Jones just assumed his uncle had gone underground, maybe changed his name to something flashier. “We’d have to wait for him to reach out and touch.” “The connection wasn’t consistent,” his nephew Shawn Little Jones recalls. He ghosted he went off the grid but he eventually came back. The rest of Little’s family - scattered across the country, disconnected from Little by that point - was less concerned when they didn’t hear from Frankie, because that’s just kind of what he did. “That was the night he disappeared and never came back.” “I just know at a certain time of night, I was in bed, and I jumped up all of a sudden like something had happened,” she says. She’s not sure if Little left the apartment to confront the man or if he took a long soak in the bath, which he often did when he was stressed. All she recalls is that it was warm out and that Little was in a huff because the neighbor across the street, whom he often worked with, hadn’t paid him for their most recent job. “I’ve never seen my dad since that day.”įor her part, Womack, now 66, doesn’t remember Robinson being there or what day it was specifically. He never found out who that person was when he emerged, the man was gone. “I remember hearing the door open, and I thought it was my dad,” Robinson says. Womack told the boy to hide in the bathroom, he says. The way he remembers it, he was at the apartment with Womack when someone knocked on the door. The music ended, though, when Little didn’t come home - and that day haunts Robinson, 48. 'Serial': Prosecutors File Motion to Vacate Adnan Syed's Murder Conviction He bought the younger Frankie drums and serenaded him with rounds of “Hush Little Baby,” his Gibson his most constant companion.
These days, he played out around the city with his band Fresh Fire, while filling his son’s life with music. Known to friends by his stage name, Brother Rabbit, Frankie had been a member of the O’Jays when they were just starting out in the early Sixties, and co-wrote a handful of songs with lead singer Eddie Levert, including “Oh, How You Hurt Me” (1964) and “Pretty Words” (1966). He did odd jobs to make ends meet, but his true passion was the guitar. “He was like any man in the music industry - my mom said that was his downfall - but I know he loved me for sure.” Little, a 36-year-old guitarist and songwriter, was living with his girlfriend, Rochella Womack. “My dad was a good person,” Robinson says of his old man. Now, there is a chance his story can finally be told.įrankie Robinson never believed that his father would willingly leave him, even after his dad vanished from his East Cleveland apartment in the late Seventies, when he was five. His bones no longer a challenge for rookie cops, this man - a musician, father, business owner, and brother - was finally returned to his family, which had wondered for decades why he never came home. For almost 40 years, he was unburied, passed down from detective to detective, a puzzle to solve as new crime-solving technologies came on the scene, promising resolutions to cold cases.įor four decades, this man remained a question mark, until his identity was revealed by a young detective and a cousin whose family started dabbling in genealogy.
The bones were far from home, discarded in small-town Twinsburg, Ohio, which got its name because it was founded by twins who married sisters, who died the same day and were buried in the same grave.īroken and nameless, the man became a mystery that would haunt this town for decades, while industries waxed and waned and the teen who found him grew old enough to see his family’s business shut down and become a ruin. This story begins in 1982 with less than half a man - a pile of bones discovered under a layer of February snow, his broken skull smiling up at an adolescent worker behind his family’s factory.
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