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On the night of December second, nineteen seventy six, three girls, thirteen year old Teresa Williams, fourteen year old Crystal Danita Parton, and thirteen year old Cynthia Maybray, we're hanging out together at the Fairview of State's apartment.

In Russellville, Arkansas.

At some point that day all three girls disappeared.

No one was quite sure what happened that day.

All three girls lived in the same neighborhood and all of them disappeared at around the same time.

Cynthia was last seen at her home in Fairview Estates on December second, at approximately five thirty pm.

Teresa and Crystal were also reported missing that day by their families.

I have read about this story over the years, but it turns out there's a lot of this story that never made it into any media reports.

Most media reports that I've read indicate that three girls were hanging around when a strange man approached them and asked them if they wanted to get into his car and drink some alcohol, and they reluctantly accepted.

The things that.

I've read online make it seem like this could have been a case of stranger abduction.

But as we're going to see, there is much more to this story that we uncovered.

It turns out that the girls had made a plan to run away.

Cynthia's mother, Doris Parton, told police she was aware that the girls had a plan.

She believed that her daughter may have run away from home and that she and her two friends were believed to be headed for Fort Hood, Texas.

The last time her mother saw Cynthia, she was wearing blue jeans, a white top, and a blue coat with a fur collar.

Part of the story was true, those three girls did get into a car with a man, a man they knew and trusted.

Then no one ever saw any trace of the girls again until ten years later Thanksgiving Day of nineteen eighty six, when a couple, Boy Duncan and his wife Bernice, were deer hunting south of Rock Cemetery when they found a human skull laying near a tree.

This was just the beginning of an investigation into an Ozark serial killer.

I'm Catherine Townsend.

Over the past seven years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there's no such thing as a small town where murder never happens.

I've received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities.

If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five.

That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen gonepod.

This is Helen Gone Murder Line.

Before we get into the forensics, we have to go back to nineteen seventy six and try to understand how and why a serial killer kept slipping through the police's fingers and escaping justice.

One person whose name came up early in the investigation was James B.

Grinder, sometimes known as JB.

Teresa Williams's cousin had told police back in nineteen seventy six that he saw James with Theresa that day, but when police talked to James, he told them yes, he had seen the three girls.

He claimed that he dropped them off at the interstate exit for Pottsville.

James told police that the girls had told him they were running away to Oklahoma, and James said he had an alibi he had been at his girlfriend, Donna's house.

Since the victim's remains.

Had not been found and James Grinder had an alibi, police assumed the girls were runaways.

The investigative notes indicate that at the time police interviewed James, he refused to take a polygraph test, so in their investigative notes, they said they believed he was not being truthful about what had actually happened to the girls.

But at the end of the day, the original investigators did not believe that he was capable of killing them, they let him go.

That was in nineteen seventy six, but by nineteen eighty six, James was a suspect in another murder, this time in Missouri.

On the early morning of January eighth, nineteen eighty four, twenty five year old Julianne Helton's parents were worried.

Julianne had gone out to a party in New Cambria the night before on January seventh, but then she never came home, so they filed a missing persons report, and the Missouri State Highway Patrol ran across her abandoned car at the Marsoline junction in Macon County, Missouri.

There were signs that her car had been sabotaged.

Julianne's purse was also missing, so now police immediately suspected foul play in Julianne's death.

After searching for her for several days, on January eleventh, nineteen eighty four, two volunteer searchers and railroad workers found Julianne's body in a field near the Santa Fe railroad tracks, about eight miles away from where her car had been found.

Julianne was fully clothed, but police later determined she had been raped, beaten, and stabbed.

Her hands had been tied together with bailing twine, they were bound together in front of her, and there were defensive wounds on her right hand.

Now, according to.

Media reports, police did find fingerprints on Julianne's car.

Some of the reports stated they were a match to James Grinder.

I'm not sure what happened to those fingerprints, if they were lost, if they were ever tested, or even if it's true that they were a match to James Grinder.

But at the end of the day, with insufficient evidence, police apparently decided they couldn't make a case against him, so James Grinder was released.

Still, after Julie's murder, there was a renewed interest in James Grinder, and investigators in Arkansas went back to question everyone they had spoken to ten years earlier.

They were trying to do a deep dive into a man they believed might be a serial killer.

James B.

Grinder was born in nineteen forty five.

There's not a ton known about his childhood, but he lived in Arkansas for a long time, and he had what can best be described as kind of a messy love life.

At the time of the girl's disappearances, he was dating different women.

In nineteen seventy six, James was involved with at least two women, Donna Hanson and Joanne Hinton.

He stayed on and off with both of them.

Joanne Hinton lived in the Fairview Estates Complex, the same complex as the three girls who went missing.

Jo Anne had a daughter from a previous relationship named Sandra.

Sandra was born in nineteen sixty three.

She gave birth to James's son, James Junior, in nineteen seventy.

After the three girls disappeared, James moved and settled in Macon County, Missouri, where he reportedly married and had a daughter in nineteen eighty, though he and the girl's mother did eventually separate.

At the time of his arrest, he was working as a woodcutter.

Sames Grinder had a criminal history in Arkansas.

He had a lifetime pattern of stealing things, especially cars.

In August of nineteen seventy six, according to the case file, he stole a septic tank truck, and then he and an accomplice also stole cars, including a nineteen sixty seven Ford Galaxy, a nineteen sixty six Plymouth Belvedere, a gold Ford Mustang, and some tools and supplies.

They stole a lot of different items.

In addition to cars, they also stole from a school.

They would grab calculators and typewriters.

They vandalized a trailer in the back of the school where they got eight track tapes, cameras, and a knife set.

So coming back to the three missing girls, it turns out that the three girls, Cynthia, Crystal, and Teresa were planning on running way from home for a reason.

They had been stealing welfare checks from apartments in the Fairview complex and they had also, according to what a witness told police, been stealing items from stores for James Grinder.

They would steal things like jewelry and electronics.

James would then fence the items for them and of course take a cut of the profits.

One of the victims of this scam was a woman named Helen Freeman.

She also lived in the Fairview apartment complex.

She told police the last time she saw the girls was on December first.

She claimed that on that day she didn't get her welfare check as usual, so the next day, on December second, she asked the mailman about it.

The mailman said he was sure that he had put that check in her box the day before.

She told police one of the three girls had stolen the check, and several witnesses told police they had seen the girls at a nearby grocery store trying to cash that welfare check.

Apparently the store refused to cash it.

Then, according to witnesses, the three girls were really freaked out by this.

They thought they were going to get into big trouble.

So after the store refused to cash the checks, they went back to joe Aanne Hinton's house and tried to burn the checks.

Joe Anne Hinton was living on and off with James Grinder.

He was also there that day.

Helen told police she talked to joe Ane Hinton about all this.

She said joe Anne had made a comment to her about the girls leaving town by the way.

Helen also later told police she saw joe Anne at a later date wearing what she describes as a jacket she said was very similar to the jacket that one of the girls was wearing on the day they disappeared, a jacket with a fur Caller Police talked to Sandra, joe Anne's daughter, who had been around the girl's age when they disappeared.

By the time of the interview in nineteen eighty four, Sandra was twenty one years old.

She told them bluntly that James was crazy, weird, dirty, a thief, and that he had threatened to kill her mother on several occasions.

She told law enforcement James had an interest in young girls, that he had tried to sexually assault his niece when she was aged twelve or thirteen.

Sandra said she was the best friends with Crystal, Teresa, and Cynthia.

She said they all hung around together at Fairview Estates.

Sandra said that James made vulgar comments about them sometimes and would try to hang around with them when they were with Sandra.

She said at one point he made a comment to her about wanting to have the girls over because he wanted some young stuff.

Sandra talked about how James got the three girls involved in his check cashing scam and in his theft.

He would drive them around the places they wanted to go.

He got them to steal things from stores and give it to him to sell.

Police asked Sandra what she remembered about that day in nineteen seventy six, the day when the girls disappeared.

She said that she remembered James driving Cynthia, Crystal, and Teresa to a local store to try to cash those welfare checks.

In fact, she said she went with them to the store to cash the checks, she distinctly remembered getting refused.

Said that the five of them, her James, Cynthia, Crystal, and Teresa stopped at Walmart after that to buy cigarettes because someone wanted them.

Then, she said they drove back to Fairview, where James and the girls let her out of the car.

Sandra said she remembered that Crystal, Cynthia, and Teresa were worried about getting busted for that check scamp.

They asked James to drive them to the interstate.

Sandra said originally she was supposed to run away with the girls, but she decided against it, so in the end they dropped her back at home.

Sandra told police she tried to talk her friends out of running away, but.

In the end she couldn't.

She remembers the last time she saw her three friends was around sundown.

She said they were leaving in the car with James in his blue and white Chevy.

She never saw Teresa, Cynthia, or crystal again.

Sandra said that that night, James stayed out all night.

This was confirmed by her mother, Joanne, who told him best gators the same thing.

They said.

James didn't come back until around nine am the next morning, and when he did, Sandra asked him what happened to the girls.

He said he drove the girls to the Interstate Highway in Pottsville, gave them twenty dollars, and that was it.

Joanne told police.

When James came back to the house, he was wearing different clothes than he had on when he left.

He told her he'd had car trouble.

He was covered in grease and oil and wearing a long sleeved shirt.

When Joanne asked him about it, James said he got the t shirt at Donna's house.

He said he would contact the girl's parents and let them know that he'd dropped them off of the Pottsville exit, and apparently that was the end of the topic.

But Joanne said James would sometimes wake up screaming in the dark after that, telling her I see three shallow graves.

She told police that when he did that, she would tell him the only way he could be seeing that is if he killed those girls.

She said she asked him point blank if he killed them, and that he denied it.

Joanne told police James wasn't really violent with her, but others definitely saw his dark side.

Sandra told police she knew he had an interest in young girls.

She said on one occasion, James tried to rape her.

She said he was giving her a ride somewhere, and then he pulled over to the side of the road and pulled a gun out of his boot.

But Sandra said she.

Was somehow able to wrestle that gun away from him and actually turn the gun on him.

She said after that she.

Forced James to drive her home at gunpoint.

Needless to say, my heart completely goes out to in addition to the three victims, to Sandra what she was experiencing at home and how brave she was to pull a gun on her own stepfather.

It turned out that a lot of people in and around Fairview Estates knew about the girl's plans to run away and saw them with James on the night of December second.

An.

Investigators stated in their report there was also an attempt to mislead them.

Apparently a friend of James's, a trucker contacted the Russellville Police Department and told them he had picked up three runaways and they were at an address in Oklahoma.

Investigators later concluded that address was false and that the driver quote had probably made the calls at the request of James Grinder, and that the information was totally false end quote.

So it's hard for me.

To imagine why James Grinder wasn't immediately arrested, or at least why he wasn't a major early suspect.

It's possible that at the time they disappeared, maybe some of the young women who knew about the check cashing scams didn't tell police what they knew because maybe they were worried about getting in trouble themselves.

But after Julianne's murder in nineteen eighty four, people started talking.

Police had a ton of circumstantial evidence, but still no bodies.

Then came the gruesome discovery of Teresa, Cynthia and Crystal's bodies on Thanksgiving Day in nineteen eighty six.

After the deer hunting couple found the skull, they went back the next day.

They picked the skull up and actually ended up taking it to a local grocery store, where an employee contacted Pope County authorities.

Investigators went to the area where the skull was found and kept searching.

They found more remains.

They included a pelvic bone, a piece of a lower tailbone, and some cloth.

They also found a huge mass that had more bones, clothing, and roots all tangled up in it.

They found one almost complete human skeleton wearing a decomposing coat and underwear over a two hundred foot area.

Once they spread out, they found more and more bones.

The remains that they found included a lower jaw with thirty five teeth, a partial skeleton in clothing including a piece of black cloth, a black and green overcoat, a great flavored chapstick, a pair of pants with white bleached spots, gloves, a pink comb, a blue sack, a wool scarf, backpacks, an empty roll of tape, some bags of potato chips, and two pairs of underwear and a handkerchief.

I'm listing all of these items because someone out there might recognize some of them, and honestly, he got away with this for many years, and I think it's very possible that there could be more victims out there.

Police believe those bodies were buried in a shallow grave, but then over the years removed, either due to animals dragging them or a massive flood that had hit that area in nineteen eighty two.

Investigators also found a weapon.

They found an old number ten shotgun shell casing with nine buck shot near the bodies, but police later stated they don't believe that gun had any part in the murders.

The girls had been stabbed, not shot.

There were a lot of bones to go through.

A state medical examiner initially concluded the remains belonged to three females in between the ages of twelve and fourteen.

This made police believe they had found the three bodies of Teresa, Crystal and Cynthia, but later investigators announced there had been a mistake.

There were only two bodies found, not three.

Police stated they had confirmed through dental records the two sets of remains belonged to Teresa Williams and Crystal Parton, and police confirmed the girls were not shot.

Both of them had been fatally stabbed in the neck, so they had found Teresa Williams and Crystal Parton, but there was still no sign of Cynthia.

Maybrey now police knew for sure these three girls had not run away.

Police suspect did James Grinder A lot of people, though believed that James Grinder did not act alone, that one or more other people may have been involved.

Another name that came up in investigative reports was an acquaintance of James named Tony Wilson.

Tony was living in the woods behind the Fairview Complex at the time of the girl's disappearances.

Meanwhile, the links between James Grinder and the three missing girls were becoming more and more obvious.

Police spoke to another young woman, Carla Titterington.

She was also around the same age as the three victims.

She told police she was with the three girls at Joe Anne's house that night and that another man, Tony Wilson, was also there, but she said she wasn't sure if Tony left with James and the girls.

She just remembers him being there hanging out at Joeanne's house.

Police interviewed Tony Wilson in nineteen eighty six as well.

Tony said that at the time of the disappearances, he had recently graduated from high school.

He said he was homeless and living in a sleeping bag behind the Fairview Estates.

He said that he believed that in December of nineteen seventy six, he drove to Montana before the holidays.

He said he was with a guy he knew who had family in Montana, but he said he couldn't be sure of the dates.

Tony said he barely knew James Grinder, that he only knew of him.

He said he had never ridden in his car, but he saw one of the three missing girls get into the car with him.

The name of that victim is redacted in the case file report.

Tony also said he was not at James's house on the night the girls vanished.

This conflicted with other accounts by Carla and some others who say Tony was around when the girls went missing.

In the end, though Tony Wilson was given a polygraph where he was asked if he was in the car and the night the girls disappeared, if he was there when the girls were killed, and if he knew who killed the girls.

The results were that he was deceptive, but in the end there was zero indication that Tony was riding in the car with the girls on the day they disappeared, or that he was involved in any way.

So in the end, the police had zero concrete evidence against Tony Wilson and so that lead was dropped.

Joe Anne and James's son, Jimmy Grinder Junior, was also interviewed by police on December seventeenth, nineteen eighty six.

Jimmy was only six years old when the girls disappeared, so he was also in the home.

Not surprisingly, he told police he didn't remember anything from that night, but he did say that over the years he talked to his mother, Joanne, about the fact that all the girls went to Pottsville supposedly, and the girls didn't come back.

He said that he and his mother both believed that James had killed the girls, and he said he continued to believe that.

Jimmy told police quote, I'm afraid of him.

You can't tell about him.

He's crazy end quote.

Jimmy said that he believed his dad would hurt him to silence him.

Jimmy also told another wild story about his grandmother.

Apparently, Jimmy said James was running the check scam and giving the proceeds of that scam to his mother, Jimmy's grandmother.

On December second, he said James's mother was also spooked by the possibility of getting caught.

Jimmy said she told James they needed to stop the scam.

Jimmy said he actually saw James grab his own mother and try to throw her inside the trunk of his car.

Police interviewed James's ex girlfriend, Donna Harris, who he lived with off and on in nineteen seventy six and who was his original alibi.

According to an interview in the case file, she told police that in nineteen seventy six, when the three girls were killed, she was on and off with James, but that James was also dating Joanne Hinton.

It turned out that in nineteen seventy nine, Donna had talked to investigators again.

This time, she admitted that she had lied about James being home all night, but apparently either police didn't think this was important or declined to further investigate this tip for other reasons.

Donna confirmed this information in nineteen eighty six.

She said that on December second or third, James came home very late and said that if police asked, he wanted Donna to say that she was with him in the car with the three girls that they drove them to the Potsville exit and dropped them there.

James also told Donna he would give her two hundred dollars if she lied.

Donna stated that in the end, when she talked to the sheriff, she told investigators the truth.

There's no record in the case file of investigators speaking to Donna in nineteen seventy six, but they did ask her in nineteen eighty six what was going through Donna's mind after James told her he wanted her to lie to police.

They asked her, didn't she wonder why?

Donna said James told her he didn't want it admit that he had been with the three girls because they were miners and because he claimed they had stolen a bunch of checks and crossed the state line.

He told Donna he didn't want any part of that.

He mentioned that the three girls lived at Fairview.

Donna said she was afraid of James.

She said he had been abusive to her in the past, that he had beat her, and on one occasion, she said, he pulled a knife on her when she refused to have sex with him.

She said he cut her underwear off with the butcher knife and put the knife to her throat.

Then Donna said James continued to curse at her while he had sex with her.

He pulled out a gun and pointed it at her head while they had sex.

She told police, quote, if I didn't do what he wanted that night, he would have killed me, and I know he would have end quote.

She admitted to police she was terrified of James.

She said she believed he was capable of coming back and hurting her or hurting her children.

But even with all of.

This new information, and even after the bodies were found, police somehow still did not feel like they had enough evidence to arrest James Grinder, so once again he was free.

James wasn't immediately charged with Julianne's murder either.

Over the years, there was some movement on the case.

In nineteen ninety three, police got blood samples from James and another suspect named Wilfrid Swank, a former Macon City policeman who they suspected, but in the end charges were dropped against both men when police said they didn't have enough evidence, and it was later announced that wilfrid Swank, the former policeman, had been cleared through DNA evidence, So once again the case went cold until March of nineteen ninety eight, James Grinder made news again when he, along with two other accomplices, were arrested for burglary.

This was eighteen years after the three girls disappeared and twelve years after Julianne was raped and murdered.

James spoke to police again.

He was already going to prison for the burglary, and in the end, when confronted with evidence, he confessed to Julian's murder, but the details he gave at times didn't make sense.

James changed his story several times and later recanted completely.

Law enforcement absolutely believed they had the right person, but they weren't convinced they had a slam duncan trial, and so in June of nineteen ninety nine, Sheriff Robert Dawson took a very unusual step by contacting doctor Lawrence Farwell, a neuropsychiatrist and the inventor of a technique called brain fingerprinting.

It's a very controversial method.

The technology works a little bit like a lot of detector test, but it involves hooking a suspect up to an EKG and looking inside their brain while they are asked questions about the crime, questions that supposedly only the killer wouldn't know the answers to Lawrence Farewell had claimed that the accuracy rate for these tests was one hundred percent and that he got no false positives.

Again, much like polygraph tests, this technique is controversial.

The company Brainwave Sciences was around in the media a lot in the early two thousands.

They ended up selling their technology to Singapore's police force.

The Florida State Police has also reportedly used the technology, but according to report on the Verge that did a very deep dive into brain fingerprinting, it's really kind of impossible to verify a lot of these statistics because the testing is conducted by pretty much one person, Lawrence Farewell.

There hasn't been any large scale peer review to my knowledge.

Brain fingerprinting, by the way, is still used.

It's not really a big thing in criminal cases.

It's used more for diagnosing mental health issues.

In James's case, though, he voluntarily submitted to this test, So Lawrence attached electrodes to James's head and had him sit in front of a computer screen while he asked him questions about the murder.

He took detailed EEG readings of brain activity asking specific details about Julianne's rape and murder, and according to Lawrence Farewell, James failed.

Lawrence later told a local newspaper quote, there is no question that JB.

Grinder raped and murdered Julianne Helton.

The significant details of the crime are stored in his brain end quote.

With that confirmed, police believe they did have enough evidence to make their case against James Grinder for Julian's murder.

James Grinder was convicted of Julianne Helton's murder in nineteen ninety nine and sentenced to life in prison.

Questions remained about whether there could have been other people involved in Julian's murder.

In addition to the former policeman, James had also named two brothers who he claimed were involved, but police eventually dismissed charges on all three of those other men due to lack of evidence.

So James was behind bars in Missouri, convicted of murder.

Now, the police in Arkansas wanted to talk to him again about the night in nineteen seventy six when Teresa, Crystal and Cynthia went missing.

James was sent to Arkansas to face justice in Pope County.

At first, he tried to talk his way out of it.

He told police the same thing he had told Donna, that he gave the three girls a ride from Russellville to Pottsville, Arkansas, on.

The day they went missing.

Then he gave them twenty dollars and left them at the Interstate Police didn't buy his story, but they agreed to cut a deal with him to take the death penalty off the table if he confessed.

He was already in for life without the possibility of parole, so he agreed.

James said the first part of the story about driving Teresa, Cynthia, and Crystal to a liquor store in buying them alcohol was true.

He said after they got into his car that he took a drive to buy the alcohol and went along with their story of running away, telling them that he was going to help them.

Instead, he drove them to Brock Cemetery, where he raped Crystal and Teresa.

After the rape, he claimed that he strangled Crystal and Teresa and then stabbed them in the neck before hiding their bodies under some brush off a nearby dead end road.

He claimed that at this point Cynthia was still alive.

So he took her into the Ozark National Forest and raped her.

Then tried to beat her to death with a soda bottle, but Cynthia was still alive, so instead he beat her to death with a tire iron.

He admitted that he dug a shallow grave and covered Crystal in Teresa's bodies with brush off of a dead end road, but he said that he left Cynthia out in the open in the forest.

He said he did not attempt to bury her body, it was just left out in the open.

In October of nineteen ninety eight, investigators stated they knew who killed Cynthia, Teresa and Crystal James B.

Grinder, and that he was already in prison serving a life sentence for Julie Helton's murder.

James was charged with capital.

Murder, only one counts, since in Arkansas at the time, capital murder was described as a premeditated homicide of two or more people.

James was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

He later requested that his sentence be reduced.

He claimed that police forced his confession.

He also claimed he didn't work alone, that there were others involved in killing the three girls, but all of his petitions for clemency were denied.

No one believed him.

I've read a lot of comments saying it would have been impossible for James to kill three young women alone, But I'm not convinced, because James Grinder had developed trust with these girls, he drove them around a lot, there was almost certainly alcohol involved, and it's certainly plausible that he alone could have overpowered three young girls, especially given their ages and his claim.

That he separated them.

At around six foot one and one hundred and eighty five pounds with a weapon, he had a significant physical advantage.

James Grinder was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In twenty ten, James passed away in prison of what was described as natural causes.

He was sixty five years old.

Cynthia Maybury's body has never been found.

Her mother, Clara, passed away in twenty fourteen without ever being able to lay her daughter to rest.

The Russellville Police Department is still handling the case of Cynthia Maybury's unrecovered remains.

They have asked that anyone with any information about Anthea's remains please contact them on four seven, nine, nine, six eight three two three two.

I'm Catherine Townsend.

This is Helen Gone Murder Line.

Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.

It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Etaily's Perez Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance and James Wheaton for legal review.

Noah camer mixed and scored this episode.

Our theme song is by Ben Sale.

Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and l.

C.

Crowley.

Listen to Helen Gone ad free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple Podcasts.

If you are interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at Helen Gone Pod.

If you have a case she'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five.

That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five.

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