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Some crimes leave behind answers. Others leave behind questions that outlive everyone who asked them. The Last Thread investigates unsolved cases where the evidence told a story, but no one finished reading it.
Hey friends. So what if I told you that there's a killer in your midst? A friend? A mentor? Maybe he or she is your coworker?
Web Pierre:I don't know. But I came across this case while researching unsolved homicides a few years ago. And the first thing I saw, it wasn't crime scene photos or even police reports. It was five caskets. They were lined up side by side at a funeral home in Harlem.
Web Pierre:And in those caskets, you have a mother and her four children five lives. All these years later, that image is stuck with me because this isn't only about five murders. It's about how an entire neighborhood can sleep through something so unspeakable. How silence can be louder than screaming. Here's one line from the New York Times that captures what this neighborhood woke up to.
Web Pierre:You never believe that a horrible crime would be committed so close to you until it happens. That's the tone for everything that follows. So tonight here's what we're doing. We're pulling at one thread, just one, and we're going to see where it leads. So it's 12/06/1975, and the sun's coming up on Carleton Terrace in Teaneck, New Jersey.
Web Pierre:And like most winter mornings, everything's quiet. But this time, it wasn't the right kind of quiet, you know? Inside a home, a TV's on in an upstairs bedroom, lights flickering against the wall, five people are already dead inside, had been for hours. There's no broken windows, no splinter door frame, no overturned furniture. And so the question is, how does an entire family die inside their own home and nobody hears anything?
Web Pierre:More than 20 shots each from a small 22 caliber firearm and yet, according to neighbors in later accounts, the neighborhood heard nothing. So a mother and her four children are lying dead. Jean Diggs was in the basement next to the stairs, her children upstairs, the two boys spying in their beds, Audrey in her bedroom, and Allison in her attic room, TV still playing. Everyone was killed with a 22 caliber firearm. The weapon law enforcement was never able to recover and so this would become the largest mass murder in Bergen County history.
Web Pierre:And at the time of this recording, it still is. When their father, Wesley Diggs opened the front door that afternoon he stepped into a scene no parent can imagine. He didn't know the case will follow him for the rest of his life. He didn't know it would outlive him. I spent months pulling from public records, newspaper databases, and local archives tracking down decades old reporting and case summaries and what I found didn't always match the headlines.
Web Pierre:From the first hours detective looked closely at Wesley because in cases like this the closest person is always examined first But later reporting was said that he passed a lie detector test and investigators never publicly named him as a suspect. But questions about what Wesley knew or even what Wesley didn't know, That followed him until his death. When you walked through a police found inside that house it didn't feel random. It didn't feel panicked. What waited inside that house didn't feel like chaos.
Web Pierre:It felt very deliberate. It felt like someone had a plan. Carlton Terrace was the kind of neighborhood that people moved to for a fresh start. The Dix family moved here from Harlem in 1969. They wanted something safer, something quieter, a yard, good schools.
Web Pierre:In the summer, the kids splashed around in their own pool. Jean Diggs was 39. She was an ABA representative, raising four kids in the house meant to be safer than the city on which they left behind. On Saturdays, she baked. She would bake yellow cake with chocolate frostings.
Web Pierre:The kitchen would smell like vanilla for hours. Audrey, 17, she played volleyball, also dabbled in basketball and a little softball as well. She was a team first kind of girl. That's what people said about her. Allison's 16, very quiet, artistic, very much like her mom.
Web Pierre:And that banner that she designed for the school competition, it was still hanging in the gym when this happened. Then Wesley Junior, 12, Roger was five, shared a room because they wanted to. There's this Halloween photo of Wesley dressed as Batman, Roger as a cowboy, and Rogers holding Wesley's cape. Their father, Wesley senior, he was a college graduate. He trained as an electrical engineer and had been a basketball player all over the cars in Harlem before turning into a businessman.
Web Pierre:He opened his first bar 1967 a place on 145th Street called Diggs Den. December 5 was just normal. There weren't any threats. No weird vibes. No strange signs the day ended like any other then sometime during the night someone crossed the threshold of that home And by morning, five lives were gone.
Web Pierre:And no one on the block could say when. Police moved through that house room by room. Dean was in the basement near the bottom of the stairs, gunshot wounds to the chest and the head. She was the only one shot in the chest. That's a detail that I'm going to ask you to remember.
Web Pierre:Audrey and Alison upstairs, Alison in her attic room and the boys, Roger and Wesley, still in their pajamas, still in bed, like they never woke up. Let that sit for a second. There was no forced entry, no struggle, nothing clearly taken, no weapon left behind. All the children had been shot in the head execution style, every single one of them so yes there's violence but it's not chaotic it's not loud it didn't feel like rage it felt like a plan very controlled, extremely deliberate, almost clinical. TNA police chief Robert Fitzpatrick had been on the force for over forty years and when he walked through that house, he told reporters it was the worst crime of his career.
Web Pierre:But that's not something a forty year veteran says lately. I want you to picture a winter night, windows shut, TVs humming, everyone's fast asleep. The burgundy prosecutor's office later estimated the shooting happened between 11PM and 2AM, the middle of the night, the deepest hours of sleep. Some neighbors told police they heard nothing. Others thought maybe they heard something like a faint noise, like a TV show or maybe a car backfiring.
Web Pierre:But it's in that kind of stillness even something terrible can hide. Here's what gets me though. The investigation didn't start until 04:30 that afternoon. Think about that. From sometime overnight, Friday, and to Saturday until Wesley came home, his family was lying in that house dead, maybe twelve hours, most likely more.
Web Pierre:And the whole block, the entire street went about their Saturday morning. Neighbors got their paper, they walked their dogs, maybe waved at the house, had no idea. And if you're like me, you hear something like that and you assume someone must have broken in, but this case keeps fighting that assumption. Did the killer break in or were they let in? Okay so let's talk about the gun because the gun is where this case starts to split wide open.
Web Pierre:Investigators found 23 shell cases inside that house, all 22 caliber. 20 of them near the bodies three somewhere else. Now here's a detail that I keep coming back to. The shot placement and the shot counts matters. Gene was shot twice.
Web Pierre:Allison shot twice. Wesley Junior twice. Little Roger once. One bullet. It was only five years old.
Web Pierre:But Audrey, Audrey was shot five times. Five. Now you have to take a step back and ask yourself why. Was it because she fought back? Did she wake up or was the shooter more focused on her for some reason?
Web Pierre:Nobody knows. But that number stands out against everybody else's and it nags at you. Now, the weapon itself, this is where even sources can't agree. The record described it as a 22 caliber automatic pistol. Crime Reads called it a 22 caliber rifle.
Web Pierre:Now the size between a pistol and a rifle, that's not a small difference. A pistol and a rifle are two very different weapons. But either way, a 22 is quiet, right? That's the thing people realize is one of the quietest firearms you can fire. Behind closed doors, behind shut windows on a cold December night, it could sound like a book falling off a shelf.
Web Pierre:A door shutting. It could sound like nothing. That's why nobody in Carlton Terrace heard anything. It wasn't because they weren't listening, it's because a point two two in the right conditions barely makes a sound. And then there's the second gun.
Web Pierre:Two of those bullets came from a different weapon, not the primary one, a different gun entirely. And Jean's 22 caliber pistol, now it was still in the house it was accounted for so you're left with one clean question is this one shooter with two weapons or two people? And remember we're gonna go back to Jean, right? She was the only one shot in the chest. Every child was shot in the head.
Web Pierre:So Jean took a bullet to the chest which I'm going to assume she was up in awake and the shot to the head was to finish her off. That's a different pattern. That's a different approach. If you're trying to solve a case, that's a difference between a theory and proof. Without the weapons, nobody could prove which story was true.
Web Pierre:The gun holds the answer and nobody knows where it is. Wesley came home around 02:30 that afternoon. He drove across the George Washington Bridge from the Europe Pole down to Carleton Terrace and from the outside everything looked fine. Nothing looked disturbed but as he opened his front door and he crossed the threshold of that home, It didn't feel like a house that had four kids and a wife in it. If you have any kids like I do, one of the sweetest and most annoying sound that you can hear are siblings fighting in a wife or a partner telling them to quiet down the noise.
Web Pierre:But it's when you hear nothing that your heart begins to drop. So he went upstairs, he found Audrey first in her bedroom, blood everywhere. He tried to call for help he picked up the phone the phone was dead no dial tone no nothing. So he ran. He ran out our front door across the driveway to the Murphy's house next door.
Web Pierre:He ran from two sixty six to two seventy Carlton Terrace screaming. The Murphy's sent the two adult daughters back to the house with Wesley. One of them was a nurse. She went upstairs. She came back down.
Web Pierre:She was shaking, pale. And she said four words to her sister Mary, she's dead, she's dead. And that's when the rest started coming room by room, body by body. A guy named Paul Ostro, who was 25 years old at the time, he was a volunteer on the ambulance squad. He got the call and it came in as multiple injuries, not homicides, not a mass killing, but multiple injuries.
Web Pierre:That's all they knew. But by the time Osho got there, the crime scene tape was already up. And years later, he said that it was obvious that everyone in the house was dead and that I'm glad I didn't have to go inside. And after it all, after the ambulance, after the police, after the crime scene tape, Wesley just stood there in the street not moving, not speaking, just standing there. And that's when neighbors started coming back out one by one watching them watch the house.
Web Pierre:Then the shock started spreading down the block. This case sits in such a weird space between closure and doubt Because there wasn't any forced entry. There wasn't anything stolen. No suspect ever named. The family had life insurance, but the payout was $6,500 for a family of six.
Web Pierre:That's barely enough to cover a funeral. So that's not a motive. But the crime itself feels practiced. It feels purposeful, very quiet. Whoever did this moved through the house without waking up the boys, without breaking the window, without leaving a single print that led anywhere.
Web Pierre:So the real question becomes, who could walk in without making noise? Who had access? Who knew the layout? Who knew Wesley wouldn't be home that night? Because that's the part that keeps on nagging.
Web Pierre:Whoever did this, they didn't guess. They knew. Six months later, paid informant tells the NYPD he knows who did it. He says three people, including himself, went to TNF to rob the house and, in the commission that said a robbery, killed the family. Three people, a robbery, five murders.
Web Pierre:NYPD wires him up, they pay him, and then they wait. Then he disappears with the back. The others that he named, well, one was already imprisoned during the crime and the other one just paroled. So this lead didn't just fall apart in public, just, they stopped existing. It didn't collapse, it vanished.
Web Pierre:And so if we take a step back for just a second and if you're anything like me, you start trying to make it make sense. But this case doesn't let you. No forced entry, multiple victims, 23 shell casings, a second weapon, and a dead phone line. This wasn't chaos. This was precise.
Web Pierre:We already knew the phone was dead when Wessie got there. That wasn't an accident. That that was part of the plan. Somebody thought this through. Somebody made sure no one could call for help not during and not after.
Web Pierre:Wesley never spent another night in the house. Not one. After the autopsies, the bodies were taken to Benson's funeral home in Harlem, six twenty four St. Nicholas Avenue, just a few blocks from Diggs Den. And the people who saw those five caskets lined up together, they said it was something that would never leave them.
Web Pierre:Then the bodies were brought back to New Jersey for the funeral, which was held at the Presbyterian Church of Teaneck a week after the murders in the pouring rain. 500 people filled that church, Standing room only, another 350 listened from an overflow room and outside in the rain, a crowd stood outside on the sidewalk listening to a loudspeaker. Over a thousand people came to say goodbye to a family, former classmates, former coworkers, friends. Wessie sat with his mother, Thelma, and his two brothers, and look, he he didn't speak. I mean, he couldn't.
Web Pierre:He sat motionless throughout the entire service, but he'd written a letter. And his friend, Arthur Sims, read it out loud for him in front of everyone. Here's a snippet. I consider myself your protector, your shelter in the time of storm. And I ask you to forgive me for not sheltering you in your greatest hour of need.
Web Pierre:He also wrote, I am a better person for having been exposed to you. More than 90 cars followed the procession to the burial grounds and perimeters. Wesley held it together through the entire church service, the reading, through the rain. But it was at the burial that's where he broke. He died in 1987, 52 years old, never knowing who did it.
Web Pierre:The murders on Carleton Terrace weren't just brutal, they're recapitulated. A family erased, no answers. And fifty years later, the question isn't just who did this, It's what it means that we still don't know. And if the killer is still alive, what have they lived with all this time? On our next episode, there's a theory about Gene that you're gonna wanna hear.
Web Pierre:I'm working from contemporaneous reporting and public records on this case. I'll list everything in the show notes. If this case stays with you the way it stayed with me, tell someone who will listen. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Take care of yourself.