'Please help me': Daughter of murder victim in Chicago cold case pleads for justice

The daughter of a Chicago murder victim tried in vain for years to get justice for her mother who disappeared under suspicious circumstances in 2018.

Teresa Smith eventually partnered with a community activist to find out the truth about the death of her mother, Daisy Hayes.

"I went to their door and I begged them, ‘Will you all please help me?' And they opened their door that very first day. And they’ve been helping me get justice for Daisy," Smith said.

Hayes was killed four years ago and her body was never found. Investigators said the killer cleaned up the crime scene and then dragged her body out of her apartment after shoving her into a large suitcase.  

The man Hayes' family and a prosecutor suspect to be the killer was in an intermittent relationship with the victim at the time of her death. 

The luggage was put into a dumpster. It then went to a landfill and was never found.

Cameras in the senior building did capture the last time Hayes went into her apartment – never to be seen again. That same camera shows the suspect, Jimmy Jackson going in and out of Hayes' unit after she went in.

He carried a mop and bucket as well as a trash bag in and out of the unit. Yet, Cook County Judge Diane Kenworthy was unmoved by the evidence and let Jackson go

Victims' family members are asking why the elected officials aren’t more concerned about this issue facing Black women in Chicago.

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"In a lot of these cases, there are leads that are strong but the institutionalized, I'll say, disdain for Black life, has not allowed them to do their job," Shannon Bennett from the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization said.

"So there is a real systemic problem in most urban cities where these people in position of authority do not take it serious even when the cases are really presented and all the detail, all the evidence is present, we still don’t get justice," Bennett said.

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Anita Padilla is following up on a series of unsolved Chicago murder cases – all of them involving Black women. 

About 50 or more cases over three decades that have never been solved. Investigators say in many of these cases the victims knew the killer. But they had no idea that they would become silenced prey.