The views and opinions expressed in Cold and Missing are exclusively those of the hosts. All parties mentioned are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Cold and Missing also contains adult themes and languages. Listener discretion is advised. I'm your host, Ali McLaughlin -Sulkowski. And I'm your co -host, Eli Sulkowski. And this is Cold and Missing, where we cover cold cases and missing person cases. Hello everyone and welcome back to Cold and Missing. I'm your
host Ali. And I'm your co -host Eli. Welcome back everyone. Just want to say another quick thank you at the top to Ginger who last week bought us a coffee on the buy us a coffee page. All of the money that's donated to us through that link just goes right back into this podcast. So thank you again to Ginger. Yeah, it means a lot to us that Our listeners are, you know, of course, willing to support in any way that they can. But, you know, in this way, it pushes
the podcast in a specific way. And it's really nice. So thank you so much. But with that, I think we can just jump into this episode. We are on episode 127 this week. Yep. And we are on a cold case. Let's get into it. So just as a quick content warning at the top, this case does involve a young person, and there are some brief mentions of sexual assault and domestic violence. Today, we are talking about the cold case of Christina Pipkin, and this takes place
in May of 1991 in Hickory Ridge, Arkansas. But first, a little bit about Christina. Christina is nine years old in 1991. She is a fourth grader at Hickory Ridge Elementary School, where she is a talkative young girl and a good student. She liked to color, read, and write poetry and gospel songs. Her mother, Frida, says, quote, She's got a lot of interests, and she's just as smart as she can be. She wrote a song called I Love You, and when she started singing it,
it sounded like about a person. In the end, it was about the Lord. End quote. Christina and her family had just moved to the little town of Hickory Ridge a few months before the timeline starts. The town is small. It has a population of less than 500 people. The mayor of Hickory Ridge is also the fire chief, the plumbing inspector, and the water operator for the town, just to kind of paint a picture for you. Christina is tall for her age. She stands at 4 '9 and weighs
about 80 pounds. She has short brown hair and brown eyes. And now a timeline of events. On Saturday, May 4th, 1991. So it's unclear exactly what Christina was getting up to on this Saturday. But what we do know is that between 4 .30 and 5 p .m., she asks her parents if she can go out and go door -to -door to try to sell some stuff for her school's fundraiser. The students were tasked with selling costume jewelry in order
to raise funds for the school. Christina gets permission but is told to be back before it gets dark. Christina is wearing shorts and a t -shirt that said Desert Storm on it, along with Hickory Ridge Elementary School. It had a logo of Arkansas, the American flag, and Kuwait on it. She's wearing white sandals and has red yarn bracelets on her ankle and wrist. She's also carrying a pencil and the order form with her as she walks around
town. At the time of reporting in 1991, the last confirmed sighting of Christina is around 6 .30 p .m. She was taking an order from a woman about two blocks away from her home, but she was near Arkansas 49 when she was last spotted, which was a busy road that had a lot of through traffic. However, in recent years, some more details have
come out around the last time she was seen. Multiple children interviewed by police said that they had seen a stranger in town driving a light blue car and had been seen near the grocery store on the day that Christina went missing. Most kids reported the man driving the light blue car as white, having long, messy hair and high cheekbones. One of the child witnesses said that they saw the car slowly following Christina as
she was walking near the grocery store. They said that Christina was shaking her head no at the car. A cashier at the grocery store told police that the day Christina went missing, a stranger came in with long dark hair and a mustache to buy cigarettes around 5 .45 p .m., about 45 minutes before Christina was last seen at 6 .30. As it gets darker and darker outside, Christina's parents begin to worry when she doesn't come back. She had never stayed out late before. They
start looking for her around 8 p .m. Her parents go door to door, asking if anyone had seen her. No one had seen her recently, though lots of folks do say that they had seen her walking around earlier. Finally, at around 8 .53 p .m., Christina's parents call police to report her missing. The town is so small that they don't have a police force themselves, but the county sheriff shows
up and takes the search seriously. The town's emergency alarm is sounded, and by 9 .30, more than 250 volunteers had showed up to help search. That's over half the town. Nobody thinks this is a runaway situation. People search through the night for Christina, but they don't find any sign of her. The next day, Sunday, May 5th, another massive search is launched as the day breaks. People are searching on foot, horseback, ATV, helicopters, and airplanes looking for any
sign of the little girl. With each passing hour, the search gets more and more desperate. Investigators say, quote, it's getting past the time when she may have stayed all night with a friend and didn't call her parents. It has the appearance of an abduction, end quote. By Monday, so Christina has been missing since Saturday night, the FBI joins the search for the missing girl, and searches continue throughout Monday and into the next
day, Tuesday, May 7th. Christina has been missing for three days now when the search comes to an end. In the evening hours, just over the border into the next county, about four miles from where Christina was last seen, A man and his sons are walking down to a nearby bridge to check on the water levels. The bridge went over Cow Lake Ditch, a water ditch that runs for miles in between fields of crops. At this time in 1991, the water was about nine feet deep, but it did fluctuate.
When the man and his sons get to the bridge, one of the sons notices something in the water. The man goes down and realizes what he's looking at. He brings his sons home as quickly as he can so he can call the police. When police arrive, they find the body of Christina in the water. Her body is fully clothed, but her white sandals are missing. Also missing is the pencil and order form that she had been carrying. Cross County Sheriff Ronnie Huey says, quote, we haven't a
clue as to what happened. There's nothing that we can even build a theory on yet, end quote. There are no obvious signs of trauma to her body, according to police. No bruising, cuts, scrapes. Police say that they will need to wait for the autopsy before commenting on a cause of death. However, police immediately begin to treat the death as foul play. The next day, Wednesday, May 8th, Christina's autopsy is conducted. Her
cause of death is labeled as drowning. and the autopsy confirms that she had not been sexually assaulted. Police do believe that she died where she entered the water, and she likely died on Saturday, the day that she went missing. Police still believe that foul play is involved. They point to her missing shoes, and they don't believe that she could have walked four miles without
anyone else seeing her on the busy road. Police say, quote, We're going to keep scratching and digging, trying to get that one clue that will get us started. You just keep on keeping on. Someone is going to remember something or we're going to kick something over. End quote. Christina's parents support this. Christina couldn't swim. There would have been no reason for her to walk
so far out of town to go swimming. And, when they did go swimming, she would only splash around on the shallow end because she didn't like going where she couldn't touch the bottom. Police spend all day searching the area where she was found for additional clues. Divers are sent into the water, but nothing further is recovered. Her shoes are never found, and neither is the pencil she was carrying or the order form. On Friday, May 10th, just shy of one week since she was
last seen, Christina is laid to rest. Police still have zero leads in the case. They have talked to a few people, but no one has emerged as a real person of interest or a suspect. Both of Christina's parents will be questioned by both the police and the FBI, and both of them will be cleared of any suspicion. The case very quickly goes cold. Over the next few years, other children will go missing and either are never
recovered or they're found murdered. This includes the murder of Michael Moore, Steve Branch, and Christopher Byers that resulted in the arrest of the West Memphis Three. Police don't think any of these cases are related, but it is happening a lot. In June of 1995, so it's been over four years since the death of Christina, and police are just as convinced today as they were the day they found her that foul play is involved. repeating that she did not get there by herself.
Someone took her out where she was found. The case has been reviewed by other detectives over the years, retired detectives and freelance detectives, but nothing new has ever surfaced from this, and no new leads have come to police. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, in November of 1999, so it's been over eight years since the murder, and police make an arrest in the case. They say that they have new forensic information that results in the arrest of Robbie Tubbs for Christina's murder.
Tubbs first came to police's attention when his late wife told police that when Christina was still missing, before her body was found, Tubbs was watching the news coverage and said that no one would find the girl because there are too many ditches for the girl to drown in. and days later, Christina was found in a ditch, drowned. She also told police that he had tied her up and beat her when she threatened to tell the
police of what he had done. Police say that they found a hair in Tubbs' 1980 AMC Eagle sedan. The hair was found on the right front passenger side. Police collected the sample about seven months after the murder. Police are not able to arrest him in 1991 because they don't have testing to prove that the hair was Christina's. But with advances in DNA technology over the years, police say that they have been able to confirm that the hair found in his car belonged
to Christina. Tubbs is arrested and pleads not guilty to the crime. And in April of 2000, nearly nine years after the murder, the trial starts. The state is seeking the death penalty in this case. However, almost as quickly as the trial starts, it stops. It's revealed by Tubbs' defense team that the hair in question, the one found in his car, was never actually tested by the FBI. There had been a mix -up in the samples, and the FBI had tested known samples of Christina's
hair. So of course those came back as a match for her DNA. So the court delays the trial for two months so the FBI can test the strand found in the car, the correct sample. Within weeks though, the FBI reports that the hair sample from the car is not a good enough sample for them to be able to get a DNA profile from. Therefore, they can't prove that it's Christina's. Tubbs' late wife also can't testify and her testimony
is not admitted into court. She can't testify because she was murdered two years to the day after Christina in a burglary that had gone wrong. Tubbs had been cleared of any involvement in his late wife's murder. So without these two pieces of critical evidence, the prosecutors are forced to drop all the charges. The prosecutor doesn't have enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt and certainly prove a death case with what evidence he has left after those
two things are taken out. The evidence that is left is really just contradicting stories in how the hair could have ended up in his car. Investigators say that they don't plan to reinvestigate the case and Tubbs can't be charged again in this case because of double jeopardy. After this, the case really goes cold until about 2023 when another podcast, Hell Gone Cold, covers this case. And it brings up a lot of media attention.
And there are some new details released. And that's when we get the details about the children seeing a suspicious figure in town the day that Christina went missing. But other than that, there are really no new developments in Christina's case. So with that, if you know anything about the murder of Christina Pipkin in 1991, please call the Arkansas State Police at 501 -618 -8420.
So that is the case of Christina Pipkin. I loved hearing the detail about Christina and that she was chatty at school and just the way... people spoke about her. And we've said this before when we've covered cold cases involving children, but it's just really heartbreaking to learn about their budding personalities and the way that they're just squashed out of existence. I don't know. As always, these are... The most difficult cases for me to listen to, but I'm so grateful
that we cover them. And just more about Christina, she sounded just like a little ray of sunshine. Yeah, the detail of Christina writing poetry and writing gospel songs, there's something about a child that writes worship music that is just so endearing. You know, whatever kind of worship music it is, it's just... There's something very innocent and pure about it. And yeah, I think that just kind of sums up Christina, you know.
Yeah. And the things that she was doing in her young life, which kind of brings us into this into the timeline, which is, you know, doing her little sales thing in the neighborhood. I definitely remember this happening in my neighborhood with fundraising stuff. little pizza kits and stuff. I remember this being a very normal thing in the 90s. So when you introduced that that's what she was doing, I immediately understood kind of her navigating of the local neighborhood.
It was a space that she knew. Definitely. And just as a side note, you know, after Christina's murder, the county, the school district banned door -to -door sales as fundraisers for children after this they didn't want kids doing it anymore and you know when I was growing up I don't think my school officially had anything like this we had other kinds of fundraisers but never anything that we were supposed to go door -to -door for but I did have that kind of fundraising for like
um like my dance squad stuff so it was something that was still happening a lot in the 90s but I don't think it's happening I wanted to ask a more specific question about this part of the timeline. I didn't catch when you said that she asked her parents to go out. What was that time window? So she left her parents' house between 4 .30 and 5 p .m. and was last seen at around 6 .30 p .m. So this was, you know, perceivably
daylight. For the most part. Yeah, it would have been the early evening hours, but the beginning of May. So the days are getting longer every day at this point in the year. When you were speaking about her route and mentioning through lanes or through traffic, is that just like concentrated areas where lots of people are crossing from like different towns or cities? Yeah, she was
the last seen. I believe near Arkansas 49. And so this is like a highway country road and it kind of links some major cities and it runs right through the small town of Hickory Ridge. So there's usually a lot of just traffic on this road as people kind of go from one city to the next. Thank you. I think I had, you know, a loose understanding, but that definitely clarifies things, which, you know, brings me to what you spoke about next,
which is. This man, this creepy mystery guy with the mustache, he also buys the cigarettes, right? Yeah, the grocery store clerk said that she sold cigarettes to a strange man that matched the children's description of the man that they saw around 4 .45 p .m. You know, you bringing up the grocery store clerk. I feel like I can't not mention the community here and the unwavering support that this family received in search of Christina. And, you know, I was kind of impressed
at how law enforcement showed up as well. A tiny, you know, a small community, but very mighty. The love is clearly there. Yeah, the town definitely showed up for Christina and searched for them. I will say this, and I didn't mention it in the timeline, but just since you mentioned it, the small town of Hickory Ridge did fall into some small town traps of, you know, rumor mills. And the town eventually was like pretty vicious towards
Christina's parents. And they ended up moving just months after they buried her because they couldn't take. the rumors or people saying they weren't acting right or a lot of townsfolk were upset that the family had used funds that were raised for a headstone, but the family had used it on other expenses at the time. So, you know, the police had to kind of come out again and again and say that her parents were not involved because people wouldn't stop speculating and
spreading rumors that they were. That's so sad and so unfortunate that there was another side to the same coin. But, you know, with a tragedy like this, rocking a community, you know, I think it can change people as well. So I, you know, that's devastating to hear because her parents absolutely deserve peace. More just like about the community in general and that, you know, it is the size of 500 people. Is it common knowledge that there are small bodies of water in this
area to outsiders of the community? I was just curious about that. Would someone have had to have known that that small ditch or body of water was there to bring her there? No, that's a good question. Where she was found, police theorized that she would have been dropped right from the road over. So anyone driving along the road would
have seen this water underneath. But again, and we'll have pictures of this on our Instagram of where her body was found, because I just want to emphasize that this, and I get why police truly believe foul play was suspected here, because this is not like a swimming spot. It's, you know, it's off. a highway, runs underneath it. If you're from the Midwest, you drive and do a long drive, you see this type of water all over the place. And you never see people swimming, you never
see people fishing. So this water just, it's not a place that a child who didn't know how to swim, I think, would be tempted to go swimming. And furthermore, on top of that, when I was looking at the maps and the Fastest way, point A to B, where she was last seen to where her body was found. If she had walked there along the road, there were other water spots. There was other places to enter the water if that's what she
wanted to do. So the fact that all these other opportunities were missed and like went even farther out, I think that is very suspicious. And I definitely see how police believe that it was foul play involved. Yeah, I mean, there's not really any part of me that thinks otherwise. I have a few questions about Robbie Tubbs, just to bring him up briefly. What do you make of this connection? I mean, I know he, Double Jeopardy, because I didn't know, I don't know, I don't
know who he is. I wasn't writing a lot of questions. I was just listening to you. And I just wanted to circle back on kind of what happened here with him. Yeah, it's Tubbs. He's not an upstanding member of the community outside of this. Later, you know, robbery charges will be brought against him. And he'll also, I believe, admit that of like having sexual relations with a teenager. So, you know, overall, not a great guy. But I don't know really what to make of this. You know,
the hair is really small evidence. Like, I, that's just having a hair kind of connect you to something. That's a lot for a death penalty case, for sure. So, like, I definitely have doubts about it, but I'm also suspicious. You know what I mean? So it's like, I'm suspicious of this person. And, you know, he did have some contradicting stories. That Christina went missing. He was out of town staying at a hotel, but the hotel
had no records of him that weekend. So he is caught in some lies there, but not enough to prove a capital murder case. Well, even though there's, you know, limited information in Christina's case, I was glad to hear that, you know, another podcast had covered this and there was a moment like a blip where there was energy around her case again. And I hope that that happens here with you sharing her timeline with us and kind of connecting some dots and providing updates.
I feel it's kind of painful to say this or admit this. I feel lost thinking about this case because, yeah, there's a lot of speculation, but I think because it happened in her town and so close to home. My mind has a very difficult time trying to pin anyone down for this. I'm so glad that you brought it to Cold and Missing. Yeah, it's hard to kind of point any way. You know, the only people truly cleared are her parents, and she has a brother. You know, her family has all
been cleared in the case. But outside of that, it's really hard to figure out what happened here. She just... Really vanished, it seems like. And then she was found a few days later with no other marks. You know, I had wondered if, you know, if there was anything else on her body that gave police an indication of foul play. But it does just seem like her cause of death was drowning. And police had theorized, you know, around the time of the trial that perhaps she
had been suffocated before. being put in the water. But that was never proved. You know, nobody testified that that's what happened. It's just kind of what police theorized in the media. You know, I do hope that there is continued momentum around Christina's case. And, you know, I, I realized that, you know, there's this double jeopardy. That's what the papers I'm not a legal expert. I'm not a lawyer. So I don't know if there's a legal loophole that would ever be able
to bring charges against him again. But You know, even just getting concrete answers for her family and just knowing beyond a reasonable doubt what happened to Christina, I think would go a long way for the community to provide answers and to give some healing to everybody that knew her, just exactly what happened to her. And so I hope police continue to work the case and put resources
towards the case. But again, if you know anything about the murder of Christina Pipkin in May of 1991, please call the Arkansas State Police at 501 -618 -8420. And like I mentioned earlier, we will have pictures of Christina on our Instagram, but we'll also have a picture of the area where her body was found just to kind of give you an
idea. There's nothing graphic in the photo. It's just kind of an image of the bridge just to give an image to the site and why it does seem very, very strange that a child would wander there to go swimming and why foul play is suspected here. So those will be on our Instagram at coldandmissing. Thank you again to everyone who's rated and reviewed us. I did see some new wonderful reviews come in this week. So thank you so much. You know, again, it just kind of feeds the algorithm machine
and kind reviews feed it even more. So if you have the time to leave us a written review, it goes such a long way in getting this podcast in front of other people. And it gets these cases in front of other people, which is really the goal here at Cold and Missing. This isn't for fame or money or anything like that. It's really just to get these cases out in front of people and to get people talking about these cases.
And if you want to see other cases that we have covered, or if you need a transcript to follow along because you or someone you love is hard of hearing, you can find those at our website, www .coldandmissing .com, where you can also leave us a review. Or if you want to donate like our friend Ginger did, you can find the link to the Buy Me a Coffee on our website. But that is all I have for you this week. Thank you so much for listening to Cold and Missing. I'm your
host, Ali. And I'm your co -host, Eli. Have a good week and stay safe, y 'all. Stay safe, y 'all.