Aliyah Nicole Wilson

What if the inconsistencies in a tragic death case could be uncovered? Listen to the mysterious circumstances surrounding the demise of 22-year-old Aliyah Nicole Wilson. This episode unveils the puzzling autopsy findings, overlooked evidence, and the alleged negligence of the authorities. The Houston Police Department allege that Aliyah's death is a suicide, but there's a growing consensus amongst the public that something more sinister happened to her. Our hearts are heavy as we remember Aliyah Nicole Wilson, an admirable soul with an uncanny creativity. #JusticeForAliyahWilson

Facebook. JUSTICE FOR ALIYAH WILSON. https://www.facebook.com/groups/639389894172468/
TikTok. JUSTICE FOR ALIYAH [@justiceforaliyah]. https://www.tiktok.com/@justiceforaliyah?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

For images related to the cases, check out the Instagram.

Transcript

Julia Goodwin: 0:00

Hi, this is Julia, and murder is bad. I'm doing something a little bit different. A woman reached out to me and asked if I would cover the death of her daughter. After looking into it, I believe it is definitely something that needs more attention. But before I get into everything, I do want to put a warning here at the top. I will be talking about suicide, because it's a significant part of the case. If you're not in a place where you want to hear about that, then please do not listen. If you're looking for resources, you can call or text 988 right now or visit 988lifelinecom.

Julia Goodwin: 1:03

On July 22, 2020, denise McClendon woke up to a text from her daughter's ex. It said "they told me that your daughter has died. Denise was told that her daughter, 22-year-old Aliyah Nicole Wilson, had completed suicide by hanging herself outside her apartment on July 19, 2020 in Houston, texas. Denise lived in Michigan. Denise was shocked and devastated and confused. Days earlier, aliyah had spoken to her about arrangements for moving back to Michigan, something they had talked about for months. They had both lived in Texas, but Aliyah stayed there. When her family moved to Michigan, the plan was for Aliyah to take the train and that Denise was going to help get the money for the ticket. On Aliyah's Facebook she posted often and had said within that same week that she was leaving, moving to Michigan, and was excited to see her new partner who lived in Detroit. Thinking about all these things and hearing more about what had happened with her daughter, denise decided that it was extremely unlikely that Aliyah had actually completed suicide, and within days she was 100% positive that Aliyah had been murdered. What the Houston Police Department was telling Denise was the following A security guard employed at Village of Piney Point was patrolling the complex when he ran through the corner and saw something dangling, but he didn't know what it was immediately and looking at pictures from this particular courtyard, it's super dark, very little lighting.

Julia Goodwin: 3:04

Most of the lighting is coming from the freaking moon. So the guard approached and he saw the body of a woman hanging from the railing of the upstairs walkway. Aliyah was the one who contacted the police, and police were able to identify Aliyah through her ID, which was found in her backpack. Two days after Aliyah's ex contacted Denise, the ex sent pictures of Aliyah's apartment to Denise and asked her what she wanted from it. Another woman the mother of a friend of Aliyah's video called Denise as she was walking around Aliyah's apartment. I am specifically avoiding using names with the hope that this will be investigated and that I won't contribute to someone not receiving due process For clarification. I will continue to call Aliyah's ex. The ex, the woman whose mother video called Denise, will be woman one and another person involved will be woman two. On the same day, woman two was seen coming out of Aliyah's apartment. The apartment complex then changed the locks. A couple days after that, exactly a week after Aliyah had been found, the ex went live on Facebook calling woman one out, saying that she had set Aliyah up and that she knew what she did.

Julia Goodwin: 4:40

Denise was able to get to Texas by July 31st. She then discovered that someone had busted a window at Aliyah's apartment. The apartment looked ransacked. Her daughter liked to dress nice and normally had a closet representing that nice clothes, wigs and shoes but all that was left were some stretch pants and t-shirts. Denise did find a trash bag full of soaking wet towels, but when she asked investigators if they wanted it for evidence, they said no. On August 22nd, just a couple days later, denise found out that there was an eyewitness to the window breaking who said they saw the ex do it. When Denise goes back to Aliyah's apartment, she sees another window broken and inside the trash bag full of towels is gone, along with all of Aliyah's bras and underwear all of which had been there before.

Julia Goodwin: 5:44

Then, on August 4th 2020, when Aliyah Nicole Wilson should have been celebrating her 23rd birthday, her body was cremated. At the end of that month, a Black Panther group held a candlelight vigil in front of Aliyah's apartment and said they were going to investigate Aliyah's death as a homicide. On September 12th, the ex sent a message to Denise saying that she knows who hurt Aliyah and that she needed to talk to the Black Panthers or anyone else investigating the death. On September 21st, woman 2 admitted that she took a pillow, a comforter and affirmations written on post-it notes from Aliyah's apartment. Now there will also be lots of conversations around Aliyah's journal, which was not found in the apartment but can be seen in some of the photos the ex sent to Denise before the two windows are broken out. It's stated sometimes that Woman 2 is in possession of the journal. The ex actually says that Aliyah wanted her to have the journal and then later says I was just inferring, because they're so close, that she would want her to have it and actually, just so you know, she doesn't have it. The ex kind of goes back and forth on a lot of things, but there's that. So at the end of November and into December of 2020, fbi agent John Schimp contacts Denise to ask for Aliyah's cell phone. John Schimp went on to talk to HPD, the coroner's office and friends and neighbors of Aliyah. From this point, denise meets more and more resistance to her questions. She also gains more and more supporters for her cause. So I'm going to get into the nittier and grittier details of this case.

Julia Goodwin: 7:53

Aliyah was diagnosed as bipolar. She had scars on her arms, just like me and a lot of other people out there, and she had overdosed on pills in 2018. Her mother says that this was more of a cry for help than a suicide attempt. Aliyah was with her ex for two and a half years, on and off, and had told multiple friends and her mother how volatile the relationship was and how abusive the ex had been. During one of their off moments, aliyah went into a shelter. When the ex found her, she got scared and felt she couldn't stay there anymore, so the shelter helped put her up in an apartment the apartment at Village of Piney Point and the ex was able to find her there as well, having a history of stalking. The police were called ten times in a year for domestic violence incidents. Aliyah had to change her phone number and about a month before Aliyah would be found dead, she tried to find a gun to purchase for protection against the ex. In April of 2020, there was a night when the ex had come over and, based on messages from Aliyah, she tried to placate the ex, not trying to start any problems. But an incident occurred which led to the ex grappling Aliyah, holding her down and biting her finger so hard that Aliyah couldn't move it. Aliyah went to the hospital, so there is a record of that injury and that report will come back later.

Julia Goodwin: 9:40

The following information has come from the relentless work of Denise MacLendon. She has been working on her daughter's case every day for the past three years. The biggest and most verifiable misstep in this investigation is the assumption that this was a suicide. Regardless of the optics of an unnatural death, the police should never conclude the cause of death until all evidence has been found and an autopsy has been completed. But the Houston Police Department assumed suicide from the very beginning In the police reports which Denise has posted, officers state that this was a suicide, and when Officer McDonnell relays the circumstances of the death to the coroner's office, he makes sure to include that Aliyah had a history of suicide attempts and suicidal ideations. This leads to the coroner to assume that the hospital record of an injury to one of Aliyah's extremities was in relation to a suicide attempt, instead of the bite to her index finger.

Julia Goodwin: 11:03

When Denise receives Aliyah's autopsy, which is all she has to go off of since she wasn't allowed to see her daughter's body, there are some concerning factors. Not all of Aliyah's tattoos are listed, which they're supposed to be, and it's stated that all of her teeth were natural, which they weren't, and it doesn't list the injury to her finger at all. Now, I don't think this is like some kind of cover-up. I more think that it is laziness. It's like why do we need to spend time detailing every little nook and cranny when we obviously know that it's suicide? In the same records from Memorial Hermann Hospital, physical and sexual abuse was also listed, so there's really not an excuse for the authorities to blow off abuse claims.

Julia Goodwin: 12:04

There's also contradictions from the police reports to the coroner's report. The police said Aliyah was found hanging in front of her apartment at 131A, but the coroner's report said she was found in between 132A and 133A. The police said that Aliyah's backpack and shoes were found on the steps outside her apartment leading up to the walkway she would eventually be found hanging from. They can't really explain why she would take off her shoes and then why the bottoms of her feet were clean after walking on the ground. But that's just another little tidbit. The coroner reported that the backpack was closer to Aliyah and in a photo given to Denise of her daughter's hanging, there's no backpack at all. Now, this photo is the single biggest piece of damning evidence that police have refused to acknowledge.

Julia Goodwin: 13:15

In the early morning hours of July 19, 2020, the security guard was making his rounds. He had been to the courtyard in front of Aliyah's apartment around 3:20 and returned to it at 4:20. This is when he found Aliyah. He said he ran to call the police and that call took place at 4:33 am. Why he didn't have his phone or a walkie-talkie on him is beyond my imagination, but between finding Aliyah's body at 4:20 and the EMTs from the Houston Fire Department arriving at 4:43, that security guard took a picture with his cell phone. Hpd then arrived at 5:03, a forensic investigator arrived at 6.18, and the remaining support officers arrived at 6:25. Now, by this time the body had been taken down and no neighbors had seen anything. But the police didn't know that, because the police did not knock on any doors or anything. They didn't talk to anybody, they just got the body down.

Julia Goodwin: 14:43

The only reason Denise was able to get this photo was because of the Black Panthers investigation and while there are parts of the photo posted out there, I will not be posting it. Even seeing parts of a photo like that can affect people in profound ways. But just look, with all this other information it can be found amongst everything else on the internet. In the photo there does seem to be some injury, at least in cruising on Aliyah's wrist and index finger and in the opposite hand her cell phone. That's right. A person the police say hung themselves was holding her cell phone, and we'll get back to that. Because I need to go into how exactly Aliyah got into the position she got to, I will post a picture of where she was found so you can go look @murderisbadpodcast that on Instagram .

Julia Goodwin: 15:52

So Aliyah was found with a makeshift noose around her neck. A black fitted sheet had been cut up to a usable length and, side note, the rest of this sheet has never been found because nobody was looking for it. It was tied to two rods of the metal guardrail on the second story walkway. The railing is about 33 inches tall and from this photo I can tell that the length of the sheet was shorter than the railing, so less than 33 inches. The noose part barely went further than the second story floor. Aliyah was 5'5". In order for her to have put the noose around her own neck, she would have had to have stood on something which obviously wasn't the case because there was nothing there. This isn't like a riddle, like a midget and a block of ice are involved. Ok, when met with this assertion, police told Denise that Aliyah must have tied it on herself on the second story and then went over the railing. Now an activist that goes by Lady G reenacted this theory and soon discovered that she, who weighed less than Aliyah, caused the railing to wibble and wobble by putting very little pressure on it. So someone who weighed more, jumping tied to this would probably honestly have broken it, and they should have tied that amount of weight onto the railing and thrown it over to prove this. And even if it would have broken the railing, the apartment community probably wouldn't have filed vandalism charges. I know that because they refused to file vandalism charges against the ex who admitted to breaking Aliyah's window. Anyways, when met with this challenge, hpd told Denise that Aliyah must have tied her own neck up and lowered herself down, asphyxiating herself without thrashing one little bit.

Julia Goodwin: 18:14

Absolutely preposterous when Denise has shared information she's compiled, the police do nothing. She has sent the photo of her daughter hanging with a cell phone in her hand, the messages talking about her abusive ex and the social media posts from those suspected to have been involved. There's been no movement. And, worse than that, during a phone call recorded by Denise, an officer at HPD, officer Moorison said we don't deal with burglaries, we deal with murders. When Denise asked if the abusive ex breaking in and taking things would be probable cause for further investigation, officer Moorison said we don't deal with abuse, we deal with murders. And it was super condescending, by the way. He said all the evidence was reviewed and that the case will not be reopened, no matter what.

Julia Goodwin: 19:22

There's a lot more than what I've presented. Like I said, denise McClendon has made this her full time job for the past three years. She's posted the autopsy, the police report, the coroner reports. Every time, the exand others seemingly involved have done absolutely bonkers things like the ex changing her display name to Aliyah Killer or her Snapchat display name to Tax Man for Aliyah. Okay, there's so much more, and Denise has compiled it all, and so go check out the Justice for Aliyah Wilson pages on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram. I do think that everything I went over is probable cause for reopening the case.

Julia Goodwin: 20:18

Please, please, please. If you know anything about Aliyah Wilson's death, please contact the Houston Police Department at 713-884-3131 or by email at hpd. communityaffairs@ houstonpoliceorg. Even if you don't know anything and you just want to help get some answers to these questions, give them a call or send an email or tag them in your social media. Heck, why don't you contact the chief of police at 713-308-1600. Or Troy. Finner@ houstonpolice. org? And while we're at it, you can just contact the mayor at 713-837-0311 or Sylvester. Turner@ houstontx. gov. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to see images related to this case, you can head over to the Instagram at Murder Is Bad podcast. If you're feeling generous, follow us, subscribe to us, and by us I mean me. You could also write a helpful review and put a little five stars on it. That's the best way to support us honestly and keep listening and remember to take care of each other.

Aliyah Wilson: 22:29

And that murder is bad.

Julia Goodwin: 22:36

Hello again. I know the episode just ended, but I really wanted to express my outrage and just confusedness in the main part of the episode. But I also want to highlight what kind of person Aliyah Wilson was, and I asked her mother to tell me a little bit about her and honestly, I just feel there's a commonality between us, so it was very enlightening to read. I'm just going to read you what her mother sent me. Aliyah was passionate about anything she cared about. Aliyah was creative and innovative. She loved people and was so kind to everyone. People loved her as well.

Julia Goodwin: 23:43

Aliyah's favorite color was yellow. She shined just like her favorite color. She liked butterflies in nature. She was always fashionable because she loved fashion. She was a proud pansexual. She was a proud member of the LGBTQ community. As a child you could catch her watching her favorite cartoons, Cat Dog and Currids the Cowardly Dog. She also loved riding her bike and going to the playground. Aliyah wanted to be a social worker. She wanted to help others. She was a very special array of sunshine. So that's heartbreaking that someone so special was taken not only from her mother and her family and friends, but from the world. So why don't you wear a spot of yellow the next time you go out and just represent the light that Aliyah brought to this world. I'm going to end this after-credits scene with something I found going through all the social media. Aliyah also loved to sing, so I'm going to leave us Hearing Aliyah's voice.

Aliyah Wilson: 25:42

Each and every day there's someone judging me why by my life and I live in these streets Every day. I wake up cause I drink. Different haters Trying to get this paper set to look like an elevator, but no one really wants to hear my story. There's one woman, no one, no one for me. So look me in my eyes and try to feel I'm in. I'm in the rain doing the highway.

Aliyah Wilson: 26:12

Just a little bit of blue rain Each and every day there's someone judging me why by my life and I live in these streets Every day I wake up cause I drink different haters Trying to get this paper set to look like an elevator. But no one really wants to hear my story. It's what I want. No one for me.