THE KFC MASSACRE

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about a case that has come to be known as the kfc murders this is the robbery abduction and cold-blooded murder of five innocent restaurant goers that happened in the 1980s and remained unsolved for 20 years it is solved now but it took two whole decades but before we get into this video i just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible june's journey june's journey is a hidden object murder mystery gear map available to download for free on both ios and android devices june parker has just discovered that her sister has been murdered and she takes on the responsibility to solve the case herself and that's where you come in you play as june going through different scenes finding different hidden objects and clues to take you further and further into the story while it is a murder mystery solving game it's not a scary murder mystery it's not like a horror game it's actually a 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this video and now let's get into it but before we do i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video on the case so for today's case we are going to texas specifically a city in east texas named kilgore the first city kilgart was pretty small it had a population of about 10 000 at the time 14 000 now on september 23rd 1983 this specific kfc restaurant in kilgar was just closing up it had a really successful shift there'd been a football game on in the area so they'd been super busy 17 year old kimberly miller was an employee at the restaurant a very new employee her mother 37 year old mary tyler had recently helped her get a job there because she was a manager there she'd worked there for a very long time mary tyler was married to a man named bill tyler who was now kim's stepfather mary had met bill when she was working at a previous kfc location she'd been moving up in the company for a very long time and she'd met him while she was working at this separate restaurant and then she got offered a better job at the kilgore one to be a manager so she eventually moved and you know the two of them married and they both had their own children and they came together to form this big family mary bill and their five children including kim anyway on this particular night at the kilgore kfc mary tyler was working with another woman 39 year old erp hughes and a young boy 20 year old joey johnson joey was a very intelligent man he was destined for a great career he was voted class president in school he graduated with honors he was very into sport he was on both the football and the basketball team but he didn't even stop there he was also part of acting classes he was just one of those kids in school that did everything they were good at everything he was really good at being able to balance so many different things all at once two sports teams the acting classes school work graduating with honors so he was very intelligent he was very you know he was keeping up with his schoolwork plus now a part-time job at kfc on top of that he also managed to maintain a dating life he had a girlfriend named leona he was just a great kid and he enjoyed his job at kfc so much so that he would take on jobs as there was a football game even though he really wanted to go to the football game kim miller mary tyler's daughter had worked a shift at kilgore kfc earlier that day and she finished around 9 10 p.m ish just before closing she left straight from the restaurant to go and meet up with friends maybe go shopping maybe go somewhere i don't know but when she got there she realized that she didn't really have much money and so she set off back to the kfc where her mother was still working to go and ask to borrow some money and mary tyler was still in the kfc at this point she'd worked a similar shift to her daughter however mary was on closing so she was going to be there until like half past 10 maybe 11 o'clock so kim arrived at the kfc she saw her mother's car in the car park so she thought great she's still there she can go in and ask for money but as soon as she got to the restaurant door she noticed that all the lights inside were off but the door was still open and at this point it was only about half past 10 quarter to 11 there should have still been people in the restaurant but there was no one the key was actually still in the lock of the door on the inside so it seemed as though someone was about to lock up but they just hadn't gotten around to it and the door was still unlocked for anyone to walk in this was very odd so kim walked inside thinking that maybe everyone was just in a back room or in a kitchen or whatever she goes inside the kfc and she sees blood on the ground and she just turns around walks back out tries to stay calm goes all the way back to her car and calls for her stepfather bill to come down bill arrived at the kfc kim told him everything that she'd just seen and he says okay well let's try going in through the back door maybe they're all in the back however when they got round to the back of the building they noticed that the doors the back doors on the restaurant were wide open and there was a bag of trash right next to the doors which was odd because the trash should have been taken out no one ever takes the trash half out why would you leave it by the door it was really worrying because it seemed as though the staff had been mid-closing they'd been in the middle of locking the door they'd been in the middle of taking the trash out and something seemed to have disturbed them so much so that the restaurant was left abandoned and not even locked up this seemed really weird so kim and her stepfather bill made their way inside the restaurant through the back door and of course the back door leads more to the kitchen rather than the front of the restaurant and as soon as they got in this kitchen it seemed ransacked there were like pans and fryers all over the floor there was flour different ingredients knocked on the floor it was a total mess but the most worrying part of all of this was that there were two kfc hats on the ground it seemed as though they'd been a struggle in this kitchen and that paired with the fact that the restaurant was now abandoned there was blood in the front of the restaurant this was incredibly serious and sir kim and her stepfather went back out to the cars and called the police when police arrived at the scene they took a quick look around the front of the restaurant and they noticed that the cash register had been completely emptied this had been a robbery police also found a dent in the wall right by where the cash register was and this didn't seemed about the same shape and size as a head as a human head so it seemed as though someone had maybe been pushed or thrown into this wall during the attack but where were the workers there were no sign of any of the restaurant workers and there were at least three in that restaurant that night kim's mother mary tyler uppy hughes and joey johnson where were they thinking on the more positive side of things one of the immediate theories was that maybe there'd been some kind of chef's injury maybe joey johnson who was a chef at the restaurant had been in the back cutting chicken and accidentally injured himself with a knife that would explain the blood it would explain why the restaurant was pretty much abandoned because they would all rush him to hospital maybe they just completely forgot to lock up completely forgot to shut the doors properly and there wasn't a lot of blood it seemed like it could have come from a simple chef's injury it wasn't so much blood that they would think someone died there or this was like a serious attack it was a few drops it did seem unlikely due to the fact that this was a robbery they could tell that this was a robbery because the cash register was open and empty it had been cleared out this was a robbery but they were just holding out hope that the three of them were going to arrive back at the kfc any minute and this would have all been a huge misunderstanding as time was going on and on there was still no sign of them none of them had contacted anyone they hadn't arrived back at the kfc and sir opie hughes and joey johnson's families were informed of their disappearances about an hour after the scene was discovered so just before midnight that night an 18 year old girl named lana maxwell turned up at the kfc looking for her husband 20 year old david maxwell david was close friends with joey johnson who was the chef at the kfc and david was just stopping by that night to return a motorbike that he'd been borrowing from joey but when david hadn't returned home that night lana got worried of course and decided to go to the kfc which is where david said he was gonna go but when she arrived there she realized that this was now a crime scene and that her husband was missing lana was pregnant at the time i think she was either six months or eight months pregnant they were still sir young she was 18 david was 20. david and joey had just enrolled in college and they were part of the same fraternity lana said that david was the man of her dreams he was so lovely to her he always just used to bring her flowers and balloons and chocolates just because just because he loved her he said i love you to her first and she said he was just unlike any other man that she'd ever met in her life and he was something so special to her which was evident you know the two of them fell in love and they were just starting their family together they were married they were having their first child everything was going so well and lana was actually supposed to be at the kfc that night or she was almost gonna be at the kfc that night when everyone went missing she and david had been out all day and they were using the motorbike that david had borrowed from joey because david had a car but he'd misplaced his car keys so joey said to david he was like look i have a motorbike we can share my motorbike until you find your car keys or until you get replacement ones and so that's exactly what they were doing joey didn't give it to david but they were both kind of using it at the same time using it when joey had work when david had this thing like they would have to try to return it to each other all the time david had it during the day that day and him and lana were out on it and that was when david remembered that joey was working late at the kfc that night and he would need it to get home so all three of them couldn't fit on this motorbike and that was why david took lana home instead of just taking lana to the kfc with him that night so now police learned that joey and david were part of the same fraternity that's two of the four missing people that had a connection so police decided to go and speak with other boys in this fraternity to see if there was something going on there just to see what kind of lives david and joey had and if they could kind of expand on that and use that to try to find these people and that was when they realized that it wasn't just david and joey from that fraternity that had gone missing there was also one other boy that hadn't returned home that night either nineteen-year-old monty landers was born in germany and raised in texas he was in college studying to one day become a forest ranger also like i said in the same fraternity as david and joey monty had also gone to the kfc that night to meet up with joey and david after joey's shift they regularly did this both david and joey worked at the kfc so they would all like meet up there after shifts just because it was an easy place to meet and they could get food so that was what they were doing on that night it was nothing different to any other night all three of them met up at this kfc and now they were missing so now that makes five people missing three workers and just two random boys that just happened to be in the kfc that night this doesn't happen with a regular robbery five people don't just go missing this seemed like an abduction as well as a robbery so now where are these five people they are potentially in danger so kilgore police once they realized that this was an abduction of five people they quickly realized that this was way out of their capabilities they were a small police force they didn't have much funding they didn't have many resources they just didn't have what it took to solve this case and it seemed like it was a race against time if these people were abducted they needed finding as quick as humanly possible and so for that reason texas rangers were brought in which are used all over texas they're the kind of step up from the police so texas rangers came in and they too got to work trying to solve this case of course kilgore police were still trying to solve it but they just needed more help so they were looking through this crime scene for absolutely anything they could possibly get and weirdly enough there were no fingerprints there were no hairs there was barely any clues to go off so it seemed as though the perpetrators whoever had done this robbery and abduction had planned it it was premeditated they knew how to get rid of evidence like that perhaps they'd won gloves perhaps they'd won hats you know they'd come in full gear to be able to carry out a crime so perfectly since this was the 1980s there was very little in the way of like cctv security camera footage in those days they didn't really have cameras on just restaurants and stuff the cameras were on the big important buildings so this case was going to be very hard to solve the next morning 39 year old opie hughes one of the missing workers of course didn't return home and she was such a homebody her family was the most important thing to her she had daughters she had a husband and it wasn't like her to just go out one night and not return home she'd never done this and so her kids called up their father opie's husband to let him know that he hadn't returned home and he was a truck driver the husband was a truck driver so he was already at work he was miles and miles away so he couldn't even come straight back home to comfort his children and to help in his wife's disappearance case meanwhile the search teams have been out in that general area in kilgart all night just searching the streets for any any piece of evidence any kind of clue and still none of the missing five had either returned back to the restaurant contacted a family member there was no sign of any of them still and this was a huge concern the fact that none of them had returned to the restaurant to lock up you know they'd left the doors wide open this pretty much threw out every single innocent explanation for their disappearances you know how i was saying that one of the immediate theories was maybe there'd been an injury that would explain the blood that would explain why they rushed off so fast but if that was true they'd be home from the hospital by now and there was still no sign of any of them it seemed that something very serious something very sinister had happened to these five people and that was confirmed later that day just 12 hours after the disappearances on the morning of september 24th 1983 an oil rig worker was just going to work at the oil lease and this was a fair few miles away from kilgore this was in rusk county and this oil lease was like a big field there were a couple of fields and so you had to go on like a kind of dirt track like a stone track to get there and as he was walking along this track he noticed a few piles of rubbish further down the track so he goes over to these piles of rubbish to go and clean them up but as he's getting closer he can see them more clearly and he notices that these piles of rubbish have arms and legs and then he notices a head and he realizes that these aren't piles of rubbish these are human beings the oil worker just assumed that these were drunk teenagers that had fallen asleep on this path because teenagers in college they're not old enough to drink yet so they can't go out to bars and things like that so they would often throw a parties on just huge pieces of land they would bring their own alcohol bring their own music and throw other parties there and this particular oil lease had experienced that a few times there were a few parties that had been held there illegally and so it wasn't unusual to see teenagers kind of sleeping off their hangovers in the streets that sounds ridiculous but i'm guessing this worker had seen that before because that's what he thought it was so as the worker was walking over to these people that were asleep on the floor he was shouting you know come on wake up get out but he's not getting any response at all from these people they're not saying anything to him they're not even moving and as he gets closer to them he realizes that these people aren't actually asleep at all these people were dead so this worker called the texas rangers who came as quick as they possibly could and there they identified these five dead bodies as those five people missing from the kilgore kfc and this just confirmed that police theory that the five workers had been abducted it seemed they'd all been taken together as this robbery happened and this was some weight away from kilgore these five people had been driven they'd had to travel in paralyzing fear for like 25-30 minutes not knowing what was about to happen to them they all seemed to have been shot in the head far of them all three boys and mary tyler were laying in a row on the ground david maxwell and joey johnson were on the outside and inside was mary tyler and monty landers and they were all laying face down with their arms kind of crossed like this and their head on their arms it was as if they'd all been ordered to lay in a specific way since they were all doing the exact same thing and none of them had any kind of self-defense wounds on their arms or their hands so did they even know they were gonna be murdered some people think that the killer or killers maybe multiple had ordered these four people to to lay down face down don't fight back and maybe then they would get away with their life maybe these people thought that they were actually gonna survive if they just did as they were told some of these four people had scuff marks on the top of their shoes now i don't know if this is actually evidence because of course scuff marks can be from just general wear of shoes but some people believe that this is possibly from them being pushed to the ground or maybe them trying to get up from the ground quickly all of their pockets had been turned inside out showing that they'd all been robbed with force and the women were also missing all of their jewelry now you might have noticed that i'm only talking about four of them here and that is because opie hughes was actually found 30 yards away from the other four of them again she was face down lying in the grass shot in the back of the head but this time her hands were full of mud and grass and even her own hair suggesting that she'd been in some kind of struggle she'd perhaps she had originally been in the grass with the other four but she'd gotten up to try and run away maybe that was why she had stuff in her hands who knows so the bodies were taken for an autopsy and it was confirmed that all of them had been shot in the back of the head at least twice each and joey johnson was actually shot three times maybe joey had tried to fight back and so they shot him again or maybe he'd been showing signs of life after the first two shots and so they shot him a third time or perhaps this whole attack was mainly focused on joey maybe that explains why he was specifically targeted with more shots than the other people maybe this was someone that had an issue with joey r was trying to get some kind of revenge perhaps they'd gone after joey when he was at work and the other people all four of the other victims had just been collateral damage maybe the killers were just taking them too just to cover their tracks i personally believe the theory that maybe he tried to fight back or maybe he was still showing signs of life after the first two shots because most of the shots were in the victim's head or neck you know this general area however on joey there was one in his head one in his neck and one on his side so maybe he was getting up to try to escape maybe he'd successfully gotten up and they'd shot him in the side to try to demobilize him a bit but one of the most valuable things that pathologists found during joey johnson's autopsy was when they undressed him and they took his jeans off they found a broken fingernail like a broken off fingernail in the waistband of his jeans but none of the victims seemed to have any broken fingernails apart from mary tyler she'd suffered some kind of injury to one of her fingers and her nail had been torn off so this fingernail that was found in joey's waistband was compared with mary tyler's finger to see if the two of them fit together and they didn't the jagged edges didn't match up this wasn't mary tyler's fingernail so maybe this broken fingernail belonged to one of the killers and maybe this was the next step in trying to identify who that was mary tyler who was killed alongside the three boys who was shot in the back of the head seemed to have other kind of injuries to her body it seemed as though she'd been beaten as part of this attack maybe she tried to escape and so her killers had beaten her to keep her in line or maybe this beating could have taken place back at the restaurant there was blood there was a head-sized dint in the wall by the cash register maybe that had been mary tyler maybe she'd been on the cash registers that night on an examination of opie hughes's body it seemed as though she'd been sexually assaulted although this couldn't be confirmed this was the 1980s and technology wasn't quite at that point where they could say yes for sure so that was just a theory at this point but it did seem somewhat likely her body was found 30 yards away from all of the others so perhaps there was a reason for that perhaps that was because she was the only one of them that was sexually assaulted so now police had two different scenes to investigate both like 30 minutes away from each other and still there were no major clues no major developments no suspects and police weren't handling this case very well yes they were investigating both crime scenes but neither crime scene was properly taped up or boarded away until well into the next day so 12 hours of just people trampling over these crime scenes this meant that evidence might have been contaminated extra evidence might have been left at the scene you know if a police officer's hair fell on the ground maybe they would think it was the killers for a long time you know it just hindered this investigation quite a bit i think a lot of it was to do with yes police just not doing a very good job like you should be taping up the crime scene straight away but also this police department severely lacked funds they had no money hence why they got the texas rangers in almost straight away they knew that they couldn't do this alone but they did what they could you know they brought in sniffer dogs to see if they could pick up any sense at both of the scenes they were questioning all the households that were kind of in the area of the murder scene but also the restaurant and people that lived close to the murder scene so near that oil site said that they had heard screams in the middle of the night but like i said college kids would often go and party in that area so it wasn't something that they weren't used to hearing you know they'd heard it a few times before but something to note about this oil site was that it was quite out of the way it wasn't somewhere where you could just stumble upon it you know you kind of have to know how to get there to be able to get there you know you have to go along a lot of like dirt roads there were very few houses around it it was a very isolated area so you have to be quite familiar with that area possibly have been there before in order to navigate your way there in the pitch black in the middle of the night you know so that immediately made police think that the killer was local to this area they'd been there before going back to the issue of lack of funding for this police force it's actually quite infuriating how much that hindered this case it majorly hindered this case the fact that they had no money to do anything they couldn't afford to get the crime scene photos professionally developed now this was the 1980s everything was done on film and they had to physically take them with a camera and get these pictures developed they couldn't afford to get these pictures properly developed and so instead they set up a kind of diy dark room at the fire station and tried to develop the pictures themselves now guess how that went this destroyed nine out of the ten rolls of film taken of the crime scene that's ninety percent of the crime scene photos gone and at this point the crime scene had been cleaned up so they couldn't go back and look at things that was potentially so many major clues that were immediately just taken away in this case and now they had barely anything to go off so time was going on and on and with the lack of evidence the lack of leads the lack of suspects this case wasn't going anywhere and naturally this led to a lot of arguments among the police because whose fault was it that this case wasn't going anywhere since the disappearance happened in kilgart and the bodies were found half an hour away that meant that there were two different police forces working on this one case and they buttered heads a lot they just couldn't work together they were constantly blaming each other for different aspects of this case there was a huge lack of communication it was terrible and it got so bad that the texas rangers they'd kind of taken a step back at this point now that there were two police forces working on it and the bodies were found texas rangers took a step back and let the police themselves solve it but they had to come back in because those two police forces just couldn't get on for the sake of this investigation they literally texas rangers literally had to mediate these two police forces to work like adults together but really all any of them could do at this point there was nothing that could be done there were no crime scene photos there was no longer a crime scene they couldn't do anything other than campaign to the public and beg people that might know anything that might have seen anything any potential witnesses to come forward they even put up a 50 000 reward one woman did come forward to police to say that she'd been in that kilgore kfc on the night of the murders very close to closing time and she'd overheard a conversation that the woman on the cash register was having on the foot now this woman on the cash register has now been identified as kim miller which is mary tyler's daughter this was when kim was working this witness heard kim call her mother mary who wasn't actually in the restaurant at this point i'm not entirely sure about the timeline here this was quite hard for me to research but from what i could find this witness told police that she heard kim miller behind the cash register call her mother mary and tell her that they had two thousand dollars in cash still in the cash register that needed something doing to it needed taken to the bank needed putting in a surf something like that and this witness said that kim said this on the phone so loud that half the restaurant would have heard you know anyone within earshot now knows that there's just two thousand dollars in cash lying around in this restaurant that hasn't been put in a safe or taken to the bank and this witness also recalled seeing another man very close to kim in the restaurant eavesdropping on her conversation on the phone and so she gave a description of this man to the police because potential suspects potential person of interest she couldn't tell them much about this man because she didn't really study his face all she could tell them was that he was six foot tall he was a black male in his mid-twenties and that's it that's all that's all she had so if this was the killer that this witness saw he knew there was two thousand dollars in cash in the restaurant so that gives a motive behind the motive does that make sense probably not i don't know she didn't see this man do anything particularly weird it wasn't like he was staring at kim she this witness just thought that this man seemed to be eavesdropping and sir she thought she would pass that information on to police if it was useful other rumored motives for these murders not relating to this man at all we're onto a different thing now other motives include a possible drug ring in the area now it sounds wild so stick with me as best as you can but this was a genuinely believable story for the time the theory goes that someone at that kfc that night i think joey johnson but i'm not 100 sure someone at the kfc that night had a recipe for meth that was very sought after all these big drug gangs in the area wanted that recipe it was worth a lot of money it was very sought after some theories said that this drug recipe was stolen from another gang and that's where the conflict came from other theories just said that this was a really good recipe that everyone wanted and then that gives motive for people to want to get rid of the person who has it because then they can get it and this is where our first suspect comes in james l mankins jr the son of a texas representative actually known in kilgore for his involvement in the drug making and trafficking scene and for that exact reason he was no stranger to the police he had a long list of charges on his record ranging from drugs to weapons to minor violence charges and his most recent arrest was just 12 hours before the murders so that morning when he was caught carrying a handgun without a license he was arrested the gun was taken from him and that same day he was bailed out of jail by a friend but that same evening mankins borrowed another gun from another friend without giving them a reason as to why he needed it like he got one gun taken off him in the morning and then he needed one so badly that same day that he went and borrowed one of another friend and he even gave this gun back to the friend that he borrowed it from the next morning the morning after the murders he borrowed this gun for about 12 hours on the evening of the murders right through until the next morning when he no longer needed it and in the days after the bodies were found mankins was actually overheard in town saying to people that if they cross him they'll end up like the kentucky five which is actually how this tip came into police one of these people that either he said that to her or someone that overheard him saying that to another person contacted police and said yo this is suspicious so mankins was arrested and brought to the police station for a bit of an interview a bit of a questioning he wasn't a major suspect right now because they had nothing to particularly link him to the murder site or the disappearances or anything he was just a person of interest but as soon as police sat down with him and they began questioning him they noticed that on one of his fingers he had an injury to his nails so if all the other things weren't suspicious enough the fact that he borrowed a gun and you know the fact that he was saying that around town after the murders he now had an injured finger which is exactly what they were looking for on a suspect due to the broken nail that was found they were pretty sure that they had the right man at this point but just to check they asked mankins if they could take a cast of his finger the nail was being kept in a different area in like an evidence locker so it's not like they could literally just bring the nail out and compare it then and there they had to take a cast of his finger and then take the cast to the nail and kind of compare the two of them and mankins accepted he was happy to do this finger mold the cast would take a few days to make like they could mold it to his finger but then it would take a few days to like harden but the police that had seen this broken nail from the murder site were pretty sure that this was mankin's nail they said that the size the texture the thickness of the nail was all there this was all seemingly his nail but yeah like i said it would take a couple of days to get this cast back and so in the meantime they decided to look into other avenues in this case other suspects or people of interest and this whole time police had still been receiving other tips other leads from the public and one of them that was particularly interesting was of two cousins two male cousins the two cousins were 25 year old romeo pinkerton and 22 year old danielle hartsfield both known criminals from tyler texas which is just 30 miles from kilgore both of these men had been raised christian they were good kids up until their teenage years when they started getting rebellious and then that rebellion led to criminal activity they got violent they began robbing places and people they'd done several robberies and violent crimes before this point the most recent of which being just a few days after the murders romeo pinkerton wasn't involved in this but darnell hartsfield actually robbed a convenience store at gunpoint and that case borrowed a lot of similarities to this one the kfc robbery abduction and murders in this robbery of this convenience store danielle hartsfield had gone inside with this gun and told everyone inside to lay on the floor face down and not to move and they wouldn't get hurt while he then went about robbing the store he'd actually been caught for this robbery and was being held in jail at this point when police wanted to speak to him so it was pretty easy to find him he said he'd committed the robbery because he was desperate for money he was a drug addict he had been since his teen years when he actually had to drop out of school and now he was in his 20s so this had been a decade of being dependent on drugs and not having the money to fuel it and so he says that was the motivation behind the robbery so here is evidence that the men are at least darnell hartfield were capable of crimes of this level they had access to firearms they were violent they were threatening they were using similar techniques to the ones in the kfc murders so it wasn't looking good well it was looking good for police it was not looking good for pinkerton and hartsfield particularly heartsfield but also if you remember on the night of the kfc murders a witness came forward to tell police that she'd seen a tall black male in his mid-20s eavesdropping over the call that kim was making to a mother saying that there was two thousand dollars of just spare cash lying around in the restaurant and that description even though it is very vague it did fit romeo pinkerton and darnell hartfield you know it wasn't concrete proof to say that that was romeo or darnell at the restaurant eavesdropping that night but it was just one little extra connection so the two cousins were interviewed and they both denied all involvement in these murders the abductions the robbery and not much more really came from the questionings romeo pinkerton had quite a good alibi saying that he'd actually been 200 miles away from kilgore that night so he couldn't have possibly done it even though he did live close to kilgore they'd actually been a hurricane around that time and he'd gone to visit someone 200 miles away and he wasn't able to come back home due to this hurricane there was no real physical concrete evidence to connect these two men to either the robbery scene at the kfc restaurant or the murder scene it was just all based on suspicion a very vague description you know that there wasn't anything to arrest these men on and so they were borderline ruled out as suspects because nothing else could connect them by now at this point in the case the finger cast from james l mankins had come back it was compared to the fingernail and it wasn't exactly a match however police felt that it was similar enough that they had the right guy this was their guy and so they arrested him and charged him with all five murders so the trial was set to begin six months from that point and mankins is facing at the very least life in prison potentially the death penalty probably the death penalty for robbing abducting and murdering five people you're looking at the death penalty for that but as the prosecution was piling up all their evidence to say that mankind's did it they realized that they didn't really have much so james l mankins jr had his first court hearing where he would plead guilty or not guilty and he pled not guilty so this meant that a trial had to commence and so the prosecution tried even harder to pile up their evidence and they were realizing that there wasn't there was nothing there was no concrete evidence no physical evidence dna fingerprints blood at either of the scenes the restaurant or the murder site to connect this to mankind's and the one piece of evidence that they did kind of have was the finger cast kind of matching this nail and even then it didn't exactly match the nail like i said they decided to dna test this tiny little scrap of nail to mankins to see if it was an exact match i don't know why they didn't do that sooner they probably should have but whatever so the test was done and the results came back just as mankind's trial was about to begin and it was negative this nail wasn't james mankin's nail so the trial was called off and mankins was let free he was ruled out as a suspect and police were now back to square one once again no suspects after that the case quickly went cold and for ten years a whole decade there were no major developments in this case it was always there in the police department in kilgore police and with it being 10 years obviously policemen are coming and going from the force the case is being passed around it's got new leaders every few years and none of them even though this case was being passed around people and it was being seen with fresh eyes every few years nothing nothing changed nothing was being done there was no new developments no new testing or anything like that people were beginning to suspect that police had messed up this investigation on purpose going back to the theory of a potential drug ring if theoretically police were involved in said drug ring they're not gonna want to solve this case are they so it would make sense how the crime scene photos were mostly all of them 90 of them destroyed you know they wouldn't want the evidence there so like i said the case for the next decade was being swapped around different people as new police joined the force they would give them it for them to look over and finally 10 years in they decided to do another dna test of this nail because of course there's also the fact that dna testing and science in general is just always getting better it's always improving it's always developing so maybe technology 10 years on would pick up a smaller piece of dna than technology 10 years prior would of new things might come up now so they decided to test this little scrap of fingernail again to see if they could find a match see if they could find whose this nail was and they did find a match they found who it belonged to but it wasn't gonna help them find a suspect this broken fingernail belonged to mary tyler one of the five murder victims like i said she had an injury on one of her fingers she was missing half of the nail it was broken but police said they checked this at the time and the edges the jagged edges didn't match up so just because the nail didn't look like it matched the injury on mary tyler's finger they just discounted that as a possibility i don't did they even test it they can't have tested it so they just assumed that this little broken fingernail was from a suspect the whole time and it had been like the main piece of evidence that they were going off of to try to find a suspect and it was useless this whole time it belonged to one of the victims this whole time so more time went by and there were still very few developments if any in this case up until the early 2000s which is two decades in 20 years this case has been going on and it's cold there's nothing new coming in and like i said it's still being passed around all these police officers when finally a new leader of the case decides to dna test forensic test once again 20 years on because technology updates you know something might come up now so this time of course the nail is useless so they can't dna test that but they decide to dna test what evidence they did have from the restaurant that night they found a napkin in the restaurant with blood on it there was also a box that was found under the cash register that too had blood on it and as they were looking through all of this old evidence they were also looking through the victim's clothes and that was when they made a huge revelation in this case opie hughes's trousers that she was wearing on the night of the murders seem to have a stain on them that was identified as a potential semen stain and this was something they'd missed all those years ago two decades had gone by in this case and they didn't know for sure that erp hughes was sexually assaulted and this seemed to be that confirmation that she was it gave them a greater idea of what actually happened that night we'll talk more about opihus and the semen sample in a bit but for now let's talk about the blood samples that were found on the napkin and the box they were tested on the system on the big dna system that's got everyone's dna in it and a match was found to both of these things and it wasn't james mankins as suspected it was actually a match to both romeo pinkerton and danielle hartsfield two previous suspects in this case that were ruled out almost two decades ago and these men were now in their 40s like i said it was a dna profile match which isn't an exact dna match the dna profile is a bit more of a simplified version which means it fits more people it's not specific to you but it's specific to like one in a million people but the likelihood of it being these men's dna is very high because both samples on the napkin and on the box were a match to both men and these men were cousins they were related so they would have a very very similar if not exact same dna profile so it has to be these two men and the reason that dna profiles are only a one in a million chance of being a match is because everyone that's closely related so like you your mum your dad siblings your children will all have the same if not very very similar dna profiles and since these two men these two cousins were the only ones in their immediate family that were being suspected then you know put two or two together it's them the semen sample however that was found on erp hughes's trousers didn't match either of the men didn't match pinkton didn't match heartsfield so perhaps there was a third attacker a third person involved in these murders and that would explain why opie hughes was found 30 yards away from the rest of the victims maybe this third person had taken her away sexually assaulted her and killed her there while pinkerton and hartsfield were dealing with the other four victims so a dna sample was taken from this semen sample and it was a proper dna sample it wasn't a profile it was like an exact sample and it was tested on the american dna database and there was no match whoever's semen this was was not on the database they weren't a criminal a previous criminal or at least a court criminal you know that they've never had their dna taken in any other case before however experts can look at this sample from the semen and tell some very basic things about this person and one of the things that they can determine from this very small sample is their wrist and the person whose semen this was was african-american now going back to james mankins he was now partially back on police's radar for this crime because the reason he was ruled out earlier was because of that fingernail but now that that fingernail was determined to be mary tyler's he was kind of back in the running as a suspect or potentially this third suspect but since the dna from the siemens sample showed that the perpetrator the third attacker in this case was african-american james mankins was once again ruled out because he's white so who was this third attacker where did they come from what is their relation to the victims or the other two suspects pinkerton and heartsfield there was actually another bloodstain found on montylanders t-shirt that didn't match any of the victims or pinkerton or hartsfield so perhaps that was blood of the third attacker so they have two different dna samples of this third person over 180 men were dna tested in that general area of kilgore people that were linked to the victims somehow people linked to pinkerton hearts field somehow they were all dna tested but no match was found so we'll come back to that later but for now pinkerton and hartsfield were pretty much confirmed killers their blood was found at the scene of the kfc restaurant on a napkin and on a box the men had previously lied in their questionings they denied all involvement in these murders in this whole attack they said they weren't in the kilgour kfc that night but their blood was there so they lied to police they were there that night and now there was proof that they lied so not only were they charged with the murders now that there was evidence but they were also charged with perjury for lying to police about being in the kfc that night so now a trial could be set for our two new suspects and this was 22 years after the murders took place in october of 2005 danielle hartsfield had his first of two trials he was actually gonna go through two trials one for perjury which was lying to the police about where he was and one for the actual murders for some reason darnell's perjury one was before either of pinkerton's i i don't know why they didn't just do like both men's charges in the same trial anyway heartsfield is on trial for lying about being in the kfc however his blood is on this box so it's not looking good he's looking like he's gonna be sentenced for this in some way but his defense team argued that where is the proof that this box yes it had hartsfield's dna on there was no debate in that but where was the proof that this box actually originated in the kfc there were no crime scene photos something happened to all the crime scene photos that meant there was no proof that this box was ever in the kfc they argued that this could actually be framed evidence they said that someone could have taken hartsfield's blood in some form of another and then put it on this box and claimed that this box was found at the kilgour kfc the next thing that hartfield's team did in this case well not hartsfield's team but hartsfield himself he decided to take the stand and testify for himself now everyone warned him against this everyone said that's not a good idea you're gonna look suspicious or guilty in some way of another but ultimately it's his choice whether he does it or not he can be advised by his legal representatives not to do it because it won't go well but if he wants to do it he can do it so he took the stand testified said he wasn't at the kfc that night he was still standing firm and of course this didn't go as planned it didn't go well just as his representatives told him and hartsfield was found guilty of aggravated perjury and for that he was sentenced to life in prison i don't think i realized how serious of a charge that was i didn't realize you could get life for it but he was now serving a life sentence before he'd even got onto his murder trial that was just for lying to police now around this same time actually just a couple of months before romeo pinkerton is still out he's free he's not in police custody and in the summer of that year romeo pinkerton was actually arrested for breaking into and robbing an elementary school and so he was taken into police custody and they decided that for the safety of the community that they had to lock away romeo pinkerton until his trial if someone was trying to frame these men of these murders and they did it using blood evidence they took these men's blood and they put it on items at the scene they didn't do a very good job at framing them since dna and forensic testing and evidence was still in its infancy at the time and it it wouldn't have done anything i'm not saying it's completely out of the question that perhaps police did frame these two men using their blood maybe that did happen but if they were gonna try to frame these men surely they would do it in another way that meant they would be caught a lot sooner however pinkerton does really believe this theory and he says that if this napkin so it was pinkerton's blood that was on the napkin hearts fields blood that was on the box so pinkerton said that if this napkin really was 20-plus years old from the crime scene which was 20 years ago then why does it look so white and brand new surely it would have some kind of discoloration if it was that old unfortunately i don't have a picture to show you of that on top of that incriminating evidence of the napkin however there is more evidence against pinkerton that says maybe he wasn't framed and maybe he genuinely was the killer or one of the killers and this piece of incriminating evidence was actually a statement from one of his fellow inmates because like i said he was caught for robbing this elementary school so from that point until his trial he was kept in just a normal jail and one of the other inmates from that jail said that they were speaking to pinkerton one day they were playing cards or some kind of game when this inmate decided to ask pinkerton about the kfc murders and he asked him you know like what what happened tell me about it and pinkerton didn't say anything he stayed silent but he did merge him with his hand like a gun and pinkerton followed up in this conversation by asking this inmate if he thinks that dna evidence is traceable or you know testable after 20 whole years which coincidentally is the amount of time that it had been since the murders so did pinkerton know that he'd bled at the crime scene did he know that that was gonna be the slam dunk piece of evidence to put him in jail however for his argument pinkerton also argued that the crime scenes hadn't properly been taped up people had been trampling all over the crime scenes well into the next morning and he says well how can police use any dna evidence in this case to convict any one person when everyone's dna everyone that trampled through that crime scene that day everyone's dna is on everything he says that like all the forensics all the dna should just be written off and there should be another way to solve this crime so in his trial pinkerton maintained his innocence until the very last minute that was until right at the end he decided to change his story and say that he was guilty of all five murders i think he realized the way that this trial was going and i think he realized that he had no way of getting out of this and if he didn't admit to this if he pled not guilty then he would be put up for the death sentence however if he pled guilty he would get a plea deal and he wouldn't be killed and in a case as severe as this the death penalty would likely be given for the robbery abduction murder of five people with potentially a case of sexual assault in there as well this was a very severe crime and i think pinkerton knew that the only way that he could keep his life was if he pled guilty so romeo pinkerton was given five life sentences for his five murders and they will run one after another after another and so he'll be in prison for the rest of his life and then in 2008 25 years after the murders danielle hartsfield had his murder trial again his case mainly focused on the fact that yes his blood was on that box but there was no way of proving that that box was at the murder scene his team also tried to deflect the blame from hartsfield by blaming someone else and that someone else was mary tyler's daughter kim the girl that found the restaurant abandoned that night they said that kim had a history of stealing which is true she had stolen things in the past and she knew that there was two thousand dollars in spare cash in the kfc that night perhaps she had other connections or friends that came along and they all committed this crime together it's unlikely that kim could ever do this herself or perhaps she was part of a group that robbed and abducted and murdered these people maybe she didn't expect her accomplices to commit murder maybe she thought that they were just gonna rob the star and that would be it however maybe this kind of got out of hand and whatever i mean it's not really believable there's no evidence and at the end of the day hartfield's blood was found in the star romeo pinkerton's blood was found in the star the jury just didn't believe this proposed theory and so they decided to find daniel hartsfield guilty of all five murders and he too was given five consecutive life sentences now that meant that he had six life sentences because he had one for perjury after the ruling opie hughes's husband jack hughes begged darnell hartsfield to give over the name of the man that sexually assaulted his wife and hartsfield just looked at him and he was silent this case is just so incredibly sad for so many reasons david maxwell whose wife lana was pregnant at the time she was like six or eight months pregnant he never got the chance to meet his first and only son that child was born and lana actually named him david after david maxwell and that child will now be in his forties opie hughes's daughter told the jury about how her last conversation with her mother that morning had been an argument and they didn't part on good terms however her mother made sure to tell her that she loved her you know just in case and that was the last thing that her daughter has to remember her by an argument and then her mother saying i love you just in case both pinkerton and hartsfield even though they pled guilty in these cases to avoid the death penalty they still maintain their innocence to this day they said they only pled guilty to avoid the death penalty and they genuinely are not guilty of these murders pinkerton says that he believes that this whole case was just racial profiling against him and heartsfield and that police were racist and the two of them are only in prison now because the police were covering for some rich white man's son seemingly a reference to james mankins remember he was the son of a texas representative romeo pinkerton has now reached the point in his sentence where he can apply for parole which he's done twice but it's been rejected twice he's still in jail darnell hartsfield isn't eligible for parole just yet but he will be in 2023 so that will be his first ever parole hearing however i doubt that either of these men will be let out of prison at all before they die unless some major evidence comes out that proves that they're not guilty of this police have unfortunately never caught this third attacker they don't even have any suspects any people of interest they have no idea who this is they believe that this person is probably in their 60s or 70s now possibly even dead but that's all i have on this case let me know down below in the comments what you think do you think pinkerton and heartsfield were guilty or were they framed thanks again to jun's journey for sponsoring this video make sure you're downloading the game and pre-registering for the contest using my link down below in the description huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching this video if you enjoyed make sure you leave a big thumbs up if you want to subscribe there'll be a circle right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there'll be a second right here and if you want to watch another one of my videos there'll be a playlist on screen right now bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,735,624

Rating: 4.9358406 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, KFC, KFC murders, kilgore, texas, pinkerton, hartsfield, romeo, james, mankins, james mankins, police, cover up, kfc murder, kentucky fried chicken, fast food, restaurant

Id: n73hnVVyseU

Length: 60min 13sec (3613 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020