missopinionated

NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT.  

ANY SIMILARITIES ARE A COINCIDENCE.

This is about a murder of a young girl I read about in our local paper when I was 9.  I saved the clipping and put it in my scrapbook.  Through the years I’ve taken out the scrapbook just to re-read the article.  I always wondered if it were a local boy who killed 14 year old Jamie Pickett in July 1974? 

They found her nude body dumped in a gravel pit about 20 miles east of the convenience mart where she was last seen.  She had been raped and strangled two days before.  Her clothes and bra were found along the highway leading away from the pit.  Her underwear and sandals were never located. 

Police interviewed several suspects  (even the happy face killer, who was not in the region at that time.)  Jamie’s killer has never been found.  Her murder is over 3o years old and I’ve never stopped thinking about it.  I can’t stop thinking about Jamie.  In the 1970’s, those types of crimes were unheard of in our community.  

 I know who killed Jamie, this is no BS.  

It really freaked me out when all the pieces started coming together.   Let me explain.   I still live in the same small community I grew up in.  It used to be very small, you know, the kind where everybody knows everybody, and alot of people come from the same gene pool.  

In January 2008, I showed my friend, Carl that clipping I’d been saving of Jamie’s 1974 murder.  To my disbelief he uttered the words, “Oh yeah, Stewart knows who killed her.”  Stewart and Carl have been friends for over 25 years, I’ve known Stewart even longer.  Carl then said, “He’s told me that story so many times, over and over again, you ought to ask him about it sometime.”  I asked Carl, “Are you sure we’re talking about the same girl?”  He said, “I’m positive.”  I asked him to tell me the story. 

He said he couldn’t remember all of it, but that it did involve someone that I knew from high school.  All he could  remember was the name Mike.  After a half hour of looking through my high school yearbooks, I read off a name he finally recognized.  It was Mike Banks who had bragged to Stewart and another buddy about raping a girl and dumping her body in the gravel pit.  Just a few days after her body was found, Mike took Stewart and another friend to the exact spot where she’d been found, almost gloating and pre-occupied in his demeanor.  

I began thinking to myself, “If that were true, why would this not have come out sooner, how can you NOT go to authorities with this information, especially since it involved a 14 year old girl?)  That, I will never understand. 

Mike would have been close to 16 years old when the crime occurred on a weekend night.  He may of still had his learner’s permit when he took his parents sedan and went cruising around town,  possibly when the parents were sleeping or while they were away.   The family lived on the east side of town, Mike’s sister was a popular cheerleader in the class below me and Mike is three years older than I am.  I saw them around but never talked with either one of them.  Jamie’s body was found dumped 10 miles east of their home.

While I was still attempting to absorb the fact that I had the answer to Jamie’s murder, I got curious.  What has Mike been doing since high school?  I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him for years, so I googled him.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  He is a convicted sexual predictor currently out on supervised release from a federal prison–it’s him, there is a photo.  He had just served 10 years for a sexual assault and sodomy.  As I googled on, I found that Mike was also convicted and served time for a sex crime including unlawful abduction when he was 19-20.  Some of the current conditions of his supervised release are having no contact with minors, not allowed drive a vehicle, no alcohol, and he must undergo regular treatment.  He will be free and off parole in 2018 and is living in a nearby city.

When I called detectives and asked if Jamie Pickett’s murder had ever been solved, I was told all their leads were exhausted, but that two detectives were still assigned to it.  I repeated the story Carl had told me, I could sense they believed me.  They said that the name of Mike Banks had never come up before. They called me a week later and thanked me, they then instructed me to nobody, not a soul.  I been checking his sex offender page to see if it had been updated to say he had been arrested.  Unfortunately, to this day he’s a free bird. 

Ironically enough, aproximately one week after I went to authorities, Mike had his resume posted on Craig’s List, trying to get a job.  I kept it in case the detectives would ever like to see it.  I appreciate you thoughts and thanks for stopping by. I’m tired of that killer still roaming free, hopefully something will come of this. 

ONLY THE  NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT. 

ANY SIMILARITIES ARE COINCIDENTAL.

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