UPDATE: Duke lacrosse accuser, Crystal Mangum Found Guilty Of The 2nd Degree Murder Of Reginald Daye

By MIKE BAKER, Associated Press – 49 mins ago

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RALEIGH, N.C. – The woman who falsely accused three Duke lacrosse players of raping her in 2006 was charged Monday with murder in the death of her boyfriend.

Crystal Mangum, 32, was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder and two counts of larceny. She has been in jail since April 3, when police charged her with assault in the stabbing of 46-year-old Reginald Daye. He died after nearly two weeks at a hospital.

An attorney for Mangum did not return a call seeking comment. The district attorney's office declined to discuss the case.

Mangum falsely accused the lacrosse players of raping her at a 2006 party for which she was hired to perform as a stripper. The case heightened long-standing tensions in Durham about race, class and the privileged status of college athletes.

The district attorney who championed Mangum's claims was later disbarred. North Carolina's attorney general eventually declared the players innocent of a "tragic rush to accuse."

Prosecutors declined to press charges for the false accusations, but Mangum's bizarre legal troubles have continued.

Last year, she was convicted on misdemeanor charges after setting a fire that nearly torched her home with her three children inside. In a videotaped police interrogation, she told officers she set got into a confrontation with her boyfriend at the time — not Daye — and burned his clothes, smashed his car windshield and threatened to stab him.

Friends said Mangum has never recovered from the stigma brought by the lacrosse case and has been involved in a string of questionable relationships in an attempt to provide stability for her children. Vincent Clark, a friend who co-authored Mangum's self-published memoir, said he hopes people don't rush to judgment — echoing one of the oft-cited lessons of the lacrosse case itself.

Clark said Mangum realizes she has mental health problems.

"I'm sad for her. I hope people realize how difficult it is being her," Clark said.

When Daye's nephew talked to a 911 dispatcher after the stabbing, he referenced the notoriety Mangum still carries.

"It's Crystal Mangum. THE Crystal Mangum," said the nephew, whose name was removed from a publicly-released version of the emergency call. "I told him she was trouble from the damn beginning."

A federal judge recently ruled that the three players accused of rape — Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans — can pursue a lawsuit against former District Attorney Mike Nifong and the police investigators who handled their case. The players have not sued Mangum.

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Just getting caught up on this..there is no doubt that this woman is completely insane!!

Last updated at 11:02 PM on 14th April 2011

Reginald Daye, 46, died last night, almost two weeks after his girlfriend Crystal Mangum allegedly stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife after an argument.

Police said it was 'more than likely' the 32-year-old, who is being held in Durham County Jail, will now be charged with his murder.

Mangum was originally charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill after the alleged attack in the early hours of April 3.

Mr Daye was rushed to Duke University Hospital after his nephew called police. The nephew told officers the couple had been arguing about rent money at the apartment they share in Durham, North Carolina.

He said the argument became so heated someone had called police earlier in the evening, but they had left before the alleged stabbing.

WRAL reports he told officers: 'It's Crystal Mangum. THE Crystal Mangum. I told him she was trouble from the beginning.'

According to Anthony McCullough, Wilson’s cousin, the couple had only been dating for a few months but that the 46-year-old was excited.

He added: ‘I told him, with her background, you should be careful.’

Row: Mangum allegedly stabbed her 46-year-old boyfriend after they had an argument over rent money

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Mangum has since been held on a $300,000 bond. Jose Lopez Senior, Durham Police Department Chief, told the Herald-Sun: 'More than likely, we will be upgrading the charge to murder.'

Her arrest came only a year after Mangum was found guilty of child abuse and resisting arrest, among other charges.

She was arrested after smashing the windscreen and slashing the tires of her then-boyfriend’s car, before going on to set fire to his clothes while her children were in their home.

At the time she claimed her then-boyfriend had attacked her, which a jury dismissed, they could not reach a consensus on the arson charges so the case was dismissed.

Mangum became infamous in 2006 when she claimed three Duke Lacrosse players sexually assaulted her at a party.

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Scandal: Duke lacrosse players Dave Evans, left, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligman were falsely accused of raping Mangum in 2006.

Duke University lacrosse players Reade Seligmann, Dave Evans and Collin Finnerty were accused of raping her while she was working as a stripper at a party thrown by the team, the Duke Blue Devils.

The case caused a media storm over allegations of racism.

It was alleged the players had asked only for white or Hispanic strippers, but became angry when two black dancers turned up.

Prosecutor Mike Nifong indicted the three on charges of rape, sexual assault and kidnapping.

The university suspended the players, sacked the team's coach and eventually cancelled the entire lacrosse season.

But the case fell apart because of a lack of evidence and Nifong was forced to resign after scathing criticism over his handling of it.

Convicted: Last year Mangum was found guilty of child abuse for smashing her then-boyfriend's car and burning his clothes while her children were in the house

He was convicted for contempt amid accusations he withheld DNA evidence and made false inflammatory statements about the players to the media.

State prosecutors who took over the case cleared all three of the charges, saying there had been a 'rush to accuse' by Nifong.

Afterwards, the three sued the university over their handling of the scandal, and received an undisclosed settlement.

At the time Duke University said it settled to 'eliminate the possibility of future litigation', and said it deeply regretted what the students had gone through.

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OMG, this poor little child...what some have to endure is mind boggling. What a sweetheart this baby is.

Just before midnight on Feb. 17, in Durham, N.C., police responded to a call about a domestic dispute. The voice on the line was a child's. "Please hurry," she said. "My mom is going to die." Authorities arrived to find a woman fighting with her boyfriend. She'd lit his clothes on fire in the bathtub and, according to police, was threatening to stab him. Her children, who are 3, 9, and 10, were in the next room. She was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder, assault and battery, communicating threats, injury to personal property, identity theft, resisting a public officer, five counts of arson, and three counts of misdemeanor child abuse, according to The News & Observer.

It was the kind of report that would normally not go any further than the local news page of the Durham paper. Except the woman happened to be Crystal Mangum, who falsely accused three members of the Duke University lacrosse team of rape and assault four years ago. The case, of course, exploded into a national news story and brought down the Durham district attorney. As the reporter who covered that case for NEWSWEEK, I am sorry to say that I wasn't at all surprised by the most recent events.

Mangum was the woman who'd faced public scorn for putting the families of three innocent young men through hell. Her accusations ended the career of the prosecutor who took her case. They unhinged a great university and cost its insurance company untold millions. And yet, after the case ran into the sand, she seemed to have the least chance of all those involved of moving on and leading a productive life. As the trial wore on, one defendant's mother, Rae Evans even expressed sympathy for Mangum. "You know, when I'm trying to get over the rage, I am thinking about so deeply this young woman who has been abused by men all her life, and nobody has abused her more than Mike Nifong," she said, referring to the Durham prosecutor. And North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper did not pursue any action against Mangum for making the false accusations. Asked about it at the press conference where he dismissed the charges, Cooper intimated that she was not of sound mind. "Our investigators who talked with her and the attorneys who talked with her over a period of time think that she may actually believe the many different stories that she has been telling," he said.

I ended up spending eight weeks in Durham over a year of reporting on the lacrosse case, devoting a good deal of time to trying to figure out who Crystal Mangum was, following her trail into the worst parts of town. Though I never met her, I came to know a troubled woman and her hometown, a city still raw with racial bitterness.

At the time of the rape accusations, Mangum was a mother of two, working as an escort, and taking classes at North Carolina Central University. NCCU was the first publicly supported black liberal-arts college in the country, but it has struggled over the years to get adequate funding. The distance between the campuses of Duke and NCCU was a few miles and a lot of resentment. Students I spoke with at NCCU's campus soon after the rape charges were filed had no doubt that the lacrosse players were guilty but would beat the rap. One student told me, "This is a race issue. People at Duke have a lot of money on their side." Another student said, "It's the same old story. Duke up, Central down." He said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted whether they were guilty of not. "It would be justice for things that happened in the past," he said. For me, it was one of the more eye-opening moments of the whole case.

Mangum lived on a small street less than four miles from the Duke campus, but it might as well have been in another city. I drove out to her neighborhood on a warm afternoon hoping she might talk to me. When I pulled up in front of her house, I found what was basically a shack. With most of its paint gone, the wood siding had turned gray. I might not have believed people were living inside if her parents had not come out to shoo me away. I'd lived in Durham for four years as an undergraduate at Duke, and I had never had any idea just how extreme the city's poverty could be. Duke students have little incentive to leave the lush grounds of their "Gothic Wonderland"—a term long used by students and alumni, but not always lovingly. But if they did, they'd be faced with a stark reality: In 2007, almost a fifth of Durham residents were living in poverty, and half of those were surviving on less than 50 percent of the cutoff.

My next stop was Diamond Girls, a dodgy strip club just outside of town. When she was 23—the same age as the Duke lacrosse team captain she'd later accuse—Mangum worked there as a dancer. She'd been involved with the courts before. One night in 2002, she lifted a taxi driver's keys while giving him a lap dance. With a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit, Mangum then stole the cab. Police chased her through the city; she was eventually arrested, but not before nearly running over a cop as he approached her car. None of the women I spoke with at Diamond Girls remembered Mangum. As grim as it was, the windowless storefront was perhaps better than her more recent work as an escort with a busy schedule of appointments at various motels, according to police documents.

Life seems to have been a struggle for Mangum for years. At 17, she told police that three men had raped her when she was 14, but the case was dropped when she didn't follow through with the authorities. Her father later told reporters that he didn't believe that she'd been raped then. Over the years, Mangum has been treated for mental illness, according to an interview her mother gave to Essence magazine. Later, when I was reviewing statements she made to the police about the night of the lacrosse incident, I remember counting that she'd changed her story at least 10 different times. There were so many different versions of events that her statements took on an air of absurdity. She came off as more pathetic than conniving.

Crystal Mangum's arrest this week is a reminder of the untidy ending of the Duke lacrosse scandal. Not the case itself, which was found to be so void of any credible evidence that not only did the state's attorney general step in to drop the charges, he also declared that the three players were innocent, that no rape had taken place, that a "rogue prosecutor" had overreached, and that, "in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly." To boot, that "rogue prosecutor," Mike Nifong, was eventually disbarred.

But though the case ended, the sadness that the scandal incidentally exposed remains unresolved. Remember that racial slur? When the two black strippers left the lacrosse party in a huff, a white freshman on the lacrosse team yelled out to them, "Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt!" Case or no case, the epithet still hangs in the air. And then there's Mangum herself. Back when she'd just accused wealthy white Duke students of rape, lawyers were volunteering to work for her pro bono should she want to sue for damages. This time around, with a case that's less financially promising, she's relying, according to WRAL.com, on a public defender. She's under house arrest on a $250,000 bond.

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A Superior Court judge has ordered a psychiatric evaluation of Crystal Mangum in order to determine whether she is competent to stand trial for murder.

Mangum, who falsely accused members of the Duke University lacrosse team of rape in 2006, is accused of the murder of her boyfriend, Reginald Daye. Superior Court Judge G. Wayne Abernathy signed the order after Mangum’s attorney, Chris Burrell Shella, filed a written motion on Sept. 20 in Durham County Criminal Superior Court.

Competency to stand trial measures whether Mangum would have the ability to understand the charges filed against her, understand her legal situation, assist her attorney in her defense, and distinguish between pleas and possible verdicts. Mangum will be evaluated at Central Regional Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Butner, which, among other services, provides forensic pretrial psychiatric services and treatment.

“I also request that the report remain sealed unless ordered by the court to be released,” Shella wrote in the motion.

Mangum’s attorney could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon to ask whether Mangum was currently at the hospital. A deputy at the Durham County Jail said Mangum was not in custody at the jail and had not been bonded out either. She would not say where Mangum was or when she left the jail.

A representative at Central Regional Hospital would not say whether Mangum was a patient at the hospital, citing HIPAA laws that prevent the hospital from releasing information about patients.

In April 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper proclaimed the players innocent, and in a report hinted then that Mangum might have mental health problems, saying that her credibility should have been suspect from the start based on “previous encounters with law enforcement, her medical history and inconsistencies within her statements.”

In another part of the report, it stated that that when Mangum met with special prosecutors, she was taking two prescribed antidepressants.

In July 2007, Attorney Joe Cheshire, who represented one of the lacrosse players, told a committee that was set up to investigate the Durham Police Department’s handling of the lacrosse case that investigators should have questioned whether Mangum was mentally ill when they were considering the veracity of her statements.

“But they also knew about her mental health records,” Cheshire said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put mental health records together with multiple diverse statements and want to ask a question. Maybe this person is mentally ill. Maybe. No one asked the questions; they didn’t even look at the statements as far as we know, the mental health statements.”

A grand jury indicted Mangum in April for killing Daye. The autopsy report indicated he died from a single stab wound.

Daye was Mangum’s boyfriend at the time of the stabbing in April, and her attorney claims she stabbed Daye to keep him from beating her.

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November 22, 2013

DURHAM — A jury found Crystal Mangum guilty of second-degree murder Friday for stabbing and killing her boyfriend, Reginald Daye, in 2011.

After Superior Court Judge Paul Ridgeway sentenced Mangum to 14 years and two months to 18 years in prison, deputies immediately led her handcuffed out of the courtroom.

Mangum’s attorney, Daniel Meir, said she will appeal.

The case was unusual because, unlike most murder cases, the jury heard the victim’s side of the story.

Mangum, 35, stabbed Daye on April 3, 2011, and an investigator spoke with him twice before he died April 13, 2011.

Daye told the investigator that he became angry at Mangum for disrespecting him by bringing other men to the apartment. He admitted Mangum was in the bathroom when he kicked in the door and that he grabbed her by the hair. He said as they continued to fight, Mangum tried to stab him several times before stabbing him in the side of the chest as he stood in the hallway.

Mangum took the stand in her own defense and said it was Daye who attacked her with knives by throwing them at her. She stabbed him, she said, after he dragged her out of the bathroom by the hair, straddled her and began strangling her.

Photos of the apartment showed kitchen steak knives scattered throughout the apartment. Blood drops were on the carpet in the hallway where Daye said she stabbed him, but not in the master bedroom where Mangum said she stabbed him.

Family satisfied

Members of Daye’s family said they were satisfied with the verdict.

“We’re just grateful that justice was served for Reggie today, for his family and his friends,” said his sister, Cynthia Wilson. “We just thank everybody that played a part, and thank God. We’re just happy.”

Meier said he hoped for a not-guilty verdict or guilty of voluntary manslaughter verdict.

“We are thankful that it did not go with first-degree murder,” Meier said.

Meier won’t file the appeal himself but said he expected the appellate defender’s office will appeal the denial of his motion to continue to give him more time to prepare for the trial and the admittance of evidence about an incident in 2010 involving another Mangum boyfriend, Martin Walker.

Walker testified that during a fight, Mangum attacked him with a chair and a step stool, slashed his tires, smashed his windshield and lunged over an officer while screaming she wanted to stab and kill him.

Name recognition

Former Durham City Councilwoman Jackie Wagstaff, one of Mangum’s supporters, said she believed Mangum was being punished because of who she was and her name recognition.

In 2006, Mangum accused three Duke lacrosse players of raping her at a party. The charges were later dismissed after the evidence did not back up Mangum’s story. Her accusations tore apart the Duke lacrosse program and resulted in the disbarment of District Attorney Mike Nifong.

Assistant District Attorney Charlene Franks, who prosecuted the murder case, said it was never about Crystal Mangum, the Duke lacrosse accuser.

“It was about Reggie Daye and what happened in April 2011,” she said.

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