Cold Case Files - A Deadly Affair / The Sting Operation

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

After 19 years, Kansas detectives reopen the case of a banker found beaten to death in his bed–and the chief suspect is his cheating wife. And a man with a guilty conscience helps Arkansas police to crack a cold case of murder.Marathon: Join Marathon Rewards today and start earning rewards on every gallon of gas. Marathon, where fun runs on full!Mint: To get the new customer offer and your new 3-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to Mintmobile.com/coldcaseRosetta Stone: Cold Case Files listeners can get Rosetta Stone’s lifetime membership for 50% off when you go to RosettaStone.com/coldcaseSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. What do we got? Let's take a look at some of these. The old Polaroids from 1982.

Bill Wall and Steve James are cold case detectives with the Olathe Police in Kansas. In 2001, they pick up the unsolved murder of David Harmon. This was a crime when you just look at strictly the picture. It doesn't look to you as being anything even closer resembling a robbery or a home invasion. I think the detectives were starting to figure that out, that this has got to be a bogus story. The bogus story begins with a bump in the night. This was the kind of a loud noise that just wakes you from a deep sleep. you sit up in the bed just pulled upright and you just look at each other and say what was that?

It's 2.30 a.m. and Gail Bergstrand awakens to a series of thumps coming from the other side of her bedroom wall. I told my husband, I said, I'm going to call the police and he said, well, what are you going to tell them that you heard thumping in our neighbor's duplex? And I said, oh, you're right. You know, I can't do that. But I said, I'm going to put my ear on the wall. and if I hear one more thing, I'm calling. Bergstrand, however, hears nothing more. All's quiet until 3.30 when there's a knock on her door. It's her next door neighbor, Melinda Harmon. She said, I think Dave is dead.

I think Dave could be dead, and she didn't know that definitively. J.W. Larrick is a detective with the Olathe Police Department. That information basically was there had been an attack in the residence, and her husband was, husband had been severely injured. So in that type of scenario, you go code three lights and sirens to the residents to get there as quickly and safely as you can. I went into the bedroom, the master bedroom, and that's when I first saw David on the bed. David Harmon is dead. His face beaten with a blunt object.

I don't think David's mother would have recognized him as he lay there on the bed. You could not tell if he was eight or 80. You could not tell if he was a man or a woman. Paul Morrison is an assistant district attorney on the scene. There was blood, brain matter, slung, not spattered, but slung on the ceiling, on all the walls from what was obviously a bludgeoning that had occurred. Officer Lerick has a talk with Melinda Harmon. When I asked her what happened, she said that she was awakened by the sounds of thuds as she lay in bed next to David.

She was then grabbed by the arm and pulled out of the bed and told to show them the intruders where the keys to the bank were. The bank is the patron state bank. David Harmon is a teller there. She said she went downstairs. showed them where the keys to the bank were, and then she was struck. The intruder's blow, Melinda says, knocked her out. Sometime later, she woke up, and she ran next door and pounded on the door of the Bergstroms to ask for help.

She was upset, but not overly upset. She never asked what was her husband's condition. She never said, are you really sure he's dead? Detective Joe Pruitt takes a statement from Melinda Harmon. She said that she was picked from the bed by her hair and led downstairs, and the two suspects who said they were probably black males, she could tell that from their voice, demanded the keys to the bank where David was employed. This bruise on her left cheek was about the size of a dime. If she'd been knocked unconscious, she would still have been woozy. She would have been disorientated.

She was able to answer questions. She was not overly upset. Mrs. Harmon's story feels shaky. The more Pruitt looks at it, the less he likes it. The real thing that stuck in our mind was, what would anybody accomplish by taking the keys and breaking into the bank in the middle of the night, knowing full well that there's a time lock on the vault?

I mean, you get, what, office chairs, a check protector? That's about it. For the first few hours, everybody subscribed to this home invasion story. And we spent considerable time chasing those leads down. Surveillance was set up at the bank, waiting for these bad guys to show up. As the hours went by, though, nobody showed up at the bank. We began to sort of assess her statement and how impractical and improbable we felt that statement was. So as the morning went into the afternoon, I think everybody felt this story stinks. detectives begin to take a hard look at Melinda Harmon, as well as a college student and family friend named Mark Mangelsdorf.

Mr. Mangelsdorf, the friend of the family, his appearance there was somewhat unusual. Be safe, stay busy. Call me if you need anything. Police at the Harmon crime scene found Mangelsdorf there, just hanging around. Officer Lerick pointed out that even though it was around 5 o'clock in the morning, Mr. Mangelsdorf hair was wet, and I don't mean. moist like you'd rent a comb through it, a wet comb, but it was wet like you'd taken a shower. I had not taken a shower, and I didn't think that he had had time to shower either. Detective speculate there might be something more than the friendship between Mangelsdorf and the widow Harmon.

Items found through a search warrant begin to support those suspicions. One of the things discovered was a collection of letters and greeting cards from Mrs. Harmon to Mr. Mangelsdorf. Some of those were signed, love, Melinda. They were very personal, more so than what you would think of friends. What we found out was that there was a very close relationship between Mrs. Harmon and Mark. In fact, Mr. Bergstrand, the next-door neighbor, later testified that he had seen them in a neighborhood pool, standing nose-to-nose in the pool in a very intimate embrace.

Detective Pruitt has the makings of a motive, but nothing more in the way of hard evidence. against Melinda Harmon. And her family sort of descended around her, circled the wagons around her, right after this crime happened. Her dad became, within a fairly short period of time, really pretty uncooperative with the police. You're picking on my daughter,

and how dare you ask her, and very controlling. She was then taken away back to Ohio within about two days of the homicide happening, never to return to that house. Well, the bottom line is that we think involved and we thought from the very beginning that there was enough information to arrest both of them for David's murder. But we never thought for one minute there was enough information

to convict them, so we did not make an arrest. The case goes cold and stays that way for almost 20 years. We are in one of the rooms in the basement of the Investigations Bureau that we use to look at evidence. Steve James and Bill Wall are detectives with the Olathe Police Department. In 2001, they pick up one of the city's coldest cases, the murder of David Harmon, nearly 20 years earlier. When you read this thing, it reads like, hey, it was either Melinda or Mark. It had to been one of them or both of them, probably both.

Melinda is Melinda Harmon, David's widow. Mark is Mark Mangelsdorf, a local college student, and, police suspect, Melinda's one-time lover. You know, after you read this thing, you have to prove it, and then you go back and you start pulling out all this evidence. This item here is the pink nightgown that Melinda Harmon was wearing the night of the murder. Not what you would think. The nightgown is splattered with blood, but only at the bottom. Above the waist, the garment is perfectly clean.

Linda's story is that she woke up in the middle of night to someone beating her husband, She was pulled out of bed. Well, if you look at the crime scene, you would see that she should have had a lot more blood on this nightgown. Just reaffirmed everything that we were reading in the case file, and now the physical evidence is starting to support that. She probably hasn't spoken to anybody about this since she went back to Ohio. I would imagine that, the best we can tell, she put this behind her and never spoke of it

again. The next step was just going up and seeing if Melinda would talk to us. Melinda Harmon is now Melinda Rash, far away from Olathe, Kansas, and the murder of her first husband. You expected to see somebody that maybe was in mourning for 20 years and maybe never got remarried again, but obviously she was able to go on with her life and go on with her life very well. At 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, cold case detectives ring her doorbell. Obviously, we caught her off guard. She just got out of the shower. She's in a robe. And her hair's wrapped in a towel, so she wasn't ready for us.

I said, hey, we're detectives from a late Kansas. We'd like to talk to you about your late husband, David Harmon. And she said, sure, how can I help you? Melinda invites the detectives in. At the kitchen table, she recounts the events of February 28, 1982. Well, her story now is that she was awakened by these terrible thuds of someone striking her husband. She got up on her own and went to the bathroom. There was a masked shadowy figure beating her husband.

In 1982, Melinda told police two men broke into her house. Now there is only one. Well, right away, we realized, hey, what about the two black guys that broke in demanding the bank keys? What about one guy saying to the other, I think he hit him too hard, you may have killed him? There wasn't any of that. So Steve and I both remember looking at each other across the table going, wow, we're on to something here. The story you later said, two black man and keys. Well, two dark figures.

Two dark figures. Thank you. Why did you tell the cops that story? At the time, I didn't know what was the story. Inside a police interrogation room, Detective Bill Wall goes to work on Melinda Rash. So I'm trying to get her to say that, yeah, I lied back in 1982. You know it wasn't true, right? This is where this secret is.

This is where I need to go. Big thing. She's changed her story. She's lied, and she's admitted that she lied back in 1982. She's admitting that she lied, and that's huge. Wall then steers the conversation to Mark Mangelsdorf. I think that I am guilty of English. encouraging and perhaps flirting in a way that I shouldn't have done.

Had we met it different? Time. You could have been an item? Yeah. He never came out and blatantly said, I'm going to take care of him. No. He's in our way and I will fix it. No.

But the more time that went on, I sense some stronger feelings. We're convinced that she's into this up to her neck. So now all I got to do is just keep her rolling. her rolling. I got to keep her talking. And usually good things happen when people keep talking. I had a sense that something bad might happen. After 45 minutes of interrogation, Melinda starts pointing fingers, all of them at her now former friend, Mark Mangelsdorf. In my heart, I knew it was him. In my heart, I know it was him. I mean, basically what she's saying is, yeah, I know it's him.

But if I play word games like I know my heart was him, I haven't actually come out and said, I knew it was him. So that's a good statement for us, because I know that we're getting somewhere, and now I need to get her over that next hurdle. Deep down, I still think there's more. It's just too weird. I want to say that's where I want to go then. I want to go deep down with you. Here's my big hang-up.

Okay. Tell me your big... That you didn't have knowledge of this prior to. Prior knowledge, Wall is suggesting that Melinda and Mangelsdorf staged the break-in and planned the murder together. And he didn't talk to me. He hit me. Wouldn't you talk to you about that prior then? No, I don't know. Crazy and smart enough to figure all this out on his own that he's not going to tell you anything so you have no guilt. And then just assume, just assume that you're going forward with this story, how he knows.

you were going to make up the story that wasn't true. How did Mark Mangelsdorf know that you were going to come up with a story about two black guys breaking the house demanding bankies? That's way out there. Of course he knew that she was going to lie for him. There was some talking about how we were going to get away with this. Melinda never admits to a murder plot. But the cold case team believes she has done enough to incriminate herself.

The mistakes that she made was to admit the relationship. which is a big deal, was to admit that she lied. That was massive. And then to try to negotiate some sort of a deal. We need to know. You need to know what the options are. You know what I'm saying? Yes.

Innocent people don't negotiate deals. And that kind of stuff just kills you if you're a defendant. You can't watch that tape and not absolutely believe that she is up to her neck in that deal. Unlike Melinda, who opened the door to police, Mark Mangelsdorf refuses to talk. Both are indicted for murder. Melinda is tried first, and Mangelsdorf plays the role of Star Witness. I did give them a saliva sample with a search warrant the next day. I knew that I would be able to attend the KUMBA program.

I had been accepted. Let me be very clear, I was not in love with Melinda Harmon. I did not have a romantic or sexual or physical relationship with her. I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. In my own account, not in the pockets of some giant wireless company. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also seem to like keeping her money too. So if you're fed up with crazy high wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks that actually cost more in the long run, maybe it's time to switch to Mint Mobile.

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Available at participating marathon locations, terms and conditions apply, seem to Marathonrewards.com for details. Mr. Mangelsdorf, were you having an affair with Melinda? No, I absolutely was not. Were you romantically involved with her? No. In April of 2005, Mark Mangelsdorf takes the stand in a murder trial. Let me be very clear, I was not in love with Melinda Harmon.

I did not have a romantic or sexual or physical relationship with her. None of that, Melinda Harmon was my friend. Melinda Rash is on trial for the murder of her husband, David Harmon, in 1982. Mark Mangelsdorf is her alleged accomplice. Well, we thought it was a love triangle. Paul Morrison is the prosecutor for Johnson County, Kansas. Two people decided that they were going to murder this guy, to get him out of the way so that they could be together.

In 1982, Mangelsdorf said he and Melinda did not stop by his apartment the day of the murder. In 2005, he backs away from that statement. On the witness stand, that proves to be a problem. What do you call somebody that doesn't tell the truth? What's the word for that? I reviewed... What's the word for that, Mr. Mangelsdorf? I reviewed the events.

What's the word for somebody who doesn't tell the truth? Forgetful? What else? What's another word? It starts with an L. And he never would say. I said, I just said it starts with an L. And he wouldn't say, and then I think he ended up saying forgetful or something like that.

I don't know. Well, that's convenient, isn't it? It comes across a lot better if the witness just says, you know what, I was freaked down, I didn't tell the truth or whatever, but he wouldn't give anything up. Melinda Harmon does not testify at her trial. The jury, however, gets to watch a video of her interrogation. I had a sense that something bad might happen. The jury got to see her firsthand how she reacted.

how she reacted. And anybody with life experiences that watches this tape will see that this woman is up to this to her neck. She is guilty. She conspired with this Mark Mangelsdorf to kill her husband. For us, as a jury, it was the issue of how the stories had changed. Randy Spector serves as the jury foreman in Melinda Rash's trial. If your husband had been brutally killed,

why would you tell a different story than what really happened to the detectives? You'd want to find out who did it, why it happened, and bring that person to justice. So as a group, it was very hard for us to try to figure out a reason why that would be. On count one, we the jury find the defendant guilty of murder. On count two, guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. For prosecutor Morrison, Melinda Harmon's guilty verdict is only half the job. The trial of Mark Mengelsdorf is still to come.

The last thing we wanted to see happen was for her to get a life term of confinement and nothing to happen to him. And that was a very real possibility. So I actually contacted the district attorney to see, was there a way that they could get Melinda to testify in his trial? Because we thought that was going to be a key component to that. I had three jurors that summer contact me independently of each other and say, what are you going to do about Mangelsdorf?

Are you going to be able to get her to help you? I know that in the eyes of the law, they're both equally guilty of the crime. But the fact that Mark was actually the one that committed the murder, I honestly was more worried about him getting a conviction. Morrison meets with Melinda's attorneys, and they strike a deal. Melinda's conviction will be set aside. She can plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder if she agrees to testify about Mangelsdorf.

At this time, you're out of the defendant, Mr. Mangelsdorf, wishes to withdraw his plea of not guilty and his election for trial, and we will be entering a plea to a substitute information. Faced with the possibility of Melinda's testimony, testimony, Mark Mangelsdorf also pleads guilty to second-degree murder. Yes, Your Honor, I understand. Back in Olathe, Kansas, Paul Morrison takes some heat for agreeing to a plea deal that set aside a conviction by jury. John Harmon, father of the murder victim, is not among his critics.

I think what Paul Morrison did was the only way that he could have achieved closure. Paul said he wanted to do the right thing, so he went ahead and did it. So to his credit, he didn't get it. It's something. At sentencing, for the first time, John Harmon has a chance to address his son's killer directly. I waited for 24 years to talk to you in just this setting. You were in many hands. You're not only a murderer, you're also a thief.

You took our one and only child in a child. A vicious, a vicious attack and act of violence. We suffer the loss of our only child. We lost forever, forever, the chance of any grandchildren. But I'm filled with sadness for you, Mark. You've destroyed yourself. What a waste. What a complete waste of a human life.

When John Harmon is finished, his son's killer takes the stand. Mr. Harmon, I can't begin to imagine the grief and the sorrow that you and your family, your wife, experienced. What I can say is I'm truly, truly sorry for David's death and for the loss of the time that you've experienced and not being able to spend time with him. What I do know is that I have pled guilty to this. I've acknowledged my involvement, and I hope that in some of the same, some small way, that that helps, I have tried to do the right things throughout my life and especially for the last 24 years. And that's genuine. It's not an act. Under 1982 laws, the judge sentences Mark Mangelsdorf to the maximum allowed by the law.

I'm going to impose the following sentence to be commanded in the state of Kansas for a period and not less than 10 or more than 20 years. Next, it's Melinda's turn to speak. to the Harmon family. I'm really sorry. Words do not adequately express the things I'm killing my heart. Just words are not enough. And I would love to have better words. I just don't. I'm very, very remorseful. I would in no way ever expect any amount of time to make up for this. Melinda, too, is sentenced to 10 to 20 years in a Kansas prison. As part of her deal, she fills detectives in on the details of a a love triangle that turned into a murder.

I think we're ready, yes. She and Mark Mangelsdorf went for a walk that afternoon. She said during that walk that Mark told her it's imminent. I bought a crowbar and it's imminent. That night it happened. After Mangelsdorf killed her husband, according to Melinda, he turned on her in an effort to make the murder look like a break-in. He then does hit her in the side of the face and says,

Sorry to do this to you, sweetie. I think that was a quote. In an ironic twist, Melinda and Mark never saw each other again after the murder. She said, you know, when I'm standing there watching Mark Mangelsdorf beat my husband to death, I knew at that time that I could never be with this man. I knew at that time that this was a big mistake.

So they never hooked up afterwards. This is kind of a crime scene diagram. This street that we're facing right here is, Main Street. Dodson's pharmacy is located down in the middle of the next block. It's an early morning on April 5, 1977, when Arkansas State Police Investigator J.R. Howard is called to downtown Beebe, where 71-year-old officer Abe Pipkin has been found beaten to death. There was blood on the sidewalks, just completely encompassing this area where he had wandered around after he'd been beaten. The blood trail leads investigators to a local pharmacy that had been burglarized earlier that same morning.

This is the glass door that was broken out, and the glass was knocked back in probably 25 to 30 feet. Our theory was, based on the way the scene looked to us, Abe had interrupted a burglary in progress. It's obvious that the burglary occurred before he got there because there was items taken from the drugstore. We felt like he encountered the suspect outside the store and that he was beaten brutally. It just didn't happen in a small town, you know, something like that just didn't happen. Joe Pipkin is Abe's son. We left our doors open. We left our keys in our cars. This just didn't happen.

There was lots of nights that I couldn't sleep for thinking about it. And a good friend of mine was a police officer in BB at the time. And I rode around with him. We tried to find something that we could put something together for us, any kind of lead whatsoever. I would have liked to have been the one to find out who done it. He would have liked to be the one that solved the case, but it didn't happen. Whoever killed Abe Pipkin left no witnesses and little in the way of physical. evidence. Obviously, it was a drugstore burglary, so we were assuming that it was someone who's

in drugs that committed the burglary. We began the investigation by looking at local people we knew to be on the drug scene. These suspects were polygraphed. A lot of them, we were able to eliminate them because we could positively prove where they were at the time. The Pipkin murder goes cold and remains that way, until one of this country's most famous serial killers steps into the case seven years later. Henry Lee Lucas has claimed to have murdered over 150 women. Henry Lee Lucas came to law enforcement attention when he started confessing to many, many homicides. That's how he got on our radar, so to speak, was from the notoriety he was gaining from his interviews he was given in Texas. Yeah, I'm going to talk about it.

It's the only way I'm going to get peace of mind. If they killed me, they kill me. I mean, I can't help that. I've got to do what I've got to do. We contacted Texas authorities and told them about the A. Pitkin case and asked them if they would run it by Henry Lee Lucas, which they did. Lucas claims he killed an old man in Beebe and grants Howard an interview to talk specifics. He gave some examples of using an iron pipe to beat the victim that he was talking about.

And it was near a railroad track. And there were a lot of similarities with the crime scene with what he was saying. But there were some discrepancies. We just kind of rode off his discrepancies as the fact that he was getting things confused with other crimes he had committed. Even though he seemed credible at the time, there was still not a guy that he particularly wanted to shake hands with. Henry Lee Lucas is charged with Abe Pipkin's murder. But those charges are later dropped when the serial killer turns out to be a serial liar. The document that we got that convinced us Henry was not the man that killed Abe

was a letter from the deputy director of the Department of Public Safety in Texas. Abe was killed April 5, 1977, which is in the middle of this time when they documented that Lucas was in Maryland. With Henry Lee Lucas out of the picture, the Pipkin homicide once again returns to the cold files. I know in April years. You can see Abe walking up and down the street. He'd have his gun on. He has his overalls on with his badge. Harold Armstrong is Chief of Police in Beebe, and still mourning the loss of a good friend

when he takes a phone call in January of 1993. He described a murder about how Abe was killed. about his gun being stolen, that he wore overalls. He said he had got that information from a lady. Armstrong is skeptical at first, but grows more convinced the longer he keeps his informant on the line. The stuff that he was telling me was not published in the paper about how Abe was beat. He just kept on telling me that this girl knew all about it. The man did, more or less, that we pick her up and talk to her,

because she could tell us some information about Abe. murder. We almost immediately took steps to, you know, process that lead and see if we could substantiate it. The informant offers up the name of a woman, Mitzie Pardoo. When they asked me to come down to the sheriff's office, I pretty much knew what it was for. Mitzie asked me, why do you want to talk to me? And all I said was, there were words to this effect was, Mitzi, I want to talk to you about something that happened a long time ago. I knew from your reaction that... The floor fell out.

Yeah, it did. It did. It was a shock to her. She was just, you could just see the look on her face. And I remember she said, and this is almost verbatim, I always knew this day was coming. I just didn't know when. And I knew then I was at the right place, at the right time. Mitzi takes Howard back to a time when she was dating a drugstore thief named Gary Evans

and a morning forever etched into her memory. Gary came in the door. I was the only one at home, which was unusual. It was early in the morning. Between 8 and 9, he said that he had something to tell me. And so he went in the kitchen and he told me that he had murdered someone. He tells her he may have beaten someone today. and that he got some pharmaceuticals out of the drugstore. Well, that's exactly what happened. He said that the police officer had recognized him and that he had to kill him.

And then he left, and I still didn't believe him. And it wasn't until later on that I heard it on the radio that I said, it must be true that he really did kill that man. A background check reveals that Gary Evans is living in Little Rock. and has no recent run-ins with the law. Howard asks Mitzi if she'll wear a wire and try to obtain a confession from her one-time boyfriend. And you asked me something to affect,

well, can you guarantee me he'll never get out of jail? Right, right. And I said, I couldn't guarantee you he'd ever go to jail. So that's when you said you're afraid to do it, afraid he would kill you. I still had a lot of fear that if he had actually murdered somebody, then he could do the same to me.

There's his best lead that we'd had in years, and I felt sure that we were only going to get one good shot at making the case. And we needed to wait until we could make it our best shot. And I wasn't convinced that if we compelled her to come forward, that she would cooperate as well as she would if she came to that decision on her own. J.R. Howard doesn't press Mitzie further, and we'll have to wait another nine years before his patients will pay off. And Mitzie puts on a wire.

I thought he pulled again on. I mean, I hit him with a crowball. You see what? Yeah. And I guess I kill him. It's almost that time again. Spring and summer trips are popping up on the calendar. Maybe you're heading to a beach town, going international for a big wedding, or tagging along on a work trip that finally takes you somewhere new.

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and just gets brutally beaten, left for dead. That all kind of came together to make it a case. It just doesn't go away. Arkansas State Police Captain J.R. Howard has the unsolved murder of Officer Abe Pipkin on his mind. I just thought that it would be a good time to look into it again. And plus several years had passed. And I was just curious to see if Mitzie's status and life, so to speak, had changed.

Mitzi is Mitzi Pardue, a reluctant informant to whom Gary Evans, a former boyfriend, had once allegedly confessed. Howard hopes enough time has passed to now encourage her cooperation. Then I found you in Georgia and called you. I didn't know if you'd even remember at that point in time. But, I mean, you obviously did. And you said you were willing, ready to help. And that your husband supported you. Yeah, he did.

And so I thought, hey, this is. this is going to work. Right. Her life had changed. She was married, had a good husband, kids, and she was ready to help us out. That we were wanting to try to wire her up, wire vehicle up, have her make direct contact with Evans,

and that's where you came in the picture. J.R. Howard meets with Arkansas State Police Investigator Hoyt Harness to set the stage for the sting operation. They first locate Gary Evans, who was a manager at a local Sears. We had concocted a ruse whereby Mitzie would go to the Sears store at the mall. From there, to engage him in some casual conversation, hopefully getting to the part about the murder.

Harness must now get Mitzie ready to wear a wire. This was a one-shot chance. I mean, if we mess this up, if we actually attempted a contact with Gary and it failed or he discovered that she was a police informant or that the police were involved, that we would never get another chance like that. I mean, what were you thinking?

I mean, did you think that he would talk with you? Yeah, I thought he would. They kept going over and over and over again what to say to get him to go to the confession. They kept saying, you know, if he goes down this path, This is how you need to bait them back in. I didn't want you to know anything more really about it than you knew back then. Even with the most routine police investigation that involves informants,

there's always concern that they'll say the wrong thing at the wrong time, that they'll get stage fright, in essence. Time is 10.05 a.m. 326, 2002. We're about to make a meeting with Gary Evans. This is the Sears store, which is where Gary Evans was employed at the time whenever you came down. There wasn't any room for me to be really nervous because it so needed to be done. And it was, like I said, it done well because of what you guys had laid the groundwork for. Wired and ready, Mitsy walks into the Sears and spots her former boyfriend.

And I yelled, hey, you know, I need to talk to you about rototilla. I need to talk to somebody about rototillers. And he turned around and he recognized me instantly. Missy? How are you doing? Good. How are you? A long time, no saying.

That's weird. It is weird. You work here? Yeah. When he recognized me and said, you know, how are you doing it all? Then it was like, let's go get a Coke. Let's go get, you know, something to drink. The para hop in Mitzi's car rigged with a hidden camera and goes for a drive.

Came over here to Sonic, in part. where that Chevrolet van is, and just started talking to him about, you know, the past and what his life was like right now. I just got remarried just like two years ago. Wow, that's not very long. No, it hadn't been long. Mitzi and Gary also talk about the old times, the good, the bad, and soon the very bad. I think about the things that I did.

And the terrible person I was, you know, how much I've changed. I've really changed a whole lot. You probably wouldn't even know. Really? Yeah, I'm a lot different. You know, I just cringe when I think about the past, things that I did, and, you know, robbing drug story. It just makes me cringe, you know. I was bringing up the past for him.

I'm part of his past, and he had told me about the murder the morning after. And I think that he felt real, just that, you know, he had met an old friend and that he was going back in time to relive that. I remember when he came over that morning and told me that he had to rob that drugstore and had you hit that guy to get away. Oh, my God. You can't be telling me too. Gary Evans is about to go to death. What happened? Do you really want to know?

Gary Evans is about to cross a line when he stops and takes a step back. So I can go to jail for it. Yeah, there's no doubt. You never go to the police in hell on me, would you? Oh, yeah, right. Here's the police. One guy that had pulled right beside us, and here's the guys right across the street,

and I'm a good liar when I need to be, And I said, no, I'm not, I'm not going to go to the police. With that, Gary takes Mitzie back to 1977, and the morning a BB police officer was killed. I just can't believe I do it either. But he pulled a gun on me and I hit him with a crowball. He sees him. And I guess I killed him. When he started going down that path, it was like keep him there.

You know, keep asking him real subtle questions. I thought you said that he recognized you. He saw my face. It was more of, I had to kill him to get away. And what the police told me that to say, if he goes on that direction, was, yes, Gary, I understand that you had to kill him, that you had to get away. I'm sorry, Gary. He didn't mean to kill the guy. Yeah, I felt like I was an actor. that I was kind of separated out from my body,

and I was watching myself go through these steps that the police had said to go through. I was on his side. I was his old friend. Little does Gary Evans know, a few more friends are on the listening end of his admission to murder. When I finally found out that not only was it successful,

but it was completely thoroughly successful, the relief was immeasurable for me. Mitzi says goodbye to her old boyfriend. Then about three months later, Gary Evans pays the price for his conversation in the car and is arrested for Abe Pipkin's murder. This is the man accused in the case. 46-year-old Gary Lee Evans of Jonesboro is facing capital murder charges after new leads surfaced in the April 1977 beating death of Officer Abe Pipkin.

It's difficult on him, but he's telling the truth of what what happened, he murdered a man in cold blood. On February 10, 2003, prosecuting attorney Chris Raff begins laying out his case against Gary Evans, one that boils down to a 48-minute videotape. We didn't have DNA.

We had no fingerprints. We had no witnesses, no descriptions, not even a description of a vehicle, no murder weapon. They pulled a gun on me and I hit him with a crowbar. Without that tape and without Mitzie, We would not have had one thing. That was the case against Gary Evans.

The trial was very difficult because at that point, he knew that it was me that had done an undercover operation on him. My thoughts were, you know, he better be convicted. This better be enough to convict him. So I was pretty nervous. On February 14, Mitzie discovers she can rest easy. as a jury convicts Gary Evans of first-degree murder. He is sentenced to 30 years. We're standing here where a guy lost his life 29 years ago.

On a summer afternoon, J.R. Howard revisits Beebe, and the place Officer Abe Pipkin lost his life. On April 5th, 1977, when we were working this crime scene, little did we know that 25 years later, we'd be back solving the case. It's a great feeling to be a part of something that has been so long coming around. You know, for 25 years, I run around and wondering who killed him, and I thought we'd never solved a case. For Abe Pipkin's son, the conviction puts to rest years of wishing and wondering.

And I prayed that we would find him, and justice would be served, and it was. God answers prayers. It may take a while. Thousands of free movies and TV shows. You swear? If I'm mine, I'm dying. This is the mindset. Free.

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