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

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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 their disappearance. Nobody seems to be able to find Marlene at Childress, but most definitely someone out there knows what happened or, 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 Union City Tennessee together and figure out what exactly happened. This is the disappearance of Marlene at Childress. So let's head to the stage first before the day it all went down. Marlene's parents, Kevin Childress, and Pamela Bailey, had divorced in December of 1985, and Marlene was just two years old when it happened. And Kevin was 24, working as a welder for a tool company in 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 Marlene, and all been living with Pam's parents over in Mayfield, Kentucky, before the whole group relocated to Union City in the summer of '86. And that was just eight months before Marlene disappeared. And in February of '87, just two months before everything changed, while 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, 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 Marlene's vanishing, I 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, all that was about to change. On the morning of April 16, 1987, Marlene and her step-brother 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. The Pierce's knew the kids, they saw Marlene that day, and they saw something else. Marlene, I outside the store, talking to a man they didn't recognize. Nobody around knew who he was, who 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, and 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 three o'clock that afternoon, Marlene 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 something because of some ice cream 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 out in the door and I couldn't see Marlene. Pam then searched the yard and called out, locked up in down the street, and still nothing. So at 4.15 pm, she called the police. 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, Marlene's stepbrother told police he'd seen it too, and so had the owner of the grocery store two locks away. The descriptions all matched, and some neighbors believed they'd caught a glimpse of the license plate. McCracken County, Kentucky, 70 miles to the north. 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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 Marlene home. And over the next couple of 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 just couldn't function and she stayed there for about a week and when she got out, the police had some more questions so they brought her into talk. And this time, Pam Bailey started saying things that she had never mentioned ever before. And 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 Marlene. and she changed again. And this time she told investigators she actually may have accidentally killed Marlena while trying to discipline her. She mentioned losing her temper and then slapping the girl, which sent Marlena headfirst into the corner of a table, which then knocked her unconscious. Now believing her daughter was dead, will panpanicked and called up an old acquaintance, sketchy guy named PL Summers. We advised her that if she wanted to get rid of a body, and she should dump it in the north fork of the Obi-Wan 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 Marlena 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 and that community in fact that he personally wrote a letter proclaiming his innocence and hand delivered it to local radio stations and newspapers from 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 the state mental institution where she was being held for a time and evaluated, well Pam recanted everything. Set her statements have 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 was she had been manipulated. She said Stan Cabness, a former juvenile officer, turned private investigator, would actually have been hired by her own family to help find Marlena, had psychologically worked her over during their sessions together. He was telling me that it 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 murderer to say it was an accident. Would you hear 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 to the body. So nobody was coaching her on that tape, and all this feeding her lines, it was just Pam talking. But without a body, there was only so far the law could go. And the second degree murder charge came down to voluntary manslaughter and then that too was dropped for lack of evidence. So Pam Bailey walked out of there 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. The story she then said was a lie forced out of her under pressure. Now one of those explanations held together but somehow it got Pam free. And meanwhile Marlena, she was still gone. Six days after Marlena van or 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 Jean's Hair Styles. One looked to be in her 20s and the other in her 60s, probably a mother and daughter. Now with them was a little boy and little girl and the stylist Gail Reach sat the little girl down and started cutting her hair. 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 believe they heard the younger woman called the child Marlena 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 when she saw a newspaper. 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. The timing was suspicious too. While she had left Union City the morning after Marlena 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 holographic theme by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and I asked in fact she was in the beauty parlor or if she had Marlena Childress, in the beauty parlor and she said no as she passed the laddie pick. The Maryland car wasn't a dead end either. Please actually track it down and pull 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 Marlena. 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. Now somebody began calling Jean's hair styles repeatedly. Was a woman's voice telling Gal 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 to random hairdressers in Memphis unless you have a reason to. In the summer of 1987 reports came in that Marlena had been seen in Aniston, Alabama and not passing through but living with a group of people there. A nomadic family led by a man named Oliver Childress, a no-relation to Marlena 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 worker's 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 Marlena 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 Marlena's. By the time investigators obtained search warrants two days later, the entire group advanced, just up and relocated, something they had gotten pretty good at. A 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 1989 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 Marlena disappeared. He produced a handwritten note he claimed was from Crystal's mother, a red simply "ungiving her to Oliver Childress." And 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 1989, more than two Two years after Marlena vanished, a woman named Amy Spoon was out shopping at a department store in LaNoire 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, as she didn't want to go. She dragged her feet and she looked back. Amy thought about it and moved on with her day. But 10 days later, she came across a flyer with Marlena'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 in the flyer with the same child. There's 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 looked just like Marlena. That woman 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 Marlena case sat in the files of the Union City Police Department, technically open but not moving. No new evidence ever showed up, and so if faded away into the background, his life went on. 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 hankerchief. He was excited, thinking she was taking him somewhere 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, she stabbed him in the neck and shoulder. A Casey got up and ran away to the nearest house he could find, and luckily he survived, man, what is that sort of thing due to a kid's psyche? Now, he was treated for his wounds or released to his father, and as for why she did it, 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, she claimed to have blacked out completely. In December of 2002, she pleaded no contest to attempted murder and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Then, the Marlene Childress case was formally reopened. The lead investigator on Marlene's original disappearance, Police Lieutenant Andy Gibson, said publicly that he thought about her every single day. When 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 believe Pam Bailey was likely responsible for what had happened to Marlene, 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 Marlene's body, there was nothing they could do. So Pam served her sentence and then she was released, and 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, Marlene of Childress is listed on the National Missing and Unidentified Person's System as Case MP5342. Her DNA profile has been submitted to National Databases, and 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 and 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, a reluctant child in the Lenore City Department store who didn't want to go. In Crystal, where their silver cat teeth kept away from the other children in a house that vanished before anyone could get a warrant. In this version, Marlene grew up somewhere else under another name, and may or may not know who she really is. In the second version, Marlene had never left Union City, and she did not survive that afternoon. Her mother struck her an anger, or something darker than anger. When it was over, Pam Bailey did exactly what she would let her 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, 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 person's fliers, 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 where the person most likely to know the truth is 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 on beside a stone that said son and stabbed him in the neck. 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 Every Town. 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, so feel free to binge away. I appreciate you very much, so thanks for tuning in. I remember to come back next week for another episode of Every Town, filled with scary, strange and mysterious stories, because you never know. Every year, Every Town will be next.