw said.

Mumaw said in 2010 he was assigned no other cases for six months. He worked with a State Law Enforcement Division agent, two county detectives and others from his own department. Federal law enforcement also helped, York police said.

Police received massive cell tower data dumps from the area but never found any link from phone calls made nearby to the killing, Mumaw said.

Mumaw interviewed people with potential grudges against Roberts through his legal, car and property businesses. Police interviewed Roberts and Phillips family members.

The alibis for everybody came up clean, Mumaw said.

“None of those people were suspects after the investigation,” Mumaw said.

Except Julia Phillips.

Suspect emerges

Mumaw said police had the question: If it was just a robbery, why did an assailant use a plastic cable tie and a gun, but not take any money? Why would they kill Roberts without robbing him?

Mumaw said Phillips’ other actions and statements seemed peculiar — they were more about her own well-being, rather than her boyfriend lying dead on the ground nearby. She talked only about being a robbery victim and never asked about her boyfriend lying dead in the driveway while talking with police.

“Her boyfriend is laying dead 15 feet away and she’s concerned about herself, not Melvin being dead,” Mumaw said. “It just stands out as not how a normal person would react.”

Roberts had a hole in his jacket collar where a bullet shot through and missed him, Mumaw said. That bullet was destroyed when it hit the concrete driveway. So it did not yield DNA or fingerprints.

No gun was ever found.

The duct tape around Phillips’ wrists and head, meanwhile, was too loose for Phillips’ alibi that her assailant bound and dragged her behind a wall many feet away, Mumaw said. Police took her clothes seized the night of the crime for testing for DNA and gunshot residue. They tested positive for gunshot residue despite her claim she had never fired a gun and was feet away behind a wall when the gun was fired.

And they found something else: Phillips was broke. And she had been spending money on drugs.

Police said they discovered Roberts was going to kick Phillips out of the house and take her out of his will after the couple had been together for 10 years. Investigators found Roberts told Phillips’ creditors he was no longer going to pay her bills, police said. Phillips had found out that, if she was cut out of the will, she would lose her store Roberts’ owned, police and prosecutors said. They said the will change would have been “catastrophic” for Phillips and left her destitute.

Phillips stole money from Roberts’ rental business in Gaffney, and she had an opioid problem where she bought pills on the street, according to Mumaw, police records, and court testimony.

Murder charge and trial

On May 18, 2010, police charged Phillips’ in the murder as she stood outside the Gaffney store Roberts bought for her. She pleaded not guilty and refused to ever give police another statement.

Phillips was released on house arrest bail in June 2010.

She pleaded guilty in a separate July 2010 case to stealing $2,000 from Roberts’ realty company in Gaffney.

The murder trial finally began in late August of 2013. Media and spectators packed the Moss Justice Center for the case.

Greenville prosecutors, who took over the case to avoid conflicts of interest, showed Phillips’ videotaped statements claiming to be dragged through mud. They showed the gunshot residue on her clothes. They talked about her drug problems and how Phillips was destitute without Roberts’ money.

Prosecutors brought in a witness from Gaffney who testified Phillips tried to hire him to kill Melvin Roberts many years earlier. He refused to help Phillips in that purported earlier plot.

Yet during the trial, police and prosecutors told jurors Phillips either killed Roberts and had help or helped somebody else pull the plastic cable tie that took away Roberts’ last breaths.

Phillips’ lawyer, Bobby Frederick, claimed she was too small and too frail to have had any role — that she was a victim. She was attention-starved, used prescription narcotics and could not keep her story straight, but that did not prove she was a killer, Frederick said.

Frederick argued in court the police charged Phillips because of public and media pressure, but a jury needed only a few hours to find her guilty. Judge Derham Cole sentenced Phillips to life in prison.

David Roberts hugged his wife that day but immediately said the next morning to The Herald the case was not over.

The probe goes on

The night of the murder, Trail, now the York Police chief, was the patrol lieutenant on duty and one of the first officers on scene. He had suspicions that Phillips’ story was phony.

“We were pleased with the arrest and conviction (but ) we knew there was another suspect and there was still work to be done,” Trail said in a statement to The Herald.

When Trail was promoted to captain in 2010, he and Lt. Rich Caddell, then the supervisor for investigations, started from the beginning with interviews, phone calls and computer records.

Detectives completed other interviews, lie detector tests and re-submitted DNA samples. Investigators went through computer records and more phone calls, Trail said.

Police followed every lead but “the case grew cold,” Trail said.

“We interviewed every person we could think of,” Trail said. “We could develop no new leads.”

Phillips dies in prison

Phillips died silently. She never confessed to having a co-conspirator or any role in Roberts’ death, investigators say.

What she knew — or didn’t — died with her on July 6, 2016, at age 72.

Ronnie and David Roberts held a news conference with York police that day announcing her death. Police said the investigation was still ongoing.

Police searched her prison cell and her personal effects, police said. Again, they found nothing, not even a mention of Roberts, said former York Police Chief Andy Robinson and Trail.

Fresh eyes on a cold case

When Mumaw and Caddell retired, Trail assigned detective Hoffman to look at the case again in the late 2010s.

Hoffman, now a lieutenant, was not living in York in 2010. He never met Roberts — unlike other officers involved in the case.

He came into the investigation with “fresh eyes” and re-interviewed people from the original case. He pored over the trial transcript. He looked through the case evidence. He re-submitted DNA materials to use the latest technology.

His findings: people with potential grudges offered legitimate alibis and DNA evidence collected in 2010 didn’t turn up any matches.

The case theory, even with Hoffman’s fresh eyes, remains the same: If Phillips killed Roberts, she likely had help orchestrating it, Hoffman said.

That person could have killed Roberts and helped stage the crime scene with the phony duct tape before Julia Phillips called 911 with the false claim about being robbed, Hoffman said.

But Hoffman also said evidence against Phillips was strong and damning. She had motive, means and opportunity.

A private investigative firm, paid by Ronnie Roberts, went through the case from beginning to end a few years ago to review if anything could lead to another suspect. It too came up empty.

A case turns cold ... for good?

Lee left the mayor’s office in 2020 after 18 years. He still lives in York.

He said in an interview with The Herald detectives fully investigated the crime. He was briefed by police often from 2010 through 2020.

York police under three different chiefs threw all they had at the case. The police force of 35 doesn’t consider the case closed — just an investigation half-solved.

“The public theory that there was a co-conspirator, it still percolates,” Lee said. “People still ask me about it to this day.... This was an emotional case, a bloody murder, and it remains for many to have a cloud over it.”

The sons fight for justice

Roberts’ two sons, Ronnie and David, have lived with their father’s death for 14 years. In some ways, it consumes their lives.

Before Roberts died, both sons saw him almost every day. They trusted Phillips as a member of the family for a decade until the investigation found she was stealing from their father and that her claims about the night were phony.

Both sons praised the York police for their tenacity and 14 years of work on the case.

Ronnie, now 65 years old, said his father was loyal, courageous and honest. He has left the house intact for 14 years so police can check and re-check the house and the grounds.

Ronnie Roberts has spent thousands of dollars of his own money on private investigations and a $10,000 reward for information remains on the table.

He’s happy to pay if the information is verifiable and leads to Julia Phillips’ accomplice.

The sons and police also gave in-depth interviews for three TV documentaries made about the case. Re-runs of those shows from Dateline on NBC, Snapped on the Oxygen Network and Investigation Discovery’s Southern Fried Homicide still air every now and then — providing hope someone will see them and provide something, anything, to move the case forward.

David Roberts always had questions about the timeline on Feb. 4, 2010. He wonders about his father’s whereabouts between leaving the office sometime after 5 p.m. and getting home after 7 p.m. He said his father likely didn’t stay at the office from 5 p.m until 7 p.m. Perhaps someone who saw him during those two hours can still provide a clue, David Roberts said.

In small York, David and Ronnie Roberts keep checking with police on the case. They go to the post office, to lunch, walk down Liberty Street where their father’s law office sits. They walk down the main business district of Congress Street.

People ask them if the case will be solved.

People ask them if a second person has been caught.

They all wonder if a killer walks among them in York.