New York 1987 Cold Case SOLVED by a Confession – Killer also had a Daughter 

The blanket is red plaid. Two kids chase each other barefoot across the grass, shrieking with laughter while their father unpacks a cooler of soda and sandwiches just a few feet away. It looks to anyone driving past like the most ordinary Sunday afternoon in the Adirondacks. It is anything but ordinary. Because beneath that blanket, beneath the exact patch of earth where his own kids are playing, lies the body of a 16-year-old girl he brutally murdered 7 years earlier.

He knows precisely where she’s buried. He chose this spot on purpose. And once a year, like clockwork, he brings his family back to picnic on top of her. For nearly 4 years, this was not a one-time act of depravity. It was a ritual. A man who fathered a daughter of his own would kneel in that same grass, running his hand across the dirt to check that nothing had shifted, that no rain had washed her closer to the surface, that his secret was still safely tucked beneath the roots and the picnic blankets and his children’s laughter.

Somewhere, roughly 200 yards away, in a house down a quiet road, a mother still set a place at the table that would never be filled. A father still listened for footsteps on the porch that would never come. They had no idea that the man who took their daughter was living close enough to hear the same church bells they did, close enough that his own children may have walked past theirs at the general store.

This is the story of Carrie Lynn Nixon, a girl who left home one summer evening in 1987 to buy groceries and simply never arrived back at her front door. It is the story of a 7-year search that spanned the entire country, chased false hope through a pop music video and a letter from a stranger, and ultimately ended less than 6 miles from where it began.

And it is the story of the man who hid in in sight the entire time, close enough to smell the smoke from the search party’s campfires and cold enough to bring his own children to play on his victim’s grave. Before we go further, I want to be up front. This case involves the kidnapping, abuse, and murder of a child.

 And some of what you’re about to hear is genuinely disturbing. If you’re new here, comment below where in the world you’re watching from tonight. And if stories like this deserve to be remembered, go ahead and hit that subscribe button before we get into it. Let’s rewind to the summer of 1987 to a small town that still believed nothing like this could ever happen to one of its own.

Ausable Forks sits in Essex County, New York. Tucked against the western edge of the Adirondack Mountains, about 2 hours south of the Canadian border. In 1987, it was a hamlet of roughly a thousand people. The kind of place where families had lived for generations and everyone knew everyone else’s last name.

There was one main road, a handful of small businesses, and a rhythm to daily life that hadn’t changed much in decades. Carrie Lynn Nixon was 16 years old and had grown up in that rhythm her entire life. She lived with her parents, Gary and Kathy Nixon, in a house within easy walking distance of the center of town.

Gary worked locally and had deep roots in the area himself. Ausable Forks wasn’t just where he lived. It was where he’d always lived. Kathy kept the household running and by every account from people who knew the family, theirs was an ordinary stable home. Carrie was an above average student and she played on her high school softball team.

She didn’t have a car, but that was rarely an issue in a town where nearly everything was within walking distance, including Thomas’s country store, the small neighborhood market just a few blocks from the Nixon home, a place Carrie had walked to more times than anyone could count. There was nothing unusual about her life, no trouble at school, no conflict at home, no indication that anything was wrong.

 She was a teenager in a small town who walked to the store when her parents asked her to. That’s what made what happened next so disorienting for everyone who knew her. There was no warning sign to point to, no red flag anyone could look back on. Just a regular Monday evening in June and a family about to run out of groceries.

 On the evening of Monday, June 22nd, 1987, Gary Nixon realized the family was low on groceries. He handed his daughter a $20 bill and asked her to make a quick run to Thomas’s Country Store, just a few blocks from their home. Carrie left the house at approximately 9:30 p.m. Inside the store, a 23-year-old man named Robert Anthony Jones was also shopping that night.

Jones wasn’t a stranger casing the town or waiting outside in the dark. He was simply in the same store buying beer and Carrie Nixon happened to be there at the same time. It was a chance encounter, nothing more, at least at that point. But it was enough. He noticed her. At 9:55 p.m., the store clerk rang up Carrie’s purchase.

 The clerk knew her by name and the two exchanged brief, unremarkable small talk, the kind of interaction that happens hundreds of times in a town where everybody recognizes everybody. Carrie paid with her father’s $20 bill, took her change, picked up the grocery bag, and started the walk home. At 10:05 p.m.

, a neighbor spotted her along the route, just a short distance from her own house. They waved to each other. It was a completely ordinary moment and by every account, nothing about it suggested anything was wrong. Carrie was close to home. She had maybe a few hundred feet left to walk. 5 minutes later, at 10:10 p.m., a group of local teenage boys walked down that same stretch of road. The street was empty.

No Carrie. No sign that she had ever passed through. Somewhere in that 5-minute gap, Robert Jones intercepted her. He forced her into his car at gunpoint, and in one of the more chilling details investigators would later uncover, he didn’t drive her away from the neighborhood immediately. He drove her past her own house first, the home she had been minutes from reaching before continuing on.

Carrie’s mother, Kathy, was inside that house at the time with no idea her daughter had already been taken from just outside her door. When Kathy checked Carrie’s room the next morning, the bed hadn’t been slept in. It was the first sign that something was terribly wrong. Though at that point, no one in Au Sable Forks understood just how close to home the danger had actually come

. At 6:00 a.m. on June 23rd, Kathy Nixon opened her daughter’s bedroom door and found the bed exactly as it had been the night before. Untouched. Carrie had not come home. Within hours, the New York State Police were notified, and what began as a missing person’s report quickly escalated into one of the largest search operations the region had ever seen.

Volunteer fire departments from surrounding towns mobilized. Personnel from a nearby Air Force base joined state troopers on the ground. Search lines formed and moved methodically outward from the last known point Carrie had been seen, covering roughly 50 square miles of terrain across Essex County. They pushed through dense brush, checked barns and outbuildings, and searched the banks of the local river.

The search covered an enormous amount of ground in a short amount of time, but it produced nothing. No dropped shoe, no torn clothing, no sign of the grocery bag she’d been carrying, no blood, no tire marks, no physical evidence of any kind along the route she should have walked.

 For investigators, this absence of evidence was its own kind of problem. A struggle usually leaves something behind. This one hadn’t. At least, nothing anyone could find in 50 square miles of open search area. What the search did not do and could not have done with the tools available in 1987 was canvas every vehicle that had been in the vicinity of Thomas’s country store that specific night.

There was no security camera footage to review, no license plate readers, no digital trail connecting anyone in that parking lot to Carrie’s route home. Investigators were working from witness memory alone, and the only concrete leads they had were a store clerk’s recollection and a neighbor’s wave from a window.

It’s worth asking what a modern investigation would have caught that this one didn’t. A single store camera, a single plate number. The technology gap between 1987 and today is enormous, and in a case like this one, it may have been the difference between a 7-year search and a resolution within days. For now, though, investigators had exhausted the ground search, and the case was about to take its first real turn.

With no physical evidence at the scene, investigators turned to a theory that, on paper, made procedural sense. That Carrie had run away. >> [snorts] >> The theory wasn’t pulled from nowhere. When detectives interviewed her friends, they learned that Carrie had written letters on at least three separate occasions expressing a desire to leave Au Sable Forks.

In one, she talked about Hawaii. In another, Florida. In the most recent, she’d written about California and about waiting until she turned 18 to go. To investigators working a case with almost no leads, this was something concrete. A motive, a pattern, a girl who had told people, in her own words, that she wanted out.

For a period, it was the most promising thread they had. But the more they pulled at it, the faster it unraveled. Carrie hadn’t taken any money with her. In fact, she’d left her own pocket cash sitting out in a room untouched and had used her father’s $20 bill only because it was handed to her for the grocery errand.

She had no savings, no history of leaving home before, no packed bag, and nothing that suggested she’d made any actual plans to disappear that night. A 16-year-old with vague teenage daydreams about moving to Hawaii or California doesn’t typically vanish mid-errand at night without her wallet. The runaway theory required Carrie to have executed a spontaneous, unplanned disappearance with no resources and no preparation.

It didn’t make sense. Investigators shelved it, and the case moved back to square one with an uncomfortable new certainty. This wasn’t a girl who left. This was a girl who was taken. Months into the investigation, with the runaway theory dead and no new physical leads, a letter arrived that reignited the family’s hope.

It was postmarked from Flint, Michigan, and the anonymous author claimed with unusual confidence that Carrie was alive and living under a new identity in Utahville, South Carolina. There was no obvious reason to believe it. The Nixons had no family in South Carolina, no friends there, no connection to the town at all.

But when you’ve spent months with nothing, an anonymous tip starts to feel like a lifeline, whether it makes sense or not. Gary and Kathy made the nearly 1,000-mile drive south. When they arrived and started showing Carrie’s photograph around town, something unexpected happened. Several residents said they’d seen a girl who looked like her.

For a few days, it seemed like the letter might actually be real. It wasn’t. The sightings couldn’t be verified. No trace of Carrie turned up in Yuccaville, and the trail went cold. The Nixons drove the thousand miles back to New York with nothing. To this day, the author of that letter has never been identified.

 No one knows if it was a cruel hoax, a genuine but mistaken tip, or something else entirely. In 1987, tracing an anonymous handwritten letter back to its sender was extremely difficult without a confession or a fingerprint match. It raises a fair question. With modern forensic document analysis and postal tracking, would that letter be traceable today? It’s one of the few threads in this case that was never pulled all the way to the end.

The next break in the case came from an unlikely place, a music video. In 1991, four years after Carrie vanished, members of the Nixon family were watching a broadcast of the New Kids on the Blocks Hanging Tough video, filmed two years earlier at a live concert in Los Angeles. As the camera swept across the crowd, it paused for a fraction of a second on a teenage girl in the audience.

To the family watching at home, she looked exactly like Carrie. They brought it to investigators, and this time the New York State Police didn’t dismiss it as wishful thinking. They took the footage to a forensics lab, where technicians isolated the frame and produced an enhanced photograph of the girl in the crowd.

Side-by-side with Carrie’s most recent photo, the resemblance was striking. Same hair length, same dark color, same facial structure. And then there was the detail that convinced investigators to take it seriously. The girl in the video had four earrings in one ear and two in the other, which matched the exact unusual piercing pattern Carrie had gotten shortly before she disappeared.

The case, already covered on the television Unsolved Mysteries in 1989, exploded back into the national spotlight. Band members Jonathan and Jordan Knight made a televised appeal asking the girl in the footage to come forward if she was safe and asking concert-goers who might recognize her to call in. Tip lines lit up.

For months, investigators, the Nixon family, and fans across the country held onto the possibility that this was the break they’d been waiting for. It took nearly 2 years to run it down. In 1993, investigators finally identified the girl. Her name was Lynette Melanson, a young woman from California with no connection whatsoever to the Nixon family or to Au Sable Forks.

The piercings, the hairstyle, the facial structure, all of it was coincidence. An extraordinary one, but a coincidence nonetheless. For Carrie’s parents, this closed the door on the most public, most hopeful lead the case had ever produced. The national attention faded, and investigators were left facing an uncomfortable reality.

 After 4 years in a story that had reached millions of people, they were no closer to knowing what had actually happened to their daughter than they had been on the night she disappeared. Before we go further, if you’re finding this breakdown valuable, take a second to subscribe. What happens next in this case isn’t something anyone could have predicted.

The break that finally cracked this case open had nothing to do with Carrie Nixon at all. It came from a completely separate crime years later. Stay with me because this is where this case takes a different turn. After the concert video lead collapsed, the case went quiet. There were no new tips worth chasing, no forensic breakthroughs, nothing left to search.

Investigators had exhausted every lead available to them, and the file sat largely untouched for the next few years. Life in Au Sable Forks moved forward even as the case didn’t. Children who had been toddlers in 1987 were now approaching their teenage years. The initial wave of fear that had gripped the town after Carrie’s disappearance had settled into a kind of permanent weariness that had simply become part of daily life there.

By early 1994, nearly 7 years had passed since Carrie walked out her front door. There had been no arrest, no suspect, no confirmed sighting that held up to scrutiny. The case remained exactly where it had been for years, unsolved and growing colder by the month. Then, in January of that year, everything changed.

The break that solved Carrie Nixon’s disappearance came from a string of bank robberies, one of them committed in Au Sable Forks itself. In 1992, a Key Bank in the same small town where Carrie had vanished 5 years earlier was robbed. Investigators eventually traced the robbery to a 29-year-old man named Robert Anthony Jones.

He wasn’t a stranger to the area. Jones was a native of Au Sable Forks, though by 1987, he’d moved away and was living in Bar Harbor, Maine working as a laborer. He’d only been back in town that specific week in June to visit family. The Key Bank robbery wasn’t an isolated incident. Investigators connected Jones to an earlier robbery in Plattsburgh as well, one where his wife, Teresa, had driven the getaway car.

Their two young children had been in the back seat at the time. By late 1993, the case against Jones was substantial enough that federal prosecutors moved forward with charges. He was ultimately convicted on four counts of bank robbery along with interstate transport of firearms and use of a firearm during a crime of violence.

In December 1993, he was sentenced to just over 15 years in federal prison, 181 months to be exact. On paper, this was simply the resolution of an unrelated robbery case. Jones was a convicted felon heading into federal custody, and there was nothing in the charges that connected him to a missing 16-year-old girl from 7 years earlier.

But the arrest put pressure on the entire Jones family. Teresa was now facing her own charges for her role in the Plattsburgh robbery, with the added weight of having had her children in the car during a felony. And with Robert facing over a decade in prison, the family situation was unraveling fast in ways that had nothing to do with Kari Nixon.

 The thing is, if Jones never returned to rob a bank in his own hometown, there’s a real possibility this case never gets solved at all. Teresa Jones eventually pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the Plattsburgh robbery, admitting to driving the getaway car with their two children inside. While she waited to be sentenced, facing the real possibility of federal prison time herself, she made a decision that would ultimately unravel the 7-year mystery of Kari Nixon’s disappearance.

Teresa told investigators that her husband had confessed to her at some point in their marriage that he had killed Kari. This wasn’t a moment of guilt-driven confession on Teresa’s part, and it wasn’t Robert coming forward out of remorse, either. It was calculated. With Teresa facing federal sentencing for her role in the robbery, and with her husband already looking at over a decade behind bars, she pushed him to use what he knew as leverage.

If he confessed to Kari’s murder and helped investigators recover her remains, there was a real possibility it could work in Teresa’s favor when it came time for her own sentencing. Robert agreed. Not because the weight of 7 years of silence had finally become unbearable, but because it was, quite literally, a trade for his wife’s freedom, or at least a reduced sentence for her in exchange for information he’d been sitting on since 1987.

Before he said anything on the record to state investigators, his attorneys made the first move. They contacted authorities directly and made it clear that their client had information about the Nixon case, but that any statement would come with conditions attached. This wasn’t a confession volunteered freely.

It was the opening move in a negotiation, one where Jones held the only piece of information anyone wanted, and he intended to use it. What followed was weeks of legal maneuvering between Jones’s defense team and state prosecutors, working out exactly what Jones would receive in exchange for telling investigators what happened to Carrie Nixon and leading them to her remains.

For investigators who had chased this case for 7 years, it was an uncomfortable position to be in. They finally had the answer they’d been searching for, but getting it meant negotiating with the one person capable of providing it on his terms, not theirs. With the plea negotiations underway, Jones began providing investigators with an account of what happened on the night of June 22nd, 1987.

According to his statement, after spotting Carrie inside Thomas’s Country Store, Jones followed her as she left and began walking home. He intercepted her in the dark on that quiet street, forcing her into his car at gunpoint. As covered earlier, he drove her past her own house before leaving the area entirely, taking her to a remote property owned by his father in the nearby town of Jay, New York.

At that property, Jones had sexually assaulted and killed Carrie Nixon. Investigators corroborated the location and in against what physical evidence remained available 7 years later. And the account was consistent with what little forensic information had ever been gathered. Jones stated that after the murder, he buried her body in a shallow makeshift grave in a wooded area near the property in the early morning hours of June 23rd.

 Around the same time, Cathy Nixon was discovering her daughter’s empty bed miles away. For investigators, the account answered the central question that had defined the case for 7 years. What happened to Carrie Nixon? But it also confirmed something more troubling. She had never been far away. The distance between where she vanished and where she was killed was a matter of miles, not states or coastlines.

The search parties that had combed 50 square miles of terrain in the days after her disappearance had been searching in roughly the right region the entire time. They simply didn’t know precisely where to look, and Jones was the only person who did. It’s a detail that sits uncomfortably alongside the years spent chasing leads in Michigan, South Carolina, and California.

The entire time, the answer was substantially closer to home than anyone searching for her ever imagined. What remained now was for investigators to confirm it and to finally bring Carrie home. On January 28th, 1994, Robert Anthony Jones was escorted by New York State Troopers into the woods near his father’s property in Jay, New York, roughly 6 miles from Au Sable Forks.

The ground was frozen, covered in snow and ice, but Jones led investigators directly to the site without hesitation. 7 years after the murder, he still knew the exact location. Detectives and forensic specialists began excavating the shallow grave Jones pointed them to. What they found confirmed the account he had given during the plea negotiations.

After more than 2,400 days since Carrie Nixon had walked out of Thomas’s country store, investigators finally recovered her remains. Alongside her, still in the grave, was the paper grocery bag she had carried out of the store that night. For investigators, this served as physical corroboration of Jones’s account and helped confirm the identification and timeline before formal forensic testing was even completed.

The bag had been buried with her for nearly 7 years, a direct physical link between the ordinary errand she’d been sent on and the crime scene investigators were now standing in. The recovery closed the central unresolved question of the case, but it also marked a difficult turning point for the Nixon family.

For 7 years, uncertainty had at least allowed for the possibility, however unlikely, that Carrie was still alive somewhere. That possibility was now gone. What remained was confirmation, and with it a shift from a missing person’s case to a homicide investigation with a named cooperating suspect already in custody on unrelated federal charges.

With Carrie’s remains recovered and Jones’s account corroborated at the scene, the case moved into its next phase, determining exactly what Jones would face in court and what kind of resolution investigators and prosecutors were able to secure after 7 years of searching. With Carrie’s remains recovered and Jones’s confession corroborated, prosecutors moved to formalize the terms that had been negotiated before he ever spoke to investigators.

Robert Anthony Jones pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, and first-degree rape. He was sentenced to 18 years to life. Critically, that sentence was ordered to run concurrently with the 15-year federal sentence he was already serving for the bank robberies. In practical terms, this meant Jones wouldn’t serve his murder sentence separately, stacked on top of his robbery sentence.

He would serve both at the same time, with the murder sentence essentially absorbed into the time he was already facing. For prosecutors, the decision came down to risk. This was a 7-year-old case with no witnesses to the crime itself, no physical evidence connecting Jones to the scene beyond his own account, and no forensic case that had ever been built for trial.

Taking Jones to court carried a real possibility of losing, of walking away with neither a conviction nor Carrie’s remains. The plea deal guaranteed both. It secured a confession, a conviction, and most importantly for the Nixon family, it guaranteed the location of their daughter’s body. Without the deal, there was no certainty Jones would have cooperated at all, and the case could easily have remained unsolved indefinitely.

 Following sentencing, Jones began serving his time at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York before later being transferred to other state facilities over the following decades. It’s worth sitting with the mathematics of this outcome. A man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered a 16-year-old girl effectively served the bulk of his sentence concurrently with a bank robbery charge.

Prosecutors have defended the decision as the only realistic path to securing both justice and closure in a case with almost no other evidence. But it’s a fair question to ask, and one worth putting to you directly. Given what was at stake, recovering a missing girl’s remains after 7 years, was this trade the right call? Or should prosecutors have gambled on a trial, even with the case they had? There’s no clean answer here, and reasonable people land in different places on it.

 In 2018, more than two decades after his sentencing, Robert Anthony Jones returned to court, this time trying to undo the very deal that had put him behind bars. Jones filed a motion to vacate his conviction, arguing that his original defense attorney had provided ineffective counsel. Specifically, he claimed his lawyer had improperly advised him to reject an earlier plea offer, one that would have amounted to a total of 20 years.

That figure is worth pausing on because it’s less time than the sentence he actually received under the deal he ultimately took. Essex County Judge Richard Meyer reviewed the motion and rejected it, finding no basis to vacate the conviction. Jones appealed that decision to the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court, which upheld Meyer’s ruling and denied his request for a new review.

The appeal didn’t change Jones’s sentence or his conviction, but it added an unexpected layer to the case. The man who negotiated his way out of a murder trial by trading a confession for a lighter combined sentence had, at an earlier point, apparently turned down a deal that would have kept him in prison for less time overall.

Whatever calculation he was making in 1994, it didn’t hold up as the better outcome, at least not by his own account decades later. Since becoming eligible for parole in 2011, Robert Anthony Jones has faced the parole board multiple times. Every single time he has been denied. That outcome hasn’t happened by accident.

 Au Sable Forks residents, along with Carrie’s own family, have organized sustained letter writing campaigns ahead of each hearing, urging the parole board to keep Jones incarcerated. An advocacy page dedicated specifically to this effort, titled Keep Carrie Nixon’s killer in prison, has continued to mobilize public opposition for over a decade, encouraging people to submit letters directly to the board before each scheduled review.

The board has sided with that opposition every time. Jones has now been denied parole on five separate occasions, most recently in August of 2023. As of that hearing, there is no confirmed update on the outcome of any subsequent review. Over the decades since his sentencing, Jones has moved through several state correctional facilities.

He began his sentence at Sing Sing. By 2018, at the time of his failed appeal, he was being held at Livingston Correctional Facility. As of his most recent parole hearing, he is incarcerated at Wyoming Correctional Facility in Attica, New York. What’s notable here isn’t just that Jones keeps getting denied. It’s that the outcome has depended in large part on organized public pressure showing up at every single hearing.

Parole boards weigh institutional behavior, but they also weigh community impact statements, and in this case, that community has never let up. More than three decades after Carrie Nixon disappeared, people who weren’t even alive when she vanished are still writing letters to keep her killer behind bars. That’s a rare level of sustained public engagement in a case this old, and it says something about how deeply this crime is still felt in that part of New York.

For Gary and Kathy Nixon, the recovery of their daughter’s remains in 1994 closed one chapter of an impossible 7 years, but it didn’t end their grief. It simply changed its shape from the agony of not knowing into the permanent weight of confirmed loss. The toll on the family extended well beyond that year. Four years later, in 2011, Gary Nixon passed away at 63.

He was the man who had handed his daughter $20 for a routine grocery run in 1987. A decision no father could have known would end the way it did, and one he carried for the rest of his life. Kathy Nixon has continued to speak publicly about the case in the years since, including participating in interviews reflecting on the decades her family spent searching, hoping, and eventually grieving.

In her own words at one point, she described not fully realizing how much hope she’d been holding on to until the day it was gone. The family also established a scholarship fund in Kari’s name, a way of ensuring that her memory continued to have a tangible positive impact in the community where she grew up, long after the case itself had been resolved.

More than three decades later, the loss is still layered into that part of AuSable Forks. It’s not a case that ended cleanly with a conviction. For the people who lived through it, the aftermath extended across generations, touching a family that never fully got the version of closure they deserved. Looking back at the full 7 years, this case turned on two moments that had nothing to do with traditional detective work.

The first was Robert Jones robbing a bank in his own hometown in 1992, the same town where he had murdered Kari 5 years earlier. The second was Teresa Jones facing her own sentencing, deciding that her husband’s confession was worth more as leverage than as a secret. Neither of these was the result of a forensic breakthrough or a new tip on the Nixon case itself.

Both were unrelated events that happened to intersect with a 7-year-old missing person’s file. That raises a fair question about the investigation itself. Investigators pursued a runaway theory, an anonymous letter that led a thousand miles south, and a national search sparked by a concert video, all before the actual break came from a completely different case entirely.

Some of that is simply the reality of working with 1987 era tools. There was no database to trace an anonymous letter, no camera footage from Thomas’s country store, no digital trail connecting Jones to the scene that night. Investigators worked the leads available to them, and when those leads ran out, the case sat until circumstances outside their control finally handed them the answer.

Whether a modern investigation with forensic document analysis, surveillance footage, and digital forensics could have solved this case faster is worth genuinely considering. It’s not a criticism of the investigators who worked it for 7 years under real constraints. It’s a question about what’s changed since and what a case like this looks like if it happened today instead of 1987.

 If you want more breakdowns like this, ones that go past the surface details and actually examine the investigative decisions behind a case, subscribe. We take a closer look at what worked, what didn’t, and what got missed along the way. Let me know in the comments what you think investigators could have done differently here.