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MURDERED: Destiny Jackson & Nazirah Muhammad
00:24:38
When Destiny Jackson and Nazirah Muhammad were found gunned down in their own home, both their families and investigators in Hobart, Indiana, are baffled. Today, they’re so close to solving the case that’s haunted them for the past three years - but they need your help to take it over the finish line.
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Hi everyone. Ashley Flowers here. If you're like me, diving into true crime is about more than just the details of a case. It is also about giving a voice to the victims and understanding the lives behind the headlines. And this is what host Kylie Lowe does each week on her podcast, Dark Down East. Every Thursday, Kylie dives into New England's most gripping mysteries, uncovering stories in a way you won't hear anywhere else. And she digs through archives, connects with families, and shines a light on the voices that deserve to be heard. From cold cases to moments of long awaited justice, Dark down east is the perfect blend of investigations and honoring the stories behind them. You can find Dark down east now wherever you're listening.
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While on a luxury yacht for a travel assignment, a journalist witnesses a passenger tossed overboard late one night, only to be told that she must have dreamed it. As all passengers are accounted for, despite not being believed by anyone on board, she continues to look for answers, putting her own life in danger. Starring Keira Knightley and based on the best selling novel by Ruth Ware. Watch the woman in Cabin 10 now on Netflix.
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Hi crime junkies. I'm your host, Britt and we're shaking things up with not one, but two episodes hitting your feed today. And here's why. The lead detective in a case out of our home state of Indiana reached out to us because he needs your help. He's got this case that's pretty fresh, meaning there's a little bit less information than usual. So we decided to cover two Indiana stories. Ashley is bringing you the other and it's actually already in your feed. But this one we knew we had to tell because they are this close to solving it. They're pretty sure they know who is behind the murder of two young women in Hobart, Indiana and why. But there's a twist. The DNA they have in the case doesn't match the main person they suspected. So are they wrong or is the DNA just misleading? I have theories, but one of you out there might have the answer. This is the story of Destiny Jackson and Nasira Muhammad Sa. If you've been listening to Crime Junkie for a while, or even if you're a new listener, you know that a lot of the stories we tell start with a loved one getting worried that moment that they realize that something is wrong. But on the morning of Friday, Nov. 4, 2022, a woman named Felicia isn't all that worried. She hasn't heard from her little sister, 20 year old Destiny Jackson in a little over a day, which is unusual for them because they live together along with Felicia's boyfriend Todd and Destiny's 19 year old girlfriend Nyzeera Mohammed. But even when Nyra's mom calls her saying that she can't get a hold of her daughter or Destiny, Felicia's not thinking that something bad has happened. Felicia knows their sleep schedules are a little bit off at the moment. Nyra isn't in school at the time. Destiny's taking some online classes and working part time, but they're staying up late, sleeping in late, doing like normal college age things. Plus Felicia knows that Destiny turns on the do not disturb when she sleeps. So even when she tries calling Destiny herself and gets sent straight to voicemail, that doesn't feel weird. Unfortunately, Felicia and Todd aren't home where they all live in Hobart, Indiana. They've been gone on a brief trip an hour away to Chicago, so Felicia can't just go into their room and check on them. So instead she keeps trying her sister, but no answer. After so many unanswered calls, she asks her brother who she's staying with in Chicago, hey, can you check and see if you can see her location? But he can't. Still though, Felicia isn't worried. She figures she'll hear from her sister soon. But it's not her sister who calls her later. It's Nyra's mom again. And she's still worried. And that's when she says something that finally makes Felicia a little nervous. According to Felicia, she tells her that she recently sent her daughter a large sum of money. She doesn't remember how much it was or exactly when or even why, though she knew that her mom had been supporting her financially, so it wasn't totally out of the blue, But I don't know, something about it just made her sister Spidey senses tingle. So better safe than sorry. Felicia decides to call local police for a welfare check that afternoon. When police get to the apartment, even from the outside, there is a sign that something is wrong. Bags of groceries are sitting outside the apartment. They don't look old, like they haven't been sitting there for days, but there are perishables in there, so leaving them just out in the hall feels like off. And from the moment police step into the apartment, they know that they've walked into a crime scene. Bullet casings litter the floor. There are bullet holes in the hallway wall, and blood spatter leads them from a bathroom to the primary bedroom. There they find the bodies of two young women, Both of whom have suffered multiple gunshot wounds. One of them, Nyzeera, is lying on the floor kind of on her side from the way she's laying. And based on the bullet holes and blood in the bathroom and hallway, it looks like she may have been in the bathroom when the attack started and was trying to run away from her attackers before succumbing to her wounds in the bedroom. And that Destiny is in bed with the covers still pulled up, almost like she was caught while sleeping. The two are long past life saving measures. They're going to have to go back to Felicia and confirm the worst case scenario. But while some officers are tasked with notifications, others begin combing through the apartment, trying not to lose any more precious time. One of the things they try to do is determine exactly how the killer got in. Because the apartment is on the second floor and the front door was locked with no signs of forced entry. But there is an unlocked and slightly still open sliding glass door in the living room. It leads out to a balcony and below they see that a table owned by one of the neighbors has been pushed to right underneath that balcony. And in the middle is a single dirty shoe print. That shoe print is one of the first pieces of evidence they photograph and collect. But it's not the only thing. There are those numerous shell casings along with Destiny's phone and Nyzeera's phone case. At first blush, they think the killer must have taken the phone itself. But they didn't take it far because they end up finding her phone off to one side of the main road that leads into the apartment complex. And by the time they get to it, it's crushed to pieces. They think whoever took it might have thrown it out a car window as they were fleeing. Which leads them to search even further across the road and down the street, where they turn up more potential two pairs of gloves. One is a blue latex pair, think like medical gloves, and the other is gray with black rubber palms, almost like work gloves. Now, Detective Gallagher, the lead detective on this case, told our reporter that he doesn't think the gray work gloves are connected, but the blue, like medical gloves, might be, based on where they are in proximity to the phone. They're directly across the street, almost as if the killer tossed the phone out one window and the gloves out the other as they were driving away. Investigators send everything they can off for testing to the Indiana State Police Laboratory while they request phone and social media records for both women and speak to their families and neighbors. When police interview both families, they're able to establish a clear timeline of when the homicides likely occurred. Nazira's mom says she last spoke to Nazira around 9:31pm on November 2, and she got a TikTok from Nyzeera that was sent to her around 1:36am on the 3rd. Then Felicia says she last heard from Destiny a little after midnight on the third as well. But after that, there was radio silence from both of them. So investigators believed they'd likely been killed in the middle of the night or sometime the morning of the third. But when they talk to neighbors, no one reports hearing any gunshots or seeing anything out of the ordinary, which I okay, sure, maybe everyone was asleep. But what I find even stranger is that when police walked into the bedroom, there was a hairdryer that was plugged into the wall, and it was still running. So it must have been running for, like, over a day. And I've lived in apartments before, and sound travels a lot and forever and long. So it feels really strange to me that no one would have clocked that the hairdryer was blasting, like, all day. Now, my first thought was that the killer may have plugged it in and tried to start a fire. It was right next to nyzeera's body. But Detective Gallagher doesn't think that's the case. He told our team that the women probably kept it in their room, and Nyzeera may have been using it at the time of the break in, which that threw me for a loop, too, because I knew, based on the crime scene, that their theory had been that she had been in the bathroom when the attack happened or when she was first shot. So I had our reporter try and clear that up with the detective But I didn't actually get any clarity. He just said that she was probably in the bathroom when the attack first started, then tried to run into the bedroom, been using the hairdryer, got up to get something from the bathroom, and then that's when the break in occurred. Or maybe she was using it, heard someone come in, went to the hall to look, saw them, jumped in the bathroom first. Or maybe she was in the bathroom and then, like, tripped over the blow dryer as she ran into the bedroom. I mean, it's hard to know for sure, but Detective Gallagher's confident that it wasn't put there to try and start a fire after they were killed, which they can pinpoint to an exact time thanks to Nyzeera's phone records. At 4:30am on the 3rd, they learned that she'd actually called 911. And that call is disturbing, to say the least. We have the audio, but we are not going to play it, because in it, you don't hear much. I mean, nothing that helps. Just gunshots and sounds from Nyzeera that make it clear that she's scared and then dying. It's fast, but it's heartbreaking. The call gets cut short, and police couldn't pinpoint Nyzeera's location. You can't with cell phones, so they couldn't respond at the time. What the call does give them now, though, is a precise time of when Nysera and Destiny were killed. And they have to figure out where everyone they knew was at that time, and they have to figure out what the motive might be. The why usually leads you to the who. And this is when the two families divide. Nyra's family starts to question if Felicia and her boyfriend Todd may have had something to do with it. I mean, how convenient it was that this is the time that they were gone and there had been some conflict, though they were your normal roommate conflicts, nothing violent, but I think they're just looking for anything, any explanation for this inexplicable loss. But police are quickly able to rule that out. Phone records and witnesses put them in Chicago on the second before Destiny and Nyeera's last cell phone communications, just like they said. But actually, the reason they were there makes police wonder if this was a targeted attack by a family member, just a different one than Phylicia. It turns out the reason Felicia was in Chicago when the murders occurred was because she was meeting with police about pressing sexual assault charges against her and Destiny's brother, Terrence. Both she and Destiny had allegedly experienced sexual Abuse by him, Destiny when she was a child, and Phylicia had been assaulted more recently. Now Felicia is the only one pressing charges. And he hasn't had contact with Destiny in over a year. Not since he reached out, promising to make things up to her, which she rejected. But with charges potentially incoming, they're wondering if he broke in targeting Felicia or maybe Destiny 2 and Nyzeera was just collateral damage. But I'm not going to drag this out. After digging into his whereabouts on the second and third, he is ruled out. He denies being involved, and his phone records confirm that he wasn't in Hobart. Investigators even speak with his girlfriend, who corroborates that he was in Chicago, and her phone records match up with his. And just in case you were wondering, because I know our crime junkies are always sleuthing for the missing piece or the angle that hasn't been explored, there's no evidence anyone in Destiny's family hired someone to do this either. And really, when you break down the motive for Terrance, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Killing Destiny wouldn't stop Felicia from pressing charges. In fact, Felicia still met with police, and Terrance got charged and eventually was sentenced to 18 years. Destiny's family agrees with police. In the end, they don't think the whole Terrence thing is related. They actually don't think Destiny was the target at all. They think Nyzeera was. And here's the context for that thinking. Felicia tells police that Nyzera was known for purchasing really large quantities of weed at one time. She got it from multiple dealers, but no one knew how she paid for all of it because, remember, Nyzeera was unemployed. So Felicia's wondering if maybe she didn't pay repeatedly and one of her dealers felt they'd been ripped off. Felicia even told our team that she knows Nyzeera had several sandwich sized bags of marijuana in the apartment when she left, but police couldn't find any in the apartment when they searched. It seems to be the only thing that was taken, assuming Nyzeera still had it all when they were killed. Now, is this why she asked her mom for that large amount of money Felicia told us about? Maybe she was trying to pay someone back. It would make sense if she actually got that large sum of money. And there's some confusion around that. Felicia is adamant that's what Nyzeera's mom told her the first day that she called her. But Nyzera's mom later states to police that her daughter never asked for that money. So I don't know what to make of the discrepancy is is someone lying? More likely, it's misremembering. Trauma does a hell of a lot to the brain, so I wouldn't fault either of them if their truth was slightly off from center. Either way, police are in on this owing someone money theory, and they have a pretty good idea who she owed money to.
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Heard about it, so I get to.
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Like me.
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Exciting case she's discovered and already started totally deep diving on.
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Nyzeera's phone records revealed a whole saga of things that happened over the 24 hours before she and Destiny were killed. Turns out she'd actually called 911 not once, but twice. Once in the early morning hours in the middle of the murders where you can hear gunshots. But she also called the police 24 hours before, around the same time. So on the 2nd, at 5:08am, she called to report a man outside her apartment looking in people's vehicles. Police drive over and they do find a guy in the parking lot, a guy that we're going to call Chip. And Chip literally admits to the cops that he's there to sell weed. And in his car, they find over a pound of marijuana along with two legally owned guns. Now, marijuana is still illegal in Indiana, so they confiscated the weed and issued him a court summons, which, I mean, is pretty lucky. They definitely could have harested him. And it doesn't seem like he's saying who he was there to sell to, but Nyzeera's phone records are now doing all the talking. They show that he was there to make a delivery to her. According to her messages, he got there, she went out to the parking lot to meet him, and then must have called the police after she went back inside. Now, what would make her buy weed from someone and then call the police on them? It seems risky, but it makes me think again about Felicia's money theory. Like, what if Nyzeera owed this guy money? She didn't have enough to pay him what she owed him, and she was afraid he'd be back to get it or something like that, so she called the police on him. Or what if he made a threat to her when she was there and she was trying to get him taken away? But again, Chip was very much a free man after this, and he was not happy. Through Facebook messenger, where he goes by a pseudonym that we're going to call Chips Ahoy, he found out that she'd called the cops and he demanded she pay him for the marijuana they confiscated. Now, initially she said she was trying to, but there was an issue with her bank. But then the tone shifted. Chip's messages turned threatening, prompting Nyzeera to say she was going to get a protection order until she moved, which, according to the messages, would be soon. But Chip wasn't having it, stating she won't make it. And that he had friends in town to back him up. She wasn't worried, though. She said she and Destiny were planning to go out of town the next day. So, quote, catch us in the city if you can. Cause it ain't gonna be out here. So if he's the culprit, the theory is that Nyra hadn't been paying him and calling the cops was the final straw. Now detectives find Chip and bring him in for an interview where he confirms he did in fact deliver some weed to Nyzera in the early morning hours of the second. He claims he's never been inside the apartment and denies killing the girls, but he can't say where he was at the time of the murders. That night. He claims he went to work at a local factory as usual, but left around 11:40pm because of a headache. But he didn't go home. He drove around and started making some sales. But when it comes to exactly where he was driving, he can't say he was smoking weed the whole time and claims he can't remember where he was, like, at all. Has zero memory of that night. I don't know if investigators buy that, but when they ask Chip if they can get a DNA swab, he agrees. Even though at that point they still didn't have anything to compare it to, all the evidence they had from the scene was still being processed. Now, they also asked Chip for his phone, but he refuses to let them search it. No biggie. They get his phone and social media records anyway. Plus, they review data from local license plate readers to try to corroborate his driving around story. And what they get paints a hazy picture of that night. First, the license plate readers. On November 3, when the women are believed to have been killed, they put him about four miles away at 2am and then again in the same area at 6am Then his cell phone records put him in the area of the apartment complex around the time of the murder. So 4:30am Ish. Although we couldn't get any more specifics on this, like, just like how close he was. Those records also reveal that he was communicating with two other men both before and after 4:30am now, we asked for those conversations. Detective Gallagher told us he'd like to hold on to those. And we won't be naming the two other guys, but investigators do have their phone records too. And what we can say is that after the murders, those two other guys were messaging back and forth saying, quote, don't say nothing to nobody. Once evidence starts Coming back from the lab, it indicates that there may have been more than one killer as well. The casings they have indicate that there were two guns used in the attack, likely a rifle and a handgun. The same kind of weapons they'd found in Chip's car when they stopped him the night before in the very same apartment complex where Nyzeera and Destiny would be murdered. But here's the catch. The rifle was seized shortly after the murders, but it's not a match for the casings found at the scene. So that's a bust. Investigators also do a bit of digging on the shoe prints and determine they're either from Nike KD tray 53 shoes or Nike KD tray 54 shoes. And we'll have some photos in the blog post if you're like me and had no idea what that meant. They're basketball sneakers. But investigators can't determine if anyone connected to the case owned a pair. So at least for right now, the shoe prints are also sort of a dead end. What they need is DNA or a fingerprint, something they can compare to literally anyone. But the Indiana State lab says they can't get anything like that off the rest of the evidence. The questions I keep coming back to were like, who is this Chip guy? Like, could he have gotten two people to help him commit double homicide? And digging into him didn't really help me answer that second question. It turns out Chip's just a small town drug dealer from Gary, Indiana. I don't know what persuasive power he has if these are, like, close friends of his. No clue. But it's not like he's some big crime boss out there who's ordering hits on people. So maybe answers lay with the two men he was communicating with that night. Police don't get to talk to them immediately. Detective Gallagher wanted more evidence before tipping them off that he's onto them, but he's trying to make that happen. Now, he's been working the case diligently since 2022, and when the Indiana state lab said there wasn't anything on the evidence, he wasn't going to give up. So earlier this year in 2025, he sent a bunch of evidence off to a private lab in Florida capable of doing more advanced DNA testing. And lo and behold, they got DNA and a print. Now, that comes with some caveats. One, the print is off Nyra's phone case, and it very well may be Nyra's. One of the many challenges they've run into in this case is not being able to get fingerprints from Destiny or Nyzerah because they were too decomposed by the time their bodies were found. Even after such a short period, it just wasn't possible. There are fingerprints all over the apartment, but without being able to compare them directly to both Destiny and Nyzeera, Detective Gallagher just doesn't feel comfortable assuming whose is whose. The second caveat is that the DNA they got was from the blue gloves, which Detective Gallagher thinks are related to the crime scene, but they can't be 100% sure because they weren't found at the scene. And he didn't tell us whether it was male DNA for sure. And before you ask, Chip's DNA is in codis, and they did compare it to it, but it wasn't a match. Same thing with the print. Not a match and no matches in aphis. Now, this development just came through, and Detective Gallagher hasn't had a chance to print or swab the other two guys yet. If they're not a match, then there's only two paths forward when it comes to wait for someone to slip up and get put into codis. So they get a hit, or tips come in that develop new suspects that they can directly compare against. I asked about igg, but unfortunately the DNA sample they had was used up, so they don't have enough to do any genealogy stuff with. So that's why Detective Gallagher asked us to share this case with you. They've looked far and wide for alternate suspects, but haven't found anything. They even went digging into the girls backgrounds checked out an ex girlfriend of Nyzeera's who had a tumultuous breakup with her. I mean, Destiny was the reason for the breakup. She cheated on this other girl to be with Destiny. But even she was quickly ruled out. Chip was recently arrested this year on a weapons law violation, but he's still out and about. Detective Gallagher feels strongly that this case is solvable and they're on the right track. They just need something, a confession, a witness. And that's where you guys come in. Crime junkies. The guys who do things like this don't normally keep things like this to themselves. If there was ever a time to come forward, it's now. Destiny's family wants justice for the young woman they say loved and forgave so easily. She was described as the glue that held her family together and an inspiration to her eight siblings because she wanted to pursue higher education. And Nyzeera's family went to see justice for the fun loving girl who had an infectious smile. Her mother said she remembers the heart shaped pancakes Nyzeera made for her on her last birthday. They shared together, a testament to how deeply she cared about her loved ones. If you know anything about the murders of Destiny Jackson and Nasira Muhammad, you can contact the Hobart Police Department. I'm going to have the contact information in the show notes. And don't forget we're releasing two episodes today on Unsolved Indiana Cases. So there is another story told by Ashley that's in your feeds right now. That episode is Murdered Jessica Starr. Go take a listen. You can find all the source material for this episode on our website crimejunkie.com and if you want to listen to this episode and all of our episodes completely ad free, be sure to join the fan club. You'll also get early access to new episodes every week and you can follow us on Instagram rimejunkiepodcast Ashley and I will be back next week with a brand new episode.
- [28:57]
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Crime Junkie is an Audio Chuck production. I think Chuck would approve.
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