More than 30 years after a little girl’s body was found in a small town in Arkansas, questions still remain as to who killed her – or if she was even killed at all.
The chilling death of Christina Pipkin has haunted the town of Hickory Ridge since she disappeared on May 4, 1991, only to be found dead in a ditch three days later.
Police initially ruled her death a drowning since she couldn’t swim and there were no signs of abuse on her body, however, they soon began to suspect that Christina’s death was a result of a homicide.
Their investigation led them to a man named Robbie Tubbs after sketches of a mysterious man in town seemed to match his description.
He was arrested for Christina’s death, but in a shocking turn of events, the evidence was deemed inadmissible and charges were dropped against him.
Speculation still loomed for years that Robbie was Christina’s killer, however, when his daughter-in-law Amy learned of the case, she set out to prove his innocence.
Amy Tubbs told the DailyMail.com that when she first met her husband, she had no idea that his father was previously accused of murder.
When her husband, who shares the same name as Robbie, revealed his shocking family history, Amy began to dig up eerie coincidences in the case.
Authorities asked the public for information after Christina’s body was found in a ditch in 1991
The town of Hickory Ridge was forever changed after a nine-year-old’s body was found in a ditch
A key piece of evidence in Robbie Sr.s arrest was his wife Sandra’s testimony. Sandra grew concerned after her husband made an odd comment about Christina’s death.
While police were looking for Christina, Robbie told her, ‘They’ll never find her, there’s too many rice ditches around here for somebody to drown in. She’s dead.’
The comment led Sandra to suspect her husband, and she later told police that he tied her up when she confronted him about it.
She told her friend, Susan, about the altercation who later corroborated the story to the police.
Although Amy did not know her husband during this time, she said that multiple family members had told her stories of an abusive relationship between Robbie Sr. and Sandra.
Sandra did end up giving a statement to authorities and suggested that she even believed her husband to be a pedophile. She told police that he assaulted a 12-year-old girl.
Robbie eventually admitted to having sex with the girl, but claimed she was 14 or 15 and had told him she was 18 years old.
Police had also found hair follicles in his car and believed them to belong to Christina. The evidence was enough to arrest Robbie, but his wife’s statement was eventually thrown out due to a chilling coincidence.
The public was enlisted by authorities to help find Christina after she disappeared while selling jewelry for a school fundraiser
Exactly two years after Christina’s death, Sandra was brutally murdered in a burglary gone wrong.
‘When he told me about his mom murdered two years later, I’m thinking, this sounds even, more awful than I thought,’ Amy told the DailyMail.com.
‘And so, I actually set out to determine if I thought his dad was involved in his mom’s death, which happened two years to the day exactly from when Christina was killed,’ she added.
Amy explained that Sandra died after she was shot multiple times attempting to run away from robbers.
Robbie Sr. had taken their car to work, and most of her sons had left for school. She was painting when two armed teenagers approached their home intending to rob them.
Amy believed that since there wasn’t a vehicle in their driveway, the teens weren’t expecting anyone at the home and were startled to see Sandra.
Sandra attempted to run away but was shot multiple times and died outside their home. Her youngest son was asleep in his bed, and Sandra’s body was later found outside.
As she died before her husband was convicted of Christina’s murder, her statement was deemed inadmissible in court.
‘I think it was just a terrible coincidence,’ Amy said of her mother-in-law’s eerie death. ‘I said to my husband, «I don’t know if your dad had the best luck or the worst luck in the world.»‘
On top of Sandra’s shocking death, a chilling discovery in Robbie Sr.’s trial revealed that the wrong hairs found in his car were submitted by police, so the prosecution had no evidence that Christina was ever in his car.
Christina’s body was found on May 7, 1991 floating under a bridge three days after she disappeared
When the case was initially dismissed in the summer of 2000, prosecutor Fletcher Long Jr. said that law enforcement hit a dead end.
‘There’s nothing else we can do,’ he said at the time. ‘We’re at a dead end. This is the end of it,’ Deseret News previously reported.
Another component of the investigation was witnesses who described a man in town who matched Robbie Sr.’s description.
Christina was seen by many locals as she was out on her own the day she disappeared to sell jewelry for a school fundraiser.
A cashier at a local grocery store told police that a man in a blue car came in to buy cigarettes and was staring at Christina.
Other kids who were interviewed told police a similar tale of a stranger in a blue car driving around town that day.
One kid even reported that the man had followed Christina when she walked by the grocery store.
The descriptions they gave matched Robbie Sr., however, he drove a brown AMC Eagle and didn’t have a blue car.
Amy said that the evidence wasn’t compelling enough to convince her that her father-in-law killed Christina.
Jackie White found Christina’s body while he was out with his two young sons
‘I began to realize that the police had never looked at anybody else,’ she told the DailyMail.com.
As Amy began to dig into her father-in-law’s case, she linked up with a private investigator named Catherine Townsend, who also hosts a true crime podcast called Hell and Gone.
‘We were able to determine that there was a, level three sex offender that lived on the same street as Christina, who inserted himself into the investigation, in my opinion, and went out looking for her,’ Amy said.
She added that the sex offender was a pallbearer at Christina’s funeral but later mysteriously vanished. The Cross County Sheriff’s Office wasn’t able to comment on whether they were investigating a sex offender in relation to Christina’s murder.
The first federal law to address sex offenses was passed years later in 1994, which started the registry program.
In 1996, Megan’s Law came into effect, which required states to provide public information on sex offenders. Since Christina’s death occurred prior to these laws, the alleged sex offender who lived on her street wouldn’t have been public knowledge.
The gruesome tragedy shocked the rural small town and has still lived in locals’ minds in the decades that have followed.
Jackie White, the man who found Christina’s body, told local ABC affiliate, KATV News, that he saw her floating in Cow Lake Ditch by a bridge, nearly four miles outside of where she was last seen.
The small town of Arkansas was rocked when police began investigating a murder in 1991
‘We looked down from the bridge and there she was against a little sapling tree and she was floating back and forth,’ White told the outlet.
‘And we went down to check. I took a stick and kind of rolled her over. I wasn’t sure it was her or a [living] person… and her eyes was open.’
James Pat Ballard III, a classmate of Christina’s, recalled to KATV, that the shocking murder changed Hickory Ridge.
He said that he didn’t believe Christina’s death was accidental and didn’t understand how she would’ve wandered four miles out of town while she was selling jewelry.
‘It was quite odd to me that a kid that young would have been able to make it all the way out of town, to the ditch, and drowned on accident. And there was some question about it could have been an accident, but I don’t see that happening,’ he explained.
Decades later, the ominous man in the blue car remains a mystery, and questions loom over what happened to Christina in her final hours.
Hickory Ridge was plagued with tragedies after Christina’s death, which still has many unanswered questions
Cross County Sheriff David West told the DailyMail.com that there hasn’t been any new evidence in the case.
‘We’re still hoping to find new evidence but as of right now, we’re still at a stalemate,’ he added.
Amy said that even though Christina’s case has gone cold, she wants to find answers for the little girl’s family.
‘I am hopeful for her family that there will be answers. But, just from what I’ve seen, going and reinvestigating a homicide case, or any kind of case, when you’re going this far out from 1991 to 2025 – people have died, people have moved, people have just forgotten.’
Even though years have gone by, Amy hopes that the renewed interest in Christina’s case may trigger someone’s memory.
‘It’s really hard to bring someone’s mind back to May of 1991. But yes, I remain hopeful, and I hope that with every interview that I can do and every way I can get her story out there, that it may trigger someone’s memory or maybe pull on somebody’s heartstrings,’ she told the DailyMail.com.
Amy, who is in contact with Christina’s family, said every anniversary of their daughter’s death is a painful reminder of the tragedy that took her.
Her father-in-law’s trial gave Christina’s family false hope, and when the charges were dropped in 2000, they were forced to live with unanswered questions.
Christina’s death still haunts Hickory Ridge, a town that has been plagued by tragedy after her body was pulled from a creek decades ago.
