December 7, 2023 • 41 mins
In May 1991, nine-year-old Christina Pipkin headed out to sell jewelry for her school fundraiser. But she never made it back home. Her body was found in a ditch several days later. Who, or what, killed Christina Pipkin? Catherine Townsend continues her investigation in Arkansas.
If you have a case you’d like Catherine to look into, you can reach out to the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. On May fourth, nineteen ninety one, nine
year old Christina Pipkin was selling jewelry door to door
for a school fundraiser in her hometown of Hickory Ridge, Arkansas.
Christina was supposed to be home before dark, but she
never made it back. Her parents, Freda and James frantically
(00:30):
looked for her. They called friends and volunteers and scoured
the area, but found no signs of Christina. This little
girl seemed to have vanished into thin air. They got
an answer, but it wasn't the answer they were hoping for.
Three days later, on May seventh, nineteen ninety one, Christina
Pipkins's body was found floating in cow Lake Ditch. Almost
(00:53):
twenty three years later, this case is still unsolved. I'm
Catherine Townsend. If you have a case you'd like me
and my team to look into, you can reach out
to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six
seven eight seven four four six one four five. This
(01:14):
is Helen Gone Murder Line. By the way. As you
(02:06):
can tell, I've been talking to a lot of people
this week, so I've lost my voice a little bit.
Please excuse me. I'm in Hickory Ridge, for a meeting
with Amy Tubbs, who, as I mentioned in the last episode,
is married to Robbie Tubbs Junior. She's the daughter in
law of Robbie Tubbs Senior, who is a suspect in
Christina's murder. Back in the nineties, Robbie was arrested and
(02:29):
he was charged with Christina Pipkins's murder, but as we
said in the last episode, he was released after there
was a mistake with the DNA testing. The prosecutor, Fletcher Long,
admitted that instead of testing hair from a vehicle once
owned by Robbie Tubbs, law enforcement tested the wrong hair,
and then when they tried to correct that error, they
(02:51):
said that there wasn't enough DNA on the hair that
was inside Robbie Tubb's car to test. I still wonder
is that hair still around and with today's technology, could
it be retested that. It's just one of the many
questions we're going to be asking as we investigate this case.
(03:11):
Amy said that since she started dating her husband, they've
never really had contact with his father, Robbie Senor. She
said she's heard that Robbie Senior has a criminal background
and that he's in her words, and not a great guy,
but as she pointed out, that's quite a different thing
from being a child killer. Amy wanted to know if
(03:32):
Robbie Senor was capable of committing this horrific crime. She
is clear, if he is the right person, he needs
to be charged, and if it's someone else, we need
to figure out who they are and where they are.
Either way, charging a suspect and then having those charges
fall apart and seeing the person you believe is guilty released.
(03:54):
As I've said for a long time, this should not
be a stopping point for law enforcement. Either you need
to get more evidence on your suspect, or you need
to find the right person to charge. Amy and our
meeting in Hickory Ridge in the morning. There's really only
one place in town, the only coffee shop for miles,
(04:15):
Cafe forty nine. How do you get around the not
being an Arkansas resident? Jazz so Amy and I are
catching up. We've had some exciting developments. Both of our
Foyer requests were granted, so we now have access to
the entire Christina Pipkin case file, all two hundred pages
of it. That's the good news. The bad news is
(04:37):
that there is no audio of the original interviews, and
there are no photos. The Arkansas State Police have also
not released the autopsy report. It's not part of the
case file. There are also almost no transcripts, so all
we have of the police interviews are these short type pages.
Presumably they were taken from notes and then transcribed. Since
(05:01):
I have a lot of experience with case files, I
want to verify every thing ourselves. I want to get
in touch with everyone we can who isn't dead and
is willing to talk. We've come here to East Arkansas
to see if there was anyone around who was there
on the day Christina went missing. This could be our
only hope for getting new information. Would I'll take one more.
(05:25):
Amy brought Denise, who describes herself as an amateur sleuth
who's been working on the case for a long time.
Denise has also brought a friend who says she just
wants to be in the background. She spends her time
as Denise's sidekick, helping her find addresses and get into
contact with people. After we get our coffee, we start
talking to some other people in the cafe. Was that
(05:45):
the little girl? She's found it in a ditch right
out here? Yeah? Yeah, I think I wat. I mean
this was this happened before I was born, And now
what I heard was that her stepdad had drowned her.
And now she said that she heard Christina's stepdad had
drowned her. That was one of the rumors We've been
hearing a lot, that someone in Christstina's family did this
(06:06):
to her and then there was a cover up. Some
people have blamed Christina's mom, others her dad. Some people
have even mentioned a step dad, even though that would
be impossible since Christina didn't even have a stepfather. But
I've heard that story. I've heard that story too. Yeah,
I heard that story too, But no, she didn't have
a step bead. This is just one of many versions
(06:29):
of rumors that have been flying around town since Christina
went missing. The woman we talked to brought her mom over,
and her mom knew a lot. She said she was
in high school at the time and was part of
the search party. I just I remember searching the town.
It's heard that she didn't just go on door to
door selling something for school. Just we searched for days
(06:52):
and days and days and days. She mentioned another rumor
that I've heard a lot of that the reason she
believed someone in Christina's family did. This was because apparently
no water from the ditch where Christina's body was found
was found in her lungs. He had chlorinated, so it
had to have come from a bathtub or something there
about this led them to believe she had been drowned
in a bathtub and then taken out there and dumped.
(07:18):
This is one of those rumors we can shut down
right now because even though we didn't get the actual
autopsy report as part of the case file, we did
get some documents that refer to interviews with a medical
examiner and to forensic testing that was done on Christina's body.
The results of those tests showed that the water and
mud in Christina Pipkins's lungs matched the water from Cow
(07:39):
Lake Ditch, the body of water where she was found.
We also learned from the case file that Fammi Malick
did the autopsy because one of the investigators put a
report in the case file. He talked about meeting with
doctor Malick to discuss some of his conclusions. I've talked
a lot about doctor Malick's controversial history on previous podcasts.
(08:00):
He was the medical examiner in Arkansas who was found
to have botched hundreds of autopsies back in the eighties
and nineties. In fact, the time period when he did
Christina's autopsy was not long before he was forced into retirement.
But for the moment, until we're proven otherwise, we're going
to take the information that we get about the autopsy
(08:22):
at face value. Doctor Malik indicated there was obvious decomposition.
We knew she had been in the water for three days.
He also said there were no signs of strangulation. He
said he had X rayed Christina's body from the outside
and from the inside. He said he could find no
stab wounds, no obvious cuts of bruises, and there was
(08:44):
water and mud found in Christina's stomach, water that matched
the water from the ditch. Doctor Malik also found pickles
and carrots and Christina's stomach. We know that Christina ate
pot pie for lunch that day. We also know that
Elsie Lyles, her next door neighbor and sometimes a babysitter,
gave her a pickle as a snack at around four pm.
(09:06):
The report reads, quote Doctor Malik was emphatic he could
find no other cause of death other than drowning. End quote.
But it also says when given the supposition that one
could smother an individual to the point of unconscious and
then throw that person into the river, Doctor Mallet could
make no comment regarding this, but said that this was
(09:27):
a possibility. In other words, we can't tell from the
limited information we have whether Christina fell into the water
on her own or was thrown in there, or whether
she was conscious at the time, but we can rule
out the rumor that Christina was drowned at home and
then taken out to that site where she was dumped
by the way. Christina's father, James, and everyone else in
(09:49):
her family cooperated completely with investigators. James Pipkin took and
passed a light detector test that's part of the case file,
and he was cleared by law enforcement. I cannot imagine
the pain of losing a child and then after that
having people in town either think that you were involved
somehow or that you were hiding something. Plus James had
(10:12):
to go through the pain of being asked about his
marital problems issues he had had previously with his wife Frieda.
That must have also been a nightmare. But unfortunately, when
law enforcement is looking through someone's pattern of life, they
have to know the history of the family members. It's
all part of solving the puzzle. There have been some
(10:32):
other rumors in this town that refuse to die, so
we need to check them out so we can figure
out what to investigate further and what else to rule out.
We went to the place where Christina and her family
lived on Doughty Street. Okay, so this was the Bearcat
right where apparently everyone in town went that day. There's
the bank. The alle still runs behind the bank, so
(10:52):
this whole thing is tiny. Yeah. And there's the tracks
right there. Yeah. And then there's the little park school.
All that is back there. This house, no, that house,
this lot, this lot where there is no more house.
There's no house there now, just a vacant, overgrown lot
with a home next door. We have a couple of
(11:14):
goals here today. First of all, we want to take
a look at the place where Christina's house was on
Doty Street and the place where she was last seen,
the Bearcat grocery store. It's not there anymore now, it's
a tire shop. Denise is talking me through the streets
in Christina's neighborhood. So that was her house, and then
the house they were saying that the backed up on
(11:35):
her yard would have been that one over there. Maybe, well,
I think that's something different or is it destroyed now? Maybe?
Ye see how that's what I'm thinking, and those houses
might have been the same. But we see from the
case file that police talked to Christina's mom Frida and
father James. They discussed what they did on the day
Christina disappeared in a lot more detail than I've ever seen.
(11:57):
On Saturday, May fourth, Frida said it started out as
an ordinary Saturday. Frida went to the post office that
morning between nine thirty and ten. When she got home,
Christina and her brother Adam were watching cartoons. Frida said
she had some coffee with her neighbor Pat Moore. Then
Pat left. After a few minutes, Frida started cleaning and
doing laundry because Saturday was wash day. At around eleven
(12:21):
thirty or twelve, Freda warmed up some pop pies. They
ate the pop pies, and they had iced tea to drink.
After lunch, she was hanging clothes out on the line
when James came out and showed her a picture of
a used car he had been looking out in the
local magazine She and James took Christina and Adam and
they went to Walmart and went They bought a few
(12:41):
things there for the house. Then they went to Cherry Valley,
a town about fifteen miles east of Hickory Ridge. They
looked at the car, a blue Mustang that was parked
out in the seller's yard. They took a quick look
at the car, asked about the price, and left there
around one pm. At some point they stopped at Gaskin's
grocery store in vandal They bought some pork rines, and
(13:03):
apparently Christina had a few of the porkskins on the
ride home, but she didn't really eat a lot of
them because apparently they were a little bit pink and
she didn't love the taste. The family got back home,
Adam and James were hanging out watching TV. Christina played
with one of Frida's old makeup compacts that she had
found lying around. James was programming the VCR to tape
(13:25):
the movie The Hunt for Red October that was airing
that night. At some point, Christina asked her parents if
she could go door to door to sell her jewelry.
She headed out at around four thirty or five PM.
Now I should say that what's in the case file
differs from what we've read in the newspapers, because in
the newspapers it said she asked her dad, James, if
(13:46):
she could go out. He said no at first, then
said okay, but you have to be home before dark.
But in the case file, James said he believed that
Christina had asked her mother if she could go sell jewelry,
though he does mention the kids knew not to cross
over to the other side of the railroad tracks. At
around seven or seven thirty pm, Frieda realized she still
(14:08):
needed a few things from the store. She ran up
to the Bearcat Grocery, a couple of blocks from their house.
The bear Cat was next to the only bank in town,
Cross County Bank. The two businesses shared a parking lot.
At the store, Frida bought onions and gravy and potatoes
and mushrooms. She said she was only in there for
around five minutes and then she went right back home.
(14:30):
She started to make dinner to fry potatoes. At some
point it started to get dark, and that's when Christina's
parents realized that she hadn't made it home. Frida sent
Adam out to look for his sister. Pretty quickly, he
came back and said he couldn't find her. That's when
Frida said, quote, I had a gut feeling something was
not right. This is a mother's concern. I sent Adam
(14:53):
out to find Christina. When he came back and said
he couldn't find her, I knew something was wrong with
my baby girl. End quote. James and Frieda went around
the neighborhood. They went to some apartments near by where
Christina had been selling her jewelry in the days before
she went missing. They went to the Bearcat store, and
then they went back home in case Christina came back.
(15:15):
They called the police to report her missing, and the
search started. James said in his statement quote after the
police came, we started a house to house search. I
went to several houses and went back home to see
if anyone had found her. After my brother in law
got to the house, we went out searching. I kept
hoping she would show up. I did not believe this
(15:35):
was happening. I wondered what happened to her? Where could
she be? As we drove around looking for her, I
was hoping to see her walking. I thought if she
could just get away. I might see her on the road.
On Sunday we went searching some more. I didn't eat
because I couldn't eat, not knowing if my baby girl
had had anything to eat. I was wondering how she
was being treated. Was she cold? Was she hungry? I
(15:57):
kept hoping that whoever took her would let her go.
I kept looking up the street, hoping that I would
see her. I kept believing we would find her alive,
even if she was hurt. We could get help for that.
But when they told me they had found her and
she was dead, how do you describe how do you
feel when you find out your daughter is dead? Angry, hurt, confused?
(16:17):
I don't know how to describe it. End quote. I
don't know how many of you have ever seen the
movie rasham On, but it's something I think about a
lot when I'm doing an investigation. Now. In that movie,
there are three different people, and they're telling the story
of an assault and a murder. Each of them witnessed
this from their point of view. Everyone saw exactly the
(16:38):
same thing, but each person gives you a different piece
of the story. Each person has another piece of the puzzle.
It's the same thing with a murder investigation. We have
all these people who are present at the Bearcat convenience
store and the bank that afternoon. Each of them saw
a small slice of Christina's day, and we really need
to put all those multiple versions together. Now. Admittedly there's
(17:02):
a separate problem, which is that memory itself changed just
ever time, even if you have great recall, But we'll
get to that later. First, we need to get as
many points of view as possible to try and fill
in some of these holes on the timeline. So let's
go back to May fourth, nineteen ninety one, Christina is missing.
Over the next few days, police started talking to people, and,
(17:25):
as happens often in small towns, a few names got
thrown around. We noticed something else in the case file
that during this time, quite a few people also mentioned
they had seen a blue car with a man driving it,
one that was in the bank parking lot and hanging
around town in general around the time when Christina went missing.
That what we were about to find out was that
(17:47):
people had a lot of different descriptions of exactly what
that man and that vehicle looked like. We measured the
distance from where Christina was last seen to where she
was found. It was around three and a half miles
so I think police were right. She was almost certainly
driven to that location. So who drove her there? In
(18:08):
a town this small, it seems like somebody would have
to have seen something. We need to find that car.
We need to explore all of those suspects, figure out
exactly where everyone was on the day Christina went missing,
and also find out where this rumor about a blue
car started. One person the police talked to was the
(18:30):
Long family. They live right by Christina's house at two
eighty nine Doty Street. Michael Long, who was twenty six
at the time, said that he was home that Saturday
afternoon at around five pm. He said Christina stopped by
the house looking for his little sister, who was ten
Christina's age, presumably to go door to door jewelry selling
with her. His sister wasn't home, so Christina left. Michael
(18:53):
said he next saw Christina walking back south down Third Street.
Then he saw her turn west on Laurel Street toward
the Bearcat's door and the bank. Michael told police that
about five minutes after Ristina left, he went outside to
check a ditch for snakes. Then he said he walked
to the bear Cat for some cigarettes. When he came out,
(19:13):
he saw Christina walking behind the alley at Cross County Bank.
At that point, Michael said she was headed north. This
would have been at around five thirty pm. After that,
Michael said he didn't see her again. Another family that
lived next to the Pipkins were the Moors, Pat and Connie.
They had a blue car registered to them, a nineteen
(19:34):
seventy three Ford Maverick. On the day Christina went missing,
two friends of Theirs, Ricky Dawson and James the Sheers,
who were eighteen and twenty at the time, came by
the house at around four thirty. They were there to
pick up Ricky's girlfriend, Jenna Algood and her friend April Jones,
who were hanging out at the moorhouse. Ricky, James, and
the two young women left for a night out on
(19:55):
the town and Win, but before they left, Ricky said
he remembered seeing Christina outside on her porch. Next door.
Ricky Dawson was driving yet an other blue car, his
mom's blue Camaro with rust on the side. He said
that he, James, and the two girls went to Win
between five thirty and six thirty. He said they didn't
come back until around midnight. By that time, Christina was
(20:19):
missing and a bunch of people were already out looking
for her. So at that point, obviously things got pretty chaotic.
It was Saturday night. People were having barbecues, making plans,
going on dates, the sun was going down, and the
night was just starting. But I want to go back
to the timeline and mention a couple of other people
who told police they noticed things that were slightly out
(20:39):
of the ordinary, because obviously any event can have huge
significance when someone goes missing. On May seventh, police went
to the Hickory Ridge Elementary School and they interviewed several children.
They asked about a stranger that the kids had seen
around the time when Christina disappeared, but their descriptions were
(21:00):
completely inconsistent. The police report said there were numerous in
consistencies in the kid's stories, and so because of that,
the officer could not follow through on completing a composite drawing.
This doesn't surprise me because by the time those kids
were interviewed, it had been several days, and unfortunately, in
my opinion, what happened probably was that the kids talked
(21:21):
to each other over the weekend, so their stories took
on elements of each other's. This is not uncommon. So
seventy two hours have passed, the whole town's talking about
a kidnapping, and suddenly the mysterious stranger had gone from
a white man with tanned skin to a Native American
and quote Indian lookalike with high cheekbones and black hair. Now,
(21:43):
because Christina lived in Cross County but her body was
found across the county line in Jackson County, law enforcement
met and decided that Jackson County would assist, but that
the jurisdiction would stay in Cross County. Jackson County did
question some people, mainly guys who were arrested for other
things like dwi's, but police really seemed to have pretty
(22:04):
much zero leads and not much to go on. There
was another family, the Earls. They lived on Fourth Street,
close to Christina's house. Kim Earles said that on Saturday night,
just after midnight, she saw a young man in a
blue car, which she described as a late model Transam
or Camaro. She said it had one of those novelty
(22:25):
brake lights that glow neon around the license plate when
you put on the brakes. She said she saw that car,
which seems like it would be pretty memorable at a
McDonald's and win. She said the guy driving it was
dark complexion with tan skin, medium bill, dark eyebrows, and
that that person was around six foot two. Other people
said there was a guy named James Hannah who had
(22:46):
a car like that, but when police showed a picture
of James Hannah to the girls, they said they knew
James Hannah and this was not him driving the car.
They described the driver as dirty looking and said that
that person was a stranger to them. Kim said that
she had seen that same man, the one driving the
blue car with the light up brakes, around on Town
for the past few months. She said that this mystery
(23:08):
guy had been parked near the bank on Saturday. Her
and her sister Angela said that they believed that this
person had followed them to the tanning bed. Sharon and
Ricky Holloman had a daughter who was friends with Christina.
Sharon was another person who said she saw a blue
car that day. She said it was sportsy looking and
(23:29):
had primer or rest spots on it, and that it
was speeding on the side streets. Of Hickory Ridge on
Saturday afternoon. She described the driver as clean shaven, with
short hair and chubby cheeks. She said that she had
seen that same car several times a week, going over
to what she thought was the Pipkin residence. Sharon and
Ricky had a daughter, and their daughter was a friend
(23:49):
of Christina's. She actually saw Christina on the afternoon that
she disappeared, and she said she saw her with a
young boy that had gone to school with Christina. The
little girl said she didn't know the boy's name. She
said for some reason, the boy would hide behind trees
and Christina seen impatient, and that when this friend tried
to talk to Christina, finally, she said, the boy caught
(24:11):
up to Christina and started walking with her, and they
went off in the other direction. Christina's friend said the
last time she saw Christina, Christina was walking south on
the southbound shoulder of Highway forty nine in front of
the bear Cat Store, so between the Bearcat Grocery Store
and the post office. She said the blue car was
following Christina, driving slow, and that Christina was shaking her
(24:33):
head no to the person driving the car. She described
it as an older blue colored car with some type
of brownish rust colored stains or rust on the lower
portions of the car. The friend said that she rode
her bike around the bank one more time and that
by the time she got back to the road, she
could not see Christina or the car. The little girl
didn't know what time this was, but her mother said
(24:56):
they had only gotten back to their house at around
seven pm, so would have had to have been a
little bit after that. If that's true, then this little
girl may have been the last person and the case
for at least to have seen Christina alive. Christina Pipkins's
(25:16):
math teacher also said she saw Christina outside of the
bear Cat grocery that afternoon, and she said that Christina
was barefoot. This seems to solve another mystery because remember
we mentioned that Christina's mother said she was wearing white
sandals on the day she went missing, but her sandals
(25:37):
were not found with her body. But it seems like
Christina had already ditched her sandals because she was walking
around that parking lot barefoot, so it seems less likely
that her killer took them or that they slipped off
during some kind of struggle. I still wonder though where
are the sandals? But in my mind, if she was barefoot,
(25:58):
that means it's even less likely she would have made
that over three mile walk out to the area where
she was found. Another name that was mentioned in the
case file early on was Charles Cotton Junior. Charles Cotton
Junior has a criminal record, including charges for lewde acts
against a child. Now, Charles Cotton would later tell a
(26:20):
journalist in Juno, Alaska, where he was living, that that
was all mistake, that what happened was a child had
walked in on him and either his wife or girlfriend
having sex on a couch. That the whole thing was
blown out of proportion. That's what a lot of sex
offenders say. And the fact of the matter is Charles
Cotton did have a lengthy criminal record. At the time
when Christina went missing. Charles Cotton was married. According to
(26:43):
his wife, Rebecca Cotton, who was twenty one years old
at the time, the couple was living a little bit
out of town. But we've also been told by people
close to Christina's family that Charles Cotton was living right
next door. We're still trying to figure out his exact
location and movements at the time. We do know that
Charles Cotton was introduced to Christina's father, James, by their
next door neighbor, Pat Moore, So as far as I
(27:06):
can tell, Charles Cotton did spend some time at the Moorhouse.
That could potentially be why some people believe that Charles
was living next door. These guys all had completely different
physical descriptions. Robbie Tubbs was white with tan skin and
dark wavy hair that went down toward his shoulders. Charles
Cotton had blue eyes and blonde hair. We mentioned in
(27:28):
the last episode that after hair testing and the trial,
the charges against Robbie Tubbs were dropped. He walked away
a free man. His last known address is in Sulfur Spring, Texas,
but he's challenging to find. Charles Cotton is much easier
to find. He's in federal prison in Washington State. After
Christina's death, Charles Cotton got into some more issues with
(27:50):
the law and eventually he found love. In twenty eleven,
Charles reconnected with a woman named Penny. They actually grew
up together and they met while they were both students
and win high school back in the day. Back then.
They dated, but they broke up and they didn't see
each other for years. This time, though, once they reconnected
that relationship got serious. They got married and Penny moved
(28:14):
with Charles to Juneo, Alaska, but their fresh start did
not last long. In Juno, Charles Cotton started managing a
hotel called the Bergmann Hotel. It was a historic structure
that had become run down over the years. In twenty sixteen,
he took that dilapidated building that had become a hangout
for people doing drugs and other illegal things and said
(28:36):
he was going to turn it around. At one point,
he actually made local news as someone who had a
criminal record but was now a productive member of society.
Charles told the Juno Empire during that interview, quote I
come in and started getting the riff rafh out, started
getting the thieves and the drugs out. I run them
the hell off, and I'd do it any day of
the week end. Quote. So in this article, Charles was
(28:59):
described as this recovering addict who was kind of running
his own alternative to narcannon called Choices. So the idea
of the program was that Charles would get the addicts
to do work on the crumbling building and they would
get free room and board, but that good press did
not last because the city came in and they found
a ton of problems without building. There were toxins in
the water, exposed wires, and apparently no heat or hot water.
(29:23):
They slapped Charles with a fine, which he didn't pay.
At some point they condemned the building. The city evacuated it,
but Charles and his tenants refused to leave. It turned
out that he was selling drugs again. At some point
he had relapsed and gone from being a program for
recovering addicts to a drug den. Charles was hit with
a string of charges for distributing methamphetamine, and then on
(29:47):
September twenty seventh, twenty seventeen, his wife, Penny Cotton, was
found dead in a hotel room in Morris, Alaska. When
Penny Cotton was found dead, she had been shot in
the head. Her death was ruled a suicide, but her
family back in Arkansas told reporters at the Mid South
(30:08):
they did not believe that Penny would take her own life.
The medical examiner did not order an autopsy, but Penny's
family got some photos and they shared those photos of
Penny's body with local media. These photos apparently showed Penny
had been shot in the left side of the head,
but Penny's family pointed out she's right handed, so to
(30:28):
them that seemed to be impossible. In twenty seventeen, Charles
was hit with charges of distributing methamphetamine and was arrested
by the FBI. In twenty nineteen, Charles Cotton Junior and
his son, Ricky Staplear Lisk were both sentenced for drug charges.
Charles got ten years in prison, Ricky got five, and
Charles is in prison today. There was a comment on
(30:52):
Penny's obituary. It referred to her as being gangster and
to her helping Charles with his business, and it was
written by someone who had been in that building with
Penny and Charles, so obviously Penny knew a lot about
what Charles was getting up to. Could this have motivated
someone connected to him to take her life. Charles Cotton
Junior may have been involved in other legal activities, but
(31:14):
what about Christina Pipkin. Let's look at Charles Cotton's connection
to the Pipkin family. James Pipkin told investigators that he
was introduced to Charles Cotton through his neighbor Pat Moore,
but that before Christina went missing, he had never seen
or spoken to Charles in his life. Charles Cotton said
that on the day Christina disappeared, he was fishing with
(31:37):
a friend of his from around one thirty to five
thirty at an area called Bird Eye near Cherry Valley,
a small town a few miles from Hickory Ridge. Apparently,
Charles did stop by the Bearcat grocery store at some
point on Saturday. Now, he said he didn't remember doing that,
but a friend of his saw him there, and he
mentions that in his discussion with investigators. He said that
(31:58):
after he was finished fishing, he went home and watched
TV with his wife, Rebecca, and the rest of his family.
At around ten thirty, he said, a friend of his name,
Neil Long, came by and asked if anyone had seen
Christina Pipkin. That's when he said he found out Christina
was missing. Charles said at that point he went out
and borrowed a friend's three wheeler and started searching for her.
(32:21):
By the way. Charles drove a seventy four light blue
Dodge Charger at the time, yet another blue car. I
have questions about Charles Cotton, mainly because reading through this
case file, it seems like he was inserting himself into
the investigation a lot. We know from James Pipkin's statement
that Charles was very involved in the search for Christina.
(32:41):
He kept looking constantly until she was found. Apparently, Charles
even borrowed two hundred and twenty five dollars from James Pipkin.
He claimed he had to pay a fine because he
hadn't had time to go pay it. He'd been out
looking for Christina and missed his chance. So James Pipkin
felt sorry for him and gave him the money, which,
of course James Pipkin never got back. Now, this could
(33:02):
have been totally innocuous. This was a big story. This
is a low girl. But the Pipkin family had only
lived in Hickory Ridge for about four months at that point. Charles,
Cotton and some other people seem to be getting very
close to the family in that time. I wondered about this,
and Amy and I made a few more stops. We
were looking for old newspapers and we found one from
(33:24):
the week when Christina's body was found. We were shocked
when we saw Christina's obituary and there was a detail
that had not been online the names of pallbearers, and
one of those pallbearers at Christina's funeral was Charles Cotton.
This seems very odd to me. Again, could be totally innocent,
(33:45):
could be just someone doing a kindness for a neighbor.
But why would someone who didn't know James at all
suddenly be super involved in the search, then borrow money
from James, and then show up as a pallbearer. Again,
though that's all circumstantial, we have to go back to
the place and time where Christina was last seen in
and around the bear Cac grocery store in the Bank
(34:06):
parking lot. Even though there are a lot of disparate reports. Actually,
what we're finding out is that Christina went missing in
a pretty small window of time, and we see something
else in the case file that could potentially help police
talk to the four people who were working inside the
Bearcat grocery store that day. Now, three of the employees
(34:28):
had either left or were otherwise occupied when Christina was around,
but one person, the cashier, got a very good look
at a stranger, someone who came into the store at
around the same time as Christina was there, someone who
she said no one in the store recognized. I wanted
to find this cashier because in the whole case file,
(34:50):
she was the only one who had a definite and
good description of a potential suspect, who had been close
to the unknown stranger and actually seen a detailed view
of their face. I will not say exactly how we
did it, and I won't use her name because I
know that this person is very nervous, but we found her,
(35:11):
and I'm putting this information out there because number one,
this case file is public. These names are part of
the public record, and also, most importantly, I believe this
information is critical to solving this case. We asked the
cashier about what she had seen that day before we
showed her her police statement, by the way, which she'd
(35:31):
never seen. In her statement, the cashier said she was
working at the Bearcat grocery store on Saturday, May fourth,
nineteen ninety one. She said, at about five forty five pm,
an individual a stranger, came in and bought some cigarettes.
In her statement to police, the officer who interviewed the
cashier noted she said that the stranger drove a mid
(35:53):
or late seventies model Oldsmobile four door and it looked
blue gray in color. In a statement, she said the
stranger pulled in heading north. The statement reads quote she
saw him on the side walk looking north and south
and making a U turn and went south. Quote. The
statement described the stranger as a white male, mid thirties,
five foot nine and around one hundred and forty five pounds,
(36:16):
hair dark brown, almost reddish in color, clean hair almost
shoulder length, not curly, almost straight. She further stated he
had a mustache and that his hair was cupped around
his face, which was thin. She said he wasn't wearing
glasses or a hat. He had on older jeans and
bell Crow type tennis shoes with a gray T shirt
(36:36):
underneath an older shirt that was short sleeved. She said
no tattoos were visible. In her statement, she said the stranger,
who was white but had tan skin, looked like Richard Gear,
that he bought cigarettes and left, and that he stared
at her. The police report was very brief, but when
we talked to the cashier, she gave us a lot
(36:56):
of details that were not in the police report. Again,
it's important to note that we asked her about her
memories before we showed her her own. Most of the
police statement match which she told us, but there were
some very important differences. First of all, she said she
got a very good look at the stranger's car, and
(37:17):
she emphatically said it was brown or tan in color,
not blue. Also, when you read the police report, it
kind of makes it sound like the stranger was standing
on the sidewalk. She clarified what she meant. She said
he pulled his car all the way up on the sidewalk.
In fact, he pulled it so far up that he
had to get out on the passenger side, and she
remembers looking out the window at that car because that
(37:38):
was annoying. She described the car as dirty, but definitely
brown or tan. And she clarified when she said the
stranger looked like Richard Gear, she was really talking about
the distinctive nose shape and eyes. She said. The stranger
walked into the store and bought Marlboro Reds in the
hard pack. Then he asked if she had some matches.
(37:58):
She said, yes, sir, we do, and gave him some
of the freebie matches. Then he left, and because he
had parked so close to the building up on that sidewalk,
he had to get in through the passenger side of
the car and shift over to the driver's side. She
said he was alone. He drove away and she never
saw him again. The next page after the cashier's statement
(38:20):
in the case file is a page that explains that
a sketch artist met with her. They developed a composite photo,
and that the completed composite would be made part of
the case file. But the photo copy of the composite
drawing is not there as far as I can tell.
I don't know if the police just aren't including it,
or if it's not in the case file at all anymore.
(38:42):
I asked the cashier about it, and she remembered that
image very clearly. She said she might still have a
copy and said she would go home to look in
her safe. Then she texted me and said she found it.
She had the original composite photo. It had been sitting
in her safe for over thirty years. We showed her
(39:02):
some pictures of the people who were mentioned by police
back in the day, including Charles Cotton, but she says
that was not the stranger she waited on. Then Amy
shows her an old picture of Robbie Tubbs, her father
in law. The cashier blinked looked shocked and said, who
(39:24):
is this? How did you get this? We asked her
if she believed that was the man she saw in
the bear Cat that day. Later, we texted her a
couple more pictures from that era. She texted me back,
I got cold chills. I think this is the man
who was in the store that day. I know that
(39:45):
IDs are not definitive proof of anything. Often people are wrong,
and even if Robbie Tubbs was in town that day,
that does not mean he had anything to do with
Christina's death. But I do find it interesting that the
description of the car was different from the one in
the case file, and that the cashier seems so haunted
(40:07):
by looking at the image of Robbie Tubbs next two
that drawing she has had in her say for the
past thirty years. I know positive ideas are not definitive proof,
but it means we need to keep digging. I'm Catherine Townsend.
This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line
(40:28):
is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced
by Gabby Watts. Music contributed by Ben so Lee executive
producers of Virginia Prescott Brandon Barr, and Helsey Crowley. If
you have a case you'd like me and my team
to look into, you can reach out to us at
our Helen Gone Murder line at six seven eight seven
(40:49):
four four six ' one four five. That's six seven
eight seven four four six ' one four or five.
Please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you listen
to your podcasts, School of Humans
School of Humans. On May fourth, nineteen ninety one, nine
year old Christina Pipkin was selling jewelry door to door
for a school fundraiser in her hometown of Hickory Ridge, Arkansas.
Christina was supposed to be home before dark, but she
never made it back. Her parents, Freda and James frantically
(00:30):
looked for her. They called friends and volunteers and scoured
the area, but found no signs of Christina. This little
girl seemed to have vanished into thin air. They got
an answer, but it wasn't the answer they were hoping for.
Three days later, on May seventh, nineteen ninety one, Christina
Pipkins's body was found floating in cow Lake Ditch. Almost
(00:53):
twenty three years later, this case is still unsolved. I'm
Catherine Townsend. If you have a case you'd like me
and my team to look into, you can reach out
to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six
seven eight seven four four six one four five. This
(01:14):
is Helen Gone Murder Line. By the way. As you
(02:06):
can tell, I've been talking to a lot of people
this week, so I've lost my voice a little bit.
Please excuse me. I'm in Hickory Ridge, for a meeting
with Amy Tubbs, who, as I mentioned in the last episode,
is married to Robbie Tubbs Junior. She's the daughter in
law of Robbie Tubbs Senior, who is a suspect in
Christina's murder. Back in the nineties, Robbie was arrested and
(02:29):
he was charged with Christina Pipkins's murder, but as we
said in the last episode, he was released after there
was a mistake with the DNA testing. The prosecutor, Fletcher Long,
admitted that instead of testing hair from a vehicle once
owned by Robbie Tubbs, law enforcement tested the wrong hair,
and then when they tried to correct that error, they
(02:51):
said that there wasn't enough DNA on the hair that
was inside Robbie Tubb's car to test. I still wonder
is that hair still around and with today's technology, could
it be retested that. It's just one of the many
questions we're going to be asking as we investigate this case.
(03:11):
Amy said that since she started dating her husband, they've
never really had contact with his father, Robbie Senor. She
said she's heard that Robbie Senior has a criminal background
and that he's in her words, and not a great guy,
but as she pointed out, that's quite a different thing
from being a child killer. Amy wanted to know if
(03:32):
Robbie Senor was capable of committing this horrific crime. She
is clear, if he is the right person, he needs
to be charged, and if it's someone else, we need
to figure out who they are and where they are.
Either way, charging a suspect and then having those charges
fall apart and seeing the person you believe is guilty released.
(03:54):
As I've said for a long time, this should not
be a stopping point for law enforcement. Either you need
to get more evidence on your suspect, or you need
to find the right person to charge. Amy and our
meeting in Hickory Ridge in the morning. There's really only
one place in town, the only coffee shop for miles,
(04:15):
Cafe forty nine. How do you get around the not
being an Arkansas resident? Jazz so Amy and I are
catching up. We've had some exciting developments. Both of our
Foyer requests were granted, so we now have access to
the entire Christina Pipkin case file, all two hundred pages
of it. That's the good news. The bad news is
(04:37):
that there is no audio of the original interviews, and
there are no photos. The Arkansas State Police have also
not released the autopsy report. It's not part of the
case file. There are also almost no transcripts, so all
we have of the police interviews are these short type pages.
Presumably they were taken from notes and then transcribed. Since
(05:01):
I have a lot of experience with case files, I
want to verify every thing ourselves. I want to get
in touch with everyone we can who isn't dead and
is willing to talk. We've come here to East Arkansas
to see if there was anyone around who was there
on the day Christina went missing. This could be our
only hope for getting new information. Would I'll take one more.
(05:25):
Amy brought Denise, who describes herself as an amateur sleuth
who's been working on the case for a long time.
Denise has also brought a friend who says she just
wants to be in the background. She spends her time
as Denise's sidekick, helping her find addresses and get into
contact with people. After we get our coffee, we start
talking to some other people in the cafe. Was that
(05:45):
the little girl? She's found it in a ditch right
out here? Yeah? Yeah, I think I wat. I mean
this was this happened before I was born, And now
what I heard was that her stepdad had drowned her.
And now she said that she heard Christina's stepdad had
drowned her. That was one of the rumors We've been
hearing a lot, that someone in Christstina's family did this
(06:06):
to her and then there was a cover up. Some
people have blamed Christina's mom, others her dad. Some people
have even mentioned a step dad, even though that would
be impossible since Christina didn't even have a stepfather. But
I've heard that story. I've heard that story too. Yeah,
I heard that story too, But no, she didn't have
a step bead. This is just one of many versions
(06:29):
of rumors that have been flying around town since Christina
went missing. The woman we talked to brought her mom over,
and her mom knew a lot. She said she was
in high school at the time and was part of
the search party. I just I remember searching the town.
It's heard that she didn't just go on door to
door selling something for school. Just we searched for days
(06:52):
and days and days and days. She mentioned another rumor
that I've heard a lot of that the reason she
believed someone in Christina's family did. This was because apparently
no water from the ditch where Christina's body was found
was found in her lungs. He had chlorinated, so it
had to have come from a bathtub or something there
about this led them to believe she had been drowned
in a bathtub and then taken out there and dumped.
(07:18):
This is one of those rumors we can shut down
right now because even though we didn't get the actual
autopsy report as part of the case file, we did
get some documents that refer to interviews with a medical
examiner and to forensic testing that was done on Christina's body.
The results of those tests showed that the water and
mud in Christina Pipkins's lungs matched the water from Cow
(07:39):
Lake Ditch, the body of water where she was found.
We also learned from the case file that Fammi Malick
did the autopsy because one of the investigators put a
report in the case file. He talked about meeting with
doctor Malick to discuss some of his conclusions. I've talked
a lot about doctor Malick's controversial history on previous podcasts.
(08:00):
He was the medical examiner in Arkansas who was found
to have botched hundreds of autopsies back in the eighties
and nineties. In fact, the time period when he did
Christina's autopsy was not long before he was forced into retirement.
But for the moment, until we're proven otherwise, we're going
to take the information that we get about the autopsy
(08:22):
at face value. Doctor Malik indicated there was obvious decomposition.
We knew she had been in the water for three days.
He also said there were no signs of strangulation. He
said he had X rayed Christina's body from the outside
and from the inside. He said he could find no
stab wounds, no obvious cuts of bruises, and there was
(08:44):
water and mud found in Christina's stomach, water that matched
the water from the ditch. Doctor Malik also found pickles
and carrots and Christina's stomach. We know that Christina ate
pot pie for lunch that day. We also know that
Elsie Lyles, her next door neighbor and sometimes a babysitter,
gave her a pickle as a snack at around four pm.
(09:06):
The report reads, quote Doctor Malik was emphatic he could
find no other cause of death other than drowning. End quote.
But it also says when given the supposition that one
could smother an individual to the point of unconscious and
then throw that person into the river, Doctor Mallet could
make no comment regarding this, but said that this was
(09:27):
a possibility. In other words, we can't tell from the
limited information we have whether Christina fell into the water
on her own or was thrown in there, or whether
she was conscious at the time, but we can rule
out the rumor that Christina was drowned at home and
then taken out to that site where she was dumped
by the way. Christina's father, James, and everyone else in
(09:49):
her family cooperated completely with investigators. James Pipkin took and
passed a light detector test that's part of the case file,
and he was cleared by law enforcement. I cannot imagine
the pain of losing a child and then after that
having people in town either think that you were involved
somehow or that you were hiding something. Plus James had
(10:12):
to go through the pain of being asked about his
marital problems issues he had had previously with his wife Frieda.
That must have also been a nightmare. But unfortunately, when
law enforcement is looking through someone's pattern of life, they
have to know the history of the family members. It's
all part of solving the puzzle. There have been some
(10:32):
other rumors in this town that refuse to die, so
we need to check them out so we can figure
out what to investigate further and what else to rule out.
We went to the place where Christina and her family
lived on Doughty Street. Okay, so this was the Bearcat
right where apparently everyone in town went that day. There's
the bank. The alle still runs behind the bank, so
(10:52):
this whole thing is tiny. Yeah. And there's the tracks
right there. Yeah. And then there's the little park school.
All that is back there. This house, no, that house,
this lot, this lot where there is no more house.
There's no house there now, just a vacant, overgrown lot
with a home next door. We have a couple of
(11:14):
goals here today. First of all, we want to take
a look at the place where Christina's house was on
Doty Street and the place where she was last seen,
the Bearcat grocery store. It's not there anymore now, it's
a tire shop. Denise is talking me through the streets
in Christina's neighborhood. So that was her house, and then
the house they were saying that the backed up on
(11:35):
her yard would have been that one over there. Maybe, well,
I think that's something different or is it destroyed now? Maybe?
Ye see how that's what I'm thinking, and those houses
might have been the same. But we see from the
case file that police talked to Christina's mom Frida and
father James. They discussed what they did on the day
Christina disappeared in a lot more detail than I've ever seen.
(11:57):
On Saturday, May fourth, Frida said it started out as
an ordinary Saturday. Frida went to the post office that
morning between nine thirty and ten. When she got home,
Christina and her brother Adam were watching cartoons. Frida said
she had some coffee with her neighbor Pat Moore. Then
Pat left. After a few minutes, Frida started cleaning and
doing laundry because Saturday was wash day. At around eleven
(12:21):
thirty or twelve, Freda warmed up some pop pies. They
ate the pop pies, and they had iced tea to drink.
After lunch, she was hanging clothes out on the line
when James came out and showed her a picture of
a used car he had been looking out in the
local magazine She and James took Christina and Adam and
they went to Walmart and went They bought a few
(12:41):
things there for the house. Then they went to Cherry Valley,
a town about fifteen miles east of Hickory Ridge. They
looked at the car, a blue Mustang that was parked
out in the seller's yard. They took a quick look
at the car, asked about the price, and left there
around one pm. At some point they stopped at Gaskin's
grocery store in vandal They bought some pork rines, and
(13:03):
apparently Christina had a few of the porkskins on the
ride home, but she didn't really eat a lot of
them because apparently they were a little bit pink and
she didn't love the taste. The family got back home,
Adam and James were hanging out watching TV. Christina played
with one of Frida's old makeup compacts that she had
found lying around. James was programming the VCR to tape
(13:25):
the movie The Hunt for Red October that was airing
that night. At some point, Christina asked her parents if
she could go door to door to sell her jewelry.
She headed out at around four thirty or five PM.
Now I should say that what's in the case file
differs from what we've read in the newspapers, because in
the newspapers it said she asked her dad, James, if
(13:46):
she could go out. He said no at first, then
said okay, but you have to be home before dark.
But in the case file, James said he believed that
Christina had asked her mother if she could go sell jewelry,
though he does mention the kids knew not to cross
over to the other side of the railroad tracks. At
around seven or seven thirty pm, Frieda realized she still
(14:08):
needed a few things from the store. She ran up
to the Bearcat Grocery, a couple of blocks from their house.
The bear Cat was next to the only bank in town,
Cross County Bank. The two businesses shared a parking lot.
At the store, Frida bought onions and gravy and potatoes
and mushrooms. She said she was only in there for
around five minutes and then she went right back home.
(14:30):
She started to make dinner to fry potatoes. At some
point it started to get dark, and that's when Christina's
parents realized that she hadn't made it home. Frida sent
Adam out to look for his sister. Pretty quickly, he
came back and said he couldn't find her. That's when
Frida said, quote, I had a gut feeling something was
not right. This is a mother's concern. I sent Adam
(14:53):
out to find Christina. When he came back and said
he couldn't find her, I knew something was wrong with
my baby girl. End quote. James and Frieda went around
the neighborhood. They went to some apartments near by where
Christina had been selling her jewelry in the days before
she went missing. They went to the Bearcat store, and
then they went back home in case Christina came back.
(15:15):
They called the police to report her missing, and the
search started. James said in his statement quote after the
police came, we started a house to house search. I
went to several houses and went back home to see
if anyone had found her. After my brother in law
got to the house, we went out searching. I kept
hoping she would show up. I did not believe this
(15:35):
was happening. I wondered what happened to her? Where could
she be? As we drove around looking for her, I
was hoping to see her walking. I thought if she
could just get away. I might see her on the road.
On Sunday we went searching some more. I didn't eat
because I couldn't eat, not knowing if my baby girl
had had anything to eat. I was wondering how she
was being treated. Was she cold? Was she hungry? I
(15:57):
kept hoping that whoever took her would let her go.
I kept looking up the street, hoping that I would
see her. I kept believing we would find her alive,
even if she was hurt. We could get help for that.
But when they told me they had found her and
she was dead, how do you describe how do you
feel when you find out your daughter is dead? Angry, hurt, confused?
(16:17):
I don't know how to describe it. End quote. I
don't know how many of you have ever seen the
movie rasham On, but it's something I think about a
lot when I'm doing an investigation. Now. In that movie,
there are three different people, and they're telling the story
of an assault and a murder. Each of them witnessed
this from their point of view. Everyone saw exactly the
(16:38):
same thing, but each person gives you a different piece
of the story. Each person has another piece of the puzzle.
It's the same thing with a murder investigation. We have
all these people who are present at the Bearcat convenience
store and the bank that afternoon. Each of them saw
a small slice of Christina's day, and we really need
to put all those multiple versions together. Now. Admittedly there's
(17:02):
a separate problem, which is that memory itself changed just
ever time, even if you have great recall, But we'll
get to that later. First, we need to get as
many points of view as possible to try and fill
in some of these holes on the timeline. So let's
go back to May fourth, nineteen ninety one, Christina is missing.
Over the next few days, police started talking to people, and,
(17:25):
as happens often in small towns, a few names got
thrown around. We noticed something else in the case file
that during this time, quite a few people also mentioned
they had seen a blue car with a man driving it,
one that was in the bank parking lot and hanging
around town in general around the time when Christina went missing.
That what we were about to find out was that
(17:47):
people had a lot of different descriptions of exactly what
that man and that vehicle looked like. We measured the
distance from where Christina was last seen to where she
was found. It was around three and a half miles
so I think police were right. She was almost certainly
driven to that location. So who drove her there? In
(18:08):
a town this small, it seems like somebody would have
to have seen something. We need to find that car.
We need to explore all of those suspects, figure out
exactly where everyone was on the day Christina went missing,
and also find out where this rumor about a blue
car started. One person the police talked to was the
(18:30):
Long family. They live right by Christina's house at two
eighty nine Doty Street. Michael Long, who was twenty six
at the time, said that he was home that Saturday
afternoon at around five pm. He said Christina stopped by
the house looking for his little sister, who was ten
Christina's age, presumably to go door to door jewelry selling
with her. His sister wasn't home, so Christina left. Michael
(18:53):
said he next saw Christina walking back south down Third Street.
Then he saw her turn west on Laurel Street toward
the Bearcat's door and the bank. Michael told police that
about five minutes after Ristina left, he went outside to
check a ditch for snakes. Then he said he walked
to the bear Cat for some cigarettes. When he came out,
(19:13):
he saw Christina walking behind the alley at Cross County Bank.
At that point, Michael said she was headed north. This
would have been at around five thirty pm. After that,
Michael said he didn't see her again. Another family that
lived next to the Pipkins were the Moors, Pat and Connie.
They had a blue car registered to them, a nineteen
(19:34):
seventy three Ford Maverick. On the day Christina went missing,
two friends of Theirs, Ricky Dawson and James the Sheers,
who were eighteen and twenty at the time, came by
the house at around four thirty. They were there to
pick up Ricky's girlfriend, Jenna Algood and her friend April Jones,
who were hanging out at the moorhouse. Ricky, James, and
the two young women left for a night out on
(19:55):
the town and Win, but before they left, Ricky said
he remembered seeing Christina outside on her porch. Next door.
Ricky Dawson was driving yet an other blue car, his
mom's blue Camaro with rust on the side. He said
that he, James, and the two girls went to Win
between five thirty and six thirty. He said they didn't
come back until around midnight. By that time, Christina was
(20:19):
missing and a bunch of people were already out looking
for her. So at that point, obviously things got pretty chaotic.
It was Saturday night. People were having barbecues, making plans,
going on dates, the sun was going down, and the
night was just starting. But I want to go back
to the timeline and mention a couple of other people
who told police they noticed things that were slightly out
(20:39):
of the ordinary, because obviously any event can have huge
significance when someone goes missing. On May seventh, police went
to the Hickory Ridge Elementary School and they interviewed several children.
They asked about a stranger that the kids had seen
around the time when Christina disappeared, but their descriptions were
(21:00):
completely inconsistent. The police report said there were numerous in
consistencies in the kid's stories, and so because of that,
the officer could not follow through on completing a composite drawing.
This doesn't surprise me because by the time those kids
were interviewed, it had been several days, and unfortunately, in
my opinion, what happened probably was that the kids talked
(21:21):
to each other over the weekend, so their stories took
on elements of each other's. This is not uncommon. So
seventy two hours have passed, the whole town's talking about
a kidnapping, and suddenly the mysterious stranger had gone from
a white man with tanned skin to a Native American
and quote Indian lookalike with high cheekbones and black hair. Now,
(21:43):
because Christina lived in Cross County but her body was
found across the county line in Jackson County, law enforcement
met and decided that Jackson County would assist, but that
the jurisdiction would stay in Cross County. Jackson County did
question some people, mainly guys who were arrested for other
things like dwi's, but police really seemed to have pretty
(22:04):
much zero leads and not much to go on. There
was another family, the Earls. They lived on Fourth Street,
close to Christina's house. Kim Earles said that on Saturday night,
just after midnight, she saw a young man in a
blue car, which she described as a late model Transam
or Camaro. She said it had one of those novelty
(22:25):
brake lights that glow neon around the license plate when
you put on the brakes. She said she saw that car,
which seems like it would be pretty memorable at a
McDonald's and win. She said the guy driving it was
dark complexion with tan skin, medium bill, dark eyebrows, and
that that person was around six foot two. Other people
said there was a guy named James Hannah who had
(22:46):
a car like that, but when police showed a picture
of James Hannah to the girls, they said they knew
James Hannah and this was not him driving the car.
They described the driver as dirty looking and said that
that person was a stranger to them. Kim said that
she had seen that same man, the one driving the
blue car with the light up brakes, around on Town
for the past few months. She said that this mystery
(23:08):
guy had been parked near the bank on Saturday. Her
and her sister Angela said that they believed that this
person had followed them to the tanning bed. Sharon and
Ricky Holloman had a daughter who was friends with Christina.
Sharon was another person who said she saw a blue
car that day. She said it was sportsy looking and
(23:29):
had primer or rest spots on it, and that it
was speeding on the side streets. Of Hickory Ridge on
Saturday afternoon. She described the driver as clean shaven, with
short hair and chubby cheeks. She said that she had
seen that same car several times a week, going over
to what she thought was the Pipkin residence. Sharon and
Ricky had a daughter, and their daughter was a friend
(23:49):
of Christina's. She actually saw Christina on the afternoon that
she disappeared, and she said she saw her with a
young boy that had gone to school with Christina. The
little girl said she didn't know the boy's name. She
said for some reason, the boy would hide behind trees
and Christina seen impatient, and that when this friend tried
to talk to Christina, finally, she said, the boy caught
(24:11):
up to Christina and started walking with her, and they
went off in the other direction. Christina's friend said the
last time she saw Christina, Christina was walking south on
the southbound shoulder of Highway forty nine in front of
the bear Cat Store, so between the Bearcat Grocery Store
and the post office. She said the blue car was
following Christina, driving slow, and that Christina was shaking her
(24:33):
head no to the person driving the car. She described
it as an older blue colored car with some type
of brownish rust colored stains or rust on the lower
portions of the car. The friend said that she rode
her bike around the bank one more time and that
by the time she got back to the road, she
could not see Christina or the car. The little girl
didn't know what time this was, but her mother said
(24:56):
they had only gotten back to their house at around
seven pm, so would have had to have been a
little bit after that. If that's true, then this little
girl may have been the last person and the case
for at least to have seen Christina alive. Christina Pipkins's
(25:16):
math teacher also said she saw Christina outside of the
bear Cat grocery that afternoon, and she said that Christina
was barefoot. This seems to solve another mystery because remember
we mentioned that Christina's mother said she was wearing white
sandals on the day she went missing, but her sandals
(25:37):
were not found with her body. But it seems like
Christina had already ditched her sandals because she was walking
around that parking lot barefoot, so it seems less likely
that her killer took them or that they slipped off
during some kind of struggle. I still wonder though where
are the sandals? But in my mind, if she was barefoot,
(25:58):
that means it's even less likely she would have made
that over three mile walk out to the area where
she was found. Another name that was mentioned in the
case file early on was Charles Cotton Junior. Charles Cotton
Junior has a criminal record, including charges for lewde acts
against a child. Now, Charles Cotton would later tell a
(26:20):
journalist in Juno, Alaska, where he was living, that that
was all mistake, that what happened was a child had
walked in on him and either his wife or girlfriend
having sex on a couch. That the whole thing was
blown out of proportion. That's what a lot of sex
offenders say. And the fact of the matter is Charles
Cotton did have a lengthy criminal record. At the time
when Christina went missing. Charles Cotton was married. According to
(26:43):
his wife, Rebecca Cotton, who was twenty one years old
at the time, the couple was living a little bit
out of town. But we've also been told by people
close to Christina's family that Charles Cotton was living right
next door. We're still trying to figure out his exact
location and movements at the time. We do know that
Charles Cotton was introduced to Christina's father, James, by their
next door neighbor, Pat Moore, So as far as I
(27:06):
can tell, Charles Cotton did spend some time at the Moorhouse.
That could potentially be why some people believe that Charles
was living next door. These guys all had completely different
physical descriptions. Robbie Tubbs was white with tan skin and
dark wavy hair that went down toward his shoulders. Charles
Cotton had blue eyes and blonde hair. We mentioned in
(27:28):
the last episode that after hair testing and the trial,
the charges against Robbie Tubbs were dropped. He walked away
a free man. His last known address is in Sulfur Spring, Texas,
but he's challenging to find. Charles Cotton is much easier
to find. He's in federal prison in Washington State. After
Christina's death, Charles Cotton got into some more issues with
(27:50):
the law and eventually he found love. In twenty eleven,
Charles reconnected with a woman named Penny. They actually grew
up together and they met while they were both students
and win high school back in the day. Back then.
They dated, but they broke up and they didn't see
each other for years. This time, though, once they reconnected
that relationship got serious. They got married and Penny moved
(28:14):
with Charles to Juneo, Alaska, but their fresh start did
not last long. In Juno, Charles Cotton started managing a
hotel called the Bergmann Hotel. It was a historic structure
that had become run down over the years. In twenty sixteen,
he took that dilapidated building that had become a hangout
for people doing drugs and other illegal things and said
(28:36):
he was going to turn it around. At one point,
he actually made local news as someone who had a
criminal record but was now a productive member of society.
Charles told the Juno Empire during that interview, quote I
come in and started getting the riff rafh out, started
getting the thieves and the drugs out. I run them
the hell off, and I'd do it any day of
the week end. Quote. So in this article, Charles was
(28:59):
described as this recovering addict who was kind of running
his own alternative to narcannon called Choices. So the idea
of the program was that Charles would get the addicts
to do work on the crumbling building and they would
get free room and board, but that good press did
not last because the city came in and they found
a ton of problems without building. There were toxins in
the water, exposed wires, and apparently no heat or hot water.
(29:23):
They slapped Charles with a fine, which he didn't pay.
At some point they condemned the building. The city evacuated it,
but Charles and his tenants refused to leave. It turned
out that he was selling drugs again. At some point
he had relapsed and gone from being a program for
recovering addicts to a drug den. Charles was hit with
a string of charges for distributing methamphetamine, and then on
(29:47):
September twenty seventh, twenty seventeen, his wife, Penny Cotton, was
found dead in a hotel room in Morris, Alaska. When
Penny Cotton was found dead, she had been shot in
the head. Her death was ruled a suicide, but her
family back in Arkansas told reporters at the Mid South
(30:08):
they did not believe that Penny would take her own life.
The medical examiner did not order an autopsy, but Penny's
family got some photos and they shared those photos of
Penny's body with local media. These photos apparently showed Penny
had been shot in the left side of the head,
but Penny's family pointed out she's right handed, so to
(30:28):
them that seemed to be impossible. In twenty seventeen, Charles
was hit with charges of distributing methamphetamine and was arrested
by the FBI. In twenty nineteen, Charles Cotton Junior and
his son, Ricky Staplear Lisk were both sentenced for drug charges.
Charles got ten years in prison, Ricky got five, and
Charles is in prison today. There was a comment on
(30:52):
Penny's obituary. It referred to her as being gangster and
to her helping Charles with his business, and it was
written by someone who had been in that building with
Penny and Charles, so obviously Penny knew a lot about
what Charles was getting up to. Could this have motivated
someone connected to him to take her life. Charles Cotton
Junior may have been involved in other legal activities, but
(31:14):
what about Christina Pipkin. Let's look at Charles Cotton's connection
to the Pipkin family. James Pipkin told investigators that he
was introduced to Charles Cotton through his neighbor Pat Moore,
but that before Christina went missing, he had never seen
or spoken to Charles in his life. Charles Cotton said
that on the day Christina disappeared, he was fishing with
(31:37):
a friend of his from around one thirty to five
thirty at an area called Bird Eye near Cherry Valley,
a small town a few miles from Hickory Ridge. Apparently,
Charles did stop by the Bearcat grocery store at some
point on Saturday. Now, he said he didn't remember doing that,
but a friend of his saw him there, and he
mentions that in his discussion with investigators. He said that
(31:58):
after he was finished fishing, he went home and watched
TV with his wife, Rebecca, and the rest of his family.
At around ten thirty, he said, a friend of his name,
Neil Long, came by and asked if anyone had seen
Christina Pipkin. That's when he said he found out Christina
was missing. Charles said at that point he went out
and borrowed a friend's three wheeler and started searching for her.
(32:21):
By the way. Charles drove a seventy four light blue
Dodge Charger at the time, yet another blue car. I
have questions about Charles Cotton, mainly because reading through this
case file, it seems like he was inserting himself into
the investigation a lot. We know from James Pipkin's statement
that Charles was very involved in the search for Christina.
(32:41):
He kept looking constantly until she was found. Apparently, Charles
even borrowed two hundred and twenty five dollars from James Pipkin.
He claimed he had to pay a fine because he
hadn't had time to go pay it. He'd been out
looking for Christina and missed his chance. So James Pipkin
felt sorry for him and gave him the money, which,
of course James Pipkin never got back. Now, this could
(33:02):
have been totally innocuous. This was a big story. This
is a low girl. But the Pipkin family had only
lived in Hickory Ridge for about four months at that point. Charles,
Cotton and some other people seem to be getting very
close to the family in that time. I wondered about this,
and Amy and I made a few more stops. We
were looking for old newspapers and we found one from
(33:24):
the week when Christina's body was found. We were shocked
when we saw Christina's obituary and there was a detail
that had not been online the names of pallbearers, and
one of those pallbearers at Christina's funeral was Charles Cotton.
This seems very odd to me. Again, could be totally innocent,
(33:45):
could be just someone doing a kindness for a neighbor.
But why would someone who didn't know James at all
suddenly be super involved in the search, then borrow money
from James, and then show up as a pallbearer. Again,
though that's all circumstantial, we have to go back to
the place and time where Christina was last seen in
and around the bear Cac grocery store in the Bank
(34:06):
parking lot. Even though there are a lot of disparate reports. Actually,
what we're finding out is that Christina went missing in
a pretty small window of time, and we see something
else in the case file that could potentially help police
talk to the four people who were working inside the
Bearcat grocery store that day. Now, three of the employees
(34:28):
had either left or were otherwise occupied when Christina was around,
but one person, the cashier, got a very good look
at a stranger, someone who came into the store at
around the same time as Christina was there, someone who
she said no one in the store recognized. I wanted
to find this cashier because in the whole case file,
(34:50):
she was the only one who had a definite and
good description of a potential suspect, who had been close
to the unknown stranger and actually seen a detailed view
of their face. I will not say exactly how we
did it, and I won't use her name because I
know that this person is very nervous, but we found her,
(35:11):
and I'm putting this information out there because number one,
this case file is public. These names are part of
the public record, and also, most importantly, I believe this
information is critical to solving this case. We asked the
cashier about what she had seen that day before we
showed her her police statement, by the way, which she'd
(35:31):
never seen. In her statement, the cashier said she was
working at the Bearcat grocery store on Saturday, May fourth,
nineteen ninety one. She said, at about five forty five pm,
an individual a stranger, came in and bought some cigarettes.
In her statement to police, the officer who interviewed the
cashier noted she said that the stranger drove a mid
(35:53):
or late seventies model Oldsmobile four door and it looked
blue gray in color. In a statement, she said the
stranger pulled in heading north. The statement reads quote she
saw him on the side walk looking north and south
and making a U turn and went south. Quote. The
statement described the stranger as a white male, mid thirties,
five foot nine and around one hundred and forty five pounds,
(36:16):
hair dark brown, almost reddish in color, clean hair almost
shoulder length, not curly, almost straight. She further stated he
had a mustache and that his hair was cupped around
his face, which was thin. She said he wasn't wearing
glasses or a hat. He had on older jeans and
bell Crow type tennis shoes with a gray T shirt
(36:36):
underneath an older shirt that was short sleeved. She said
no tattoos were visible. In her statement, she said the stranger,
who was white but had tan skin, looked like Richard Gear,
that he bought cigarettes and left, and that he stared
at her. The police report was very brief, but when
we talked to the cashier, she gave us a lot
(36:56):
of details that were not in the police report. Again,
it's important to note that we asked her about her
memories before we showed her her own. Most of the
police statement match which she told us, but there were
some very important differences. First of all, she said she
got a very good look at the stranger's car, and
(37:17):
she emphatically said it was brown or tan in color,
not blue. Also, when you read the police report, it
kind of makes it sound like the stranger was standing
on the sidewalk. She clarified what she meant. She said
he pulled his car all the way up on the sidewalk.
In fact, he pulled it so far up that he
had to get out on the passenger side, and she
remembers looking out the window at that car because that
(37:38):
was annoying. She described the car as dirty, but definitely
brown or tan. And she clarified when she said the
stranger looked like Richard Gear, she was really talking about
the distinctive nose shape and eyes. She said. The stranger
walked into the store and bought Marlboro Reds in the
hard pack. Then he asked if she had some matches.
(37:58):
She said, yes, sir, we do, and gave him some
of the freebie matches. Then he left, and because he
had parked so close to the building up on that sidewalk,
he had to get in through the passenger side of
the car and shift over to the driver's side. She
said he was alone. He drove away and she never
saw him again. The next page after the cashier's statement
(38:20):
in the case file is a page that explains that
a sketch artist met with her. They developed a composite photo,
and that the completed composite would be made part of
the case file. But the photo copy of the composite
drawing is not there as far as I can tell.
I don't know if the police just aren't including it,
or if it's not in the case file at all anymore.
(38:42):
I asked the cashier about it, and she remembered that
image very clearly. She said she might still have a
copy and said she would go home to look in
her safe. Then she texted me and said she found it.
She had the original composite photo. It had been sitting
in her safe for over thirty years. We showed her
(39:02):
some pictures of the people who were mentioned by police
back in the day, including Charles Cotton, but she says
that was not the stranger she waited on. Then Amy
shows her an old picture of Robbie Tubbs, her father
in law. The cashier blinked looked shocked and said, who
(39:24):
is this? How did you get this? We asked her
if she believed that was the man she saw in
the bear Cat that day. Later, we texted her a
couple more pictures from that era. She texted me back,
I got cold chills. I think this is the man
who was in the store that day. I know that
(39:45):
IDs are not definitive proof of anything. Often people are wrong,
and even if Robbie Tubbs was in town that day,
that does not mean he had anything to do with
Christina's death. But I do find it interesting that the
description of the car was different from the one in
the case file, and that the cashier seems so haunted
(40:07):
by looking at the image of Robbie Tubbs next two
that drawing she has had in her say for the
past thirty years. I know positive ideas are not definitive proof,
but it means we need to keep digging. I'm Catherine Townsend.
This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line
(40:28):
is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced
by Gabby Watts. Music contributed by Ben so Lee executive
producers of Virginia Prescott Brandon Barr, and Helsey Crowley. If
you have a case you'd like me and my team
to look into, you can reach out to us at
our Helen Gone Murder line at six seven eight seven
(40:49):
four four six ' one four five. That's six seven
eight seven four four six ' one four or five.
Please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you listen
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