Many believe he was deeply psychologically disturbed. He is currently serving his sentence on death row. Odom: While a lready on the run, Odom raped and murdered year-old Mina Johnson as he fled Mississippi. Odom was convicted and sentenced to life in prison as a result of his fingerprints being recovered from the scene.
Irick was supposed to be babysitting the girl, but she was found asphyxiated in her living room. Irick was discovered hiding beneath a bridge and confessed to killing Dyer. He pleaded severe mental illness but was ultimately sentenced to death.
He confessed to the police that he strangled two or three other homeless men. And sad. And a reminder that there is a darkness out there that you want to keep far, far away. Leave your thoughts in the comments below! During these uncertain times, please keep safety in mind and consider adding destinations to your bucket list to visit at a later date. Tennessee In Your Inbox spinner.
Thank you! You'll receive your first newsletter soon! May 2, August 10, September 26, May 19, February 15, January 21, John T. March 7, June 6, Jon D. July 29, April 17, June 22, January 15, 19 Late 18th century.
July 22, July 24, December 14, March 3, November 30, January 30, August 14, April 15, David IVY. June 8, Ernest D. June 19, Cecil J. December 8, January 11, David M. March 16, Roy E. July 31, September 6, Robert L. July 8, October 19, At different times, Mullins lived with both Harris and his sister, Janice Mullins. They say they never saw him get upset or violent.
Yet when Dr. James Walker, a forensic neuropsychologist, examined Mullins after his arrest, Mullins admitted "wanting to hit the heads of others and take his brother's life with a brick.
Fingerprints that we can tie to the suspect in such a short amount of time, like we did in this case. It was this guys time to be caught. Merritt, a crime investigator with the Memphis Police Department, took recorded statements from serial killer Michael Mullins where he confessed in detail to the murders of Beatrice Cole, Valerie Ector, Gwen Jackson, and the attack on Jessie Lee Maples.
March 4, - Sgt. It wasn't one or two people," Merritt said. It would have been impossible because we had no idea who Michael Mullins was at that time. Merritt knew Jackson's killing was very similar to Ector's death 10 months earlier. He knew all three women had been bludgeoned in the head, left nude from the waist down and covered with a blanket. He knew the fingerprint on the bag containing the malt liquor can found at the scene matched Mullins.
But he had to make certain Mullins was the killer, that his fingerprint hadn't just wound up at the crime scene accidentally. Finding an empty beer can isn't rare in Downtown Memphis. He needed DNA, and Mullins willingly supplied it. Merritt sent it to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Meanwhile, down the hall in the cold-case unit, Sgt. Bill Ashton had been following the case. Something about it jogged his memory of working the crime scene 13 years earlier of Marie Cole, whose first name was Beatrice.
And Beatrice Cole's case just came to mind. I couldn't remember her last name, but I remembered her first name, Beatrice," said Ashton, who spent 17 years as a homicide detective. I submitted it to TBI also with a letter saying if you get a profile, check it against these other three cases. And the description of that scene and Joe Stark's scene, they were identical to me. I said, 'Oh no,' and then it clicked my mind - Beatrice Cole.
Mullins is an addict. His brother discovered this in , when Mullins called asking for money. When Harris declined, Mullins became enraged. Harris later found out Mullins had pawned a pager he bought him, then used the money for drugs.
I got mad at him and didn't want to talk to him for a day or two. When he came back, I told him he had to straighten up and fly right.
He said he would and he kinda tried," Harris said. But one day, Harris was driving home and passed by a pawn shop. When he looked in the window, he saw one of the lawnmowers on display was his.
Mullins had stolen and sold it, too. Mullins claimed he knew nothing about one of the killings, but when presented with evidence, he came clean. Some of what he told the police was proved false, particularly when he claimed he killed the women in self defense.
He claimed each of the women consented to sex, something police don't believe. He also claimed many of his victims drank and did drugs with him, even when their toxicology reports came back negative.
He repeatedly tried to blame his actions on his drug habit, saying he attacked Maples "because I was on them drugs real hard. Even his apology, told to police in one of his interviews, rings hollow: "I apologize for treating that woman that way, taking advantage of her. I don't want anyone taking advantage of my mother, my sisters, my daughter. I apologize for everything I've done. I don't mean no harm. I just ain't lined up right. I need some serious help.
From his confessions to police regarding Cole, who Mullins killed on May 28, , in Downtown Memphis:. We had some dope, cocaine. We went up there and smoked dope, got our drink on, smoked some cigarettes. Mullins said he and Cole then had sex, and he left to use the bathroom.
When he came back, Mullins said he saw Cole having sex with another man. That enraged him. I hit her two times. It was a concrete block. I said, 'I tell you what, I'm gonna bust your expletive head. His brother and sister still refuse to accept that Mullins murdered three people and beat a year-old woman so badly she never left a nursing home. In an interview at his Berclair home, Harris said he didn't think his brother did it, or, if he did, someone made him do it.
I know my brother better than anybody in my family," Harris said. I said they got the wrong somebody. I say he didn't do that by himself. His sister, Janice Mullins, recalled her shock at seeing her brother's face on the morning news the day he was caught for Jackson's murder. Yet until a reporter told her, she didn't know there were three other victims. When told that Maples was 78 when attacked she was actually 79 , Janice Mullins kept repeating, "78," and shaking her head.
She later repeated she didn't believe a man with three sisters could do what her brother did to these women. I find it hard to believe, what I know of my brother," she said. Like I say, he got three sisters. But in one of his interviews, Mullins told authorities he had a "history of becoming physically aggressive with others when angry.
When Mullins confessed to his crimes, the almost delight he took in answering police questions disturbed those working on the case. That's kinda spooky," Detective Joe Stark said. He's asking Sergeant Brown, 'Mike, you got anything you want to ask me? I'll be glad to answer it. In Mullins' confession to attacking Maples, he told police he'd never seen her before, despite living two floors above her for as long as a year.
I pushed her down in the bushes. And I put my feet in her face, stomping my feet in her face. In the face. About two times. No sir, she didn't say nothing. She couldn't say nothing 'cause she was in a state of shock. I think he had the type of personality where he was very friendly to anyone he met," said Gerald Skahan, now a judge but then the public defender specializing in murder cases who was appointed to represent Mullins.
I don't know if it was ever determined what did that. Mullins lived in West Memphis with his father for a while, and was four years younger than Cole. There's no evidence he knew her, but it's not an impossible they encountered each other there. Mullins lived two floors above Maples and it is likely he would have seen her coming and going from the Isabella Towers on one of her miles-long walks. There's no proof Mullins and Ector met, but they were both homeless addicts living around Downtown Memphis, so it's possible their paths intersected at some point.
Mullins was well aware of Jackson, however. His family members say Mullins talked about her often, pointing her out when they passed her in a car. But according to Ron Bezon, who manages the St. Mary's soup kitchen, Mullins and Jackson got into a spat a couple of days before she was killed.
Mullins — as he often did — tried to jump line at the soup kitchen, but this time he tried to do it to Jackson. She was having none of it. Probably two or three days before the murder happened.
They had an altercation, which I didn't think anything of. It was just somebody being belligerent," Bezon said. It had to be his way, doing whatever he wanted to do. They're narcissistic and seem disconnected from people. In a sense you have to feel for somebody like that, because you know there's trauma that happened to them," Brown said.
Memphis authorities charged Mullins with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of aggravated rape. Veteran Shelby County prosecutor Jennifer Nichols became involved with the case. I've never said to a defense attorney before, 'You need to come up to my office and listen to this. You've got to hear this guy before you get too far into things,' " Nichols said.
His willingness to say, 'I picked up a brick and hit her in the head' was unusual. Mullins was interviewed by numerous mental-health professionals to determine his competency to stand trial. While all agreed he was mentally ill and mildly retarded, some of the psychologists believed he was exaggerating the extent of his disability to curry favor.
Ultimately, he was ruled competent to stand trial. Under normal circumstances, someone with a body count like Mullins would have been a candidate for the death penalty. However, federal law prohibits that punishment for anyone with an IQ under 70, and Mullins' highest recorded score was So Nichols and Skahan worked out a deal and on Dec.
He was sentenced to three life sentences without parole for the murders and three year sentences, also without parole, for the rapes.
Skahan: "Michael was one of the easiest people I ever represented. He was very friendly, polite, obsessively clean. If you met Michael, you would think he was simple. You would probably think he was mildly retarded. You would think that he was harmless. Skahan, later: "He's just a fascinating person.
He is so different. He's the kind of guy that psychologists could write a book about or make a movie about. Why does he do this? Is it instinct? Does he really enjoy killing? Mullins repeatedly tried to claim Jackson had hit him in the head with a stick, and he had then gone and found a brick with which to beat her. Except detectives discovered he got the brick before he interacted with her, which proved to them he planned to attack her.
Mullins even claimed to one of his psychologists that he threw the brick at her from a distance of five feet. It went a little further and I picked up a brick and I hit her with it. Although Maples had been attacked in April , she didn't die until November Family members said Jessie never really recovered from the attack, but the Knoxville medical examiner's office did not rule her death a homicide.
For my medical examiner not to make that connection, you can bank on it. On May 1, , Mullins pleaded guilty to the attempted first-degree murder and aggravated rape of Maples. He was sentenced to 50 more years in prison. He is housed in a cell with another inmate. He is enrolled in Adult Basic Education, and his security level is classified as "minimum restricted," Tennessee Department of Corrections representative Alison Randgaard said.
That means he can move around the prison on a regular basis, but is locked down in his cell from 9 p. Mullins never responded to a letter seeking a telephone conversation. A message asking Mullins to call was left with Harris, who talks to his brother regularly, but to no avail. One question remains for almost everyone involved in the Mullins case: How many more victims are out there? Not are there more victims, but how many have yet to be connected to him?
No one in law enforcement — not even his attorney — believes Mullins committed just these four assaults. Merritt said he went back through MPD's murder books — bound volumes with a description of every killing — through the early s and didn't find anything definitive. But there was no DNA, some of the victims pretty much decomposed. And if you didn't have some leverage against him, he wasn't gonna confess to them.
Memphis police homicide detective Joe Stark sent an alert to departments around the state, asking if anyone had similar assaults in their records. No one responded. Harris said his brother often disappeared for months at a time, then suddenly popped up in some random town. No one knew where he was, or what he was doing.
You could lose contact with him for six months to a year," Harris said. It wasn't just Knoxville. He'd go from any city he wanted to at any given day or time. Please turn your device to landscape orientation. Memphis Memphis, Tennessee For more than 13 years, a serial killer targeted women living in the margins in Memphis and one in Knoxville, yet for much of that time, no one knew he even existed.
Cole's case had gone cold. Nine years later and miles away, the killer had found his second known victim. Doctors didn't believe she could survive. But she slowly recovered, to a degree.
The tests came back on the knife: nothing. Valerie Ector Story by Jody Callahan. At the time, it seemed like just another Memphis homicide. But that Thursday night, the Tunica sheriff showed up at Keyes-Pollard's church. Her grave remains unmarked. She was 46 years old. This time, he'd left behind a clue that would lead directly to his capture.
Mary's, saw Jackson almost every day. The watch remains in that safe today. And there it was, tinged purple from the treatments. A fingerprint near the lip of the bag. So Winston had his 20 names, and his magnifying glass.
He looked at them, one by one.
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