He Stole Them From Their Mother Only to do This- The Story of Ariana and Tyler Payne

He Stole Them From Their Mother Only to do This- The Story of Ariana and Tyler Payne

I continually tried to call and do all I could to get my children back. I felt helpless in my quests for getting them back, even though I had a signed court order and saw every single means necessary to get my children back. The state left them in their father’s care and left me feeling hopeless.

This is the story of Ariana and Tyler Payne.

Ariana Socorro Payne was born on October 18, 2002, and her older brother, Tyler Christopher Payne, was born on November 15, 2001, to their parents, Jaimie Hallam and Christopher Payne.

While Tyler was born in New Jersey, Ariana was born in Tucson, Arizona, where the family would continue to reside. The siblings were best friends and had been born only 11 months apart, which made them even closer.

Ariana was bubbly and cuddly; she had an amazing smile and was a sweet and happy girl. She also loved doing art projects and she loved rainbows. Tyler was said to be sweet and gentle, and he loved Scooby-Doo, Spider-Man, and spending time with his mom cooking.

Now, the children’s parents, Jaimie and Christopher, had begun dating in 2000, and not long into their relationship, Jaimie would discover that Christopher would often get very violent. But when she discovered this, she was already pregnant with Tyler, so she decided to go back home to New Jersey.

However, Christopher would end up luring her back to Arizona with promises that he was a changed man. The couple would then get married in 2002, however, they had split up only a year later.

After that, the children’s mother, Jaimie, obtained full custody of both Ariana and Tyler, and the children were happy in her home.

Now, Christopher, who had prior drug problems, fell deeper into his addiction once he separated from the children’s mother, Jaimie. Also, after the divorce, Christopher would disappear from Jaimie and the children’s lives altogether. He wasn’t even paying the child support that he owed to Jaimie; he was actually $19,000 behind on his child support payments.

Christopher also had a prior criminal record dating back to 1994 for misdemeanor offenses, including domestic violence and drug- and alcohol-related charges. So, Christopher had not been in his children’s lives since Tyler was one and Ariana was just a newborn.

But seemingly out of nowhere in December of 2005, he contacted Jaimie and asked if he could see his children again. Christopher also told her that he was now in a committed relationship with a woman named Raina Gonzalez, and the two had a baby together named Christopher Jr.

In addition, Christopher said he was clean off of drugs, so to Jaimie, it sounded like her ex-husband had really started to turn his life around. With that information, in late January of 2006, Jaimie decided to let Tyler and Ariana go stay with their father for the weekend, even though he had zero custodial rights.

Prior to this weekend visit, the children had had a few supervised visits with their father, and since those went well, they then had an overnight. So this was the second time they were going to be spending the night at their father’s.

Christopher told Jaimie that there was going to be a family birthday party that weekend so the children would have a lot of fun. But at the end of the weekend, when Jaimie went to pick up Ariana and Tyler at Christopher’s apartment at the Portofino Apartments in Tucson, Arizona, he gave her an excuse to extend the visit.

She agreed, but then he started giving her more excuses to keep extending the children’s visit at his house. Eventually, in mid-February, Christopher started avoiding Jaimie altogether.

After weeks of these excuses from Christopher, at the beginning of March 2006, Jaimie went to police to get their help in getting her children back. Jaimie would meet with two officers outside of Christopher’s apartment, and she presented them with paperwork stating that she was their legal guardian. It also showed that her ex-husband had no parental rights, not even visitation.

But since the officers found that Christopher was living in a tidy apartment, there was food in the refrigerator, the children appeared to be fine, and there had also been a prior Child Protection Services report made about Jaimie in 2005, the police decided that they needed to first call CPS to ask them what they should do about the situation.

When police contacted CPS, a social worker named Cindy Grossman would confirm what Christopher had told them during their visit: that Child Protective Services had been investigating Jaimie for drug use, and that he had filed for temporary custody of Ariana and Tyler.

Jaimie still had full legal rights to her children, but the police would decide to leave Ariana and Tyler in their father’s custody. Police later claimed that the CPS worker, Cindy, had told them that it was in the children’s best interest to be with their father, Christopher. She denies it; she says that she told police to abide by whatever the court order said.

So, in regards to the CPS report that had been filed back in 2005, there had been an anonymous complaint made saying that Jaimie and her boyfriend were using methamphetamine as well as neglecting the children. Child Services had investigated and found the complaint to be unsubstantiated.

This was after the social worker, Cindy, had made two surprise visits out to the house, and both times the children were dressed appropriately and appeared to be healthy. When she did make one of her visits, however, she noticed that Jaimie had scabs and sores on her face, which made her suspect drug use.

So Cindy asked Jaimie to take a drug test, which Jaimie did. It came back clean. However, since Jaimie had taken three days to get the urine sample, the social worker, Cindy, said that she considered the drug test to be positive for drugs. That’s not how that works, though—like, not at all.

When police had contacted Cindy, she had told them that Jaimie was under investigation and she had been uncooperative. That was anything but true; the case had been closed a while ago, and Jaimie had fully cooperated with the CPS investigation.

So, even though it was pretty clear the complaint against Jaimie was baseless, the case against her would not be closed until the following year. And while Jaimie does have a history of drug abuse, she says that by 2005 she had been clean for two years.

Now, the reason that Christopher had that paperwork showing that he had filed for temporary custody of Ariana and Tyler was because he himself had called CPS in February and told the caseworker that Jaimie had just left her children with him and was now trying to get them back.

To which the amazing caseworker, Cindy, responded and told Christopher that he should try to get temporary custody of Ariana and Tyler. Cindy had suggested this even though she had never met Christopher, she didn’t do a background check on him, and she didn’t give him a drug test—kind of sounds like the one that gave Harmony to Adam Montgomery.

And as I had said earlier, Cindy, as well as her supervisor, had told police that the children were better off with Christopher. So it’s not exactly known why the children were allowed to stay with Christopher, even though Jaimie clearly had the paperwork stating that she was their legal guardian.

Former CPS supervisor Christy Tarpley was later to testify that officers had told her that Christopher had a signed court order giving him temporary custody of the children, and she was not able to override that document. The officers would testify that they had simply told her that Christopher had paperwork saying he applied; they had never said that it had gone through and he had custody.

About a year later, on February 16, 2007, Christopher’s storage locker that he had at U-Store-It, which was located on the 500 block of East Prince Road, was opened up by the facility’s manager after Christopher had failed to pay the rent for the locker in months.

Just a few weeks prior to that, the storage facility manager had actually opened up Christopher’s locker, but she had been so repelled by the rank smell that she had closed it and decided to come back and do it at a later time.

And when she went to clean out Christopher’s unit this time, the putrid smell was still very much present. Once she was inside the unit, the manager would find where the smell was emanating from: it was a 25-gallon plastic tote, which was very heavy and had flies all around it.

She would throw this into the dumpster, and when she did, the lid came off and a duffel bag was visible inside. Some liquid also poured out of it.

That night, the manager had told one of her friends about the plastic tote that she had discovered as well as how bad it smelled. The friend told her there was probably a dead body in there.

So on February 18, two days after the tote had been found, the manager of the storage facility would call the police. And once police arrived and looked inside the tote that she had found, they would find, wrapped up in a duffel bag and black trash bags, Ariana’s body.

And they did not further search the dumpster that she had been thrown into. Since Ariana’s body was so badly decomposed, it would take several days to identify her and then lead detectives back to Christopher.

So on March 1, police would arrest Christopher and bring him in for questioning after they found him at a local motel. It was believed that Tyler’s body had already been hauled away by a trash truck and it was most likely now in a landfill. The landfill had been thoroughly searched at one point, but it turned up no results, and to this day Tyler’s body still has not been found—though at one point Christopher would tell police that he had thrown Tyler’s body into the same plastic tote that Ariana’s was in, but it wasn’t there when they later looked.

Ariana’s body would undergo an autopsy, and the medical examiner would find that she had 12 broken ribs, a broken spine, and a broken shoulder. She had been so badly decomposed that they were unable to determine her cause of death or when she had died.

The coroner, however, believed that the murder had happened sometime between March and September of 2006. It was also September 6 that Christopher started renting the storage unit where Ariana’s body was later found.

Christopher’s living girlfriend, Raina, was also arrested on one count of child abuse in Ariana’s case and brought in for questioning as well. Then, in May of 2007, she would be additionally charged with murder and child abuse in both children’s cases.

Raina would maintain her innocence, and she told police that she had actually gone away for a week, and when she returned back home the children were gone, and she just assumed that they were back at their mother’s.

Raina then told investigators that back in the spring of 2006, Christopher had lost his job, which made him fall deeper into his drug addiction. He had worked driving for a medical transportation company, and then shortly after he had also started dealing heroin.

Losing his job added to his stress, and the physical and emotional abuse that his family was normally already going through at his hands only got worse. Most of the physical and possibly emotional abuse was geared towards Tyler and Ariana.

Whenever Christopher thought they were misbehaving, he would savagely beat the children. He also started punishing them by withholding food and letting them go hungry.

Now, when Christopher did have a job prior to him getting fired, Raina had been the one to stay at home with the three children, but this was a challenge that she could barely handle, and she would call Christopher multiple times every single day to complain about Ariana and Tyler.

In order to keep Raina happy or shut her up—I’m sure—Christopher, who had already been locking the children in a closet for punishment, then began locking them in a closet all day long while he was at work.

Christopher would keep Ariana and Tyler in the closet more and more until, in June of 2006, they were permanently living in the closet. While Christopher at first would feed them one sandwich a day, after they had been in there for about a month he stopped feeding the children altogether.

He would check on them once a day, but he would never let them out to go to the bathroom or for any fresh air. So, with no food, the children slowly withered away until they starved to death.

Ariana had been the first one to die, in August of 2006, Christopher would later estimate. After she had passed away, her father had stuffed her body into a duffel bag and then into the tote where she would later be found.

That plastic tote, before it had gone to the storage facility, had then been placed back into the closet next to Tyler, where he would sit next to his sister’s dead body while he also slowly died. And only a week later, Tyler also starved to death.

Raina claimed that she had seen Christopher beat the children on a number of occasions, and she also admitted that she had never done anything to contact authorities or help the children in any way. When asked why she had done nothing, she said she was too fearful for her own safety as well as Christopher Jr.’s. So instead, she had just started taking tons of drugs to numb herself.

When it was Christopher’s turn to be interrogated by police, he would unbelievably tell them that the children had starved themselves to death—yeah, he said that once they found out they weren’t going back to their mother’s house, they stopped eating.

Christopher would claim that he bought, stole, or would make food that the children would like in an attempt to get them to eat, like Cream of Wheat and pizza, but it was to no avail.

Christopher said to police, “I would just take them the food, man, they wouldn’t want to eat. I’d put it in front of them and we’d sit down and try to watch TV, and they’d throw it. They would get mad and they would kick and scream; it was a constant battle with them.”

At one point, Christopher even told detectives, “They were freaking me out how skinny they were getting, and I didn’t want anyone to know that because then they would take them away for good—as they should.”

Eventually, Christopher told police that his children had started to look like starving Ethiopians and they had become incontinent. And when asked why Christopher did not call 911 at this point, he told police, “It’s not about food, they just wanted to be with their mom.” Sure, Christopher, sure.

At one point during the interrogation, Christopher would even tell detectives that he had given Ariana CPR for an entire day after he had found her lifeless—an entire day, come on, that’s a huge exaggeration.

He, however, had no explanation for the broken bones that had been found in Ariana’s body, saying that he never hit his children.

Investigators spoke with a few people who had been over Christopher and Raina’s home prior to August of 2006, when they believed the children had been murdered. A roommate who had actually moved into the Payne home in June of 2006 said that she did not even know that Ariana and Tyler were in the house; she thought the entire time that they were with their mother, though she did say she heard some strange noises coming from the closet a few times.

Others close to the family claimed that on multiple occasions Raina had expressed her dislike for Ariana and Tyler, or they had heard her verbally abuse them. One witness said that while she was on a phone call with Raina, she could hear her yelling at the kids, the kids screaming, and Raina said that she wanted to kill them.

While they were living with their father, Ariana and Tyler were also visited by some of the Payne relatives. Terry White, Christopher’s aunt, said that she had last seen the children when she had visited in Easter of 2006 to drop off some gifts.

She described Ariana as looking thin and dirty, and when she spoke she seemed very unhappy. And when Terry returned back to their apartment two months later, neither Tyler nor Ariana was anywhere to be seen, and she just assumed that they were back with their mother, Jaimie.

Terry would also say that her nephew had never mentioned any food problems with the children or decreased appetites. In fact, he had said that Ariana would get up in the middle of the night and go searching for potato chips.

Christopher also told his aunt that he would rather have custody of the children than just pay Jaimie the child support. Well yeah, because now you’re probably bringing money in from the government in benefits for the two children instead of having to pay money out, and you don’t even have to take care of them—you can just throw them in a closet.

A few of the family’s neighbors at the Portofino Apartments had seen Christopher Jr., but they didn’t even know that Ariana and Tyler existed. By the time police were finally able to search the apartment, no one was living there anymore.

The Payne family had been evicted back in September, and the unit was in such poor condition and smelled so bad that the manager of the apartment complex had been unable to rent it out. In the apartment, investigators would find blood on the walls and floorboard in the closet, as well as hair and feces hidden in a cutout that was inside the wall of the closet.

The closet the children had been kept in was full of trash from ceiling to floor. There was also some blood found in a small storage shed that was kept out on the balcony.

So, due to aggravating circumstances in Ariana and Tyler’s murders, the prosecution was seeking the death penalty for Christopher and Raina. There were three aggravating factors, which were that there were multiple victims, the victims were under the age of 15, and the crimes were cruel, heinous, and depraved.

Eventually, Raina would agree to testify against her boyfriend, Christopher, in hopes of getting a lesser sentence for herself, and in August of 2008 she pled guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. She was then sentenced to 22 years in prison.

When Christopher went to trial in 2009, the prosecution stated that Christopher was addicted to heroin, and instead of using money to feed his children he had used it instead to feed his heroin habit. Christopher had let Ariana and Tyler starve to death, and that was despite the fact that his other son, Christopher Jr., was perfectly taken care of.

Christopher’s defense strategy was to put the entire blame on Raina. They said that Raina had starved the children to death because she had been resentful of them.

One of the defense’s first witnesses was Jeanette Nicks, who had worked at the medical transportation company with Christopher. Jeanette testified that when Christopher had first started working for the company, Raina would occasionally call and ask when he was going to be home. Then, starting in March of 2006, the calls became much more frequent and angry.

She said as a result, Christopher would start spending more time at home during slow periods, and towards the end of his employment he would begin calling in sick often. And Jeanette would say that when Christopher had first started working with her, he was overweight but cleancut, but had lost a lot of weight and was no longer cleancut by the time he was fired.

One witness who was testifying for the prosecution was friends with Raina—her name was Caroline Calderon. Caroline said the last time she had seen Tyler was in the summer of 2006; he had been sitting on a dirty mattress in the living room and he had large bruises on his right cheek as well as both his arms.

He also looked very sad, she said, but she also said that she never saw Raina yell at either child—they were both well behaved and calm. However, during cross-examination, Caroline would admit that she could see that Raina could not stand Ariana and Tyler, and she recalled a few times that Raina had showed preferential treatment towards Christopher Jr.

When it was time for Raina to testify, she would deny that she called Christopher frequently while he had been at work to curse at him or threaten the children. She also denied telling one of her and Christopher’s friends slash drug dealers that she couldn’t stand any of the children in the home other than Christopher Jr.

Raina would also say that she had been scared of Christopher because he had hit her on a number of occasions—she said so many times, in fact, that she couldn’t remember how many. But during a pre-trial hearing, she said that he had only ever hit her twice.

So Raina also said that one time Christopher had hit their child, Christopher Jr., on the head, and she was too scared to get help for any of them.

During closing arguments, Christopher Payne’s public defender pleaded with the jury to convict his client of second-degree murder instead of first-degree murder, which he had been charged with. The lawyer would also ask them to spare Christopher from the death penalty, saying that his life still had value.

He also said that his family still loved him and he had had a dysfunctional childhood—not that that matters in the least. Besides, they were still trying to argue that Raina had starved the children to death and Christopher had nothing to do with it.

However, the prosecution would tell jurors to discount many of the mitigating factors brought up by the defense, such as the fact that Christopher was unable to care for the children properly due to his heroin addiction. The fact was that Christopher had been able to do other tasks while he was taking the drug, including driving, calling his father begging for money, selling heroin, and caring for Christopher Jr., but he was unable to care for Ariana and Tyler. Why?

Prosecutor Susan Epper told the jurors that Christopher needed to be held responsible for his heinous actions. The prosecutor also said, “Every day he locked those battered and broken babies in that closet, he chose to become a killer. Every day he watched them wither away while he went out to get high, he chose to be a killer.”

In March of 2009, a jury would find Christopher Payne guilty of three counts of child abuse, two counts of concealing a dead body, and two counts of first-degree murder. At sentencing, the jury also found that there were aggravating circumstances in Ariana and Tyler’s murders, and there would be no leniency. Therefore, Christopher was handed down the death penalty. He is still on death row awaiting his execution.

And Ariana and Tyler’s mother, Jaimie Hallam, filed a lawsuit against Child Protective Services as well as the Tucson Police Department. She alleged that their negligence had contributed to both of her children’s deaths.

CPS would end up admitting to mishandling the Payne children’s case, citing staff shortages as the reason; they would end up paying Jaimie out a million dollars. Yet the lawsuit against the Tucson Police Department would end up being dismissed in October of 2010 after the court decided that there was insufficient evidence that police had known or should have known that Ariana and Tyler were not safe with their father, Christopher.

A memorial service was held for Ariana and Tyler Payne on Saturday, August 25, 2007, at Air Avalon Chapel in Tucson. During the ceremony, Jaimie, the children’s mother, read their favorite book, Goodnight Moon, one last time, and she recited a poem that she had written for them:

“They were the sunshine of my days and the star beams of my nights,” she said. “I loved them dearly on earth when they were alive, and just so much more in death.”

Well, thank you for listening to all of Ariana and Tyler’s story today. This case is just horrific—what a horrible, long, and agonizing death these children had to go through. And then to think that Tyler had to sit next to the body of his dead sister for a week while he died!

And even though it does not account for all the pain and suffering that Ariana and Tyler went through, I’m glad that in the end the person responsible was given the maximum possible punishment.