Town note
The region was originally home to the Chickasaw Indians, a tribe related to the Choctaw.
about 0:08:14The story
Walnut is a small town in Tippah County in north-eastern Mississippi, three miles from the Tennessee border and about an hour and fifteen minutes from Memphis. In 1993 it was a place where everybody knew everybody, which mattered when a twenty-year-old college student disappeared on a Friday afternoon.
Christie Ray was twenty. She studied at Northeast Mississippi Community College and worked part time at the Sunburst Bank, where her mother Mary also worked. She lived with her mother in Challey Beat, an unincorporated settlement on top of Walnut. On Friday June 29, 1993, she and Mary left the bank when it closed at about a quarter past five. Christie had errands and a boyfriend to see, and the two women planned to meet later at home.
At about 6.45 that evening Mary telephoned the house and got no answer. She was not alarmed at first. Christie was twenty, she had a car and a boyfriend, and this was 1993, when people called houses and turned up without warning. Mary got home around seven and found her daughter gone. Then she found a note on the table: a crude map with a message that there would be a red flag somewhere on the block at midnight on Tuesday, that $15,000 in a gym bag should be left there, or she dies, and no police.
Mary searched the house. Christie's purse was still there, which suggested she had not left willingly. Her bedroom was in disarray, though she was normally organised, and the telephone in the room was dead. Outside, the screen on Christie's window had been cut and pallets had been stacked against the wall to make a ladder. A drawer in her parents' bedroom had been rifled. Mary drove into Walnut, checked the house of Christie's boyfriend Brian Mathis and the video store where Christie sometimes worked, then rang her husband Tommy and finally 911.
The Tippah County Sheriff's Department began asking questions, but once the ransom note came into it the case went to the FBI, and a command post was set up at the Challey Beat school. Mary kept searching and found the forced entry herself.
It was worded differently from the one at the Ray house but was recognisably the same kind of note.
From the age of six he had hallucinations, blackout spells lasting from a few minutes to half an hour, and uncontrollable terror. At ten a psychiatrist prescribed phenobarbital and he was hospitalised at the East Mississippi State Hospital. In 1989, after a suicide attempt, he spent six weeks there and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, manic type, and substance abuse. He was sent home on an old antidepressant and lithium. Two years later he spent two weeks at the Memphis Mental Health Institute and was given the same diagnosis.
He was also in serious legal trouble. On April 13, 1991, Nicole Cutbirth, sixteen, and her friend Sue, seventeen, were driving Nicole's grandfather's car around Walnut. He did it at a nearby ball park and told Sue he needed to talk to her privately. Later that evening they met him at the cemetery. He said they had to get out of Walnut because his ex-wife Gale would see them together and stop him seeing his son.
Sue got into his truck, and he told her that her boyfriend had some bad photographs of her which he had taken and planned to destroy. They were at his house. All three drove there, with the girls told to duck down as they passed the school. He parked near an abandoned house and told Nicole to wait in the truck. Inside, he put a gun to Sue's head, taped her mouth and her hands, led her into a bedroom and raped her. Afterwards Sue asked him not to hurt Nicole. He went outside, came back saying somebody was there, and they ran out. Sue saw a hammer in the truck but no Nicole. He gave Sue the gun and asked her to shoot him. She refused. He said he needed to see Janet and asked Sue to go with him to Memphis.
They drove the back roads. Barry King refused to lend a car; Jackie Brooks refused to lend his truck but drove them himself. Janet told him, through Joiner, to turn himself in. He called 911 from a convenience store and surrendered. Sue was taken to hospital for a rape kit. A search of his house found Sue's tampon, duct tape with hair on it, blood on the stairs and footprints leading to an abandoned house. His truck was found behind Brooks's house and a .22 revolver was recovered.
In the car he asked repeatedly what was going on and said he did not know Christie, though he knew her to see around town. He complained of a broken leg and a back injury from falling into a well, and lay on the floor during the interview. When the FBI agent finally said Christie's name, he began to cry. Within about twenty minutes he admitted that she was dead and agreed to show them where she was.
They left at about eight that Saturday night. At 9.48 p.m. they found Christie Ray's body in a heavily wooded area 400 yards from the Hopper barn, an abandoned building where he liked to hang about. She had been handcuffed around a small tree, a sock stuffed in her mouth, a cloth tied round her head, and her body covered with leaves. Her jeans were pulled down. The pathologist found a single stab wound to the left mid chest, consistent with a Marine Corps style knife, which punctured her heart and left lung. She would have taken one to two minutes to die. There were abrasions and contusions consistent with a struggle, with being dragged, and with an attempt to resist rape.
He said he had a blackout by a fire, then found himself in the Ray house, heard a girl crying, put on a ski mask, took Christie and her car, and drove for between forty-five minutes and an hour. He claimed they made a deal, that he took her handcuffs off and she did not run, that they walked along Jonesboro Road and spent the night in the barn eating cookies and talking. The next morning, he said, he heard a siren, told her it was the law, and ran. He claimed she chased him asking him to surrender, that he handed her the shotgun, had another blackout, and woke on a stump with her dead at his feet. He dragged her by the feet and covered her with leaves. He denied writing the ransom note.
The physical evidence did not depend on his story.
Christie Ray, who was born in Germany, is buried at the Tippah County campground United Methodist Church cemetery. Sue survived and testified against him.