True Crime Chatter

The students had never seen a criminal case file before, but already, they thought they were on to something.

The undergraduates had signed up for a brand-new class called Special Topics in Crime and Criminology: Forensic Assessment of Cold Case Files, offered by the University of Texas at Arlington in partnership with the local police department. One of the students, Jacey Concannon, had languished at an all-day breakfast chain and in a series of jobs in the medical field before returning to college in her late 20s, hoping to become a forensic scientist. Now she and other students were staring down a murder that had occurred years before any of them were born. No one had ever been arrested for the crime, let alone convicted.

Two weeks into their review, the team—Concannon, alongside younger students Jenna Lewis, Preston Schroeder, Natalia Montoya, and Samantha Underwood—gathered around a table in the forensic lab to share their findings and discuss theories. Montoya, a criminology major who also works at Starbucks, was the first to mention a potential suspect. “This name keeps coming up,” she said. “Wait,” Concannon replied. “I noticed that name in another report.” The name had caught the attention of another student as well.

The person in question had no alibi for the night of the murder and had failed two polygraph tests, according to police records. And it was written right there in the files: The suspect had confirmed, in a police interview, that they were glad the victim was dead.

The more details the students uncovered, the more convinced they became. Could it really be? Had five students done what a veteran homicide detective had failed to do more than 30 years earlier?

“We were pretty confident this was something that needed to be investigated right away,” Concannon said.

In recent years, when a new break in a cold case makes headlines, it’s often because of updated genealogy tools or forensic detection technology. In the murder of a young mother named Cynthia Renee Gonzalez, it took something else entirely. Following the discovery in the classroom, Cynthia’s now-adult daughter would learn of the potential new finding, just a year after her latest plea for an update in the case, as would her long-mourning friends and family. Eventually, so would a new suspect accused of the murder.

It would turn out there was a reason no one ever saw the suspect right in front of them—and that the new twist in the case was just the beginning.

At first, Jessica Roberts wasn’t sure what her father meant when he said her mother was missing. Twenty-five-year-old Cynthia hadn’t come home from work the night before, but Jessica, only 6 years old, didn’t know where her mom worked or what she did there.

Tall and athletic, with long, teased auburn hair, Cynthia was an exotic dancer at Playmates, a seminude bar tucked amid the sprawl of Arlington, Texas, the largest suburb in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Cynthia was also an entrepreneur. From the dining room table of her modest apartment, she owned and operated Beauty and the Beast Entertainment. Her company delivered stripteases, called stripograms, to private audiences, such as bachelor parties and individual clients, usually as a gag gift.

Jessica lived with her dad in another town, but she was staying with her mom on Sept. 16, 1991, a Monday, when a dancer for Beauty and the Beast had a last-minute conflict and was unable to perform that evening. None of Cynthia’s other dancers were available on such short notice. Cynthia decided to do it herself, so she called her estranged husband, Don Gonzalez, a truck driver, and asked him to leave work to pick up their daughter.

It had been a treat for Jessica to spend time with her mom. With their visit cut short, she became upset. Her mom tried to comfort her, but Jessica cried as her dad drove her back to their home in Azle, a small suburb on the northwestern fringe of Fort Worth. Late 1980s or early ’90s family photo of a 20-something woman with her daughter. Jessica Roberts

Cynthia also had lived in Azle, with Don and Jessica, for a time. A doting mother, she had enrolled her young daughter in cheer and dance classes, and the family whiled away summer days camping and boating on Eagle Mountain Lake, a reservoir down the street from their house. By early 1991, after Cynthia and Don’s marriage of more than six years crumbled, Cynthia was the one who moved out. She had met another man, and they were said to be living together in her Arlington apartment. They were even discussing marriage.

The day after Jessica’s tearful ride home, her dad told her that her mom had disappeared. He dropped Jessica off with a friend while he and others went out to search the streets of Arlington. Days passed with no word from Cynthia.

Then, less than a week later, as Jessica was in her bedroom, being comforted by her maternal grandmother, Linda Gandy, her father appeared.

“My dad is the one who told me,” Jessica recalled over the phone recently while driving in the Fort Worth area, where she’s lived all her life. “He just came in my room and told me that my mom was dead and somebody had shot her, point-blank. There was no easing me into it.”

Cynthia Renee Gonzalez was pronounced dead on Sept. 22, 1991. For many years, Jessica knew almost nothing else about the murder. Whenever she asked her dad for details, she says, he became angry and refused to speak. Don eventually remarried and had three more kids, but he held on to a big box of Cynthia’s clothes and other keepsakes, including a lock of hair and bottle of her perfume. Jessica liked to crawl into the box, sometimes taking a nap inside. She often sifted through the belongings. A whiff of Cynthia’s signature scent, Lauren by Ralph Lauren, helped her remember her mom.

As a teenager and young adult, Jessica tried to learn more about her mom’s case. She requested a copy of the autopsy report, but it raised more questions than answers. Every so often, she called the Arlington Police Department to request an update, but there was rarely much to share. Wedged between Dallas and Fort Worth, Arlington is a city of 400,000 that employs six homicide detectives who contend with an average of 15 to 25 new cases a year. With no dedicated cold-case squad, they also juggle approximately 100 older investigations. Cynthia’s case was one of those. In 2011 the investigation had been shelved in the department’s cold-case archives.

In May 2024, Jessica called the police department one more time. By now, she’d been married for several years and was raising a young son of her own. She spoke with a homicide sergeant named Blake Ritchie. While he didn’t have any updates for her, the conversation with Jessica apparently struck a chord, and he asked a homicide detective named Anthony Stafford to review Cynthia’s case.

Stafford was feeling slammed at the time. Bald with a wry grin framed by a tidy beard, Stafford is a former chef who worked in some of the world’s most celebrated kitchens, capped by a stint at Noma in Copenhagen, before his pivot to police work. He had recently arrested a man suspected of robbing and killing a Vietnamese restaurant owner, a gruesome case in which the victim’s head had been run over during the alleged getaway.

During a scrap of time between active investigations, Stafford opened the digitized files from Cynthia’s case. He began to sift through hundreds of disordered pages. He didn’t see any new leads or evidence holding potential for DNA testing, so he set the files aside.

The case likely would have continued to languish if not for the sergeant’s chance encounter with a professor that fall.

Patricia Eddings, an expert in trace evidence, is short, with fiery red hair and a cheery Mississippi drawl. Before she became an educator at UT–Arlington, she spent decades as a forensic analyst working high-profile cases such as the Branch Davidian siege in Waco.

In October 2024, Eddings was intrigued to learn that a local homicide sergeant, Ritchie, was set to deliver a campus lecture on a cold case she had worked in 1985: the murder of Terri McAdams, a UTA student who was found beaten to death in her off-campus apartment. Working with the FBI, Arlington police had finally solved the crime that summer through genetic genealogy, matching the killer’s DNA to relatives in a public database.

Toward the end of his presentation, Ritchie lamented the police department’s struggle to reopen cold cases such as McAdams’. Because the city’s homicide detectives were constantly responding to new murders, several weeks might pass before they could return their attention to an older case from the vault. By then, he said, their memory of the case’s intricacies was already fading. It was almost like starting over.

That was the aha moment for Eddings. Unlike the city’s homicide detectives, her students in the department of criminology and criminal justice had nothing but time on their hands, even if they didn’t always realize it. “They tell me they don’t have time,” she told me, “but they have time for things they want to do. And I knew they would be excited about this.” When his presentation ended, Eddings found her way to Ritchie and asked if he would consider working with her undergraduate students.

Police can be territorial about open cases. To Eddings’ surprise, however, Ritchie was receptive, even enthusiastic, as were his supervisors. When the fall 2025 semester rolled around, police delivered flash drives containing the records of three murder cases to Eddings’ newest class. The files for Cynthia Gonzalez’s murder were the oldest.

Concannon and her teammates plugged the drive into a shared laptop and clicked it open. “We were kind of going in blind,” Concannon said.

They’d been expecting a large file, but sorting through 400 pages was overwhelming at first. Then it became addictive.

Growing up in Fort Worth, where many of her friends knew her as Cindy, Cynthia Renee Gandy was a talented athlete who was popular with her classmates. Her obituary describes her as the “high school queen” her junior year. But her father wasn’t in the picture, and her mother, Linda Gandy, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Cynthia’s life began a “downward spiral” after the family moved to a different neighborhood. Cynthia dropped out of Fort Worth’s Carter-Riverside High School during her senior year, in 1984. Four months later, 18 and pregnant, she married Donald Gonzalez, who was nearly seven years her senior. Jessica was born that December.

A friend, Lora Chionie, says that Cynthia was deeply committed to her daughter but had a rough life in Azle. “I remember seeing her with some bruises that we never talked about,” she said in a recent phone interview. (Jessica says she never saw her parents fighting.) But there were better times too. Chionie and Cynthia often partied with international business executives and once found themselves in a hotel room with players from a visiting NFL team. One of the athletes bought Chionie a new set of tires for performing a striptease. “We were crazy,” she said. “We had so much fun.”

But by 1991, Cynthia and Gonzalez were locked in a contentious custody dispute for their daughter, recalled another friend, Michelle Feigenbaum, who met Cynthia on the local entertainment circuit. But Cynthia was also talking about a new man in her life—a man she was wild about.

In 1991 Army veteran and divorced dad Anselmo “Tony” Ortiz, who also goes by the nickname Rocky, was working full time and attending college. He needed to let off a little steam. One night, he found his way to a local topless place.

The way Ortiz describes it, he walked through the door of Playmates and instantly locked eyes with the gorgeous dancer mingling with customers on the other side of the room. At the time, Ortiz sported a veritable headdress of 1980s rock ’n’ roll hair. Cynthia, the object of his desire, had enormous hair of her own, which she teased into a plume. It was love at first sight, an experience the now-63-year-old says he hadn’t had before—and hasn’t since.

Ortiz scored Cynthia’s number that night, and they met a couple of days later, before her shift at Playmates. The couple’s budding romance was complicated by the fact that Ortiz was already living with a woman named Janie Hatley, who waitressed at a different gentleman’s club in the area. When Ortiz broke up with Hatley, he turned around to leave when, he says, she punched him in the back of the head and sent him tumbling to the floor. Ortiz says that he then stood up and kneed Hatley in the stomach. She couldn’t breathe, so he called 911. When police arrived, he says, Hatley told the officers she fell down the stairs. (According to APD’s Records Services Division, the facility does not keep records dating so far back. An attorney for Hatley said he was not at liberty to discuss Ortiz’s claims and that Hatley was unavailable for comment.) The relationship, Ortiz thought, was over.

Ortiz knew Cynthia by her middle name, Renee, the stage name she used at Playmates. He remembered meeting her in late summer, in a whirlwind courtship that he described as a Hallmark movie. Newspaper accounts and police records indicate that they met several months earlier, around January 1991.

Whether they lived together in her Arlington apartment for just a few weeks, as Ortiz recalled during a phone call from his home in Tioga, a small town north of Fort Worth, or several months, as records indicate, Cynthia was clearly in love as well. She and Ortiz spent every possible second together, he remembers. They also went on family outings, Cynthia with Jessica and Ortiz with his son, who was around Jessica’s age. On a notebook on her coffee table, she wrote Cynthia Renee Ortiz, doodling hearts around her prospective married name.

Cynthia was also working steadily at Playmates. Fellow dancer Heather Berry, who now manages the Justice for Cynthia Renee Gonzalez Facebook page, said she and Cynthia entertained anyone who came in with cash: businessmen, construction workers, next-door neighbors, and famous people alike, including original members of Arlington’s homegrown Cowboys From Hell, the heavy metal band Pantera.

Berry went onstage right after Cynthia. The friends coordinated songs and outfits, with Cynthia sporting a Stevie Nicks look with black lace gloves past her elbows. She had a way of belly-dancing to “Rhiannon,” the classic Fleetwood Mac song, that turned heads throughout the club. After a good night, Berry and Cynthia would walk out with about $150 each.

At Playmates, Cynthia kept her personal life relatively private, but Berry believed she was still very much in love with Gonzalez. Cynthia was more open with Berry about her recovery from addiction, an experience that bonded the dancers because Berry was also in recovery. Cynthia went to rehab in 1991 and, Ortiz says, proudly carried a Narcotics Anonymous key chain.

Although precise dates are hard to track down, Cynthia founded Beauty and the Beast Entertainment around the time she separated from Gonzalez. To advertise her business, she affixed a decal and phone number to her white 1984 Pontiac Fiero, a sporty two-seater with retractable headlights. Friends believe she viewed the stripogram company as her way out of dancing at Playmates.

About five dancers worked for her. One was her boyfriend, Ortiz, who says he performed as the Lone Ranger, complete with mask and holstered six-shooters. When Cynthia knocked on a client’s door, she often dressed as a Pizza Hut delivery driver.

That was the costume she wore to her gig on Sept. 16, 1991. She did not enter the booking in her datebook, which was unusual, but Ortiz told police the stripogram had been scheduled for 6:30 p.m. at a private residence near the busy intersection of South Cooper Street and Grand Avenue, a few blocks south of the UTA campus. Her shows typically lasted 15 to 20 minutes.

Ortiz, who had left the apartment at about 3 that afternoon to attend an aviation class at a nearby airport, told me he came home later that night to find the TV and stereo still on. Cynthia had also left behind two unopened packs of cigarettes, indicating to him that she had not intended to stay out long.

When she didn’t come home, Ortiz phoned Gonzalez. He hadn’t heard from her either. They didn’t panic at first. “We let it go a little bit, ’cause we thought she might be out partying,” Gonzalez later told the Star-Telegram. Around noon the next day, Gonzalez reported Cynthia missing to the Arlington police.

Putting aside their differences, her husband and boyfriend went looking for Cynthia that afternoon. Ortiz says Gonzalez found Cynthia’s white Fiero surprisingly quickly. The car was parked on a quiet residential street, Cedar Springs Terrace, a couple of miles from her apartment and about a mile and a half from her gig.

Michelle Feigenbaum, Cynthia’s friend, remembers things differently. She says she was in a group of searchers that discovered the Fiero. They were worried that Cynthia was locked in the trunk, but they were also afraid to taint any evidence by touching the car. “It really creeped me out,” she recalled. A woman with teased reddish hair in an ’80s-style fringe neon-pink top. Jessica Roberts

They called the police, who told them to leave. Cynthia was not in the trunk. Her Pizza Hut outfit and a prop pizza box were folded neatly in the back seat. There was no sign of a struggle, seemingly offering no clues. No one on Cedar Springs Terrace knew Cynthia or had thrown a party the night before. “Her whereabouts are absolutely unknown,” a police officer told the Star-Telegram.

Friends and loved ones continued to comb the area for signs of Cynthia, searching creeks and sewer drains and putting up flyers on utility poles. They consulted a psychic, who said that Cynthia’s body would be found near water.

The disappearance was also starting to make local news. “Stripper’s Mom Fears the Worst,” a Star-Telegram headline blared. In a subsequent article, Cynthia’s mom, Gandy, who’d put up a $2,000 reward, criticized the newspaper’s focus on her daughter’s profession. “If the news had called Cindy a mother instead of a stripper, then people and maybe even the police would be more concerned,” she told the paper.

Around sunset on Sept. 22, six days after Cynthia was last seen, a rural landowner was walking her dog on a private dirt road 40 miles south of Arlington when she noticed a foul odor. The woman has not been publicly identified, and a neighbor said she has since died, but her property sat about a mile west of the Interstate 35 West freeway, next to the enormous Turkey Creek Landfill, off a winding country lane. Investigating the smell, she ventured about 50 feet off the dirt road, toward heavy woods, where she peered into a tree-lined creek bed. There, she discovered the body of a naked woman. Heavy rain had fallen that week, and the body was badly decomposed. Her face was unrecognizable, but the Johnson County authorities who responded to the crime scene quickly suspected that she was Cynthia.

Ortiz says an Arlington police detective called him and asked what fingernail polish Cynthia had been wearing when she disappeared. Ortiz, who often painted Cynthia’s nails for her, knew immediately. “They’re hot pink,” he said.

The color matched. “Tony, we found her,” he said the detective replied. Later, Cynthia’s body was officially identified by her fingerprints. She’d been shot several times in the chest.

Berry, the dancer who worked with Cynthia at Playmates, said she was clocking in that evening when the head waitress informed her that Cynthia’s body had been found. She says the club dedicated the evening to Cynthia, playing her favorite songs. Berry felt as if she were in a fog. Onstage, she cried through her dances.

A week after Cynthia was discovered, police still had no leads or suspects. Besides the gunshot wounds, an autopsy revealed no signs of trauma. Nor was there evidence of sexual assault, although decomposition made that difficult to confirm. Because Cynthia’s white Fiero had been released to Gonzalez before it could be properly fingerprinted, police said it wasn’t useful to the case either.

A veteran homicide detective named Jim Ford tried to retrace Cynthia’s last steps. Although Cynthia had not documented her Monday evening stripogram in her datebook, Ford apparently was able to confirm that the booking had been legitimate. He also spoke to a witness who had been working the drive-through window at an Arby’s restaurant near the corner of South Cooper and Grand, the same intersection where Cynthia had said she was meeting her client. The Arby’s employee noticed Cynthia’s Fiero parked at a car wash across the street from about 9 to 11:45 that night, hours after the stripogram was supposed to end.

One by one, Ford also tracked down the men in Cynthia’s life. He followed some for months to learn their patterns, and he ultimately eliminated more than a dozen suspects. Gonzalez had been home with Jessica. Ortiz had been at school. Other potential suspects had alibis of their own.

Colleagues told me Ford worked the case tirelessly. In December, he was named Arlington’s Officer of the Year. In a newspaper article, one of Ford’s fellow officers described him as a member of the old guard who chain-smoked cigarettes and worked late, “like the old TV detectives,” with Coke cans and 7-Eleven cups strewn around his disorderly desk. Wearing cowboy boots and a handlebar mustache, he had a Texas twang and a quiet, calm presence that disarmed suspects, eliciting confessions. “He was one of their best detectives ever,” said Eddings, the trace evidence expert and UT–Arlington senior lecturer, who often worked with Ford on murder cases. “None of us can say enough good things about Jim Ford. He was outstanding.”

His other leads exhausted, Ford turned his attention to a serial killer named Kenneth Allen McDuff. Along with an accomplice, McDuff had kidnapped and murdered three teenagers in a small town south of Fort Worth in 1966. After Texas paroled McDuff in 1989, he went on to rape and murder at least six more women, including a victim kidnapped from a car wash in Austin, Texas.

The car wash connection seemed promising to Ford, but he was never able to link the serial killer to Cynthia. McDuff was recaptured in 1992 and executed in 1998.

Ford retired in 2010, and he died in 2013, two years after Cynthia’s case was assigned to the cold-case archives.

To find their way into Cynthia’s unwieldy case at the start of the fall 2025 semester, Concannon and her teammates tackled the project much like a task force would, dividing it into sections. One student reviewed evidence logs, while another followed up on interviews and polygraphs. Other team members studied DNA analysis, crime scene photos, and so on. There were videos and audio to review as well.

Before long, the students were arriving to class early, staying late, and showing up to the forensic lab on their days off to continue their research. There were several days that Concannon spent eight hours poring over files. Some of the detectives’ notes had been written in cursive, which she helped translate for her younger teammates.

Shortly into the review, the team members had their epiphany. In the weeks that followed, their suspicions crystallized. They had to tell police.

Midway through the semester, Detective Stafford was scheduled to visit Eddings’ class to chat with students and answer questions. One week before his visit, the students emailed him a list of 35 questions that largely circled around Janie Hatley, the Arlington waitress who’d dated Ortiz.

Hatley’s wasn’t a name Stafford recognized from his own review of the case earlier that year. He’d never even considered a female suspect. But the list of questions piqued his interest. The students had been reviewing digital files. Now Stafford and his partner, Detective Julie Evans, hauled six boxes of records and physical evidence into the police department conference room and spread them across the table.

Ford, the original detective, had interviewed Hatley not long after Cynthia’s death. According to a police affidavit, Ortiz had been dating Hatley and Cynthia at the same time. Weeks before Cynthia’s death, after Ortiz broke things off with Hatley, she allegedly became hysterical. According to a police affidavit, Hatley said that she and Ortiz were soulmates and that he would never be rid of her.

Ford determined that Hatley was the only person who couldn’t provide an alibi for the night of the murder. She claimed she was off work and home alone—that she had unplugged her phone and gone to bed. When the detective asked her to take a polygraph, she consented. During the examination, the polygrapher asked Hatley if she knew who shot Cynthia. She was also asked whether she was the one who shot Cynthia. Hatley said no to both questions but showed the highest level of deception in both answers, according to an affidavit that Stafford later filed.

One week after her first test, she submitted to another polygraph. She failed again. The polygrapher concluded that Hatley showed significant indications of deception, suggesting that she had hired someone to kill Cynthia.

But polygraphs are unreliable and inadmissible in court, and Hatley maintained her innocence under further questioning.

She did admit to Ford that she still loved Ortiz and “would do anything in the world for him.” She also said that Ortiz was the only person she cared about and she kept no secrets from him.

And Hatley made a further disclosure: According to Arlington police, she said she was glad Cynthia was dead. She also allegedly admitted that she had thought about killing Cynthia herself, or having her killed.

Despite her disturbing admission, Ford apparently let the matter go, and he spent the next year and a half pursuing other suspects. Then, in February 1993, a Vietnam veteran named Robert William Hardee was arrested in Grand Prairie, a Dallas suburb that borders Arlington. While under arrest on charges unrelated to Cynthia’s case, Hardee asked to speak with Ford.

Hardee told Ford that he was Hatley’s closest male friend, and he gave a sworn statement claiming that she had made a number of confessions to him regarding Cynthia’s murder. Hardee’s statement has not been made public, but police say that Hatley told him she had killed Cynthia because Hatley and Ortiz were soulmates and she couldn’t live without him. After Cynthia’s body was found in the rural creek bed, police say, Hatley told Hardee she was being investigated as a suspect and asked him to provide her alibi. (It’s unclear whether he acquiesced.)

Hardee and Hatley’s relationship seems to have been platonic, although Hardee admitted that he had romantic feelings for his friend. Around the first anniversary of Cynthia’s death, he finally told her he loved her. She allegedly replied that they could never have a relationship because she was evil and that she had killed Cynthia to get Ortiz back.

Hardee shared one last potential bombshell. He said that Hatley told him she had lost her apartment keys in Cynthia’s Pontiac Fiero on the night of the murder. Police had actually found the keys when they searched the car the next day. They knew the keys didn’t belong to Cynthia, but they apparently did not link them to Hatley at the time.

After speaking with Hardee, Ford followed up with Ortiz, who’d never met Hardee. In a sworn statement, Ortiz said that Hatley told him in October 1991, the month following Cynthia’s death, that she was the one who had killed Cynthia. In a slightly contradictory claim, laid out in a police affidavit, Hatley also allegedly indicated that she was with someone else who killed Cynthia, going so far as to describe the four gunshots she heard and noting that Cynthia had been shot four times in the chest by a .44 Magnum pistol. In addition, Hatley reportedly told Ortiz that Cynthia had been raped and that her clothes were thrown away at a dump. She bragged that she had people who would do anything for her.

According to Ortiz’s statement, Hatley provided the same motive to him that she had given her friend Hardee: With Cynthia out of the way, Ortiz would come back to her. Indeed, police say that Ortiz and Hatley resumed their relationship after Cynthia’s death but that it ended again within six months. (Ortiz disputed the claim that he ever dated Hatley after he broke up with her to be with Cynthia.)

Not everything lined up. For one thing, there was no evidence that Cynthia had been raped. Also, she’d been shot by a .38 Special revolver, not a .44 Magnum. It is also notable that Ortiz apparently did not report Hatley’s alleged confession to police until Ford tracked him down following Hardee’s statement in 1993. In a recent interview, Ortiz said he chose not to inform police because he hadn’t believed that Hatley was being truthful. “I had no inkling that it was Janie, none, even though she had told me weeks later, that she did it and blah, blah, blah,” Ortiz told me. “And then she’d say, ‘Well, I was just mad at you, you know. That’s why I said that. I didn’t really do it.’ ”

Through her defense attorneys, Hatley—who changed her name to Janie Perkins after she got married in 1995—said she is innocent of the allegations. A police officer standing behind a lectern, addressing a roomful of college students. Arlington Police Department

Back at the police department conference table in 2025, Detectives Stafford and Evans passed case documents back and forth. In the weeks before the murder, Stafford said, officers had responded to several disturbances involving Ortiz and Hatley after their breakup. Cynthia was involved in some of them, but Stafford said that she eventually tried to smooth things over with her rival. The two women even went out together, just the two of them, he said, to meet other men.

After more than five hours, Stafford and Evans cleared the table to focus on the crime scene, comparing the evidence to the witness statements. In their opinion, Hatley seemed to know details that only someone who was involved in Cynthia’s murder would know.

The fall semester was more than halfway through when Stafford visited the UT–Arlington forensic lab on Nov. 6. He was joined by his police chief, Al Jones, and a media relations coordinator who recorded the session. Addressing more than a dozen criminal justice and forensics students—including two other groups who’d reviewed different cases for their class assignment—Stafford announced that U.S. Marshals were waiting outside a house in Azle, the same town where Cynthia had lived with her husband and daughter.

The Marshals were in Azle, Stafford explained, to arrest Hatley—now Perkins, age 63—on a warrant for capital murder. The lab erupted into claps and cheers. Concannon became misty-eyed. The students passed around tissues as Stafford shared Cynthia’s diary with the class.

Stafford had also phoned Jessica and asked her to come by the police department. The timing was inconvenient. Jessica and a friend were set to leave for a long road trip to a fantasy convention in South Bend, Indiana. She asked if Stafford could tell her the news over the phone.

“No, I have to tell you this in person,” he replied.

A detective led Jessica to the same conference room where Stafford and Evans had sorted through the evidence only days earlier. Now Stafford walked Jessica through the recent developments in the investigation, culminating in the arrest and charge of a suspect more than 34 years after her mother’s murder.

Jessica began to sob. She knew nothing about Perkins. It felt surreal, and Jessica says she was slow to process the news. But it turned out there was another shock to come.

Later that month, Jessica returned to the police department, along with Eddings and her students, for a celebratory press conference that rocketed the news of Perkins’ arrest across the globe. The novel partnership between students and police to break open a decades-old murder case, with a love triangle at its center, was irresistible fodder for the media’s true-crime boom. One of Eddings’ co-workers heard about the arrest on the radio in China.

As TV producers jockeyed for scoops and access, prosecutors in the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, in Fort Worth, were faced with another task. They spent much of the winter and early spring of 2026 behind the scenes, readying to present the case to a grand jury, which would weigh the evidence and determine whether to indict Perkins for Cynthia’s murder. Grand jury proceedings are secret in Texas, as are their schedules. Heading into spring, there were rumors of delays. But on March 23, 2026, four months after Perkins’ arrest, the district attorney’s office finally issued an announcement.

The grand jury, in fact, had declined to indict Perkins.

In a statement, Assistant District Attorney Kim D’Avignon blamed her office’s failure to secure an indictment on a lack of admissible evidence that would have proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt. “We will not give up hope that someone knows something that could help us to successfully prosecute this case in the future,” she said.

In a statement of his own, Perkins’ defense attorney, D. Miles Brissette, ripped the “premature and highly publicized accusations” leveled against his client.

Suddenly, the narrative had whipsawed. What happened?

From the public record, it never made much sense that a respected homicide detective like Ford would have failed to look more seriously at Perkins when he had a chance more than three decades ago—why it took five students to see what he couldn’t. One theory was that Ford suffered from tunnel vision. He was so locked into the assumption that only a man could have killed Cynthia that he disregarded Perkins’ multiple alleged confessions. Or maybe Ford was more clear-eyed than that. What if he simply realized he didn’t have the goods? We just don’t know.

In an interview prior to the grand jury’s decision, Stafford alleged that Perkins had had help in the murder plot, theorizing that her friend Robert Hardee, who died in 2012, had more to do with the killing than he had let on when he tipped off Ford to her alleged confessions in 1993. Stafford did not respond to questions after the grand jury issued the no bill, but an Arlington police spokesperson referred me to a general statement that the department stands by the investigation but respects the grand jury’s decision. Recently in Crime

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The DA could try to indict Perkins again, especially if other witnesses come forward or new evidence emerges. When Stafford obtained the warrant for Perkins’ arrest in November, he also secured a search warrant to collect a sample of her saliva. He submitted it for DNA testing against evidence from the case that he declined to describe to me. He expects results this summer, if not sooner. The story of Cynthia Renee Gonzalez may not be over.

Jessica later likened the recent developments in her mom’s case to an old TV show she’d seen over and over. “This season left off on a cliff-hanger halfway through, unexpectedly,” she said.

Concannon is interning this semester at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office and is set to graduate this spring. She hopes to pursue a career in forensic science, as either a crime scene or crime lab analyst.

Even with the uncertainty in this case, Eddings tells me, she has been inundated with queries from other educators interested in starting their own cold-case classes across the country. After all, students and murders are never in short supply. Eddings is offering her class again this fall.

The case of Cindy James, a Canadian woman who was found dead under suspicious circumstances in 1989, continues to captivate the public's attention due to the perplexing details surrounding her life and death. Despite authorities ruling her death as a suicide, many unanswered questions and disturbing incidents leading up to her demise have left family, friends, and the public sceptical. This article delves into the life of Cindy James, the relentless harassment she endured, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her tragic end.

Born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Cynthia "Cindy" Elizabeth Hack James had a successful career as a nurse after earning a degree in nursing. She dedicated twelve years to working with preschool-age children with special needs, finding great fulfilment in her job. Following her marriage to psychiatrist Roy Makepeace in 1966, Cindy's life seemed ordinary and promising, until a series of events would shatter that sense of normalcy.

In 1982, four months after her separation from Roy, Cindy James started receiving harassing phone calls from an unidentified male. The calls were characterized by unusual sounds, whispers, and eerie silence, leaving her in a state of constant unease. Despite reporting the incidents to the authorities, the harassment escalated rather than abated.

Alongside the relentless phone calls, Cindy James experienced a disturbing array of incidents over a span of seven years. She received threatening letters, heard mysterious noises outside her home, and discovered dead cats in her yard on multiple occasions. Her property was vandalized, with the lights destroyed and the telephone lines cut. The most chilling incidents involved physical violence, with Cindy reporting being attacked and assaulted.

Authorities investigated Cindy James' allegations of harassment extensively. They employed surveillance, forensic analysis, and psychological profiling, yet no conclusive evidence pointing to a specific culprit was found. Despite the presence of blood on an abandoned vehicle, Cindy's car and wallet, which were linked to her, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police ultimately concluded her death as a suicide.

The ruling of Cindy James' death as a suicide has faced significant scrutiny. Friends and family question the circumstances surrounding her body's discovery, with her hands and feet bound and a nylon stocking tightly secured around her neck. The signs of a struggle and the presence of drugs, including a fatal dose of morphine, raise doubts about the suicide conclusion. Many believe that the relentless harassment she endured may have been connected to her tragic fate.

The case of Cindy James remains an unsolved mystery, with no definitive answers regarding her death. The haunting details of her life, marked by persistent harassment and unexplained incidents, continue to fuel speculation and scepticism. As the years pass, the quest for justice and the truth behind Cindy James' untimely demise remains unresolved, leaving her loved ones and the public seeking closure.

In the quiet town of La Porte, Indiana, Belle Gunness orchestrated a series of gruesome murders that shocked the nation in the early 20th century. Despite her seemingly ordinary façade as a widow living on a farm, Gunness was, in reality, a cunning and prolific serial killer. Her victims included not only her two husbands but also numerous single men and even some of her own children. The extent of her crimes remains uncertain, with estimates ranging from 14 to as many as 40 victims.

Gunness had a sinister modus operandi. Following the deaths of her husbands, she placed enticing ads in newspapers, targeting fellow Norwegian-Americans who sought a taste of home and a promising investment opportunity. Her farm became a magnet for these hopeful souls, and she also cast her net wider, luring wealthy bachelors through lovelorn columns.

One of her victims, Andrew Helgelien, fell under her spell through heartfelt letters. He journeyed to La Porte, captivated by Gunness' promises of everlasting love. Tragically, he met the same fate as those before him—his dismembered body was discovered in her hog pen, alongside other unfortunate souls.

Gunness' crimes were shrouded in mystery until a significant turning point in 1908. Following a suspicious fire that consumed her farmhouse, authorities unearthed a chilling scene. Amidst the debris, they found the remains of Gunness' three children and a headless woman presumed to be her. However, doubts lingered; the corpse appeared oddly small, and conclusive identification proved elusive.

As the gruesome discoveries unfolded, Belle Gunness earned infamous nicknames such as the "Black Widow" and the "Mistress of the Castle of Death." The media frenzy surrounding her story turned La Porte into a national spectacle, drawing crowds curious about the horrors that had transpired on the so-called "horror farm."

Ray Lamphere, a jealous farmhand with romantic feelings for Gunness, was charged with arson but not murder. However, on his deathbed, he confessed to his involvement in 42 murders with Gunness. Lamphere's revelation raised chilling questions: Did Gunness orchestrate her own death in the farmhouse fire, escaping the clutches of justice? Or did she vanish, free to continue her murderous spree elsewhere?

The mystery deepened when, years later, a woman named Esther Carlson, bearing a striking resemblance to Gunness, faced charges of poisoning a man in Los Angeles. Despite her demise from tuberculosis, suspicions persisted that she might have been the elusive killer, perpetuating the enigma surrounding the true fate of Belle Gunness. To this day, the exact circumstances of her death and the extent of her crimes remain unresolved, leaving behind a haunting tale of deception and bloodshed.

In the sleepy town of Keddie, nestled amidst Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, an unsolved mystery continues to haunt the collective imagination. The Keddie Cabin Murders, which occurred in April 1981, left a chilling scar on this serene landscape On April 11, 1981, three members of the Sharp family met a horrifying end. Sue Sharp, a single mother in her late 30s, her two children John (age 15) and Dana (age 17), and John's friend Dana were the unfortunate souls who lost their lives in this brutal incident. It's a small-town tragedy that still sends shivers down the spine of anyone who hears about it. The victims were found bound and bludgeoned to death, with tape and wire used to immobilize them. The cabin was a mess, and the brutality of the crime shocked even seasoned law enforcement officers. The gruesome details hinted at a personal vendetta rather than a random act of violence. Initially, authorities focused their attention on a neighbour, Marty Smartt, and his acquaintance, John "Bo" Boubede. However, these two were never formally charged, and the case went cold for decades. Despite countless hours of police work and numerous leads, the Keddie Cabin Murders remained unsolved for years. Theories floated around, involving everything from drugs to personal grudges, but the truth remained elusive.

Now, here's where it gets even stranger. In 2016, nearly 35 years after the murders, a startling revelation came to light. A hammer, believed to be the murder weapon, was discovered in a local pond. This discovery reopened the case, leading to renewed interest and speculation. So, what happened that night? Why did someone target the Sharp family? Why was this case never solved, despite all the evidence and suspects? These questions continue to perplex amateur sleuths and armchair detectives to this day.

Unravelling the Mystery of a Grisly Crime

In the annals of true crime history, few cases have captured the public's fascination like the infamous Lizzie Borden case. The shocking and brutal murders of Andrew and Abby Borden continue to intrigue and puzzle generations of crime enthusiasts. On August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered in their own home. Andrew was found hacked to death with a hatchet while sleeping on the living room couch. Abby, his wife, was discovered upstairs, similarly bludgeoned. The crime scene pointed to someone with an intimate knowledge of the house, as there were no signs of forced entry. Lizzie Borden, Andrew's 32-year-old daughter, became the prime suspect due to her presence at the time of the murders and the strained relationship she had with her stepmother. Lizzie's behaviour after the crime, including conflicting statements and questionable alibis, raised further suspicion. Despite this, the case against her was largely circumstantial.

Lizzie Borden's trial began on June 5, 1893, captivating the nation's attention. The prosecution presented a case built on motive, opportunity, and circumstantial evidence. However, the defence argued that Lizzie was wrongly accused and that the evidence was insufficient. The trial lasted for thirteen days, and on June 20, 1893, the jury acquitted Lizzie Borden of all charges. After her acquittal, Lizzie Borden returned to Fall River and lived there until her death in 1927. The murders remained unsolved, leaving a lasting sense of mystery and intrigue. Speculation about the case continued for years, with various theories proposed, including theories involving an unknown intruder or potential family involvement.

Meet Rebecca Reusch, a 15-year-old K-pop enthusiast from Berlin, Germany. Unfortunately, she's been missing since February 18, 2019, and the police are still trying to piece together the puzzle.

Rebecca was big on social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, where she had a following of over 30,000 fans. She was a close-knit part of her family, including her older sister Jessica, who was 27 at the time.

Sometimes, Rebecca spent weekends at Jessica's place, and her parents were cool with it because they were one tight-knit family. On February 17, 2019, Jessica's husband, Florian, was out partying with his co-workers, leaving the girls alone for some sisterly bonding.

Rebecca's mom gave her the green light, but with one condition: she had to be in school on time the next day. The plot thickens when Jessica left early for work at 7 a.m., leaving only Florian and Rebecca at home.

When it hit 7:15, Rebecca's mom called to remind her to head to school, but her phone was off the grid. Panic mode engaged. She called Jessica, who had no clue where Rebecca was, and then Florian, who claimed she'd already left.

Initially, nobody was too alarmed, thinking it was just a mix-up. However, as hours passed, they got a call from school saying Rebecca hadn't shown up. That's when the missing person report hit the police.

The police released photos of Rebecca, but her family said they didn't capture her true essence thanks to all those Instagram filters.

Some thought maybe Rebecca ran away, but the family couldn't believe it since they were super close.

On February 28, 2019, the police threw a curveball by arresting Florian, Rebecca's brother-in-law. That shook the family, but it made Florian the prime suspect. Why? Well, Florian's story had more twists than a rollercoaster.

He said he was home all night, but data from the internet router told a different story. It showed he was online well past his bedtime. Plus, Rebecca's phone stayed connected till 7:46 a.m., and he got a call at 7:15 a.m. saying she'd vanished.

They also found Rebecca's DNA in Florian's car, but here's the twist – Jessica used that car too, so it wasn't a slam-dunk piece of evidence.

Florian got released due to lack of evidence but got arrested again on March 4. This time he said he went to Poland to meet a drug dealer and returned to find his lost wedding ring. Not the most convincing alibi.

The cops searched Poland high and low but found nothing. Then, Rebecca's family dropped a bombshell – they mentioned a mysterious "Max" she'd met online. She'd asked to meet him, but they said no. After she disappeared, Max vanished too, wiping his social media clean. The police never tracked him down.

Fast forward a few years, and the case is still unsolved. Rebecca's family stepped back from the investigation due to tensions with the cops. The case files remain open, waiting for a breakthrough.

Nathan and Denise Leuthold were childhood sweethearts, their religious beliefs stopped them from dating at school they were good friends and spent a lot of time together Nathan practically lived at Denise’s house. Once Denise graduated, she headed off to college in Minnesota and Nathan soon followed her and pretty quickly the pair were married in July 1995 and settled down in their hometown.

A while after though Nathan felt a calling and convinced Denise to leave her life behind and become a Missionary in Lithuania for a year, once the year was up they came back home and had 2 children While Denise would have preferred to stay settled with family around to help during this time Nathan was keen to go back to Lithuania his calling was very strong so Denise agreed her and Nathan packed their life up again and headed back. Denise dove in headfirst and began sharing her love of music with people during their many trips out there and as such they got close to many local families including a young teen Aina Dobilite. Aina shared Denise’s love of music and often babysat for the couple's children. 2010 rolls around and the and the family headed back to the USA and decided to sponsor Aina so that she could attend college in Florida.

3 years later On Valentines Day 2013 Denise was shot dead as she walked into her home that was shared with her parents, she had just got home from dropping her youngest child at daycare, she4 had barely stepped inside when she was shot once in the head. Nathan arrived home with the youngest that he had picked up from daycare he noticed that there was some broken glass near a door, so he took the child to a neighbour's and then called 911 he calmly told 911 “We’ve got a break-in".

The police arrived quickly and found Denise inside shot in the head by a .40cal handgun. It was first thought that Denise must have interrupted a burglary but upon seeing a number of valuables that had not been taken looking closer they began to suspect someone close to her as she4 was found lying on her car keys but someone had found the spare set and then took her car to a nearby park and dumped it and the keys there. Also, Diane whose jewellery was stolen states that she only has 3 valuable rings, and they were the only ones taken which is odd how did they know which ones were worth something. Detectives grew more suspicious after learning about the unusual relationship between Nathan and Aina they both denied there being any sexual aspect to their relationship but her school had asked her to leave due the inappropriate relationship between her and her sponsor including overnight stays at a hotel and while the police were checking Nathans alibi that he was buying a voucher at a spa for his wife's present the owner informed the police that he regularly accompanied Aina to her waxing appointments and payee for them. While being interviewed Aina declined to answer many questions about her relationship with Nathan and just glared at the police.

Three weeks after the murder Nathan was arrested and during the trial one of Nathan's fellow inmates testified that Nathan had told him he killed his wife as a Valentines Day present to Aina.

He was found guilty of first-degree murder in just 90mins and was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

On July 29th multiple people fell ill and three died leaving one fighting for his life in intensive care hoping for a liver transplant.

Erin Patterson in Leongatha, Victoria's Gippsland region, on July 29 Invited her in-laws and ex-husband to dinner with her current husband. The ex-husband pulled out last minute but his mum, dad and Gails sister still joined Erin and Ian. The guests fell ill around midnight with food poisoning type symptoms and were taken to hospital where Gail, Don and Heather sadly passed away and Ian remains in Intensive care waiting on a liver transplant. The symptoms are consistent with death cap mushroom poisoning, The children present had eaten a different meal and they are fine no symptoms or concerns.

Erin is not showing any symptoms and has been named as a suspect but police caution that they do not know for sure if this was intentional or accidental and are trying to get to the bottom of what happened. Detectives have searched Erin’s house and taken some items to be tested also a food dehydrator that they found at the tip has been taken in for forensic testing.

Social media posts from Simon Patterson (Erin’s ex-husband) describe a time he spent in intensive care and his family was even brought in to say goodbye to him as he was suffering from stomach issues, though the cause is not in these posts and it's unclear if this could somehow be linked to the ongoing case.

Hopefully the tests will be able to clear up what happened.

Kyron Horman was born sept 9th 2002 in Portland Oregon to his mum Desiree Young and dad Kaine Horman, they divorced before Kyron was born, but they both shared custody and seemingly co-parented well. Until 2004 when Desiree became very ill suffering with kidney failure with many hospital visits and treatments the pair thought it would be best for Kyron to stay with Kaine as primary parent to give him some stability of course visiting and communicating plenty with Desiree.

Three years later (2007) Kaine married Terri Moulton, the two met and got together in 2001, she worked as a substitute teacher and had a son from a previous marriage and in 2008 they saw the birth of their daughter Kiara. According to friends and family the Horman's were a tight knit, loving family they enjoyed spending time together playing board games, bowling with friends and taking trips. Terri volunteered at Skyline Elementary School which is where Kyron attended, she also earned a bachelor's degree in 2000 and mostly worked as a substitute teacher but slowed and then stopped subbing so that she could be home with Kyron during his toddler and preschool years. She continued to learn going on to earn her Master's in education in 2004 and in 2003 she placed 4th in a bodybuilding competition though the same year she was caught drink driving with her 11-year-old son in the car.

On June 4th, 2010, at 8am Skyline school opens up early for the science fair so parents and students can have a look around and see all the exhibits, Gina Zimmerman the school president sees Kyron and Terri around 8:15 and Terri says she watched Kyron walk towards his classroom as she heads out around 8:45 an unnamed student said they saw him near the south entrance a bit later (although the sheriff later backtracks on this statement).

At 10am Kyron's Teacher marks him absent, she didn’t think anything of it as she and Terri had discussed Kyron having a doctor's appointment coming up and she just presumed that was why he was not here.

Later that day around 1pm Terri uploads pictures of Kyron and the science fair on her Facebook and then at 3:30 Terri and Kaine head to the bus stop to get Kyron and they discover he is not on the bus and had been marked absent.

This causes the Skyline secretary to call 9-1-1 and soon after officers begin to arrive at the school and the Horman house. There are texts from the school sent out to all parents to alert them of a missing child and at 7pm the sheriff alerts SAR that they need to start a formal search for Kyron. Many search teams and news outlets arrive at the school and photos and information are given out to everyone and news starts to inform the public that Kyron is missing.

Over the weekend more SAR teams are called in and associated press start to spread the story, a facebook page is created and also a helpfindmychild.net page is made for Kyron. FBI and National Guard are brought in to help. Parents and students are called into the school to answer questions and bring as much info to light as possible. The next week sees Skyline open up for classes and offers a counselling service to all students, SAR continues, mid-week Terri makes her Facebook page private, and an FBI spokesperson announces that the family are not speaking to the media as they don’t believe it's in the best interest of finding Kyron. More SAR teams are called in and the search expands to Sauvie Island but by Sunday June 13th the Sheriff announces that the search has ended, and the case has shifted to a criminal case.

On Saturday June 26th two 911 calls were made from the Horman household and were classified as a threat and a custody issue, but no other details have been released after this Kaine and his daughter move out of the house and serves Terri with a petition for divorce and a restraining order. A while later the News reveals that the landscaper that worked for the Horman's told police that Terri approached him and offered to pay him to kill Kaine 6/7 months before Kyron’s disappearance.

It's announced to the court that Terri will not contest the restraining order or the request to move out of the home and Kaine asks Terri to be held in contempt claiming that she violated the RO by starting a sexual relationship with an old school friend of his, shared sealed legal info and trying to kidnap their daughter. News reveals that the police have been putting a lot of pressure on a small circle of Terri's friends including DeDe Spicher and search her property.

Many searches take place on Sauvie Island and a forested area west of it as police say they have new and specific reasons, but nothing is found. The family continue to post and speak out hoping for information there Facebook page is very active to this day.

Online there are many theories about what happened that day split between Kyron wandering off in the chaos of the science fair and those who think Terri had something to do with his disappearance. It’s a case I return to many times and there is a lot to say about it, where do you fall what theory do you believe or do you have any different ideas.

I hope one day the truth will be found and the family can get some closure.

ST. ANTHONY, Idaho - Lori Vallow Daybell, the woman convicted for the murders of two of her children and conspiring to kill her fifth husband's wife, was sentenced Monday following emotional impact statements from the victims' families. She was given multiple life sentences.

For the deaths of 7-year-old JJ Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan, Vallow was convicted on two counts each of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, as well as grand theft. She was also convicted for conspiracy to murder Tammy Daybell, the former wife of her husband, Chad Daybell.

https://tinyurl.com/sentanced

Been a long time and so many twists and turns but some justice served for those kids.

Jasmin Paez (18) was arrested on Tuesday. She allegedly used a website called Rentahitman.com where she filled out a form to hire a hitman to kill her 3yr old son, she provided a photo and the address while requesting that the job be completed by the end of the week.

The owner of the site contacted the local authorities Miami Dade three times regarding this request and tried to get an officer to look into it but each time he was referred to Crimestoppers who also did not seem to understand the urgency of the situation. He was finally able to get through to someone that this wasn’t a joke or prank he had serious concerns regarding the safety of a young child and the investigation was passed onto a detective. Investigators posed as the hitman and spoke with Paez to go over details of the hit, the mother agreed to pay $3000 for them to murder her son.

Robert Innes who owns the site, set up for a cyber security company years ago, has received many requests for hitman most people see the joke or see through the site and request silly hits but over the years he has had a few requests that have raised red flags when a requests makes him question things he tries to verify the details name address etc and if he can verify the people he passes it on to the local authority to check into.

Shortly after posing as hitmen and confirming the hit with Paez the police arrived at her house and arrested Paez on charges of soliciting murder and unlawful use of a communication device, she was given a $15000 bond and ordered to stay away from her son, who is safe and well with relatives, DCFs has been alerted and I imagine will be opening a case into the overall safety of the child.

NBC6 spoke to her father who says that the case is not what it seems.

"My daughter is not a monster," the father said in Spanish. "My daughter is a little girl who was born with health problems. She has liquid retained in her neck. She's had 12 surgeries and she lost the ability to move her face. She's been bullied in school, they called her 'the monster.'"

The father added that he's confident the justice system will bring out the truth.

Colin Smith, who was fatally stabbed in Portland, Oregon, on July 2, died protecting a friend who was facing anti-LGBTQ harassment.

Colin Smith 32 had gotten off work and headed to a bar with friends. Once at the bar having a nice night a man came up and started harassing his friends using homophobic slurs, Smith defended his friend and the man retaliated by stabbing Smith multiple times and fled the scene. Unfortunately, he had passed away by time that Officers arrived.

“He died being the person we all knew him as, The protector”

The suspect was later arrested on the 7th of July by US Marshalls, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced Thursday that a grand jury had indicted Rahnique Usef Jackson, 24, on three charges relating to Smith’s death: murder in the second degree, unlawful use of a weapon and bias crime in the second degree.

June 9th 1995 Morgan Nick and her mother Colleen Nick travelled to a little league baseball game in Alma, Arkansas. Around 10:30pm Morgan asked her mom if she could go catch some fireflies with friends her mom was reluctant at first but other parents said it was a safe area and she could be seen from where she was sitting, so she relented and made sure to turn round and check o them all 4 or so times.

Morgan was last seen at 10:45 leaning against her moms car as she shook sand out of her shoes her friends stood a little way away from her and cleaned out their shoes they noted that a ‘creepy’ man was chatting to Morgan while this was happening they headed back to their parents after this and told Morgan's mom that she was at the car waiting for her. When Colleen got back to her car tho Morgan was nowhere to be seen.

Colleen desperately searched the parking lot for Morgan and a coach say her worried searching and called local authorities. Six minutes later deputies had arrived and while they started to look around, they thought Morgan had just wondered off they soon began to share the worry Colleen was having. The Alma PD immediately started to search and began an investigation asking for help from the FBI and Arkansas PD. Also reaching out to the media. The town Courtroom was turned into a call centre for tips and the FBI set up a mobile command centre in the parking lot. While the Nick family moved into the local Fire Department it became the HQ for all volunteer searches.

People came forward to share that they had seen an unidentified male looking at Morgan a lot while she was playing and may have approached her friend also verified that there was a ‘Creepy’ man talking to Morgan while she was emptying her shoes out at her mom's car.

Police release a sketch of him to the public he was described as 23-38, medium to solid build, 6’0, 180 pounds with black salt and pepper hair combed back full facial hair and a hairy chest. He was said to have spoken with a ‘hill billy’ accent and was wearing just blue jean shorts. His vehicle was a red pickup truck with a white camper shell with curtains covering the windows it was seen leaving around the time Morgan went missing.

Many tips and leads have come in over the years a couple of properties have been searched but nothing has come from those as far as we have been told. Recently a link may have been made between Morgan and a man called Bill Jack Lincks who owned a red pickup and was arrested for an attempted kidnapping of another young girl shortly after Morgan went missing, when arrested his truck was impounded and kept by the police for a good while and according to a documentary called ‘still missing Morgan' the police have searched the truck and found blood, blonde hair matching the colour of Morgan's hair and blue/green Fibres.

I am going to leave this write up here at this point but am going deeper in to the latest findings which will hopefully bring some closure and help put this horrible case to bed. I'll add to this post when I have a write up of those findings.

Not read to much about this but this sounds promising an arrest in the Gilgo Murders will definitely be keeping up on this as it unfolds.

https://tinyurl.com/2erqp2hr