Solved 1987 NYC Cold Case Reveals Monster Was a Father to Daughters

Solved 1987 NYC Cold Case Reveals Monster Was a Father to Daughters

Every summer for years, a man packed a cooler, loaded his wife and two young kids into the car, and drove to a quiet wooded spot for a picnic. He’d lay out a blanket on the grass, right where his children would laugh and play just a few feet away. But as they played, he would carefully scan the ground beneath them, ensuring the earth hadn’t been disturbed.

 Because buried directly beneath that very patch of dirt was a 16-year-old girl he had brutally murdered. He raised his family just 200 yards from her hidden grave, living alongside his dark secret for seven long years while a desperate town searched in vain. Welcome to Retrograde Crime, where we look back at the dark, forgotten corners of history to uncover the mysteries that shook communities to their core.

 Kindly comment your country’s flag below to let me know where you’re watching from. To understand how this monster managed to hide in plain sight right under everyone’s noses, we have to travel back to the summer of 1987. O Sable Forks in the summer of 1987 was the quintessential American small town. Nestled deeply against the heavy timber lines of the Aderandac Mountains in upstate New York.

 Life there moved with a predictable, comforting rhythm. It was a community forged on deep multigenerational roots and absolute trust. People didn’t just know their neighbors. They knew their neighbors parents, where they worked, and what time they usually sat down for dinner. Front doors were left unlocked. Keys were routinely left in car ignitions overnight, and children roamed the streets until the street lights flickered on.

 In Oabil Forks, danger was a concept reserved for evening news broadcasts from distant, chaotic cities. It simply did not happen here. 16-year-old Carrie Lynn Nixon was a fixture of this idyllic protected environment. By all accounts, she was a young woman thriving in the small world she inhabited. She was an above average student at the local high school, an avid singer with a beautiful voice and a passionate aspiring creative writer.

 On summer afternoons, you could usually find her on the Diamond playing as the star pitcher for her high school softball team. She had deep roots in the community, a loving family, and a wide circle of protective friends. There was absolutely nothing in her life to suggest she was under any kind of stress, hanging around the wrong crowd, or in any sort of trouble.

 Her world was undeniably small, but it was safe. Or at least that was the illusion everyone in Osabo Forks happily lived under. That comforting illusion was permanently shattered on the evening of Monday, June 22nd, 1987. It began as nothing more than a completely mundane ordinary household request.

 As the sun began to dip below the Aderandac treeine, Carrie’s father, Gary, realized they needed a few groceries. He asked Carrie if she would mind making a quick trip down to Thomas’s Country Store, a familiar neighborhood market located just a few blocks away from their house. It was a walk Carrie had done hundreds of times before.

 It was a route so familiar she could have walked it blindfolded. Before heading out into the cool evening air, Carrie went to her bedroom. In a small, seemingly insignificant action that would later carry immense weight for investigators, she left her own pocket money sitting out on top of her dresser. Instead of using her own cash, she took a $20 bill that her father handed her for the errand.

 She stepped out of her family’s front door at approximately 9:30 p.m., slipping out into the quiet twilight. What was supposed to be a routine 5-minute errand was about to become a one-way trip into a harrowing multi-year nightmare. For the first 25 minutes, Car’s movements followed the exact mundane script of small town life. She made the short walk down the sidewalk to Thomas’s country store without incident.

 Inside, the store clerk, who knew Carrie by name, greeted her warmly. They exchanged brief small talk as Carrie picked up the few items her family needed. At exactly 9:55 p.m., the clerk rang up her groceries. The final bill came out to just over $3. Carrie handed over her father’s $20 bill, pocketed her change, took the grocery bag, and began the short journey back toward her house.

 10 minutes into her walk home at 10:05 p.m., Carrie passed a neighbor’s house just a short distance from her own front porch. The neighbor was outside, saw Carrie walking along the familiar path, and waved. Carrie smiled and exchanged a brief friendly greeting. Everything was completely normal. She was mere hundreds of feet from safety.

 But then the timeline tightens into an suffocatingly small window. Exactly 5 minutes later at 10:10 p.m. a group of local teenage boys walk down that exact same empty street. They were laughing, talking, and looking around the quiet road. But as they traversed those final few hundred feet that separated the neighbor’s house from the Nixon residence, they saw no one.

The street was completely deserted. In that razor thin 5-minute window, in a space spanning just a couple hundred ft of familiar concrete, Carrie Lynn Nixon completely vanished. The nightmare began in earnest the following morning. At 6:00 a.m. on June 23rd, Carrie’s mother, Kathy, woke up and went to check on her daughter.

 When she opened the bedroom door, her stomach dropped. Car’s bed was neatly made. It had not been slept in. A wave of instant, blinding terror washed over Cathy. She immediately began making frantic phone calls to Car’s closest friends, praying that her daughter had simply lost track of time and crashed on a friend’s couch.

 But every call yielded the exact same terrifying answer. Nobody had seen Carrie since the previous night. Realizing that something was terribly wrong, the family contacted the New York State Police, officially beginning a waking nightmare that would paralyze the town. The initial law enforcement response was monumental. O Sable Forks had never experienced anything like this, and the community rallied instantly.

 A massive grid search was organized, drawing in hundreds of passionate volunteers from local volunteer fire departments alongside personnel from a nearby air force base who joined state troopers to canvas the area. Together, they formed lines and meticulously combed through roughly 50 square miles of dense terrain surrounding the town.

 They pushed through thick brush, searched abandoned outbuildings, checked old barns, and walked the muddy banks of the nearby Osible River. They looked for a dropped shoe, a torn piece of clothing, the grocery bag, anything. But day after day, the grueling search yielded absolutely nothing. There was not a single piece of physical evidence.

 No signs of a struggle on the pavement. No tire tracks, no blood, just an empty street. For a town that measured danger in the abstract, the absolute silence from the woods was its own suffocating kind of horror. There was no crime scene for forensics to process, no witnesses to interrogate, and absolutely nothing for detectives to work with except the final five minutes of a young girl’s known life.

 Desperate for any kind of lead, investigators initially looked into the painful theory that Carrie might have been a runaway. This wasn’t just a generic assumption. It was backed by actual evidence. When police interviewed Carrie’s friends, they discovered a secret Carrie had kept from her parents. She had written letters to her friends on at least three separate occasions, expressing a deep desire to leave Osabo Forks.

 In the first letter, she fantasized about moving to Hawaii. In the next, it was Florida. Most recently, she had written about packing up and moving to California the moment she turned 18. For a brief, fleeting moment, investigators thought they had a thread to pull. They hoped Carrie had simply orchestrated a clever disappearance to start a new life.

 But as they pulled at the thread, it quickly unraveled into nothing. Carrie had left her own money sitting on her dresser. She had no financial means, no history of running away, no packed bags, and absolutely no reason to suddenly vanish into thin air in the middle of the night on a random Monday, leaving her family behind.

 The illusion of a runaway quickly evaporated, leaving behind a far more sinister reality. Captain Robert Louu of the New York State Police eventually went before the media to address the agonizing lack of progress. His statement was bleak, direct, and unforgettable. “My theory on this case,” Captain Louu announced heavily, is that Carrie Lynn Nixon was abducted.

 “She has walked off the face of the earth, as far as we’re concerned.” With those words, the active search slowly ground to a halt. The yellow crime scene tape was packed away. The volunteer search grids dissolved and the case files were closed and placed into storage. The case of the missing softball pitcher from Osabile Forks was officially growing cold.

 And as the weeks bled into months and the months into agonizing years, the staggering numbers behind that silence began to tell their own tragic story. Over the next several years, dedicated investigators would chase down roughly 70 reported sightings of Carrie spanning all across the United States. They would conduct more than 1,500 individual interviews, talking to anyone who had been in the area or who claimed to have information.

 They even cross-referenced and examined over 200 sets of unidentified Jane Doe remains uncovered across the country. desperately searching for a single match, a single confirmation, or a shred of closure that never came. For Gary and Kathy Nixon, life stopped being about living and became a torturous, neverending cycle of hope and profound despair.

 They were trapped in a state of suspended animation, waiting by a silent telephone, wondering if their daughter was alive, suffering, or gone forever. Completely unaware that the answer to their agonizing questions wasn’t thousands of miles away. It was waiting for them just down the road. As the late 1980s bled into the early 1990s, the crushing weight of the unknown wore heavily on the Nixon family.

 The initial shock of Car’s disappearance had subsided into a dull, agonizing ache that permeated their daily lives. The phone rarely rang with case updates anymore, and when it did, it was almost always a dead end. Yet, Gary and Kathy Nixon refused to let their daughters memory fade. They became prisoners of hope, willing to follow any lead, no matter how fragile or logistically impossible it seemed.

 Months after Carrie vanished, a bizarre and ultimately cruel false lead emerged from outside New York. The family received word about an anonymous letter postmarked from Michigan. The author claimed with absolute certainty that Carrie was alive, well, and living under a new identity in the tiny town of Utahville, South Carolina.

 The Nixons had no family in the South, no friends there, and absolutely no logical connection to the state. It made no sense for Carrie to be there, but desperation doesn’t care about logic. Desperate for any possibility, Carrie and Cathy packed up and traveled nearly 1,000 m to the small South Carolina town.

 When they arrived, they showed Carrie’s photograph to anyone who would look. To their utter amazement, the lead seemed to gain traction. Several local residents looked closely at the picture and became certain they had seen a girl matching Car’s exact description wandering around the area recently. For a few breathtaking days, the Nixons believed they were on the precipice of a miracle.

 But as investigators dug deeper, the trail abruptly went cold. The sightings could never be verified. The author of the letter remained a phantom, and no trace of Carrie was ever found in South Carolina. It was a massive, devastating wave of hope that crashed violently into disappointment, leaving the family to make the long, silent drive back to New York empty-handed.

Then in 1991, 4 years after Carrie vanished into the night, the case took a surreal turn that would catapult this localized upstate New York tragedy into the national spotlight. It centered around an incredibly unexpected cultural phenomenon, the massive pop music group New Kids on the Block.

 Two years prior, in June 1989, the wildly popular boy band had filmed live concert footage at a packed stadium in Los Angeles, California for their hit, Hanging Tough music video. The video was played constantly on music television networks, broadcasting to millions of households worldwide. One evening, members of Car’s family happened to be watching the music video when the camera panned across a screaming crowd of teenage fans.

 For a fraction of a second, the camera focused on a young girl in the audience. The family gasped. The girl in the video looked exactly like Carrie Lynn Nixon. When investigators were notified, they didn’t just dismiss it as wishful thinking by a grieving family. The New York State Police took the footage to a specialized forensics lab where technicians isolated the frame and produced an enhanced highresolution photograph of the girl in the stadium crowd.

 They placed it side by side with the most recent photograph of Carrie. The similarities were not just striking. They were terrifyingly exact. The hair length and dark color matched perfectly. The facial structure, the slope of the nose, and the shape of the smile were identical. But the detail that blew investigators away was the ears.

 The girl in the music video crowd had distinct ear piercings. Exactly four earrings lining the lobe of one ear and two earrings in the other. It matched the precise, highly specific piercing pattern that Carrie had gotten shortly before she disappeared. It seemed statistically impossible for a random lookalike thousands of miles away to share the exact same face, the exact same hair, and the exact same asymmetrical piercing layout.

 The resemblance was so powerful that it ignited a desperate sustained wave of hope across the entire country. The Nixon case had already been featured on the national television show Unsolved Mysteries back in 1989, but this new development breathed frantic new life into the search. The story exploded. Recognizing the gravity of the situation, New Kids on the Block band members Jonathan and Jordan Knight made a personal televised appeal on national television.

 Standing before millions of viewers, Jonathan pleaded directly with the girl in the video to come forward if she was safe. While Jordan asked anyone who might have attended that Los Angeles concert or recognized the girl to immediately call the police hotline. For months, the Nixon family, state investigators, and a literal legion of teenage fans across the globe held their collective breath.

 The hotline lit up with thousands of tips. Every time the music video played on television, millions of eyes scanned that crowd, praying for a miracle. But the truth, when it finally arrived in 1993, was crushing. After an exhaustive 2-year cross-country search, investigators finally tracked down the teenager from the stadium footage.

 She was identified as Lynette Melanchon, a young woman native to California who had absolutely no connection to upstate New York, let alone the Nixon family. The striking resemblance, the hair, even the highly specific number of ear piercings. It was all a cruel astronomical coincidence. The phantom in the crowd was not Carrie.

For Gary and Cathy, this resolution permanently extinguished the last most public flicker of hope that their daughter was alive and hiding somewhere out in the world. The national spotlight faded. The boy band fans moved on and a heavy suffocating silence returned to O Sable Forks. The heartbreaking resolution solidified a much darker, inescapable reality for the investigators left holding the file.

 The answer to Car’s disappearance wasn’t thousands of miles away in a California stadium or a South Carolina town. It was waiting to be found right where it began, buried deep within the familiar, quiet landscape of home. For seven long years, the thick case file labeled Carrie Lynn Nixon, sat on a shelf in the New York State Police barracks, slowly gathering dust.

 The frantic energy of the initial search had long since evaporated, replaced by the cold, stagnant reality of a mystery gone frozen. In the streets of Osabul Forks, children who had been toddlers when Carrie disappeared were now nearly teenagers, walking the same roads under the watchful, anxious eyes of parents who had never forgotten that terrifying 5-minute window in 1987.

 The town had learned to live with a ghost. Then, in January 1994, the break that everyone had stopped praying for finally came. It didn’t arrive through a brilliant piece of detective work or a sudden discovery of old evidence. It came from an entirely unexpected direction. Born out of a completely unrelated crime wave, federal authorities and local police arrested a 29-year-old carpenter named Robert Anthony Jones.

 He hadn’t been picked up for questioning regarding a missing child. He had been busted as the ring leader of a violent string of bank robberies that had been plaguing the region. Jones was a native of O Sable Forks, a familiar face around town. At the time of Car’s disappearance back in the summer of 1987, he had been living hundreds of miles away in the coastal town of Bar Harbor, Maine, working as a laborer.

 He had only been back in his New York hometown that specific week in June for a brief family visit. To investigators tracking a missing girl, a transient visitor with no local criminal record, hadn’t even registered on the radar. But as the walls closed in on the bank robbery syndicate, the criminal alliances fractured.

 During a highstakes interrogation, an accomplice facing decades in federal prison decided to trade a secret for leniency. He told authorities that Jones was carrying a burden far heavier than stolen cash. Years prior, during a moment of dark bravado, Jones had explicitly confessed to abducting and murdering Carrie Lynn Nixon.

 In other investigative accounts, it was Jones’s own wife, Teresa, who shattered the silence, telling terrified detectives that her husband had confessed the horrific truth to her in their own home. Faced with a mounting federal robbery indictment and the sudden exposure of a 7-year-old homicide, Jones’s defense attorneys quickly contacted state authorities.

They delivered a chilling message. Their client was willing to talk about the Nixon case, but it would cost them a plea deal. When Jones finally sat down in the interrogation room, he laid out a narrative of opportunistic predatory violence that turned the stomachs of even the most hardened investigators.

 On the night of June 22nd, 1987, Jones was 23 years old. He was driving around O Sabel Forks, heavily fueled by alcohol and a blinding, volatile rage over his wife Teresa’s recent infidelity. He happened to pull his car into the parking lot of Thomas’s country store just as Carrie was buying her family’s groceries. He didn’t know her.

 She was just a target of convenience, a proxy for his anger. Jones watched her leave the store and begin her walk home. He drove ahead, intercepted her in the dark on that quiet street, and forced the terrified 16-year-old into his car at gunpoint. In the span of those 5 minutes, he drove her away from the town, taking her to a remote, isolated cabin owned by his father in the nearby town of Jay, New York.

 There, he subjected her to hours of unimaginable terror, raping her repeatedly. When the assault was over, he attempted to strangle her to death. When that failed, he drew a firearm and shot her. The next morning, as the sun rose and Kathy Nixon was just realizing her daughter’s bed was empty, Jones took Car’s body into the dense woods near the cabin and buried her in a shallow makeshift grave.

What Jones did next remains perhaps the most profoundly disturbing detail of the entire case, a window into the mind of a true psychopath. In 1990, 3 years after the murder, Jones decided to permanently move his wife and two young children back to the Oable Forks area. He didn’t flee the state or hide in a big city.

Instead, he rented a home that sat a mere 200 yard away from the dense patch of woods where Car’s body lay buried. For nearly 4 years, he lived a short, casual walk from his victim’s secret grave. While Gary and Kathy Nixon wept at a kitchen table just down the road, while local police chased phantoms in South Carolina and California, and while the entire community raised money for search funds, Jones lived a peaceful domestic life right beside the horror he had created.

 He raised his own children in the shadow of a grave. While you sit here comfortably listening to how a monster hit a tragedy for 7 years, Car’s family spent 2500 days in total darkness. Don’t let her story fade back into the dust. Subscribe to Retrograde Crime right now or you’re letting the silence win. This brought the narrative full circle to the sickening reality of those summer afternoons.

 Every single year, Jones would pack a cooler, load his unsuspecting wife and toddlers into the car and drive them down the dirt path to that exact wooded clearing. He would spread out a family picnic blanket directly over the disturbed earth. As his children ran through the grass and laughed under the warm sun, Jones would carefully inspect the perimeter of the dirt, ensuring the elements hadn’t exposed her remains.

 It was a calculated annual ritual of self-preservation masquerading as a family tradition. He used his own children as human shields to cover the spot where another man’s child had been discarded. On January 28th, 1994, the 7-year freeze enveloping Osabul Forks finally thawed under the most somber circumstances imaginable. Escorted by a heavy contingent of New York State troopers, a handcuffed Robert Anthony Jones led investigators into the biting winter cold of the Aderandac Woods.

 The ground was choked with snow and ice. But Jones knew the landscape perfectly. He walked directly to the clearing near his father’s old cabin, the very spot where he had spent years hosting family picnics, and pointed to a frozen patch of earth. As detectives and forensic specialists carefully excavated the shallow grave, the full heartbreaking reality of June 22nd, 1987 was unearthed.

 There, after 2,412 days of silence, they finally found Carrie Lynn Nixon. But it was a specific, devastating detail of the recovery that broke the hearts of the recovery team. Buried alongside her remains was the simple paper grocery bag she had carried out of Thomas’s country store. Inside, frozen in time, were the $3 worth of everyday groceries she had bought for her family just minutes before her life was stolen.

 It was a tangible, agonizing reminder of how violently an ordinary, innocent errand had been intercepted by evil. With the physical evidence secured, the legal system prepared to process Robert Anthony Jones. However, the final chapter of Car’s story would not culminate in a dramatic, high-profile courtroom trial.

 Instead, it concluded with a quiet confession and a highly controversial, deeply frustrating plea agreement to guarantee that Jones would confess, ensure the successful recovery of Car’s body, and prevent his wife Teresa from serving federal prison time for her own minor role in the bank robberies. Prosecutors were forced to cut a deal with the devil.

 Under the terms of the agreement, Jones plead guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 18 years to life. However, the true sting of the deal lay in the fine print. This murder sentence was ordered to be served concurrently with his 15-year federal bank robbery charges. In the calculus of the justice system, this meant Jones would essentially serve his time for the violent robberies and the brutal murder of a child at the exact same time.

Mathematically, he might only serve an additional 3 years of prison time specifically allocated for taking Car’s life. While the local district hitter and state prosecutors were deeply frustrated by these limitations, they ultimately felt trapped. It was the only absolute guarantee to secure a conviction, avoid a risky trial based on 7-year-old evidence, and most importantly, fulfill the sacred promise to bring Carrie home to her parents.

 The fallout of the case rippled outward. Teresa, whose marital infidelity had triggered Jones’s initial night of rage, was sentenced to two years of probation for her peripheral involvement in the bank robberies. She and Jones eventually divorced, scattering the fractured remains of the family that had picnicked on a grave.

 But if the legal system offered Jones a path toward eventual freedom, the community of O Sable Forks resolved to block it permanently. In the decades following his conviction, the small town transformed its lingering grief into a fierce, unyielding wall of resistance. Every single time Robert Anthony Jones has become eligible to stand before a parole board, the community has mobilized.

 Thousands of letters, petitions, and victim impact statements have routinely flooded the corrections department, ensuring that the voices of O Sable Forks are heard. The community’s absolute refusal to forget has worked. The state has repeatedly denied Jones’s release, fiercely rejecting an appeal of his conviction in 2018.

 Most recently, during his scheduled parole hearing in 2023, the board looked at his history, looked at the town’s enduring outrage, and once again ordered him back to his cell. For the Nixon family, the definitive confirmation of Car’s death brought a traumatic end to one agonizing chapter of uncertainty. But it simultaneously marked the beginning of a lifetime of structured grief.

 The closure they were promised didn’t erase the ache. It merely formalized it. The loss had become deeply woven into the fabric of those who fought longest to find her. Richard Cipekc, the lead state police investigator who had spent nearly a decade chasing thousands of dead-end leads across the United States on Car’s behalf, openly admitted that over 7 years of searching, he had come to love and know Carrie as if she were one of his own daughters.

 The weight of the tragedy was a heavy burden borne by the entire family. When Car’s story had first aired on national television during that Unsolved Mysteries broadcast back in 1989, it was her own 15-year-old younger sister, Lorie, who had stepped in front of the cameras to portray Carrie in the dramatic reenactment scenes.

 The family was so thoroughly entwined with the search that even the public retelling of her disappearance required their physical bodies. The generational toll of Jones’s crime continued to claim pieces of the family long after he was behind bars. Car’s brother, John, passed away in 2007 at the age of 29. Strikingly, the exact same age Robert Anthony Jones had been when he was finally arrested for the murder.

 Jon died after a grueling year-long battle with ALS. But before he went, he named his newborn daughter Carrie Lynn, ensuring the aunt she would never get to meet would always have a living namesake. Four years later, in 2011, Carrie’s father, Gary, passed away at the age of 63. His heart permanently scarred by the walk he had asked his daughter to take on a quiet June night.

There is one final thread to this case. A piece of the narrative that the Nixon family never asked for, never wanted, and one that still sends a distinct, icy chill down the spines of those who study the dark anomalies of true crime. It is a sequence of events so bizarrely precise that it feels less like a coincidence and more like a cruel, unexplainable glitch in the universe.

 It centers around a young woman named Kathy Hobbs. Kathy was born in July 1971, entering the world just 12 days apart from Carrie Lynn Nixon. The two girls grew up thousands of miles away from each other, entirely unaware of each other’s existence. Carrie thrived in the dense green timber lines of upstate New York, while Cathy moved through the sunbleached landscape of Las Vegas, Nevada.

 They had different friends, different dreams, and different lives. But on July 23rd, 1987, exactly 1 month to the day after Carrie was forced into the back of a car in Oable Forks, 16-year-old Kathy Hobbs vanished. The parallel lines between their final moments are terrifyingly exact. Just like Carrie, Cathy’s disappearance began with a completely mundane, ordinary neighborhood errand.

 Late at night, she left her home to make a short walk down to a nearby neighborhood market to buy a few basic items. She walked into the store, made her purchase, and began the brief journey back toward her house. And just like Carrie, Cathy was intercepted in the dark, cut down in the final few hundred feet of an ordinary street, mere moments from the safety of her front door.

 When investigators from both sides of the country inevitably cross-referenced the two cases, looking for a terrifying connection, they found absolutely nothing. Robert Anthony Jones was firmly entrenched in the Northeast when Cathy was taken in the desert. Cathy’s killer was a completely different predator, operating on an entirely independent timeline.

 Law enforcement on both sides officially confirmed that there was zero connection between the two perpetrators. There was no shared conspiracy, no traveling serial killer, no overlapping sequence of events. And yet, the haunting echo remains. Two girls born less than two weeks apart, targeted by two completely unrelated monsters, killed exactly one month apart under the exact same domestic circumstances.

 Both went to buy groceries in the dark. Both vanished in a 5-minute window. Both were stolen in the last few hundred feet of an ordinary errand. For those left behind, it stands as a grim mathematical reminder of how uniform and predictable predatory evil can truly be. This is the ultimate enduring legacy of Carrie Lynn Nixon’s case.

 It is at its core a story about a community’s sudden violent loss of innocence. Before June 22nd, 1987, O Sable Forks was a sanctuary where trust was a given. After that night, the town was permanently altered. Parents who had routinely sent their children down to Thomas’s country store without a second thought suddenly began waiting anxiously by the window.

 They began watching the clock, counting the minutes, and pacing the floor until they heard the heavy click of the front door lock. A generation of children grew up under a cloud of hyper vigilance, suddenly aware that the dark woods surrounding their beautiful town could hold secrets for years. But it is also a powerful testament to the absolute persistence of human devotion.

 It lives on in the legacy of state police investigator Richard Cypek, who refused to let Car’s file grow cold, chasing hundreds of dead-end leads. across thousands of miles for seven long years because he couldn’t bear to let her be forgotten. It lives on in the fierce love of Gary and Kathy Nixon. A love that outlasted nearly a decade of absolute silence that traveled a thousand miles to South Carolina on the whisper of an anonymous letter and that stared at a stranger’s face in a pop music video, daring to hope against all odds that their little girl was still breathing somewhere. To ensure her memory would always be associated with light rather than darkness, her parents established a perpetual scholarship fund in her name before they passed. Ensuring that Carrie Lynn Nixon would continue to help others long after they themselves were gone. Ultimately, Carrie’s story remains a chilling, unforgettable reminder of a tragedy entirely defined by proximity.

It is the story of a 5-minute window that stole a lifetime. It is the story of a few hundred feet of sidewalk she never got to cross. It is the story of the agonizing 200 yards between a family’s sunny picnic blanket and a shallow frozen grave that a killer claimed he didn’t know was there. And it is the heartbreaking reality of a massive 7-year nationwide search that finally ended just a few miles from where it originally began.

 The silence of O Sable Forks lasted for 7 years. But we don’t have to let the darkness have the final word. If you believe that stories like car’s deserve to be remembered and that the monsters who commit these crimes should never be allowed to fade into anonymity, take a second right now to hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications, and give this video a like.

 By supporting Retrograde Crime, you help ensure these victims are never forgotten. I genuinely value your opinion. So, before we call it a wrap, here are a few questions for you. One, do you think prosecutors made the right choice by giving Robert Anthony Jones a concurrent sentence just to secure the location of Car’s body, or should they have gone to trial and risked losing the evidence entirely? 

Two, Jones’s wife, Teresa, claimed she didn’t know about the murder for years, yet she participated in bank robberies with him and went on those annual picnics near the grave. Do you believe she was completely oblivious to his dark secret during those first few years? Three. How do you explain the terrifyingly exact parallels between the murders of Carrie Nixon and Kathy Hobbes? Is it a pure astronomical coincidence, or do you think certain predatory behaviors naturally repeat themselves across different killers? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. I read every single