Christie Mullins

Right now In true crime: Donna Adelson trial update, Menendez brothers parole update, parents of Emmanuel Haro arrested. 

In August 1985 in Columbus, Ohio 14 year-old Christie Mullins had her life taken in a horrific way. What seem to be a pretty cut and dry open and shut case turned into a decades long answer for the truth. We are going to chat about it all and unpack Christie’s case from start to finish. 


Sources for episode: 

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/crime/2015/11/06/police-man-who-claimed-to/987555007/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Christie_Lynn_Mullins
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/81870569/christie_lynn-mullins/photo
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/teen-murder-lying-eyewitnesses-wrong-160000899.html
Ebook: https://books.google.com/books/about/An_All_American_Murder.html?id=HrQlAwAAQBAJ

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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

(00:20):
up some cold cases.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Let's go.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Hey, guys, welcome to this week's episode of Primetime Crime.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
It's Kylie.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
So let's talk right now in true crime.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
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,

(01:16):
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

(01:37):
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

(01:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
When I made the recording.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
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,

(02:48):
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

(03:09):
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.

(03:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
On her own. It is just horrible.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
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

(04:12):
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

(04:32):
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

(04:53):
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

(05:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
There's reports that when.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
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

(05:47):
mind would ever harm a helpless.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Child, but I know that it happens.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
And Jake showed a pattern of this behavior and that
was a pretty good indicator that he was a horrific
human and needed to.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Be locked up for the rest of his life.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
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,

(06:23):
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

(06:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
That is my personal opinion.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
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

(07:24):
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,

(07:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Speak with his parents.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
They didn't seem like they.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
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,

(08:36):
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

(09:00):
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

(09:20):
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

(09:43):
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

(10:04):
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

(10:26):
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

(10:50):
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

(11:11):
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

(11:35):
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

(11:56):
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

(12:18):
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

(12:39):
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.

(13:00):
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.

(13:23):
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

(13:43):
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

(14:04):
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

(14:27):
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

(14:50):
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

(15:11):
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,

(15:32):
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

(15:53):
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

(16:14):
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.

(16:37):
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

(16:57):
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

(17:19):
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

(17:43):
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

(18:07):
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

(18:28):
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

(18:51):
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.

(19:12):
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

(19:35):
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

(19:57):
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

(20:19):
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

(20:40):
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,

(21:02):
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

(21:23):
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,

(21:45):
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

(22:05):
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

(22:26):
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

(22:47):
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

(23:10):
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

(23:31):
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

(23:55):
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,

(24:15):
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

(24:38):
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,

(25:00):
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

(25:22):
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

(25:44):
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

(26:05):
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

(26:29):
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

(26:51):
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,

(27:12):
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

(27:32):
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

(27:55):
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

(28:15):
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

(28:38):
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

(29:00):
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.

(29:24):
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

(29:48):
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

(30:10):
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

(30:33):
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

(30:55):
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

(31:15):
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

(31:36):
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

(31:59):
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

(32:22):
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

(32:45):
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

(33:08):
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

(33:29):
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

(33:53):
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.

(34:17):
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,

(34:41):
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,

(35:02):
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

(35:25):
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

(35:46):
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

(36:08):
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

(36:30):
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,

(36:52):
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

(37:14):
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,

(37:37):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:24):
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

(38:46):
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.

(39:07):
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

(39:29):
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

(39:50):
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

(40:12):
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

(40:32):
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

(40:52):
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

(41:13):
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.

(41:35):
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

(41:57):
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,

(42:18):
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

(42:42):
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

(43:05):
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.

(43:26):
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

(43:49):
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

(44:09):
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

(44:32):
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

(44:53):
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,

(45:13):
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

(45:34):
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

(45:55):
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

(46:16):
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,

(46:39):
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.

(47:01):
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

(47:21):
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

(47:42):
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

(48:02):
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

(48:23):
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

(48:44):
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

(49:07):
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

(49:28):
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

(49:51):
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

(50:12):
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

(50:32):
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,

(50:56):
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,

(51:20):
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

(51:43):
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

(52:06):
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

(52:27):
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

(52:48):
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

(53:11):
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

(53:36):
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

(54:00):
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

(54:22):
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

(54:45):
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

(55:07):
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

(55:30):
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

(55:51):
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

(56:12):
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

(56:33):
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,

(56:56):
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.

(57:17):
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

(57:40):
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.

(58:01):
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

(58:23):
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

(58:43):
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

(59:05):
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

(59:30):
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,

(59:50):
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.

(01:00:11):
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

(01:00:35):
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

(01:00:56):
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

(01:01:17):
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

(01:01:37):
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.