Christie Mullins

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. Please listen with discretion. All witnesses, suspects, and persons of interest are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome to this week's episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to go ahead and get into right now in true Crime. There's just a few things I want to update on. I have been so under the weather this week, and I've been doing my best to try to stay in the loop on everything, but it has been not an easy feat and I am very much counting down to crime con at this point in time. So let's talk right now in true crime. So last week, after I recorded the right Now in True Crime, they officially announced that Lyle Menendez and Eric Menandez are not being granted parole. They have another chance at getting parole in three years. And the reasons for them not getting parole. They have been in prison for a long time and initially when they were first imprisoned, there was some cell phone infractions that I guess did not look great to the parole board, so that is the reason that they decided to deny it. I personally think there's a lot more to it. I think that they are kind of grasping at straws at this point because they have been quite model prisoners for the last several decades, for sure. So I know that they were very disappointed, as were their families. Because their families, every single living family member was there to speak on their behalf. So I know that there is a lot It's not black and white. There is a lot of gray area with the Menanda's brothers and their case. But I will keep you guys updated because they're supposed to be some other type of petition or something of sorts. I can't think of the name of it right now at the top of my head. That was also filed previously, so I will keep you updated on that. Okay, Next thing I want to get into is last week we had also talked about maybe Emmanuel Harrow, who is missing from California. When I made the recording. I said that I thought the parents would probably be arrested sooner rather than later for their involvement in Emmanuel's possible death or disappearance, because at that time they were still sticking by their story that he was kidnapped. Well Friday afternoon, they officially arrested and charged both parents with murder. Jake, who is the father, has officially said that he killed Emmanuel and put him in a trash can, and they have been out searching for a baby Emmanuel for the last week trying to figure out where his remains are. Jake was with them at one point in time kind of showing I guess investigators a potential area where he might be, but they have so far come up empty handed. They have not found a manual. They do believe that he was abused long term and he eventually just succumbed to his injuries. Jake should have never been out of jail. He should have never been able to even have baby Emmanuel because he so physically horribly abused a daughter of his. His ten week old daughter abused her so severely and violently that she is confined to a wheelchair, She is unable to speak, she is unable to eat. On her own. It is just horrible. The amount of abuse that he put this poor child through, and he was in and out of prisent a literal slap on the rest on probation, he was able to get married, have another baby, and now the cycle of abuse has continued over again, and it is just so horrible and tragic. This never should have happened. Emmanuel should never have been put through this. They're calling out the judge that originally put Jake on parole because this never should have happened. He should have been incarcerated and penalized appropriately. And then Jake's wife, Rebecca is still sticking to her story that he was kidnapped and she needs to be out so she can look for her son, and just going on and on, and honestly, I blame Rebecca for a lot of this, but she also seems to me that she is an abused woman and has been under Jake's thumb for god knows how long, who knows what he's filled her head with. So I also do think she's a victim, but she's complicit in it at the same time, because she knew that this man was physically abusing their son, probably for his whole entire life life. And this is just horrible, and they came up with this concocted story of him being kidnapped, and they think that he was already deceased a whole week prior to this story that was concocted. There's people coming out that said that she had been in that sporting good store the week before, asking them if they had cameras in their parking lot. There's reports that when. Investigators went into the Harrow home that all of Emmanuel's belongings were not there anymore. It was basically like a baby didn't live there anymore. So that is why I think they are speculating that he has been deceased for longer than what they have said. So it's all really interesting. I can't get a grasp for why anybody in their mind would ever harm a helpless. Child, but I know that it happens. And Jake showed a pattern of this behavior and that was a pretty good indicator that he was a horrific human and needed to. Be locked up for the rest of his life. And they didn't listen, and they let him out and they let him have another child, and that to me is just unacceptable. All right, last thing I want to talk about is Donna Adelson's trial started this week, so they have officially sat a jury. We have been going through witness testimony. Wendy Adelson has testified, Katie mcmanawas testified, Luis Rivera has testified, and there's been a lot going on. Jeff Laicos testified. There has been so many interesting things that have come out. I've been trying so hard to stay up to date on it, but it is really hard with my full time job to sit and watch eight hours of testimony every day. But there's been a lot of really interesting things in this trial so far. Luis Rivera directly implicated Wendy Adelson in being involved in this, which I thought was very interesting and I don't disagree with it. That is my personal opinion. Allegedly that Wendy was involved or at least knew kind of the details but didn't know exactly what was going to happen or when it was going to happen. That is just my personal opinion on the matter. And watching Donna as Wendy Adelson was on the stand, you could tell that Wendy is the one that used to run the show. She wore the pants, she was controlling, she very much dictated how things were going to go. And even in Wendy's testimony, you could tell that she didn't want to look at Donna, and Donna was very much trying to look through her, trying to manipulate her. But Donna also looked terrified and unsure and scared, and it was just so interesting. The most interesting witness though, for me, was Rob Adelson, who is the estranged son of Donna and Harvey. He and his wife lived separately. They did not live in Florida, so they weren't super close, but he would. Speak with his parents. They would you know, gather together for birthdays and holiday celebrations and such. But he said he really started to see the disconnect after Dan Markell was killed and the way that his family was acting. They didn't seem like they. Were curious at all about who was responsible or you know, figuring out who did this if they were in harm's way potentially. He said that after Dan was killed, he talked to law enforcement and told them what he knew, and he had told Donna, you know, I went and I talked with investigators, and she made the comment of, oh, you don't know anything anyway, because she told him. She didn't want him to talk to the cops, and he didn't obviously have anything to hide, so he went and talked to the cops and told them what he knew. And then he said, once he found out that they had arrested somebody for Dan Markell's murder, he was kind of waiting to see if his parents were going to bring it up. And they eventually called him to wish him and his wife a happy anniversary, and they didn't bring it up, so he ended up bringing it up, and very much Donna just changed the conversation. She would kind of redirect the conversation, and at that point in time, he said, that is when he knew that they were involved in this whole plot to kill Dan Markel. And I have to give props to Rob, because it cannot be easy to know that every single one of your family members, in some way, shape or form, could have potentially been involved in this, and I just can't even imagine trying to come to terms with that and having enough sense to completely cut them off, which is exactly what Rob did. So there is one Adelson out there that has some sense, and that is Rob Adelson. God bless that man. So that is the latest on Donna Adelson. I have not had a chance to listen to today's testimony. If you are looking for trial updates, Pretty Lies and Alibis does daily trial updates, and then my girls Racheline Heather from Like Mother, Like Murder are also doing nightly recaps as well. I went on one with them. I think it was for day two when Wendy and Rob testified. I can't remember who else testified that day, but I think it was Wendy and Rob mostly and we just kind of discussed everything and broke it down. So if you're wanting a good trial recap, check theirs out. Check out Pretty Lies and Alibis, and we are going to go ahead and get into today's episode. Alrighty guys, Today I'm going to be telling you about the homicide of a fourteen year old girl out of Columbus, Ohio named Christy Lynn Mullins. This case is a little different than some of the other cases I typically cover because as of twenty fifteen, there has been somebody named that is the alleged perpetrator in Christie's case. But this one does have a lot of twists and turns, and there was also somebody who was wrongfully confused and made a wrongful confession to the murder of Christy Mullins. So this is a very important story to tell because despite us having so many advancements in all sorts of technology investigators knowing what to do and what not to do, sometimes some of these false confessions still to this day happen, and I think that talking about it and learning from it is so important so things like this don't happen again, because Christie's case went for so long without anybody being held accountable for her death. So we're going to talk about everything. We're going to talk about what happened leading up to Christie's murder, We're going to talk about her death in itself. We're going to talk about what happened after the fact and how they finally came to the conclusion that they knew who the perpetrator was. And this perpetrator isn't just anybody. He was somebody that had been there from the very beginning, somebody who had put himself there from the very beginting, and he flew under the radar until twenty fifteen. So for my research for this episode, I read an all American murder by John Aller, and that came out in twenty fourteen. I'm gonna link it below in the show notes, and it's something that you can look at and access for free. The book really helped propel this case forward, and I think a big part of why they finally came out in twenty fifteen was this book and the research and the interviews and everything that John did, So hats off to him. You really can make a difference, even thirty nine years later in a cold case, and this is a perfect example of that. Let's go ahead and get into Christie's story. Christy Lynn Mullins was born on August twenty eighth of nineteen sixty in Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, to her parents, Norman Vincent Mullins and Phyllis Eileen Marine of Union County, Ohio. She had an older sister named Melanie and a younger sister named Kim. The Mullens family lived at four thirteen Roslin Avenue in the neighborhood of Clintonville. Clintonville was a small suburban neighborhood where everyone knew everybody and it was very tight and close knit. Christy was a student at Whetstone High School and was your regular average cheenage girl. She is described as being sweet, shy, and quiet around strangers, and pretty naive for her age. But she liked doing the regular teenage girl stuff, hanging out with her friends, going shopping, and she very much enjoyed music and had dreams of becoming a fashion model. Just one street away from where the Mullens family lived, there was an apartment complex that had a swimming pool, and because it was the heat of summer in August nineteen seventy five, Christy was often escaped to the pool with neighborhood friends to cool off and enjoy the last few days of summer before school started back up. It was also just a few days before her head fifteenth birthday, so she was soaking it all in, enjoying the last few days of summer and getting ready to celebrate her fifteenth birthday. So we are going to jump to Saturday, August twenty third of nineteen seventy five. Christy had been invited to the fair of that day by a couple of friends, but for reasons unknown, she decided not to go. How much different the story might have turned out if she had decided to go to the fair that day. So there was a gal who lived in the same neighborhood as Christie, and she lived about a block away, and she was about fourteen years old. Is described pretty much as the exact opposite of Christy, And basically they said that she is described as more on the wild side. And her name is Carol. And this wasn't somebody who was necessarily friends with Christy, but they had attended a couple of parties together earlier in their summer, so they did know each other. And of course from the neighborhood and from hanging out the por and Carol becomes a very interesting and important part of the story, and we're going to get into all of that now. So I do want to preface this. There is a lot of twists and turns in this story and in this account of things, and I'm going to do my best to try and explain it as clearly and accurately as I can. In the book An All American Murder, this girl is called by a different name, but I am calling her Carol. I've seen multiple different reports of her name being Carol, so that is what we're going to call her. But if you do read the book. They call her Lisa, so like I said, they are the same age, fourteen years old. And Carol had been at the apartment swimming pool that's Saturday when her younger sister came to tell her that there was a man who was trying to get in touch with her. He had called the home several times that week and was wanting to get in touch with Carol, and for one reason or another, she kept missing his call. So Carol ended up leaving the pool and going home around one o'clock in the afternoon to take this phone call. And this phone call was from a man who Carol said had a hillbilly accent and kind of a nervous stutter, and he said that he was a disc jockey for a radio station, and he had told her that there was going to be a cheerleading contest around one forty five that afternoon behind the wool Coast or in the Graceland Shopping Center. And this disc jockey also had said that there would be an Olin Mills photographer on site to also take pictures. He also made a comment about if she knew some of the shortcuts through the Graceland Woods, and she said, of course, she did because all of the locals knew all of these different shortcuts. So keep that in the back of your mind because we are going to come back to that later. So, according to Carol, Christy went with her to this cheerleading contest. Now how exactly Christy ended up going with Carol is definitely one of those things that there have been several different stories and several different accounts that were given. So Carol first said that her and her little sister were on the way to Woolco and on the way there, she ran into Christy and asked Christy to go with her and ended up sending her younger sister back home. But Christie's sister, Kim, said that's not what happened, because Kim said that Lisa and Christy left the pool together that day. And there's also another eyewitness named Barb who lived at the apartment complex where this pool was. She was also at the pool that day, and she recalls that Christy and Carol were together at the pool and they mentioned to Barb about this cheerleading contest and asked Barb to go with them, and Barb could not, so she ended up turning them down. And I do want to be clear, the version that I believe is Kim's because they have the exact same story. Kim and Barb have the same story. I don't know the reason that Carol told this other story of finding Christy on her way to this cheerleading contest and then picking Christy up and telling her she needed to go with her. I don't know why she would change her story and tell that version of events. Maybe we'll get into it a little later, maybe we'll break it down a little bit, but that is the story that she gave. But I do believe that they left from the pool together and went to this cheerleading contest, So despite what actually happened, they ended up there at the cheerleading contest. So I'll post pictures of Woolco. But it's a long store, and then to the right of it, if you're looking at it, there's a guardrail, and then there's woods behind that guardrail. So this store pretty much backs up to what they call the Graceland Woods. So they go to Wolco and they sit on the guardrail on the side of Wolco kind of waiting for things to start up, and nobody ended up showing up. So Carol was getting impatient. Around one point forty, she said that she went inside of Wolco to check on the time of when the cheerleading contest was going to start, and she left Christy outside sitting alone on the guardrail. So Carol goes inside of WOLCO. She says she's in there for approximately three minutes. There are no eyewitnesses that can actually place Carol inside of WOLCO that day. However, she then comes back out and said that Christy was gone, so she just assumed Christy was tired of waiting and went on her merry way, so she pretty much did the same. She ended up going back home and eventually made it back to the apartment pool around two thirty pm. But unfortunately, around that same time a body had already been found in the Graceland Woods. Now, this body was found in a remote wooded area off of the main path, about half two three fours a mile from the spot where Christy had been last seen sitting on the guardrail in front of Wolco. The victim had been brutally murdered, and it was assumed that also the victim had been sexually assaulted. Her hands were tied together in the front of her body, and her face was described as unrecognizable because she had been beaten so badly. Her bra was pulled down. It was very obvious that she had been sexually assaulted. Her cause of death was determined to be blunt forced trauma to the head. But at this point in time, investigators did not know who this girl was because she is unrecognizable. They are processing the scene, they're looking for any form of identification, any clues, and they are coming up unsuccessful. So at this point in time, they don't know who this girl is. But around in the same time, Phyllis Mullins, who is Christie's mom, is phoning police to basically say that her daughter, Christy is missing. She talked about how Christy had apparently gone off with a friend around twelve thirty from the pool and she had not returned and it was very unlike her to not be in contact and to not come back. She also said that one of her neighbors had informed her that a body had been found behind the Woolcoast Shopping Center and she was just very concerned at this point, so law enforcement arranged for somebody to go pick up Phyllis and her husband, Norman to take them down to the morgue to basically try and identify this body as that of Christy. Now, Phyllis wasn't sure if this was Christy again, she was so badly beaten that even her mom wasn't able to identify her just by looking at her. But she did notice a birthmark that Christy had on her leg that matched the birthmark that the victim had, so she was able to positively identify this as her daughter. So this is where investigators very much start to piece together this story. Phyllis had told them that Christy had left the pool with a friend, so that is where they're going to start their investigation. They track that friend down and start their investigation from there. Now, the area where Christy was last allegedly sitting on the guard rail was right on the side of the Wool Coast store and like I said, this backed up to the woods where she was found. And I will post a picture. It'll make a lot more sense once you can actually see it in real life. So investigators very much do believe that Christy was abducted from this area and then brought to the woods and her body was found fairly quickly, which is a very interesting caveat in this whole story, because what are the chances that her murder happened and just shortly thereafter her body is found. So I'm going to tell you about the person who found her body and how this person happened upon it. And yeah, we're going to enter a new character here, and it is somebody named Henry Hester Newell. He was twenty five years old at the time, and he went by Junior, so I am going to refer to him as Junior from here on out. He had a wife named Pam, and Pam had a couple of children from a previous relationship, so Junior was a stepfather to them now. He and Pam actually lived right across the street from Carol, who was the friend that brought Christy to the cheerleading contest. Junior did not have a great reputation, and in an All American murder ebook, it is said that he was feared by just about everyone who knew him. He had been in and out of different jails and also juvenile correctional facilities, and he had also successfully escaped jail a couple of times. He was convicted on two separate arson accounts, and as record prior to nineteen seventy five, included convictions for wrongful influence of a minor, disorderly conduct, trespassing, and also discharging a weapon. He and Pam ran a small bar and restaurant downtown, but other than that, he was unemployed at the time of Christie's murder. He would often spend his time riding his bike and walking through the Graceland woods in his free time, which he had a lot of because he didn't work. Junior and Pam said that they spent that Saturday morning at home with Pam's kids, and at one point in time they decided to drive to Wolco to buy something for one of their children, and then one of their other children wanted to go on a nature hike and go into the woods right behind the Wolco. So it was essentially them trying to kill two birds with one stone and going on at nature hikes and all was something that they did often, and like I said, Junior was notorious for being in the woods a lot, riding his bike in the woods, exploring the woods, so this was a place he was very familiar with and very comfortable. So Pam and Junior drove about three minutes from their home to the woolco and parked, and they parked pretty much right at the same spot that Christy and Carol had been sitting by the guardrail, and they put themselves there at the exact time, around one forty five PM that Christy and Carol potentially possibly could have been sitting on the guardrail. Now, if we go back on the timeline, they got there apparently around one forty pm, and they were waiting, and Carol got tired of waiting. The contest was supposed to start at one forty five. She was tired of waiting. She went in at one forty and nothing happened. She came out at one forty three, and that's when she said Christy was gone. Now, there probably is a little bit of give or take here when it comes to the minutes. So if we're in such a short window of this timeline where one forty three comes, it has to be one forty three on the dot that Carol walks out, Christy's already gone at this point and it decides I'm going to go home and starts walking that way. It would have to be very very close for Christy and Carol to both have been gone when Junior and Pam pull up and park right in front of the guardrail around one forty five. They claim that they didn't see Christy or Carol sitting on that guardrail or anywhere in the vicinity. So interesting to say the least. Around two fifteen to two twenty, Junior and Pam claimed that they went into the woods with their kids, and they said that they happened upon a man who was swinging a two by four three to four times, and this person looked at Junior, looked at Pam, locked eyes and then ran off, And of course Junior and his wife realized what was going on and they go up to the body of a girl who had been beaten to death. Pam was a nurse, so she went ahead and checked for a pulse and found none. Junior describes himself as being very emotional when he happened upon the scene, and he grabbed the two bui four board and threw it deeper into the woods. Then he also took off his shirt and wrapped it around the girl's head. Once he realized that she was in fact deceased, they then went back to the wool coastre and called the cops. To report the crime, and the police phone call came in between two twenty and two twenty five in the afternoon, so again we're working on a very narrow time frame here. The news broke very very quickly, of course, about Christy Mullens being found in the woods deceased. Now, since Junior was one of the main i witnesses, he was able to give a description of the assailant. He described him as a white male in his late teens, around six foot tall and thin, weighing around one hundred and sixty pounds. He said that he was shirtless and wear and cut off jeans. He had a long black hair that was also shiny, and he was pretty scruffy and not clean shaven. Junior and Pam helped police come up with a composite sketch of the suspect and it appeared in the Columbus Dispatch the following Monday, August twenty fifth. So, of course, the town of Columbus is terrified that this heinous killer is out on the loose living in the neighborhood. And there were a lot of local people that fit this description and looked like the composite sketch. There was a lot of people living in town that kind of fit it. But of course, at this point they had no idea where this investigation was going to take them, and that it would take nearly forty years. So investigators very much theorized that whoever did this had to be low and had to be from the town, because they knew the Graceland Woods very very well, and they seemed comfortable in that area. And we're going to go back to in that disc jockey called Carol and asked her if she knew the shortcuts in the Graceland Woods area. It's just too coincidental for me to think that these two things are not related. It's very interesting to see how all of this ties together. Rumors, of course, world and there was a lot of police theories as well. They thought that Christy and Carol had maybe gone into the woods to maybe buy or smoke some marijuana. Maybe they had been lured there by some local teenage boys. But one thing was sure. They thought the fact that Christie's death was so violent and brutal and nobody heard anything, no struggle, no screams, they did theorize that Christie must have gone there with somebody that she knew and trust, which again makes it that much more worse that whoever did this turned on her after they had gained her trust. So the next day after the sketch was released, it was August twenty sixth, and police announced that they had their man cut and dry. This man was a man named Jack Carmon. Now Jack was from downtown. He lived a whole eight miles away from that area. And we're going to get into who Jack Carmon exactly is here in a little bit. But they said that this was their man. They didn't believe that this was the same guy who had made the disc jockey call, and they just thought that all of that was a mere coincidence, And they said Jack was their man. He matched the sketch, and by September third, Jack Carmon had confessed and pled guilty to Christie's murder. He had also been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Christy Mullins. All of this happened extremely fast. Ten days after Christie's murder, they had found, charged, trialed, and convicted Jack Carmen. So if this story was as cut and dry as it seems at the moment, this would be a very short episode we would be moving along. Jack Carmon would be in prison, and that would be the story. But it goes way beyond this, and it goes way beyond Jack Carmon, and unfortunately, Jack is caught up in the middle of all this, and not just in the middle. He is at the forefront of this investigation and he's the only person that law enforcement is looking at at this point in time. So who is Jack Carmon? How did he come to be the number one suspect, and how did he find himself at the forefront of this investigation into a heinous murder and sexual assault of a fourteen year old girl. We are going to get into all of that now. So Jack Carmon was twenty five years old at this time and he was a mental ward of the state. He had an IQ of forty three to fifty five. So how did Jack come into the picture? So August twenty sixth a police officer was standing near a Greyhound bus stop in downtown Columbus when he spots a man who, in his mind, looks exactly like this composite sketch. He has dark hair, he's tall, he's thin, he's scruffy, and his police officer is shocked at what he's seeing, so he ends up calling the homicide investigators and they come down to the bus station and they asked this man if he would come down to the station and talk with them, and this man agrees. They learn of his identity and he is Jack Carmon, So they realize pretty quickly that communicating with this individual is going to be a little bit difficult cult because they realize that he is a warden of the state, and they also discover that he is living and working at the Volunteers of America, which essentially provides health and housing services for individuals who are in a vulnerable state. So he comes in, he agrees to be questioned, but given the fact that his IQ is so low and he does have some issues, he doesn't really quite grasp what he's being asked about. Why he's brought in and investigators, at this point, my opinion, had tunnel vision, and they just pressed on they didn't bring anybody in to help facilitate a good environment for this individual, and they proceeded to question him for six hours. And in this six hour long interrogation, Jack is pretty one word answer kind of guy. Doesn't really say a whole lot. He doesn't really expand on anything. He gives one word answers, and in those six hours, the investigators are sure that Jack is their guy, and he confesses to killing Christy Mullins. So investigators say this is what happened. They said that on the day that Christy was killed, Jack left the VOA and he rode the bus for about an hour to the neighborhood of Clintonville. He pulled up to the Woolco shopping center and spotted Christy alone, which keep in mind, she was only alone for a very short window of time, and Jack hadn't gone there that day planning to murder anybody or abduct anybody. It just happened that she was there, and he decided to go through with this murder of Christy. According to investigators, of course, so he took her from the guardrail and went behind the shopping center with her, tied her wrists up and threatened to kill her if she didn't cooperate with him, And once they were a good distance into the woods, he beat her and sexually assaulted her, and Christy started to kind of run away and try to fight back, so he ended up picking up a two by four and chased her down and beat her with it. So there's a lot of reasons that this doesn't make any sense, and Jack doesn't have the IQ to tell anybody this story. So my opinion is investigators led him to answer yes to all of these questions. Why would Jack, who was coming from work, who had a lot of mental health issues and very low IQ, have something with him to tie up a girl when he wasn't planning to tie up a girl. Where did the two buy four come from? Was it just conveniently in the woods? None of this makes any sense, But investigators very much think that Jack is their guy, and they think that from all of the one word answers he gave them that he was able to give them information that only the killer would know. They even take him to the scene of the crime and they say that he is able to point out where everything happened, which I do not believe for a second. So investigators are pretty sure that this is their guy, but they do want to do their due diligence, so they put together a photo lineup for Junior and Pam to take a look at because they are the eyewitnesses here, and they both point to Jack as being the one that they saw there in the woods. So the next day they charge Jack with the murder rape kidnapping of Christy Mullins. Jack, of course, doesn't have the money for any legal representation, so he is given a court appointed attorney, and this appointed attorney goes ahead and accepts a plea deal on behalf of Jack in exchange for dropping the rape, kidnapping, and felony murder charges and for the death penalty to be taken off the table, because all of these charges did mean that the death penalty was potentially on the table. So they sentenced him September third to life in prison. And isn't it crazy what kind of turnaround at is? We're talking ten days after Christy was murdered. This guy is already going to be locked up for the rest of his life. They've already tried, convicted, all the things, and Jack is going to be locked away. And for the community and the Mullins family, they're glad that this person is off the streets. They believe that law enforcement has gotten it right. They've done their investigation. They have an eyewitness account this was their guy, and they also have a confession. But it doesn't all stop there because members of the community, especially those that knew Jack and knew who he was, were concerned that he only confessed to the crime because he was afraid of the death penalty. There was even a woman who was one of Jack's vocational instructors, and she said that he wasn't the kind of person who would stand up for himself. He wouldn't stand his ground, and she said all she thinks that they had to do was say the words electric chair, and Jack would have confessed to anything that he was being accused of. And as far as his confession goes, they believed that Jack was fed those answers because again, his IQ was in the fifties, he didn't have the mental capacity to tell people what exactly happened. So if he was being fed answers and saying yes, yes, yes to all of these questions, that is how they got their alleged confession. So there were more holes poked in Jack being the number one suspect by the community, people that lived and worked and knew of who Jack was. There was a few things that didn't make sense to them because they learned that not only did they take Jack to the scene that day, but they also took Pam and Junior to the scene that day, and although they say that they didn't see each other, is it possible that Junior did catch a glimpse of Jack, knowing enough of what he looked like to be able to pick him out of the photo lineup? Will never know the answer to that. I don't know, but I firmly believe that investigators took both of them to the scene that day to kind of replay things. There is a high probability that Pam and Junior saw Jack that day, and that is why they were able to identify him in the photo lineup. There were also people that knew Jack very well that said there's no way that Jack would have been wearing cutoff shorts because he didn't like showing his legs, and even in the dead heat of August summer, he would not have been wearing gene shorts. And there were people that saw him that day get on the bus and then travel all around and he was not wearing gene shorts. And in the timeline that we're given, with all of this happening in such short proximity, he wouldn't have time to go anywhere and change into gene shorts and also if we're going to go in the direction of he's trying to throw off the path and dress in a way that he normally wouldn't so people don't suspect him. He doesn't have the mental capacity to be that intelligent to think of that, because his IQ is in the fifties. So the community comes together and on September eighth, there are seventy people that go to a township meeting basically to make their concerns known and basically question police and prosecutors about what's going on here. And after this meeting they form a committee called Justice for Jack, and they just want the truth. They want to know why Jack was a arrested in the first place and how they got him to confess. And these are people that were all familiar with Jack, so they know how he is and they know that he doesn't have the mental capacity or capability to commit a murder, much less explain how he committed a murder. In the midst of all this, Jack ends up getting a new attorney and they of course want to withdraw the guilty plea. And Christie's family also isn't convinced of Jack's skill either. And so much so that her father, Norman, decides to start his own investigation into things. And the one thing that really stuck out to the Mullen's family and bothered them was Carol's story and take on everything. They weren't sure that she was telling the entire truth about everything, and they didn't think that even though investigators thought that this was just merely a coincidence, they thought that these two things were related. Carol's behavior following Christy's murder it was odd, to say the least. Her reactions were very, very extreme and then sometimes very muted. She said things like it wasn't supposed to go this far to Phyllis Mullins, and she just acted in a very bizarre manner to those that were around her. Her story continuously changed, nothing lined up, nothing made any sense, and nobody understood why Christy or Carol would be interested in going to a cheerleading contest. Because Christy thought cheerleaders were dumb, she didn't like them, she didn't want any part of them, and Carol thought the same thing. So why would Carol be so gung ho about this cheerleading contest? And why would Christy go with her? Knowing that Carol and Christy weren't really even good friends, they were acquaintances at best. So Norman very much takes all of this stuff into his own hands. He actually even goes to the woods where Christy was murdered, and he claims that he found a pair of men's cut off jeans, and there were also some neighbors that claim to have found some bloody men's underwear. Both of these were turned over to law enforcement, and to this day we don't know anything about what happened to those items. But there's no way that that isn't involved in Christie's murder. It's too coincidental that both of those items were found in that same area. Norman also doesn't think that Jack, being so tall and skinny, could have forcefully taken Christy and pulled her into the woods. Because Christy was tall, she kind of had an athletic body, she could have held her own. And he also doesn't think it makes any sense that random two by four was just randomly in the woods conveniently, and he just doesn't think it makes any sense. So in the midst of him doing his own investigation, Jack's guilty plea is basically set aside and they decide to order a competency hearing, and in May a judge basically decides that his confession was not obtained in the correct way and they throw out his original guilty plea, meaning that he gets a whole new trial. And everyone that was behind Jack and believed that he was innocent thought that this was a huge, huge win for them, And honestly, let's give these people the community props, even the Mullins family props, because if it wasn't for them, Jack would have been behind bars for probably right until right now, for the murder of Christy Mullins when he had nothing to do with it. But it very much takes an interesting turn because in the trial, his defense team has a whole plan as to the direction that they're going to go, and they have somebody in mind that they think is responsible for this, and that is none other than Henry Noel Junior, who puts himself at the scene of the crime wearing the exact same clothes as he described the suspect to be wearing no shirt and cut off jeans. He had on no shirt and cut off jeans. Why did he have on no shirt? Because he said he took it off and wrapped it around Christie's head after he realized she was deceased. So when Junior and Pam went into the Wold Coast Dore to phone police, the clerk said he was shirtless and wearing cut off jeans, and she said he had a mark on his face. He looked like he had been in a fight. And it's also interesting because one of Junior and Pam's neighbors said they all noticed that Junior had kind of scratches on his hands and it just looked like he had been through a bit of a battle, and none of that really added up to him just stumbling upon this girl in the woods. Now, I don't know exactly where the Mullens family stood on all of this, because I personally think from all of the stuff that I've seen in all the research I've done, that they didn't think that Jack necessarily was involved, but they did think that maybe he had lied to help protect other people in everything. So they did file a civil suit against him in August of nineteen seventy seven, and they were seeking five hundred thousand dollars in damages and one point five million impunitive damages. So I think Norman was overwhelmed in his investigation on his own, and everywhere he went, it just kind of came up at a dead end and he didn't really know where to turn. And he said that he was just hoping that the new trial was going to bring everything to light and everything would eventually make sense. I do believe that the civil suit was eventually dropped, and the trial for Jack begins in December of nineteen seventy seven. So the trial commences, it is a packed courtroom. There are a lot of people there. The Mullen's family is they're supporters of Jack there. And the first witness is Pam, Junior's wife, and she sticks to her story. This is what happened. We went to Wolco, we went into the woods, this is what we saw, this is who we saw, so on and so forth. Then Carol gets on the stand and she also sticks to her story. She denies knowing Junior, even though they lived across the street from one another. And then Junior comes on the stand and he's in handcuffs because he tried to burn his house down. Because he is such an upstanding citizen and person, and everything he says should be leaved at face value. And then they play the confession tape where Jack seemingly confesses to the murder of Christy Mullins. And it's obvious in the playing of this tape that the investigators were leading him in their questioning, and it's obvious that this was a false confession. There's even one point in time where one of the investigators said, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that's exactly what he was doing, and he was taking advantage of somebody with a low IQ and having tunnel vision to try to convict this person wrongfully of a heinous murder. And it's obvious for the prosecution that things are not going well playing this tape. It's not looking good for them. But then there's another witness that comes up, and this is Junior stepson who is named Bobby, and he's twelve years old now by the time that this trial is taking place, and his testimony is quite different from the testimony of Pam and Junior. Now previously I did not speak about it, but Pam had said that the morning that they were at the house, there were some kids that I guess were throwing firecrackers in the area, and Junior left for a few minutes to go yell at these kids. And Bobby also talks about the story, but his account of things is wildly different, and he says that Junior was gone for more like thirty to forty five minutes, and when he came back home, his shirt and his shoes were missing, and he had scratches on his face and his body. Now, Bobby had no idea what any of this meant, but he said that his mother and Junior went into another room, they went and chatted, and then when they came out, they said that they were going to go to Woolco to go shopping. And then he said they got there and they started walking to the trails, and that's when they found one of Junior's sandals in the woods with the broken strap. And then they said that a little further up they found Christie's body. And he recalls that his mom told him not to talk about what he saw, what happened with anyone, and that is why he has kept quiet all of this time. And of course he's a young kid. When this happened, he was ten, so he doesn't really have the ability to kind of rationalize and figure out what is going on here. There was another person who came forward and testified. This person was a friend of Junior's, and he ends up testifying that Junior had actually admitted to him that he is the one who killed Christie, and he says it was accidental, he didn't go there with the intention of killing her, but he still killed her. So all in all, Jack Harmon ends up being acquitted and he was let go, but the question still remained, who in the heck killed Chris Steve Mullins, we have a lot of, I guess you want to call it circumstantial evidence surrounding Junior and his actions and those that surrounded him following the murder, and the prosecutor said they weren't going to take this case any further. They weren't going to bring charges against Junior, and a few months following that, Christie's case goes cold. Now Norman of course continues to investigate and look into things, but unfortunately they never were able to bring charges against anyone in Christie's murder, and Norman passed away in two thousand and six of cancer, and unfortunately he died without ever knowing what happened to his daughter. So in twenty thirteen, we are going to enter a man named John Aller, who is the one who wrote that All American murder book that I've been talking about, and he very much decides that he is going to take this case on himself and try to dig in to everything that happened and write about it. Talk to all of the people, talk to the investigators, talk to the eyewitnesses, talk to people that knew Christie around that time. And in a lot of the people he talked with, they talked about how a lot of the local teens would go to that area in the woods behind the shopping center where Christy was found, and they would go back there and they would smoke weed. Not anything crazy, not anything out of the ordinary. But which interesting with all of this is who they got their weed from. None other than upstanding citizen Junior, Henry Nell or Henry Junior, Nole, whatever we're calling him at this point in time. And since Christie's murder, Junior has been up to his old antics. His rap sheet is growing by the minute. He has more arson on his rap sheet. Domestic islands, sexual assault, harassment, and there's another death that he is maybe connected to but he's never charged with. And that's the death of his wife, Pam. If you don't have chillbubs going up your entire body right now, Holy Molly. So Pam filed for divorce in nineteen eighty two, and a month later she was found deceased in her bed. Her cause of death was a overdose of a sedative that was used to treat insomnia. But I have major questions about all of this. Junior was never charged in connection with his wife's death, and he died in September of twenty thirteen, so we can't talk to him. We can't ask him what the deal was, what happened, We can't ask him anything about Christy Mullins. But John Forge is ahead. He continues his investigation, he continues reaching out to all these family members, and he's eventually contacted by several members of the Newle family and basically they say, we know that Junior killed Christy. It was kind of an open secret in our family, which again is such a wild thing that all of these people were just kind of living day to day knowing what they knew and knowing that Junior was responsible, but also not really coming forward with anything. A niece of Juniors came forward. Her name was Pam Brown, and she said that when she was sixteen years old, Junior, who was her uncle, confessed to murder in Christie and shared the gruesome details of what he did. She said that before he confessed, he said that he was going to tell her something that might shock her, and then, according to Pam, he said that he did kill her. He then told her that he happened to spot Christi, who he knew as a neighbor, at the guardrail at the shopping center by the woolco and he stopped to talk with her and made a move on her, and of course Christy didn't want anything to do with him and fought back, so then he tied her up and then he picked up a two by four which was nearby and just started bashing her in the head with it. And that is a quote. And Pam said that she was afraid to come forward about the confession until after he passed away in twenty thirteen. So, with all of this, detectives aside in May of twenty fourteen to officially reopen Christie's case. And now, of course they have advanced technology. They have a whole new case of detectives and they go through and look at all of the evidence. They interview a bunch of people over the next year and a half, and they also go ahead and retest some of the evidence. They did have some what they thought might be DNA on some Christie's clothing, so they decided to go ahead and run it. But unfortunately it is way too degraded and hadn't really been stored in their best way, and it was hard to tell who it belonged to, but they did know that it was from a male. In all of this, on November sixth of twenty fifteen, the Cold Case Unit calls a press conference and that is where they announced that they are sure that Henry Knowle Junior was the man who killed Christy Mullins, and they say that if he was alive today, they would have enough evidence to file charges on him, and unfortunately, because he is passed away, the best that they can do is offer a public apology to the Mullins family because their investigation was the worst and they did a horrible job, and they left Christie's case unsolved for such a long time, and when you really think about it, with the rap sheet that Junior had, I'm not fully convinced that Christy was the only person that he murdered, because I say it all the time, if you do something so heinous like this, I think you're capable of doing it more than just once. Now, we are never going to know the exact circumstances of what happened that day. We're never going to know if Carol was involved in any way, shape or form, if this disc jockey phone call really happened, if Carol was familiar with Junior, which we know she was because they were neighbors and he also sold the neighborhood kids marijuana. We're never going to know if Carol helped war Christy there that day, if Junior had expressed interest in Christy before that. Those are questions were never going to really have answers to. But it's crazy to me that so many people kept his secret for so long and they didn't feel comfortable coming out until twenty and thirteen hours after he passed away. I talk about the family loyalties all the time and how they shift and change over the years, and this is a prime example. He obviously was somebody that people were terrified of and did not want to speak up against, and once he passed away, all of that went out the window and they were free to speak up. But in my opinion, it's a little too late. Because he was able to live his life out in whatever way he wanted, whether it was in and out of prison, which I'm sure he was because he was a heinous human, he allegedly, maybe possibly ended up taking another life, the life of his wife, Pam, who stuck by him and his story and corroborated his story. Which I don't even know what to think about that, but there's a lot to it. So him leaving to go yell at the kids about some firecrackers is the window of time in which he went and murdered Christy allegedly, and then he came back to the home and they decided they were going to go to Woolco and that's when they entered the woods and found the body. And I don't know how he was able to convince his wife to lie about this eyewitness, but sure enough, he was able to convince her of that. And despite him having such a horrific criminal history, investigators never looked at him. Despite he was one of the only eyewitnesses at the scene of the crime. They even brought him back there to kind of recount what happened. They never once thought that he was involved, and he was literally right there the entire time. It's wild. I don't even have words for any of this, but that is the story of Christy Mullins, a story that spanned a heck of a long time. Luckily, there was a group of people who banded together to stand up for Jack Carmon. He was released. He could have spent the rest of his life in prison, and nobody would have been the wiser if nobody would have spoken up. So it's a really good example of your voice matters, and your words have weight, and your actions have weight, and it's very important. And then fast forward to twenty thirteen when John Aller gets involved again. His actions and his words and his dedication to Christie's case mattered, and it helped bring everything to the forefront. And that is the reason why this case is solved today. Unfortunately, because Junior passed away in twenty thirteen, he never had to face the consequences of his actions, and Christie's father never got the answers that he was so desperately searching for for all of those years. But at least we can now say that Christie's case is solved and the perpetrator is no longer with us, and I hope he's paying for his horrible actions in the afterlife. So thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. It's a little bit of a longer one because holy moly, there was so much to this case. It was so involved, and I very much had another case planned for this week, but I last minute kind of had to switch it. So getting this case and looking at it doing all the research, it was a lot. There was a lot of information here, but I think it was a super important story to tell. So thank you for listening. I hope you guys have a good one and I will see you next week for a brand new unsolved case. Bye.