More than 30 years after the body of a little girl was found in a small town in Arkansas, there are still questions about who killed her – or that she was even killed.
The horrifying death of Christina Pipkin has chased the city of Hickory Ridge since she disappeared on 4 May 1991, to be found dead three days later in a ditch.
The police initially ruled her death a drowning because she could not swim and there were no signs of abuse on her body, but they soon began to suspect that the death of Christina was the result of a murder.
Their research led them to a man named Robbie Tubbs after sketches of a mysterious man in the city seemed to meet his description.
He was arrested for the death of Christina, but in a shocking turn of events, the evidence was considered indisputable and the charges were withdrawn against him.
Speculation appeared for years that Robbie was the murderer of Christina, but when his daughter -in -law heard Amy of the case, she wanted to prove his innocence.
Amy Tubbs told the Dailymail.com that when she first met her husband, she had no idea that his father was previously accused of murder.
When her husband, who shares the same name as Robbie, revealed his shocking family history, Amy began to dig up creepy coincidences in the case.
Authorities asked the public for information after the body of Christina was found in a ditch in 1991
The city of Hickory Ridge was changed forever after the body of a nine -year -old was found in a ditch
An important evidence in Robbie Sr.'s arrest was the testimony of his wife Sandra. Sandra was delivered after her husband made a strange remark about the death of Christina.
While the police were looking for Christina, Robbie told her: 'They will never find her, there are too many rice tickets for someone to drown in. She's dead. “
The comment led Sandra to suspect her husband and she told later that he tied her up when she confronted him about it.
She told her friend, Susan, about the fight that the story later confirmed to the police.
Although Amy did not know her husband at this time, she said that several family members had told her stories about an abuse relationship between Robbie Sr. and Sandra.
Sandra eventually gave a statement to the authorities and suggested that she even believed that her husband was a pedophile. She told the police that he attacked a 12-year-old girl.
Robbie eventually admitted that she had sex with the girl, but claimed that she was 14 or 15 and told him she was 18 years old.
The police had also found hair follicles in his car and believed that they belonged to Christina. The evidence was sufficient to arrest Robbie, but his wife's statement was eventually thrown away due to a horrifying coincidence.
The public was recruited by the authorities to help Christina find after she had disappeared while selling jewelry for fundraising in school
Exactly two years after the death of Christina, Sandra was brutally murdered in a failed burglary.
“When he told me that his mother killed two years later, I think, this even sounds more terrible than I thought,” Amy told the DailyMail.com.
“And so I actually set off to determine if I thought his father was involved in the death of his mother, who happened two years to the day exactly when Christina was murdered,” she added.
Amy explained that Sandra died after she had been shot several times and tried to run away from robbers.
Robbie Sr. Had brought their car to work and most of her sons had left for school. She was painting when two armed teenagers approached their house who were planning to rob them.
Amy believed that, because there was no vehicle in their driveway, the teenagers did not expect anyone at home and shocked Sandra.
Sandra tried to run away but was shot several times and died outside their house. Her youngest son slept in his bed and Sandra's body was later found outside.
While she died before her husband was convicted of the murder of Christina, her explanation for the court was considered inadmissible.
“I think it was just a terrible coincidence,” Amy said about the creepy death of her mother -in -law. “I told my husband:” I don't know if your father had the best happiness or the worst happiness in the world. '' '
On top of Sandra's shocking death revealed a hair -raising discovery in the process of Robbie Sr. That the wrong hairs found in his car were submitted by the police, so the persecution had no evidence that Christina was ever in his car.
Christina's body was found on May 7, 1991, who drove under a bridge three days after she had disappeared
When the case was initially rejected in the summer of 2000, said public prosecutor Fletcher Long Jr. That the police got a dead end.
“There is nothing else that we can do,” he said at the time. “We are in a dead end. This is the end of it, “Deseret News has previously reported.
Another part of the research was witnesses described a man in the city who corresponded to the description of Robbie Sr.
Christina was seen by many locals because she was on her own on the day she disappeared to sell jewelry for a school fundraiser.
A cashier in a local supermarket told the police that a man came in a blue car to buy cigarettes and stared at Christina.
Other children interviewed told the police a similar story about a stranger in a blue car that drove through the city that day.
A child even reported that the Man Christina had followed when she walked past the supermarket.
The descriptions they gave corresponding to Robbie Sr., however, he rode a brown AMC adel and had no blue car.
Amy said that the evidence was not compelling enough to convince her that her father -in -law killed Christina.
Jackie White found the body of Christina while he was out with his two young sons
“I started to realize that the police had never looked at anyone else,” she told the DailyMail.com.
While Amy started digging in the case of her father-in-law, she joined a private detective named Catherine Townsend, who also organizes a real crime podcast called Hell and Gone.
“We were able to determine that there was a sex offender at level three who lived in the same street as Christina, who, in my opinion, qualified in the research and went looking for her,” Amy said.
She added that the sex offender was a pallbearer in the funeral of Christina, but later disappeared mysteriously. The office of the Sheriff of Cross County could not comment on the question of whether they were investigating a sex offense with regard to the murder of Christina.
The first federal law to tackle sexual offenses was adopted years later in 1994, which started the register program.
In 1996, Megan's law came into force, for which states required Staten to provide public information about sex offenders. Because the death of Christina took place for these laws, the alleged sex offender who lived on her street would not have been public knowledge.
The horrible tragedy shocked the rural town and still lived in the heads of the locals in the decades that have been followed.
Jackie White, the man who found Christina's body, told the local ABC branch, Katv News, that he saw her floating in a cow lake stern at a bridge, almost four miles outside where she was last seen.
The small town of Arkansas was turned upside down when the police started investigating a murder in 1991
“We looked down from the bridge and there she was against a small tree tree and she floated back and forth,” White told the exhaust.
“And we went down to check. I took a stick and rolled her up a bit. I wasn't sure it was she or one [living] Person … and her eyes were open. '
James Pat Ballard III, a classmate of Christina, recalled Katv that the shocking murder Hickory Ridge changed.
He said he did not believe that the death of Christina was by chance and did not understand how she would have walked around four miles outside the city while sold jewelry.
'It was very strange to me that a child who could have achieved Young to make the city completely, had drowned the ditch and accident. And there was a question that could have been an accident about it, but I don't see that happening, “he explained.
Tens of years later, the ominous man in the blue car remains a mystery, and ask questions what happened to Christina in her last hours.
Hickory Ridge was plagued by tragedies after the death of Christina, who still has many unanswered questions
Cross County Sheriff David West told the Dailymail.com that there has been no new evidence in the case.
“We still hope to find new evidence, but from now on we are still a stalemate,” he added.
Amy said that although Christina's case has become cold, she wants to find answers to the little girl's family.
'I hope for her family that there will be answers. But, only what I have seen, go and invest a murder case, or another case, when you go so far from 1991 to 2025 – people have died, people have moved, people have just forgotten it. '
Although the years have passed, Amy hopes that the renewed interest in the case of Christina can cause someone's memory.
'It is really difficult to bring someone's mind back to May 1991. But yes, I will remain hopeful, and I hope that with every interview I can do and every way I can get her story there, that it can cause someone's memory Or maybe I put on someone's heart, “she told the DailyMail.com.
Amy, who is in contact with Christina's family, said that every birthday of their daughter's death is a painful memory of the tragedy that brought her.
The process of her father -in -law gave the family of Christina false hope, and when the charges were withdrawn in 2000, they were forced to live with unanswered questions.
Christina's death still chases Hickory Ridge, a city plagued by tragedy after her body had pulled out of a creek decades ago.
