School of Humans.
As a lot of you probably already know, While I've been working on the Christina Pipkin case, I've also been exploring other unsolved deaths in Arkansas. Right now, I'm looking at an article from the Commercial Appeal newspaper that came out on Thursday, June third, nineteen ninety three. The title of the article is Authorities wonder if six kids deaths in East Arkansas are related.
Those children in.
The article referred to were Christina Pipkin, who as we know, went missing in May of nineteen ninety one, and also Steve Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers, the three eight year old boys who were murdered in West Memphis in nineteen ninety three. It also includes sixteen year old Guardina Cross and thirteen year old Geneva Smith. Guardina and Geneva's bodies were found near Wynn, Arkansas, just a few miles
Hickory Ridge. To be honest, I haven't seen any obvious connections between these children in East Arkansas.
As we said.
Before, these children were different ages, some were different races, and they had very different life circumstances. The boys in West Memphis and Guardina Cross had been brutalized, while in Christina's case, there didn't appear to be any outward signs of violence. So just on the surface, it does not seem like this was the work of a single serial killer. But there are a lot of weird coincidences in these cases. In fact, in three of the four cases, suspects were
arrested but ultimately released. All of these children were found in or near bodies of water, and all of them are unsolved.
I'm Catherine Townsend.
Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Helling Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I've received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities.
If you have a case you'd like me and my.
Team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. I'm making my way through all these freedom of information requests I've done over the past few weeks. Obviously, we have Christina Pipkins case file, though there do appear to be some documents missing, including crime
scene photos. The Arkansas State Police told me they believe the Geneva Smith case is still open, so they were not able to provide me with any information from that case file. And they weren't able to find Guardiana Cross's case at all. They said they had no record of it at the Arkansas State Police. Now, this could just mean that this case file is with the county. I filed a request in Cross County and I'll let you
all know what happens. But even though the circumstances of all these children's deaths were so different, I want to take a look at some of the seemingly odd similarity in Christina Pipkins's case. Remembered there was a suspect, Robbie Tubbs. He was arrested years later in nineteen ninety nine, and then he was later released due to some pretty catastrophic mistakes with the hair fiber evidence that was found. In
nineteen ninety two, Geneva Smith was thirteen years old. She left home to get on the school bus and she never came back. A few days later, her body was found floating in the Saint Francis River. Her remains were badly decomposed, so much that it was hard to identify her.
I was struck by the fact that there.
Is very little about Genevas Smith's murder out there. The theories about who killed her if you look on online forums, ranged from a serial killer to the KKK to a member of her extended family. Basically, it's a mixed bag and no one seems to have any real answers. There was an arrest in Geneva's case, but like in Christina Pitt Dolkin's case, the.
Arrest came years later. In November of nineteen ninety nine.
The same year when police were building a case against Robbie Tubbs for Christina Pipkins murder, two men named Johnny Key and Freddie Jones were arrested and charged with Geneva Smith's murder.
Police did not say.
Much at the time, but apparently the case depended on the cooperation of a key witness.
I found this.
From a local newspaper back in the day. It read quote Freddy Jones twenty six of Earl and Johnny Key thirty six of Parkin appeared before Judge Richard L. Proctor on Monday and were bound over to Cross County Circuit Court to stand trial on one count of capital murder. The article goes on to say Sheriff Ronnie Baldwin said Rinne page twenty two of when was also arraigned on a charge of hindering apprehension of a suspect.
In connection with the Smith case.
She was being held in the Cross County jail Monday on unrelated charges when she was arrested in connection with the murder end quote.
So the newspaper.
Brings up two male suspects and one female who they believed were involved in Geneva Smith's murder. The newspaper also talked to the sheriff, and the article mentioned that the sheriff said that he had worked with the Arkansas State Police investigator Dale Arnold. Remember that's the same investigator who
also worked on Christina Pipkins's case. The sheriff said that he and Dale Arnold felt they finally had enough information to make some arrest and the article said that all three of these suspects, Johnny Key, Freddie Jones, and Irene Page, had all been interviewed by police back in nineteen ninety two, when Genevasmith originally went missing. Police seemed fairly confident that they had a case, but then something happened. Apparently their
key witness had a change of heart. The sheriff, Ronnie Baldwin, later confirmed this. He told the newspaper the case had fallen apart when that witness backed out. So I'm wondering about the woman who was arrested. If she was the witness and was twenty two years old in nineteen ninety nine, that would mean that she would have been around sixteen years old, just three years older than Geneva back when Geneva was killed. So now I'm wondering who was this woman?
What was her connection to Geneva Smith? And it's been years since these suspects were questioned and later released. Is law enforcement planning on building that case any further? Have they developed any new suspects, Do they have any new leads at all? And if not, would they consider turning over this case file and making it public like they have with Christina Pipkin's case. I am not sure what
the decision will be in Geneva Smith's case. I do know Arkansas has made new rules to classify cases as officially cold when they've been unsolved for two years or more. Maybe they will release part of the case file. I do hope they'll consider it because in Christina's case it has helped. I've only been working on this case for a few weeks, and even though it has been almost thirty years since Christina Pipkin went missing and her body was found, we've been able to find a lot of
people who've never been interviewed by the police. We've also gotten a lot of names out of the case file, and we were able to find a lot of them. As a result of that, we are filling in the blanks. I would love to be able to do the same thing for Geneva Smith's case. So if someone out there knows someone who knew Geneva Smith, anyone in her family, her friends, or anyone who saw anything, I would love
to hear from these people. I did some very preliminary online sleuthing to try and find the people who were charged with Geneva's murder and what happened to them. I found Freddy Jones. It wasn't too hard because he's now in prison. Freddie Jones has a fairly long criminal record. According to records. In twenty seventeen, he was sentenced to forty years for aggravated robbery of a Valero gas station in Fayetvil. He also got an additional five years for
carrying a firearm because he was a felon. According to court documents, this length of sentence, which does seem very long, was due to his status as an habitual offender. So let's go back to the newspaper article for a minute. The one I talked about at the top of the episode, the one that talked about potential connections in these child death cases. The reporter Rob Johnson talked about sixteen year old Guardina Cross, who was.
Murdered in nineteen ninety two.
Guardina was sixteen years old and in tenth grade at Wyn High School on October fourteenth, nineteen ninety two. She disappeared that same day on Moore Road, right outside of when a guy was collecting cans. When he found her body on the side of the road. Guardina was naked except for a bra. Her skull had been pierced and punctured with a small object.
Police thought it could be some.
Type of tool, maybe something like a screwdriver. Forensic testing later revealed that at the time of her death, Guardina was around five months pregnant, and then there were crickets. There was nothing more that I could find really ever reported about this case, but I think the reporter Rob Johnson got some crucial information. He went to interview Guardinia's great grandmother, Hattie Cross. He found out that Guardina already
had a two year old daughter. That means that Guardinia's daughter must have been born around the time Guardinia was around fourteen years old. He was also the person who reported that she was five months pregnant at the time for death. Now, I don't want to rush to conclusions. The killer could have been a stranger. This could have been a random attack. But we also know that sadly, pregnancy can be one of the most dangerous times of a woman's life. One of the leading cause of death
of pregnant women in America is homicide. So I want to know where that baby's father is, if that person was ever questioned, Maybe there was someone who was not happy about her pregnancy. And these are all things that
we have to consider. Coming back to the Christina Pipkin case, I've been going through the case file and trying to reach out to people the police interviewed, and when I did, as you probably already know, there were a lot of discrepancies, not only that I saw something in this case I've never had happened before in anything I've ever investigated. One of the biggest issues we've had in trying to review this case file is the fact that basically none of
the interviews were transcribed. Everything is just these brief, typed reports, So there are a lot of mistakes in those. I've seen errors and police reports before, but I've seen mistakes in Christina's case unlike anything I've ever seen. In our last episode, I talked to Donna King. Now in the case file, there is a police report where an investigator
said he spoke to Donna King. She told them that on the night Christina Pipkin went missing, she saw Charles Cotton's wife, Rebecca Cotton, walking on the side of the road and that Charles Cotton was approaching her on a three wheeler. This was a very detailed description of what happened. Apparently, according to police, Donna said she observed Rebecca Cotton crying, looking annoyed at Charles and not getting on the three Wheeler. Then Charles Cotton apparently left and came.
Back in a vehicle.
This was a few minutes later, and he picked Rebecca Cotton up and they left together in the car. The only problem is Donna King said that this was absolutely not what she said to the police. She insisted that she never saw Rebecca Cotton on the night Christina Pipkin went missing. Donna King said that part of the story was correct. She was out of town that day. She and her husband had gone to Memphis, but she said as soon as she got back in town, she met
up with a friend of hers. The friend of Donna's who she met up with is actually someone else we've spoken to. There were two cashiers at the Bearcat who we've talked to so far. The woman all call Cashier number one served the mysterious stranger who came in at around five forty five. She's the one who worked on
the composite drawing with police. There was another cashier, we'll call her a Cashier number two now cashier too was working in the back section of the store where the video rentals happened for most of the night, but between seven and nine pm she worked the main register. After Donna came back to town. She met up with Cashier number two. Together, they rode around and looked for Christina Pipkin, and they both confirmed each other's stories.
They said they never saw Rebecca Cotton that night.
When I asked Donna what she thinks happened, she believes that maybe the police officers got her story mixed up with someone else's. This sounds crazy, but it's actually not that hard to believe, because even more disturbing than the wrong information Donna said the police included in that report was what she said they left out. Donna said that the next day after Christina went missing, she saw a stranger in a brown car near the area where.
Christina's body was found.
She is adamant, she said she described that person and that vehicle to the police, But there's no record of that brown car anywhere in the case file.
So the question is where did the police get.
The information about the person who supposedly saw Rebecca Cotton on the side of the road that night.
And if that person wasn't Donna King, who was it.
In the last episode, we talked about a couple of the names he keep coming up in this case, and I want to give you all an update. We have gotten more information about a friend of Robbie Tubbs, the man named Jackie. The person who I referred to is Jackie question Mark in last week's episode. Because we didn't know his last name, we were able to get his
last name. I've been exchanging messages with a couple of different young women who told me that Jackie was, in their words, creepy and that he made her and several other young women very uncomfortable.
I wanted to track Jackie down.
I wanted to ask him questions about Robbie Tubbs and about what went on around the time.
When Christina went missing.
I wanted to know word Jackie and Robbie in or near Hickory Ridge that day. But I found out that Jackie passed away in two thousand and eight. Sadly, this is another dead end. The second cashier at the Bearcat who we talked to in the last episode, told us about the fear and panic that broke out in the town after Christina went missing.
She described what the atmosphere was like the next day.
I'm at work at twelve at Bearcat, and it was just horrific. Seeing it was horrific and how that awesome at the sun time, that so many people we're there, We're on the street, we're in the parking lot, we're you know, gathered together to try to you know, set up teams. You know, the community really came together.
And she noticed the same thing that I noticed.
She noticed that Charles Cotton seemed to have been very involved in the search for Christina Pipkins. She also found it out she said he wasn't someone who appeared to know the family well, and James had said he just met Charles Cotton through his neighbors.
She may, I mean, I thought, is he really trying to make an incrusion? And it was just like gloved to the family, it seemed like. And I was just like, you know, of course we were all wanting to search and look absolutely, but I mean then I said, you know, candlelight Nis came down, there was a lot of publisty, and I just put it as you know, he was just wanting attention, and I didn't really you know, thinking much more about it.
With help from some sources in town, I have mapped out the rest of Christina's neighborhood and there are other people who I would like to locate I have verified through multiple sources who were living in the neighborhood at the time, that Charles Cotton and his family were, contrary to what his wife Rebecca told the police, living in a house just a couple of doors down from the Pipkins.
There was also another young family there. They lived in a trailer, They had several children, and according to the neighbors, they were only there for a few months. Apparently the family was from around Beadeville, the area near where Christina's body was found. Now people say this family was not around for a long time. They weren't sure of the
exact dates. But I would like to know who those people were, and I would like to talk to them because if they left abruptly after Christina went missing, that's something we need to check out. We know from past cases that people who show up in town and leave shortly after a suspicious death need to be thoroughly vetted. And I want to go back and ask something that may seem obvious, But since part of this is investigating the investigation itself, we have to double check everything.
We need to know.
How can we be sure that Christina Pipkin drowned and how can we be sure that it was definitely not an accidental drowning. I want to take a step back for a minute, because there's been a lot of discussion during Christina's case about what we can learn from the limited facts we have without an autopsy report.
So let's talk about drowning.
According to report on NBC News, deaths by drowning are super challenging. They're among the hardest for investigators to prove. The way that medical examiners figure out that a death is by drowning is basically by the process of elimination. They have to rule out everything else. A lot of
children drowned in the United States every year. According to a twenty twenty three article in The New Yorker, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has listed drowning as the number one cause of death for young children, which they define as age one to four, and Arkansas has one of the highest rates of childhood drowning in the country, according to a study done by Quote Wizard, the third highest in the nation. Between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty,
there were twenty five fatal drownings in Arkansas. Thirteen of those were children under the age of five. So how do we know if a body found in water did drown and if that drowning was intentional or accidental.
In water, bodies tend to sink.
First and then rise to the surface in warm, shallow water like at Cawlake Ditch as gases in the body accumulated from the decomposition process. This would have taken around seventy two hours. Christina's body was found three days after she went missing. Water investigations have come a long way in the past three decades. Now there are training seminars for investigators who are processing homicides that involve a body of water. There are a few different types of scenarios
that can occur here. You have people who are killed on land and then dumped into the water as they are dead or dying, people who actually drowned in the body of water, and accidental drownings, and they all have some distinctive characteristics. We know that Christina could have accidentally drowned.
Because she couldn't swim. That would have made sense.
But the first question homicide investigators are told to ask is if the victim's location makes sense, and in Christina's case, it did not. It made zero sense that she would suddenly be miles away from home right before dark, when she had been hanging around very close to her house all day. But even though crime scene investigation techniques are improving, killers can still have a lot of evidence in pools of dirty water. I use a textbook for all of
my investigations. I carried it around everywhere with me, so at this point it's kind of falling apart. But it's called Practical Homicide Investigations. I've talked about it before. It's by a former NYPD homicide detective named Vernon Gabirth. It's become the textbook that a lot of police departments used
to train their detectives. In this book, he describes a lot of staged crime scenes involving drowning, and he has a lot of examples summer cases where the victim was drowned elsewhere like a bathtub, and then taken and dumped into the body of water. Remember, a lot of people thought this was what could have happened to Christina Pipkin, But we know the evidence in Christina's case indicates the mud and water found in Christina's lungs did match the water in.
Cal Lake Ditch.
I've also talked to a family member, and this person is attempting to access Christina's autopsy report. I hope that we can get access to that because there are a lot of things I think we could potentially learn. Among the questions I have are these. I want to know if there was any white foam present. It's called haemorrhagic edema fluid. This foam forms as a result of mucus
from the throat mixing with water and blood. It's a major indication the person may have drowned, and we don't know from doctor Fawmi Malik the medical examiner's report if that was present.
We do know.
Doctor Malick said there were no signs of violence. He said he didn't find signs of a struggle, no bruising, no obvious signs of strangulation, nothing to show, for example, that someone held her head under water forcibly.
But maybe there are other clues in the.
Report, something that could tell us if she had less obvious signs, like the broken blood vessels, that could be indicative of strangulation. Also, I would love to know did Christina have anything in her hands. This could tell us if she was grabbing at some pointing for example, when she was in the water. If not, this could indicate she was unconscious when she went into the water. And I know that it's been a long time, but don't forget sometimes major breakthroughs can be made by a second look,
even decades later. The NBC report had an example. The news channel talked about a case from Illinois where a woman had drowned in a bathtub and basically there was no sign of a.
Struggle or forced entry.
At first, it was ruled an accident, but eventually investigators brought a new pathologist in and that person found bruises on the victim's elbows, bruises that forensic testing had missed. Later, police focused on this woman's husband. They were able to find insurance policies that the husband had taken out and his wife.
They eventually found a.
Motive, but they wouldn't have even looked for that motive if they had not first gone back over the forensics. This is what I'm trying to do, both with the autopsy report and with the case file. But again, because the police reports were so vague, I've been really struggling with being able to verify concrete times in any part of this report, which brings me back to the very.
Beginning of the case.
One of the only things that we have a time for a definite time is that movie. And I've been thinking about that movie that James Pipkin was watching since this case started. In James's statement, he said on Saturday, May fourth, he said that he was taping the movie The Hunt for Red October and he was starting to watch it while it taped, and that during that movie he became concerned that Christina had not come home, and that's when he started looking for her.
Let's take a step back.
Let's track everyone who said they saw Christina Pipkin for sure that day, at least according to the police reports in the case file, after the family came back from their errands, Christina Pipkin was at her home on Doty Street by around four pm. That's when the Fords, the neighbors whose yard backed up to the Pipkins house, saw Christina playing out in her backyard. Shortly after that, Christina
left the house to sell jewelry. She had her flyer showing the different types of jewelry people could buy with her. That's around when Elsie Liles, the Pipkins neighbor, and the person who sometimes babysat Christina, saw Christina and gave her a pickle as a snack. Christina ate the pickle and she left Elsie's house, telling Elsie she'd be back for dinner.
Elsie said Christina never showed after leaving Elsie's. During that afternoon, Christina was walking around the area around the bear Cat in the bank.
Again, this is a very small area.
But a lot of people were coming through the main drag around then, because if you want to get cigarettes or snacks, the bear Cat was pretty much the only game in town.
We know that.
Around five forty five pm, the first cashier we spoke to, the one who was working the register for most of the day, said she he saw the stranger, the one who came into the store and looked a little like Richard Gear, the guy she later identified in a composite photo.
She said that he came in to buy a pack of Warboro Reds.
He parked his car, a brown sedan, not blue, as the police wrote in their report, way up on the sidewalk. Then he got in his car and left. The cashier said the stranger came and went just a few minutes after Christina and some other kids were walking through milling around the bear Cat grocery store. Christina was going to and from the area right around her house. At around five thirty, Ricky Dawson and his friend James Bashers, who were next door at the Moor's house, saw Christina on
the porch of her house. By around six thirty, Christina was back at the bear Cat. That's when her math teacher, Miss Lamb, told police that she saw Christina and briefly talked to her sometime before dark, which was around eight pm. The other cashier, Umber two, the cashier we talked to who police never interviewed, said she saw Christina in the store.
She said she knew for sure this happened before dark. She remembered the.
Street lights were not on yet. Then Christina left. Frida, Christina's mom, told police she went to the Bearcat store at around seven thirty pm. She bought some groceries, hung around for a few minutes, and then went back home. After she got home and started cooking dinner. This is when James Pipkin said they started watching the movie The Hunt for Red October. They got worried that Christina hadn't come home, and Frida sent Christina's brother Adam out to
look for her. When Adam came back and said he hadn't seen her, Frida left the house to look for her.
But here's where it.
Gets interesting, because James says in the police report quote, I got the VCR ready to tape the Hunt for Red October. The movie came on and I started taping it. I started getting worried that Christina had not come home yet, so we started looking for her. This was around eight pm end quote. This was one concrete time that we could sort of frame everything else around. So I got a little obsessed when figuring out what time this movie aired.
Back in the nineties, before streaming services HBO and Cinemax, movies aired on a national schedule, it was broken into different time zones, but basically it was exactly the same air date around the country, so we should be able to verify that.
There's just one problem.
When I found the commercial for the movie on YouTube and an old.
Guide for Red October.
I found out that The Hunt for Red October aired in that region on Friday night, not Saturday, the day Christina went missing. So if that's true, James could not have been taping the Hunt for Red October on Saturday night. That movie aired on Friday night. He might have misspoken. He could have said he'd previously taped the movie and
was watching it on Saturday. Maybe the police were wrong, But in that police statement he said a couple of times he was taping the movie, setting the VCR to tape it that night, he seemed to say he was watching the movie live as it aired. Now, maybe he's remembering Friday night instead of Saturday night.
Getting mixed up again.
Police did not interview James for several days after Christina went missing. But I do wonder and I would love to clear up that discrepancy. Frida went into the Bearcat store right before nine pm that night, and the second cashier who we heard from earlier said she vividly remembers Christina's mother walking into the store crying and saying she couldn't find her daughter.
And then missus Pipton came in. She was crying and we said, well we go and put much set the registers down or they'll be glad to and said no, I just need to use the pay phone. The pay phone was like when you walked in the door, though you would make a right, direct right, and it was on the wall. There was a window, and then there was the pay phone, and then it started with the drinks and she ran to the phone and she called the police, and she didn't really That's when we heard
or say my little girl's missing. I was like, oh my god, you know, we saw her just you know, a couple of hours ago. And I don't know why no one ever questioned me. Ever, at the time, I kept thinking mister Arnold would come and talk to me. No one ever questioned me.
I find it shocking that there was no police interview with this cashier, this person who was one of the last people to see Christina alive. There's also no interview with the other cashier. The police report just said he had nothing of substance to offer the investigation.
But I disagree with that.
I think he could have seen something extremely important, even if he didn't realize what he was seeing at the time, and it's a shame we don't have a longer interview with him. So where do we go from here? There's still a lot of people who need to be checked out further. After speaking to Cashier number one, it seems very plausible that Robbie Tubbs could have been in Hickory Ridge that afternoon. A family member confirmed to me that
Robbie does smoke Marlboro reds. We know that he drove a brown car, a sedan that matched the description of the one the cashier saw at the time, and most crucially, the cashier felt strongly that the photo of Robbie's she saw from back in the day looked like the composite drawing that she did with the police. Robbie Tubbs could have been the stranger who came into the bear Cat that night, but that's not enough for a definite ID.
And even if it was, even if Robbie Tubbs was there, this is not proof that he did anything wrong.
I want to be very clear about that.
He absolutely could have been in that store for totally innocent reasons. We know that he had some ties to the area. He had his friend Jackie, who he went shelling with when he drove through there. He would often drop him in Waldenburg, which is near Hickory Ridge. At the time, Robbie and his wife Sandra lived near Pocahontas, Arkansas, and at the time Robbie had a girlfriend named Janetta.
We've talked about that before.
The route from Pocahontas to where Robbie went, Shelling passed right through Hickory Ridge. There's a route that would go right near his girlfriend's place and near the bear cat Robbie Tubb smoked, and there are not that many places to make a pit stop and buy cigarettes. I also
wondered about the evidence. We've already talked a lot about everything that happened with the hair, the disastrous wrong testing, So now I'm wondering is there anything that police can do with the hair evidence that was so badly mishandled. We know forensic testing has improved a lot since nineteen ninety two. But then I take another look at the case file and I see a report dated March fifteenth,
twenty twenty three. In fact, it seems to be the only activity on Christina Pipkins case that's taken place in years, and it's not good news.
According to the case file.
In March of twenty twenty three, investigator Robert Scott of the Arkansas State Police contacted Dale Arnold, the original Arkansas State Police investigator on Christina's case. Robert Scott asked Dale Arnold about the hair sample Dale Arnold said he had already given testimony about it when the mistake was discovered. It seemed from reading the report like it wasn't something
that Dale Arnold wanted to pursue further. Then, Robert Scott wrote, quote, Cross County Sheriff's Office investigator Boykinds pulled the case at my request and researched the evidence. Investigator Boykins was unable to find the hair recovered from the vehicle of mister Tubbs in the Cross County Sheriff's Office property room. Investigator Arnold stated he didn't know where the hair was.
Now.
I reviewed the case file on the custody of Cross County. No new information was developed. It is highly unlikely that the recovered hair could be used in a court proceeding due to the previous submission in the trial of mister Tubbs end quote.
I knew it was a long shot.
With this hair, but I can't help but feel devastated for Christina's family because what that means is that after that mistake at Robbie Tubbs's trial, the evidence, it seems was returned from the Arkansas State Police crime Lab to the Cross County Sheriff's Office, but it didn't stay there. Somehow it's missing. And this is where I really start to feel outraged, because it's not enough that they botched
the testing. Now they've lost the hair, They've lost the one piece of physical EVA evidence that could be definitively tested.
It's just shocking.
Investigator Scott goes on to say that he and another investigator did reach out to Robbie Tubbs.
Though they misspelled his name as Ronnie Tubbs.
He said they have a last known address for Robbie at a motel in Sulfur Springs, Texas. I don't know if they don't want to find him or if they can't find him, but no further contact with Robbie Tubbs was recorded in the case file. I found Robbie Tubbs in about ten minutes. I saw on social media that he sometimes posts from his hotel room.
And I really don't know.
If the ASP don't feel they have enough evidence, they don't want to reach out, Maybe their jurisdictional issues, maybe they don't want to call Texas law enforcement with this. But either way, that recent report, plus the fact they've released the case file publicly tells us the police, in my opinion, are not actively investigating this case. After Christina's funeral, her parents, James and Frieda, moved away. Eventually they divorced again. I take no joy in re traumatizing anyone and digging
up family trauma. But I believe that there are answers in this case that could be found, and they are not in this police case file.
We have to find these people, We need to talk to them.
We have to keep going back to that bear Cat convenience store on the night of May fourth, nineteen ninety one, and we have to zero in on the tiny little details.
Now I'm zeroing in on one discrepancy. Christina's math teacher said when she spoke to Christina that Christina had her flyer for jewelry selling in her hand, but the cashier Cashier III, who saw Christina in the doorway of the bear Cat a little while later, said Christina did not have anything in her hands, and she remembered that because Christina kind of shrugged and she saw both of her hands go up and they were empty. So could Christina have left her flyer at home then come back to
the store. If so, why was she coming back to the store if she was done selling her jewelry could she have seen someone she knew outside, maybe someone who offered her a ride, Maybe that person that already talked to Christina when the cashier saw her inside the door. Maybe their car was sitting outside right then.
I am not giving up on this case.
I'm going to work my way through the hundreds of messages I've received and keep reaching out and keep trying to get answers. I'm going to document every single interview that I have, and I'm going to turn over any helpful information I find to law enforcement and to the prosecutor's office.
And I'm going to keep.
Pushing for access to that autopsy report, and also to get any information that I can about Geneva Smith and Guardina Cross. Of course, we can never know exactly what will happen next, but I can promise, as always, I will keep working on this case in the background, and
I will keep you posted. Most importantly, I'm gonna keep talking to people any one I can, because every time I do, with every new detail that I learned that was not in the case file or in any of the police reports, that potential window of time that someone had to kidnap and murder a little girl gets smaller. And smaller. We have to keep digging. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
It's written and narrated by me, Catherine Townsend, and produced by Gabby Watts.
Music is by Ben Sale.
Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Else Crowley. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six ' one four five n eight seven four four six one four five. Please don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever.
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