Produced by Patti Aronofsky and Elena DiFiore
(CBS News) - New York City Police Detective Robert Stewart started noticing all sorts of strange things when Jeffery Locker was found stabbed to death in front of a Harlem housing project in July 2009.
"It was strange that he would end up down there, huh?" "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Richard Schlesinger asked Det. Stewart.
"Absolutely was," he replied. "Jeffery Locker was an upper middle class individual with a nice home on Long Island.
Locker was 52, the father of three. His Facebook page was filled with images of a tight-knit family.
There was a reason it looked like he was a victim of a robbery. "His ATM card was not amongst his belongings," said Stewart.
"Poor guy comes in from Long Island...next thing you know, he's slumped dead at his steering wheel," said Laura Italiano, a reporter for the New York Post.
To Italiano, it fit a pattern every New Yorker has seen before: Jeffery Locker was in the wrong place at the wrong time and trusted the wrong people.
"You know...suburban cautionary tall -- lock your doors when you drive through some neighborhoods," she said.
But then a witness told police Locker bought condoms in a local store, detectives suspected Locker was looking for a prostitute.
"The double life story is a much better story," said Italiano.
Steve D'Annunzio knew Jeff Locker for almost 30 years. And he had news for the reporters and the cops. There was no way Locker was in Harlem to visit a prostitute. Locker was devoted to his wife Lois.
"He was a respectful and a faithful family man," D'Annunzio said. "One of the last things he said to me the last time we were together was 'Lois is my best friend.'"
Jeffery Locker speech: My wife told me this morning I can't even say hello in 15 minutes.
Just a few weeks before Locker was killed, D'Annunzio was at a family celebration in honor of Lois and Jeff's daughter.
"It seemed like it was a gala event," D'Annunzio said. "...one of the most loving families I ever met."
The police theories were collapsing. Despite what that witness said, police could find no evidence that Locker bought condoms or was looking for sex or drugs. Police did know Jeffery Locker had no business being in that neighborhood. His business usually took him far from Harlem... closer to Wall Street.
Jeffery Locker speech: Life is all about timing.
That's where he became a very successful motivational speaker, specializing in the insurance industry.
Jeffery Locker speech: How do we keep our existing clients knowing we love and appreciate them while we're fishing for new prospects?
"My image of Jeff is of a well dressed guy, who oozed success," said insurance executive Robert Miller. Miller says Locker seemed to know how to encourage insurance salesmen who, he says, frequently feel under appreciated.
Jeffery Locker speech: When I gotta make prospecting calls, it's pretty easy to go, "The dogs got to go out." "Oh my wife needs me to do that."
Video: Locker talks to college students on becoming a successful entrepreneur
"Nobody likes to go out and make a dozen calls and have everyone say no to you," said Miller.
In the early 1990s, Al Brodbeck hired Locker as his personal business coach.
"He was very self-confident. He had good presence," Brodbeck said. "He'd go over various activities -- what he felt I was doing right, what I could do better at."
A few years later, Brodbeck didn't need Locker anymore and he lost sight of the man who seemed for so long to be a rising star. But Locker still had that house in an expensive suburb on New York's Long Island when NYPD detectives went to tell Locker's family he was dead.
"It's never easy to tell somebody that they just lost a family member. But it's part of the job," said Det. Kevin Flynn.
Detectives Flynn and Jeff Hershman braced themselves for what is almost always a highly emotional, traumatic meeting. But they needn't have bothered. They don't think Mrs. Locker got very emotional nor did the kids when the detectives watched her break the news to them.
"They didn't seem to take it as a shock," said Det. Hershman.
"I remember the daughter saying that she's going back to bed," Flynn recalled. "...it was like we were telling them something they already knew. ...and then we walked out the door, Jeff looked at me and I looked at Jeff. I asked him, 'Are we in bizarro world?' Unless this is the way they handle grief, which could very well be possible, I'm not making any judgments. That was weird. It was just weird."
They told other detectives about their visit with the Lockers. But the case started moving quickly. Surveillance cameras caught pictures of a man entering Locker's car around the time police believe Locker was killed and leaving shortly after. Then, police heard from Locker's bank about that missing ATM card
"We received at least five different locations in which someone accessed the victim's ATM card," said Det. Stewart.
Whoever it was got $1,100. And it was all caught on security cameras. Police quickly got these videos from corner stores and small businesses all over the neighborhood.
"At each location it was the same individual using the ATM card," said Stewart.
"We had stills made of the pictures... And eventually somebody says...'that's Kenneth Minor.'"
They hauled in Kenneth Minor. It wasn't his first brush with the law. He had a record of drug violations and a robbery... a sad profile that fits many murderers. But Kenneth Minor had a story unlike any other murder suspect.
"Nobody wanted to believe me," Minor told Schlesinger.
It all started when he met Locker on a street corner in Harlem.
"What did he say?" Schlesinger asked Minor.
"He said he was looking for a gun," he replied.
"A gun?"
"Yeah," Minor replied. "I asked him, 'What do you want it for' and he was quiet for a second, and then he told me: 'I want you to shoot me.'"
"He said it just like that?"
"Just like that."
Source: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsMain/~3/jBqdmyodg2E/
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