Every Town - Confessed To Killing Her Daughter. Walked Free. Then She Stabbed Her Son

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

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Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep. with Benjamin Boster. Every town has a dark side. On April 16th in 1987,

a four-year-old girl walked out into her front yard to play. Pink jelly shoes on, she had light brown hair, and silver caps on her front teeth. She was gone within the hour, and in the 39 years that have followed since, through confessions and recantations, sightings and dead ends, even charges filed and then charges dropped,

Not one person has ever been convicted of anything in connection with her disappearance. Nobody seems to be able to find Marlina Childress, but most definitely someone out there knows what happened to her, and it might be the people she was closest with. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to every town where today. We have a case that turns a lot darker with every step you take. It's unique and tragic and deserves to find an end. So, let's head on over to Yon. Union City, Tennessee together and figure out what exactly happened.

This is the disappearance of Marlina Childress. So let's set the stage first before the day it all went down. Marlina's parents, Kevin Childress and Pamela Bailey had divorced in December of 1985, and Marlina was just two years old when it happened. And Kevin was 24, working as a welder for a tool company and Martin. And Pam was young, just 20 years old back then, and within weeks of the divorce, she had already gotten remarried to a guy named Johnny Bailey. This new blended family setup wasn't exactly simple.

And Pam, Johnny, Johnny's seven-year-old son from a previous relationship, and little Marlina had all been living with Pam's parents over in Mayfield, Kentucky, before the whole group relocated a Union City in the summer of 86. And that was just eight months before Marlina disappeared. And then in February of 87, just two months before everything changed, well, Pam gave birth to another child, a boy named Damon. And so by April of that year, the house had a newborn, seven-year-old stepson, a four-year-old girl, and a 22-year-old mother who, by any measure, had a lot going on. And Kevin and Pam had kept things civil after the split for the most part, so Dad had the chance to see his daughter often if he wanted, and he did. By the accounts of people who knew both of them, he was a good dad.

And there was nothing in the picture of this family in the months leading up to Marlina's vanishing that would have ever told you anything bad was coming. It was just a blended family in America making their way. But on an ordinary Thursday afternoon in small town, Tennessee, while all that was about to change. On the morning of April 16th, 1987, Marlene and her stepbrother walked a couple blocks from their home on Caldwell Street to a small neighborhood grocery store run by a couple named Alan and Caroline Pierce. Now, the Piercees knew the kids. They saw Marlina that day and they saw something else. Marlene outside the store talking to a man they didn't recognize. And nobody around knew who

he was. He was ultimately described as a transient, a day laborer who had recently picked up work in town but hadn't come back from his lunch break that same afternoon. It was from Clinton all the way across the state in eastern Tennessee. Investigators tracked him down a few days later in Chicago, questioned him, and cleared him. It was never definitively established whether he was even the same man the Pierce's had seen, but he couldn't be placed at the scene, and so that trail went cold before it even really started. And by around 3 o'clock that afternoon, Marlina was back at home, out in the front yard of the house playing by herself.

And Pam was inside with the baby, and that's when she heard it. I was in the kitchen, and I heard a car. And I saw the car from the kitchen window. And I thought they might hear her something because somebody slammed on the brakes. I thought. And I come in here, and I looked at the window, and I could see the back end of it. And I opened up the door, and I couldn't see Marlena. And Pam then searched the yard and called out.

out, locked up and down the street and still nothing. So at 4.15 p.m., she called the police. And from there, she told them everything she knew, what she'd heard and seen from the window. An older, model two-door red car with faded paint moving fast. She said she hadn't gotten a clear look at the driver, Marlina's stepbrother told police he'd seen it too, and so had the owner of the grocery store two blocks away. And the description's all matched and some neighbors believe they'd caught a glimpse of the license plate. McCracken County, Kentucky, 70 miles to the north. It sounds weird to know the county, but from 1927 up until 1988,

Kentucky plates did in fact have the county they were registered to stamped right in them. So if anyone looked, they could see it. Finding a good doctor feels like finding a diamond in the rough. I say that from personal experience because a while, back, I had this nagging shoulder issue and I genuinely didn't know where to start. Like, do I just Google it and hope for the best? Well, that's where Zoc Doc came in and honestly, it made finding a good doctor super easy. Zoc Doc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high-quality in-network doctors

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Zocdoc.com slash every town to find and instantly book a doctor you love today at Zocdoc.com slash every town. Zocdoch.com slash every town. Thanks Zock doc doc for sponsoring this message. The search is fanned out from there and be on the lookout alerts for the car from Kentucky. were sent out across police radio waves and news segments. And Pam was front and center on a lot of those TV interviews, and she was tearful and visibly distressed, pleading directly into the camera for whoever had her daughter to please just bring Marlina home. And over the next couple weeks,

Pam just deteriorated to the point where a little over a month after her daughter had vanished, and she checked herself into the hospital complaining of stress and exhaustion. Her brain, it just couldn't function. And she stayed there for about a week, and when she got out, well, police had some more questions, so they brought her into talk. And this time, well, Pam Bailey started saying things that she had never mentioned ever before. At first, she said she had sold her daughter off to pay off a drug debt. And then she changed it up, saying that a man who had abused her as a child had come back and taken Marlina. and then she changed again,

and this time she told investigators she actually may have accidentally killed Marlina while trying to discipline her. She mentioned losing her temper, and then slapping the girl, which sent Marlina head first into the corner of a table, which then knocked her unconscious. Now believing her daughter was dead,

while Pam pan panicked and called up an old acquaintance, a sketchy guy named P.L. Summers, who advised her that if she wanted to get rid of a body, and she should dump it in the north fork of the Obion River, out near Campground Road. Police spent five days searching that stretcher river, and in the end, they found nothing at all. As for PL Summers, well, he denied every word of what Pam had said. Now, he claimed he never got a call from her, and in fact hadn't seen her or Marlina in the last two years. He also had an alibi for the afternoon of April 16th, and investigators,

couldn't crack it, so he was cleared. He was so determined to protect his name in that community, in fact, that he personally wrote a letter proclaiming his innocence and hand-delivered it to local radio stations and newspapers for publication. Despite finding no body, with all those wild stories that didn't quite add up, police figured the truth was in there somewhere, and so really they had no choice but to charge Pam with second-degree murder.

And two weeks later, from a state mental institution where she was being held for a time and evaluated, well, Pam recanted everything, said her statements had been made while she was under distress and medicated on top of it. And Pam's explanation for why she said what she said was that she had been manipulated. She said Stan Cavness, a former juvenile officer turned private investigator, who had actually been hired by her own family to help find Marlina, had psychologically worked her over during their sessions together. He was telling me there was physical evidence that Marlena was there, and that somebody saw me do it.

And so I just went along with everything he said. And he said, you can't make it out to be a cold-blooded murder to say it was an accident. But you hit her. And Cabness, just like Summers, wasn't having any of it, so he went public. He sat down with journalists and played them a... five-minute audio recording of Pam, describing in her own words, calmly, clearly, without anybody pushing her, exactly how she had lost her temper, struck her daughter, and disposed of the body. So nobody was coaching her on that tape, and all was feeding her lines, it was just Pam talking.

But without a body, it was only so far the law could go. The second-degree murder charge, aimed down to voluntary manslaughter, and then that too was dropped for lack of evidence. So Pam Bailey walked out of their free woman. She had offered at least four different explanations for what had happened to her daughter, a stranger in a red car, a drug debt, a man from her past who had abused her, and an accident she caused herself. A story she then said was a lie forced out of her under pressure. Not one of those explanations held together, but somehow it got Pam free. And meanwhile, Marlina, she was still gone.

Six days after Marlina vanished, something happened in Memphis that opened a thread investigators would pull on for weeks because, well, it was very interesting. Two women walked into a hair salon called Jeans Hair Styles. One looked to be in her 20s and the other in her 60s, probably a mother and daughter. And with them was a little boy and little girl, and the stylist, Gail Reach, sat the little girl down and started cutting her hair. As soon as a little girl sat in my chair, she started crying for her mommy. At the time she was looking straight up at me, hollering for her mom, which it upset me because the two ladies did not want to console the child in any way. She was very upset.

Now, Gail was glancing at the younger woman expecting her to say or do something to comfort her child, but she didn't move. The older woman eventually told the girl that if she behaved, they'd take her to the movies. Both Gail and her colleague Janice Wells believed they heard the younger woman call the child Marlina at one point. The group left in a car with Maryland license plates. They mentioned they were in the middle of a move to Memphis. Now, later that same morning, Gail was at the store. store when she saw a newspaper. The newspaper in front of me, and I got it, stand it, and Marleneau's picture was there,

and I said, you know, that looks exactly like the child, you know, the hair that I just cut. He was certain. This was the girl sitting in her styling chair just a few hours ago. She called up Janice to check if she was going crazy, but Janice was certain, too. The girl from the salon and the girl in that photograph. were the same kid. Now, Gail and Janice didn't just sit on what they'd seen. They had a theory about who the younger woman was,

a local waitress they both recognized from around town. And the timing was suspicious, too. Well, she had left Union City the morning after Marlina disappeared and hadn't shown back up for several days. That kind of thing tends to get noticed in a small town. But when investigators dug into it, the whole thing, it fell apart. The lady was a question about this, and in fact put on a polygraph machine by the

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and I asked, in fact, she was in the beauty parlor or if she had Marlina Childress in the beauty parlor, and she said no, and she passed a light effect. The Maryland car wasn't a dead end either. Police actually tracked it down and pulled it over in Mississippi. And there was a young woman inside and an older woman, a boy and a girl, and that's when they got the girl's name. Marlene, not Marlina. Close enough to stop your heart for a second, but not the same kid. The family was exactly who they said they were, people in the middle of a move to Memphis,

completely unconnected to Union City or anything that had happened there. So that whole thing turned out to be a dead end in every direction. but then the phone call started. Somebody began calling Jean's hairstyles repeatedly. It was a woman's voice telling Gail and Janice she knew where they lived. She named their family members. The calls were never trace. Nobody was ever harmed, but those calls came from somewhere.

And you don't threaten two random hairdressers in Memphis unless you have a reason to. In the summer of 1987, reports came in that Marlina had been seen in Anniston, Alabama, and not passing through, but living with a group of people there. A nomadic family, led by a man named Oliver Childress, and no relation to Marlina whatsoever, just the same last name on a man who moved constantly between states, living off government assistance, and who had a documented history of taking in children who didn't belong to him.

A social workers visited the group after receiving reports that some of the children were being abused, and that's when they saw a girl in the group they didn't recognize, a girl the family called Crystal, who was largely kept from socializing with the other children. Both social workers and several neighbors looked at photographs of Marlina Childress and said that Crystal was her. And a pretty crazy detail was that Crystal's bottom two-front teeth had silver, caps, just like Marlinas.

By the time investigators obtained search warrants, two days later, the entire group had vanished, just up and relocated, something they had gotten pretty good at. Two weeks later, they were located in Florida, but Crystal, she wasn't with them. Oliver Childress

was eventually arrested in Panama City, Florida, in January of 89 on abuse charges involving his wife and two of his ten children. When investigators pressed him about Crystal, while he said he had acquired her in Lubbock, Texas, in 1987. The same year, Marlina disappeared. He produced a handwritten note he claimed was from Crystal's mother that read simply,

I'm giving her to Oliver Childress. He refused to ever say where Crystal was, and that's where that branch of this story hits a dead end. And in September of 89, more than two years after Marlina vanished, a one of the one of the A woman named Amy Spoon was out shopping at a department store in Lenore City, Tennessee, which is about as far across the state from Union City as you can get. Her young son had drifted off the way kids do in stores and ended up playing with a little girl he had found somewhere in the aisles.

Amy watched as a woman, came over and put a sharp stop to it. She grabbed the girl by the hand and pulled her away without much warmth. What stuck with Amy was the girl's reaction. didn't want to go. She dragged her feet and she looked back. Amy thought about it and moved on with her day. But ten days later, she came across a flyer with Marlina's face on it, and that was that. She called it in immediately. Both she and her son were convinced. The girl in that store and the girl on the flyer were the same child. Investigators took it seriously and looked into it, but like everything else in this case, they couldn't confirm it. A handful of additional

sightings came in through the summer of 1990. A girl spotted in Nevada that multiple people said look just like Marlina. That one was looked into too. Same result, though. Nothing that could be pinned down, nothing that held. Pam eventually moved away from Tennessee and settled in Kentucky with her remaining children. And for years, the Marlina case sat in the files of the Union City Police Department, technically open but not moving. No new evidence ever showed up, and so it faded away into the background as life went on. And then, in late April of 2002, 15 years after her daughter vanished, Pam Bailey did something that changed everything.

And this is wild, so get ready. She told her 12-year-old son, Casey, that she had a surprise for him. She got him in the car and then blindfolded him with a blue handkerchief. He was excited, thinking she was taking him somewhere of fun. They then drove three miles out to Arnett Cemetery in Graves County, Kentucky, where she had him sit down beside a grave marker and scribe with one word, son. After that, well, she stabbed him in the neck and shoulder. Casey got up and ran away to the nearest house he could find, and luckily he survived, but, man, what does that sort of thing do to a kid's psyche? and he was treated for his wounds and released to his father.

And as for why she did it, when investigators believe Pam may have blamed the boy for her pending divorce from his father. They could never get a straight answer from her, as you can imagine, though, because she denied ever having done the stabbing at all, said she was innocent. In another version of her events, well, she claimed to have blacked out completely. In December of 2002, she pleaded no comment. contest to attempted murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Then, the Marlina Childress case was formally reopened. The lead investigator on Marlena's original disappearance, police lieutenant Andy Gibson, said publicly that he thought about her every single day. And the attack on Casey gave his investigation a new lens to look through now, the shifting confessions, the stories that kept changing, and the calm measured voice on that audio tape describing how, she had disposed of her own daughter's body. All of it looked different now. Not just suspicious, but coherent now that they knew for sure what this woman was capable of. The police have said

publicly that they believed Pan Bailey was likely responsible for what had happened to Marlena, but they didn't charge her because they couldn't. The murder charge dismissed in 87 for lack of a body couldn't simply be reinstated. And without physical evidence, aka Marlina's body, well, there was nothing they could do. So Pam served her sentence and then she was released. She's never been charged with anything relating to her daughter. As far as the courts are legally concerned, she remains the mother of a missing child, not the cause of one.

Right now, Marlina Childress is listed on the National Missing and Unidentified Person's System as case MP 5342. Her DNA profile has been submitted to national databases, the case remains open, and the official classification remains non-family abduction, and she would be 43 years old today. There are two versions of what happened on Caldwell Street on April 16th of 87, and they cannot both be true. In the first version, a stranger, an old red car pulled up to that intersection. A four-year-old girl in pink jelly shoes got in. or was taken in and driven away. In this version, the sightings matter.

That crying girl in the Memphis salon asking for her mommy, the reluctant child in the Lenore City Department store who didn't want to go. And Crystal, with her silver-capped teeth, kept away from the other children in a house that vanished before anyone could get a warrant. In this version, Marlina grew up somewhere else under another name, and may or may not know who she really is. In the second version, Marlina never left Union City, and she did not survive that afternoon.

Her mother struck her in anger, or in something darker than anger. When it was over, Pam Bailey did exactly what she would later describe on tape, calmly and without apparent distress. And then she spent the next 15 years telling different versions of a lie to anyone who asked. The threatening calls to Jean's hairstyles were never explained, though in hindsight of what Pam did to her son, you could see that maybe, if anyone, well, those probably came from her.

In this version, the sightings are nothing more than people thinking they saw the same girl from the papers or the missing persons flyers in real life. A lot of young children look similar, especially when you don't know them personally. And so what we are left with is a case with The person most likely to know the truth has told so many different stories that the truth itself has become almost unreachable. And Pam confessed on tape and then said the tape was a lie.

She named a man and then took it back. There was an accident, a table, and a river. None of it held, but all of it came from her mouth. And in April of 2002, while she blindfolded her 12-year-old son, drove him to a cemetery in the dark and sat him beside a stone that said, son and stabbed him in the neck. Now, that fact certainly doesn't close the case, but it doesn't exactly let you forget it either. Now, Pam's had nearly four decades to tell the truth.

Had every opportunity, but still, has chosen every single time, to tell a different story instead. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. If you did, well, then you're in luck because we have a ton of other true crime stories that you have to hear to believe. feel free to binge away. I appreciate you very much, so thanks for tuning in. And remember to come back next week for another episode of Every Town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories

because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.