Homicide captain retires in Camden County

The sobbing on the other end of the phone startled Arthur Folks one weekend in 1995. Folks, an investigator with the Camden County Prosecutor's Office homicide unit, could not readily place the voice.

"Do you know what today is?" the woman asked.

Folks rummaged through his memory.

"Georgia?" he asked.

Georgia MacNeir kept crying. She and Folks had talked often since her daughter, Jennifer Persia, a 16-year-old track star at Sterling Regional High School, was beaten, strangled, and stabbed more than 20 times in her Magnolia home on April 4, 1994. Investigators hadn't solved the case.

Folks knew this would have been Persia's 17th birthday.

MacNeir sobbed harder. "You do care. You do care."

MacNeir died in 2009. Her husband, Mickey, died earlier. Persia's death remains unsolved.

Her case has haunted Capt. Arthur Folks, 51, who retired last week after 25 years in a career that he stumbled into after his father's death in 1980 from a heart attack.

In his quarter of a century on the job, Folks has investigated dozens of cases, some that made national headlines. Most prominent was the November 1994 murder of Carol Neulander, the wife of Rabbi Fred J. Neulander, who was convicted in 2002 of hiring a hit man to kill her and is serving a life sentence.

Folks' coworkers say the Prosecutor's Office has lost a devoted investigator who took on-call assignments as a homicide-unit commander to ease the load on his sergeants. Folks also boasted a wealth of experience, and could work the streets and interrogate suspects to get confessions where others couldn't.

"He's known as a closer. He's what you called 'great in a room,' " said Marty Devlin, 65, a retired lieutenant who took over the Neulander investigation months after the killing as Folks worked other cases. "He had the ability to take the most vicious people on Earth and relax them."

Folks, the son of a Philadelphia detective, led a department that in 2003 helped the Prosecutor's Office achieve its highest clearance rate ever in murder cases - 89 percent.

"That doesn't say anything for the cases we didn't solve," Folks said.

Last week, his office was mostly bare, save for some papers on his desk, a Bible, and a box on the floor with about eight accordion folders of material from Persia's case. Folks and a Magnolia detective met months ago to discuss the cold case and have reinterviewed people since then, he said.

Folks wrapped up his last interview around 8:30 p.m. June 25. He retired Wednesday.

Persia's killing perplexed many in quiet Magnolia, and scared them, too. Her home was not entered by force. She was not sexually assaulted. The only things missing were four plastic containers that held about $200 in coins. The athletic teenager apparently put up a struggle and might have hit her attacker with an Eagles beer mug found shattered on the floor.

Over the years, the calls between MacNeir and Folks became less frequent. Still, they talked periodically. When she called last year, she was terminally ill with scleroderma and was using a wheelchair. Folks meant to call to let her know authorities were looking at the case again, and to say hello.

Investigators are close to solving the case, he said, but declined to reveal more.

MacNeir told him that she knew he was working on it, Folks remembered.

"He feels for that family," said Capt. Rich Minardi. "He would love to be able to solve it - and not for him, not for a feather in his cap. That's what drives him in that case and many other cases."

In 1980, the three Folks boys - Arthur, Leslie and Albert Jr. - were hit hard when their father, Albert Folks, died of a heart attack at 63. Arthur, the youngest, was a sophomore at what was then Glassboro State College, hoping to become an actor.

His father had been stern but friendly. Sometimes, he wouldn't let his boys leave the dinner table until they had figured out a riddle he had posed. He had retired from the Philadelphia Police Department as a detective after almost 20 years. He later worked as a police officer in Lawnside, where the family lived.

Arthur Folks never finished college. He bounced around among part-time jobs over a few years.

Leslie Folks, then an investigator with the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, pulled his brother aside. "You can't do that for a career," he said. He suggested that Arthur Folks become a police officer.

"My brother is a world-class individual, just like my father," said Leslie Folks, who is 56 and now a lieutenant in the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office. "My brother is my hero, and he's my best friend."

In 1985, days after police academy graduation, the Camden County prosecutor hired 25-year-old Arthur Folks. Prosecutor Sam Asbell knew Leslie and the brothers' mother, Helen.

"If he was raised by that mother, he's got to be as good as Leslie," Asbell recalled thinking.

Arthur Folks is gregarious, strong-jawed, and handsome. He stands at a broad-shouldered 6-foot-3. He speaks in a machine-gun chatter.

Coworkers tease him about his speaking pace. He's just enthusiastic about his job; they understand.

Working homicide, as Devlin put it, is "the show." It's a highly respected job in a law enforcement career.

Investigators "are like pit bulls, trying to get the right answer, but when it comes to an innocent person. . . . It just affects you," Folks said. "It's just a bitter, nasty feeling you have. You want to get it out of your system, and the only way you can get it out of your system is to solve" the case.

Coworkers say Folks is compassionate. He inserted himself into the on-call rotation as the homicide commander, which wasn't necessary, Minardi said.

"He had sergeants that could have done it, but he only had two sergeants. That would have shortened their time off," said Minardi, who oversees the domestic violence, child abuse, and juvenile units. "He didn't want people to get burned-out. He took it to ease their load."

Folks isn't sure of his next chapter. He has been offered jobs at a golf course and a hot-tub distributor. It's possible that he could work for the Department of Homeland Security, he said.

His health, though, might influence the decision that he'll make with Lisa, his wife of seven years. He has an enlarged heart, a bulging disk in his back, vertigo, and gout.

"You love it so much," he said, "you don't realize how much it's affecting you."

He'll miss the camaraderie, the jokes, working on cases with colleagues.

"I have people," he said, "who I consider family - that are not blood - because of what we've been through together . . . the loyalty, the love, the trust that's built up."