i m, like, okay, yada yada yada, i was watching television. you were zoned out. i was zoned out, and i m so zoned out finally i fall asleep. marcus woke up later that evening to the sound of his baby brother crying. so, i go downstairs, why is this little kid crying? where is everybody at? finally the phone rang. my stepfather calls me and he tells me, you know, he s saying, hey, is your mom there, is your mom home yet, whatever? and she and i m, like, no, where the heck are you guys? i ve been here and marquis won t stop crying. he just won t stop. he says, okay, okay, i ll be there soon. andre said he d last seen marie around 5:00 p. m. just before he left for his son andre jr. s football game. now when he returned home, marie and her car were gone. andre made a round of calls to friends, nobody knew where marie was. he then took all the kids to his mother s house and
i mean, she would just light up every time she talked about him just big smile. oh, the glow. uh-huh. he was he was her her her everything. the methodical businesslike marie seemed to change overnight. were you privy to the courtship with andre? the whirlwind courtship? yeah. well, that s real quick. that s the way we would put it because one day she was smitten. the next day she was in love. and then she was pregnant. pregnant and having a wedding and no one knew about it. marcus knew about it. he was there. your mom was happy? yeah. she looked happy. andre was happy? yeah. we all were happy. at age 8, marcus found himself welcoming a little brother named marquis. i think once my little brother came into the picture
of her. add to that the guilt he feels about the day she disappeared. i hate the fact that i can remember that it was a bugs bunny movie on the television but i can t even remember the last words my mom said to me. you were, what, 8 years old? yeah i hate that, yeah. because, why? you think this is your fault? you ve got to know intellectually it had nothing to do with you. i feel like i could have done something to protect my mom. i could have just changed up one thing. and yet even now marcus still couldn t accept the idea that the man he once considered his father had killed his mother. marcus didn t want to testify against andre. lewin had to serve him with a subpoena for a pretrial hearing. marcus ignored it. i got subpoenaed to go to court and said, no, i m not going. i ripped it up, threw it away. lewin had to do something
it was more, you know, i realized that it wasn t just the two of us anymore but we re actually starting to become a family. and there were two other stepsiblings in the mix, andre jr. and andrea. and you get along with them? yeah. it was pretty great. i had a brother and a sister at home, and it was a pretty cool experience. another cool experience, for the first time having a dad. he taught me how to swim. he taught me how to throw a football. he even rode me on the back of his motorcycle a few times. it was good to actually have a male figure in the house that i could, you know, do stuff with. so andre was living up to his job as your father? yeah. yeah, he was. for marcus and his mom, everything seemed just perfect. honestly, it was like a complete family. it felt like i finally had a complete family. it was the best feeling in the world. like the ultimate high. and then suddenly, the ultimate low. the ultimate low because on
what lewin needed most was a witness, and no one had seen anything on the day of the murder. yet lewin found there was a secret, buried in the memory of a grown man, who was all of 8 years old when a murder was being committed. marie s son, marcus singleton. we interviewed marcus in 2004, really the first in-depth interview that had ever been done. marcus was deeply conflicted between his feelings for his mom and the love he still felt for his stepfather andre. and at first, he had no intention of talking with investigators. but finally he broke down and told the story of what an 8-year-old marcus had seen on october 1st, 1994, 6 weeks before the murder. it s a story he also told to us. i remember hearing them screaming and going into the bedroom and them arguing and her telling me to call the