Tanesha Robinson, 15, was killed because she witnessed a murder and was willing to testify in court about it, police say.
Her cousin Jeanie Robinson, 20, and LaToya Cook, 17, were killed with her to ensure that they could not speak about Tanesha's slaying, police theorize.
Police and prosecutors now say they are close to ending the chain of violence that began on Oct. 25, 1992, the day Tanesha saw a man plead unsuccessfully for his life.
Yesterday, Anthony Butler, 26, was held without bail on charges of murder, conspiracy, witness intimidation, and retaliation against a witness in the slayings of the three young women, whose bodies were found on Aug. 4, 1993, in a sixth-floor apartment at North Philadelphia's Cambridge Plaza housing development.
"We believe that Tanesha Robinson was killed because she had testified," said Sgt. Larry Nodiff, who heads the Homicide Division's special- investigations unit. Her cousin and friend, Nodiff theorized, "were killed so that there would not be any additional witnesses to her murder."
The triple slaying stirred tough questions about the seeming inability of the justice system to protect witnesses willing to testify in criminal trials. Just four months before, a witness in another North Philadelphia murder case was slain.
It also spread fear - exactly as intended, police and prosecutors say - through Cambridge Plaza, a cluster of 368 high- and low-rise apartments in the 900 block of North 10th and 11th Streets, near Girard Avenue.
Police were called just before 7 a.m. that day by neighbors, who had heard gunfire. The three victims - the cousins lived there, and Cook had been visiting - had each been shot once in the head with a large-caliber weapon at point-blank range.
Tanesha's body was found in the fetal position in a closet of one of the apartment's two bedrooms, police said. Jeanie was found on a bed in the other bedroom. Cook, 10 weeks pregnant, was on a living-room sofa. Her 8-month-old daughter was found unharmed in a car seat on the floor nearby.
With no sign of forced entry, no evidence of drug activity, no indication of another motive, investigators turned quickly to the theory that Tanesha was killed in retaliation for her testimony.
In statements to police and at two preliminary hearings, she had described an earlier slaying at Cambridge Plaza - the murder of Pedro "Peter" LaCort, 26, on Oct. 25, 1992.
