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investigative reporter in Mississippi. He works for a non-profit But before that, He was at the Clarion Ledger, the state's biggest newspaper, for more than 30 years. Jerry's written a lot of big stories, but he's probably best known for his work in reopening cold cases from the civil rights era. One of those cases was the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Jerry's reporting resulted in the killer being re-prosecuted and sent to prison 30 years after the crime occurred.
Jerry also wrote about the Birmingham church bombing, in which four little girls were killed. He tracked down and interviewed the last living suspect, a former member of the KKK who had allegedly planted the bomb. Jerry's stories helped secure his conviction at age 71. Jerry's role in these cases brought him national attention. People from across the country began calling, hoping he could solve a cold case in their city or town.
But his beat was Mississippi, and he turned most of them down. Then, in the spring of 2012, Jerry got a tip that piqued his interest. I got a telephone call from this woman who said, would you be interested in writing about a serial killer living in Mississippi? And I said, yes, absolutely. The woman's name was Mary Rose. The story concerned her daughter, Annette, and a man that she'd been married to years before, named Felix Vale.
So we kind of talked back and forth. And then at some point, I asked for the five minute version of this because it was a little bit confusing. And so I said, give me the five minute version of this. And she did. And then I understood it. The gist of the story was this. Back in 1962, Felix Vale had been married to a woman who mysteriously drowned in the Calcasieu River in southwest Louisiana. Eleven years later, a girlfriend of his disappeared.
Then, Felix married Mary Rose's daughter, Annette. And in 1984, Annette too vanished, allegedly after a road trip they took through the Midwest. Mary Rose never saw her again. Felix, however, was still around and living on his family's property in Mississippi. So she told me this whole story. I'm like, well, this is wild. And so she told me she wanted to go confront Felix. And I'm like, well, I want to be there with you.
A few weeks later, Mary Rose flew down to Mississippi. After meeting Jerry and Jackson, they drove out to a tiny rural community in the northeastern part of the state called Montpelier. And so we went there. She knew where he lived. We pulled up. The gate's locked. So she hopped over the gate. So I followed her. And we walked down this little dirt road. I swear it seemed like the weeds were 10 feet tall. It was very creepy. And we finally get to this clearing.
And there's like an Airstream trailer. And she goes and knocks on the door. No answer. Mary Rose circled the trailer to see if Felix was inside Jerry meanwhile scoped out the rest of the property When he came back, he discovered that Mary Rose had pried open one of the trailer's windows and crawled inside. Then she opened the front door so I could see and I wasn't going to step in the trailer. I didn't want to be accused of trespassing.
So she opened the door and she started rummaging around. Next thing I know she threw out a machete and clinked on the floor. And then another machete. and then all these soar What have I gotten myself into? I'm Judd Lipinski. This has gone south. After Mary Rose threw Felix Vale's collection of machetes and swords out of his trailer, she spotted a box full of journals on the floor. She was tempted to read them, but Jerry advised against it.
He was concerned Felix might pull up at any moment, and that he wouldn't appreciate two intruders rummaging through his stuff. They waited for another hour or so, but Felix never showed. Mary Rose placed the machetes and swords back in the trailer, and the two of them drove back to Jackson. On the way, Mary Rose showed Jerry some materials that she'd compiled. It turned out
She had about an inch and a half thick folder. It was full of like documents and different things that she had collected. She had been very much her own investigator. She had newspaper articles mainly and things like that, and had some documents involving her own daughter. But one document that stuck out to Jerry wasn't about her daughter. It was about Felix Vale's first wife, the one who had mysteriously drowned back in 1962.
The document was an autopsy report. It noted that there were bruises on the back of his wife's head and that a scarf had been lodged four inches down her throat. The pathologist had ruled the death an accidental drowning. But that's not what it looked like to Jerry. Jerry had helped to solve multiple cold cases from the 1960s in which the perpetrators were still alive. After seeing the autopsy report, He began to think that maybe he could solve this one too.
There were obvious challenges. The civil rights era cold cases Jerry worked on happened in a specific place and time. The Felix Vale story spanned 50 years and multiple states. Plus, two of Felix's alleged victims had never been found. Jerry knew it was almost impossible to prove a murder without a body. But Jerry was inspired by Mary Rose's tenacity. He decided to start reporting and see where it led.
As Mary Rose told Jerry, Felix Vale first appeared in her life almost exactly 30 years earlier, back in the summer of 1982. She and Annette, who had just graduated from high school, were living together in a small house in Tulsa. Annette's father had died years before in a car crash and Mary Rose had raised her as a single mom. Annette was 17 at the time, but according to Mary Rose, she seemed a lot older than that.
She was extremely wise for her age. She had so much integrity. She was very well liked. My friends all adored her. She was so mature, you know, my friends became her friends. Mary Rose had a net when she was just 17 herself. People often mistook the two of them for sisters, and Annette often treated her mother like one.
I had multiple relationships and that was one of the things that Annette would call me on. She said, Mom, why do you always need to have a man in your life? And you deserve better than him and blah, blah, blah. She was a great kid. She was easy to raise until this whole episode of Felix came into her life.
Mary Rose told Jerry that Felix had appeared on his motorcycle one afternoon. She was surprised to see Annette jump into his arms. Unbeknownst to Mary Rose, he and Annette had met a few years earlier and formed a kind of long-distance relationship. This was especially surprising because Felix was in his early 40s, which made him about 25 years older than Annette. Mary Rose remembers Felix as handsome, worldly, and intelligent. Like Annette, he was a free spirit.
He fancied himself as a very charismatic guy that women loved. And he was kind of this, for lack of a better term, kind of a hippie type. you might say, from the 60s and kind of stayed with that mentality throughout the years. Not long after Felix's arrival, he invited Annette on a cross-country road trip. Annette enthusiastically agreed. And she was an adventurer. And so when she informed me, it was already a done deal. She was going.
Mary Rose pictured the trip lasting just a few weeks. It wound up lasting close to a year. The two of them crisscrossed the country, crashing with friends and family. During that time, Annette turned 18, and against Mary Rose's wishes, she and Felix got married in Bakersfield, California.
Mary Rose was obviously concerned, but Annette had always been fiercely independent, and she assured her mom that everything was fine. And she would write me letters. She would stay in touch telling me she was having a great time and this and that and this and that. By the end of the trip, though, their relationship appeared to have fallen apart. Annette moved back in with Mary Rose in Tulsa. She told her mom Felix had become abusive. She talked about filing for divorce and enrolling in college.
A friend of mine was a photographer, actually my boyfriend at the time, and he took a picture of her looking up at me and that confused look on her face. She was just out of sorts. She was definitely not her same self, for sure. Mary Rose and Annette reconnected in small ways, gardening together and painting the house. Annette would disappear into her room for hours, writing songs and singing to herself.
But a few weeks later, Felix reappeared. And according to Mary Rose, he slowly wormed his way back into Annette's life. Imagine if you could ask someone anything you wanted about their finances. How much do you make? Who paid for that fancy dinner? What did your house actually cost? On every episode of What We Spend, a different guest opens up their wallets, opens up their lives, really, and tells us all about their finances.
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Actually help you level up. Listen to and follow Aspire With Emma Greed and Odyssey podcast available now wherever you get your podcasts. Mary Rose was stunned by the effect that Felix had on her daughter. At times, it seemed as if he'd brainwashed her. Felix is the wisest person in the world and that told her once
I can't make decisions without him. Under Felix's spell, Annette pressured Mary Rose to deed the house in Tulsa over to them. When Mary Rose finally relented, Felix and Annette fought her over the price. They gave me two grand and they said, take it or leave it. It was always the words out of her mouth, but I could tell it came from him. So when they moved in they moved all my stuff out they got rid of my cat and she wouldn't even let me come back into the cottage
And she said to me, Mom, if I leave Felix again, I'm either going to give him this house or a big chunk of my money. I was under so much duress, I was almost suicidal. And I said, Honey, it's yours now to do whatever you want to with. And I left. It was just so painful. Mary Rose was going through her own relationship struggles at the time. Having sold her house to Annette and Felix for two grand, she decided to move in with some friends in Sausalito, California.
and yet even as they drifted apart annette still kept in touch with her mother That summer. Annette wrote to say that she and Felix were embarking on another road trip. But then a few months passed with no word from Annette. In October 1984, she learned that Felix had returned from the trip alone. A friend called me and he said, did you know that Annette did not come back with Felix? And I did not.
Mary Rose immediately called the house in Tulsa. Felix picked up. He told her that Annette had left him again, and this time he let her go. You know, she didn't want to come back. She's gone back to Mexico. We were camping out in Missouri or somewhere. He put her on a bus to go to Mexico. Mary Rose didn't believe him. She drove back to Tulsa and filed a missing person report. She told the Tulsa PD about Felix, how manipulative and controlling he could be.
The cops brought him in for questioning, but to Mary Rose's dismay, they believed him and not her. They believed his story. She left on her own. They had no reason not to believe it. And they questioned me because apparently he said a lot of negative things about me to them. I don't know exactly what, but they investigated me. Are you working? And blah, blah, blah. You know, I don't remember what all. I think you can understand this that she's a bit of a frantic mom at this point.
You know, they're hearing her franticness, but they're not really listening to her. And then Felix is just calm as a cucumber. Question, yeah, yeah, she went off to Mexico, yeah. The police took no action against Felix, and since Annette was over 18, they told Mary Rose not much else could be done. If there was no clear sign of foul play they assumed the missing person had simply chosen to leave. The burden was on the family to prove something was wrong.
After the cops let Felix go, Mary Rose went back to California, but she continued hounding Felix about Annette's whereabouts. Felix responded by blaming her for Annette's disappearance. claiming that Mary Rose had fallen short as a mother. In a letter he wrote,
I assure you with all the sympathy I have for you as a parent that I have not the slightest idea where she might have gotten to by now. I will tell you that I very much respect her right to freedom, and so I also assure you that even if I did know, I would not tell. Eventually, Mary Rose decided to confront Felix in person.
I reached out to him and told him I was gonna be in town and I'd like to see him and he said oh I'm so sorry but I'm gonna be out of town I have to earn some money I've got a job whatever And Fields kept putting her off, putting her off, and was supposed to meet with her, wouldn't meet with her, wouldn't show up, different things like that. And so Mary Rose begins to kind of do her own investigation about what happened to her daughter.
A few months later, Mary Rose knocked on the door of her old house. No one answered. The locks had been changed. So Mary Rose broke in. So I pulled around back, stood up on my car and I got in through a window and I found a Barbie case under the television in the bedroom. I opened it up and lo and behold, there was her passport.
And she finds the passport. Like she did not leave with her passport. So she's supposedly going to Mexico and she didn't leave with her passport. And all her clothing was there too. Mary Rose had never believed that Felix had put Annette on a bus to Mexico. Finding Annette's passport and clothing seemed to confirm he was lying. She reported her discoveries to the Tulsa police, but once again they turned her away.
What followed was a wrenching, years-long journey to figure out what happened to her daughter. As she told Jerry, she hired private detectives, she spoke with police departments in other states, and briefly got the attention of the FBI. I even went and contacted Unsolved Mysteries, but the FBI encouraged me not to get them involved because if Felix saw it televised that he would probably run.
Despite her efforts, Mary Rose failed to make any headway on her daughter's case, but she held out hope that Annette was still alive. I kept waiting by the phone. Birthdays, holidays, Mother's Day, you name it. Oh, she's going to call me, she's going to call me. But she hadn't been in touch with anybody. And I strongly believe that if she's mad at me and doesn't like me, she has old friends, she has other family members that she loved, nieces and cousins.
As the years passed, it got harder to hold on to the idea that Annette was still out there. But a chance encounter with a stranger would soon force Mary Rose to face the truth and discover that Annette was not Felix Vale's only victim. Around a decade after Annette's disappearance, Mary Rose had moved to Oregon, where she worked as a school administrator.
She was at a local town fair one weekend when she walked past a psychic seated at a small table. I didn't make an appointment or anything. I just sat down in her chair. And then I just said, I'd like to talk to you about my daughter, Annette. And she said nothing before she said, oh my gosh. The image I'm getting is not good. I'm sorry, but when this kind of thing comes up for me, I can't talk about it. And she shook her head and she looked very distressed. I believe that she had some insight.
And then I walked out of there with the determination, oh my gosh, she's gone. So that was basically it. I gave her my $10 or whatever it was and said, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. Accepting that Annette was gone renewed Mary Rose's desire to hold Felix Vale accountable. Law enforcement had been no help to her, so she decided to track down some of Felix's relatives on her own. She learned he had a sister living in Sulphur, Louisiana, and drove down to meet her.
So I knock on the door. She invites me in. I wasn't surprised or shocked. Felix's sister sympathized with Mary Rose. She remembered Annette. In fact, she said she'd seen her with Felix not long before she supposedly disappeared. And then the sister was the one that told Mary that they'd seen Annette.
It was like a little state fair there. This was in 84. And all of them had gone together there. And then within a few days after that, Felix had left with Annette. But when he came back, he was by himself. And he told this story about how she got on the bus and went down to Mexico. But of course, it's a completely different place. You know, this is like Louisiana. This isn't St. Louis.
At this, Mary Rose perked up. Felix had told his sister that Annette boarded a bus from Louisiana. But years earlier, he told Mary Rose and the police that she'd boarded a bus from St. Louis. And then she mentioned all the blue about Felix's first wife. According to Felix's sister, his first wife had drowned in the Calcasieu River in 1962. Felix later told the police that he and his wife had been fishing in a boat when they swerved to avoid a stump, and both of them toppled into the water.
When he surfaced, he couldn't find her. After two days of searching, authorities found her body close to where Felix claimed she'd drowned. The scarf she was wearing extended a few inches into her throat, and there was a bruise on the back of her head. But after conducting the autopsy, the local pathologist had ruled it an accidental drowning.
Investigators later learned that Felix had taken out a life insurance policy on his wife a few months before her death. Due to the suspicious nature of the drowning, the insurance company paid him only part of the settlement felix's sister told mary rose that the cops and many people in the area believed felix was behind his first wife's death But he was never indicted, and he left town soon after it happened. So she told me that
And I'm in my mind. I'm taking notes and I can't wait to get back and write it all down. And then as I'm leaving, she said, oh, oh, wait a minute. I just remembered. She said there was a woman, her name was Sharon, and her mother called my mom, you know Felix's mom, often wondering what happened to her. The woman's name was Sharon Hensley. According to Felix's sister, she'd been with Felix for several years before she too disappeared sometime in the mid-70s. But that was all she knew.
Mary Rose was able to find a number for Sharon Hensley's mother in the phone book. And when she answered the phone, I told her who I was and I said, do you by any chance know who Felix Vail is? She said, yes, I certainly do. I said, well, we have a lot to talk about. So she was very open and one of the things she did is she sent me a letter that he wrote to her about what happened to Sharon, his version. And it was so similar to what he told me about my daughter.
In the letter, written in 1974, Felix told Sharon Hensley's mother that she had decided to leave him and start a new life. He claimed that After the two of them visited Key West, she had sailed off with a couple from Australia and planned to island hop through South America and the West Indies, with possible stops in Hawaii, the Philippines, and the Mediterranean. According to Felix, Sharon wanted to become a new person, clean and free from memory associations, he wrote.
He added that she left him because he was, quote, too much of a straight country boy and wasn't evolving fast enough. It was the same type of convoluted story Felix would use to explain Annette's disappearance 11 years later. But the letter wasn't the only thing that reminded Mary Rose of Annette. Sharon Hensley's mother said that after a year in Felix's company, her daughter had changed. It was pretty clear that Sharon was also in great distress.
She just wasn't the same person her mother told me. And I could totally relate to that. And she actually sent me a picture of Sharon shortly before she disappeared and gave me another picture of her before feeling. And what did those pictures show, the difference between the two time periods? Oh, that she was fun-loving and popular and a beautiful woman, and then she was sitting there all droopy and looking sad and depressed.
Armed with this new information, Mary Rose went back to her contacts at the FBI. This time, she got the attention of an agent at the Bureau's Violent Crime Apprehension Program, who was helping them with cold cases. And I do know that he agreed with me. He said, just between you and me, Mary. I think we have a serial killer on our hands. I'd like to get a representative from all three families in Quantico, Virginia to meet. I was really hopeful that that was going to happen.
Mary Rose spent months trying to convince other family members to come to Quantico, but they were scattered across the country, and they worried that Felix might come after them if they talked. Then she got word that her agent at the FBI had been transferred to another department. I said he's no longer with us. So that was the end of that.
During the years Mary Rose spent investigating her daughter's disappearance, she struggled with the grief and guilt that she felt. She blamed herself for letting Annette marry Felix and for giving them the house. In the late 90s, looking for a fresh start, she moved to Western Massachusetts to work with a spiritual healer. She also entered a support group for parents who lost adult children. The group helped her arrange a memorial service for Annette.
I worked with gathering things up that she had left and bringing it to the service. One of my brothers and my older sister came and attended the service. so i was doing some healing myself and i kept putting out the energy for somebody to show up in my life that could help you know i just felt like i tried everything Then, not long after,
Mary Rose was listening to NPR one afternoon when she heard Jerry Mitchell's voice. Jerry was talking about the famous Mississippi burning case in which three civil rights workers who were investigating the burning of a black church were abducted and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Jerry's reporting helped uncover new evidence that led authorities to reopen the case. In 2005,
a former Klan leader, was convicted at age 80, more than 40 years after the murders. Mary Rose had been tracking Felix' whereabouts for years. She knew he'd recently settled on his family's property in Mississippi. All of a sudden, I realized, oh my gosh, this guy is not afraid of cold cases. He lives in the same state where Felix is now living again and where he was born and raised. So as soon as I finished listening to the Jerry Mitchell's interview,
I said, I have got to get in touch with this man. This is an answer to prayer. Somehow or another, I managed to get through to his direct line, and he answered. I was surprised how easy it was to find him. And then, of course, I said, would you be interested in a case where there's a man living in Mississippi that I think is a serial killer and he's living as a free man? Would you be interested? And he said, you bet I would. Next time on Gone South.
Very difficult to prove because it's very easy for defense lawyer to get up and say, well, they weren't really killed. We don't have a body. We can't prove that. That was terrible. That was traumatic beyond any description. And I had my recorder down in my bra. It's a comfortable place to have it. I truly believed that if he was acquitted and I was returned to my father,
If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gone south podcast at gmail.com. That's gone south podcast at gmail.com. And for bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at GoneSouthPodcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack, GoneSouth with Jed Lipinski. GoneSouth is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created remotely Thank you.
The South is edited by Chris Basil and Perry Crowell. It's mixed and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to J.D. Crowley, Leah Reese-Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephine Efrain, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff.
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