Solved cold cases in Arkansas
3 documented cases.
James Ricks
James Ricks, a 27-year-old African-American father from North Little Rock, Arkansas, was abducted in 1967 by two brothers fleeing a robbery whose own car had broken down. They took Ricks and his 1964 Oldsmobile, shot and wounded him, handcuffed him, and drove roughly 90 miles to a farm near Newport in rural Jackson County, where James Leon Clay shot him in the back of the head. His skeletal remains were found by a man and his son on August 27, 1967. The Clay brothers were convicted in the 1960s only of stealing the car and crossing state lines with it, never of the murder. Nearly half a century later, a fellow inmate's tip and a recorded jailhouse confession reopened the case, and in 2016 James Leon Clay pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years in the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Rebekah Gould
Rebekah Christian Gould was a 22-year-old Northwest Arkansas Community College student from Mountain View, Arkansas. On the morning of September 20, 2004, she dropped her boyfriend, Casey McCullough, at his job at a Sonic in Melbourne, stopped at the Possum Trot convenience store for coffee and a breakfast sandwich, and returned to McCullough's mobile home in rural Izard County to pack for the drive back to school. She was never seen alive again. A week later, on September 27, 2004, a search party found her body down a steep embankment beside Arkansas Highway 9 south of Melbourne. She had been bludgeoned about the head. For sixteen years the case stalled, with investigators' suspicion lingering on people close to her. The break did not come from forensic science. It came from the public: after journalist and licensed private investigator Catherine Townsend launched the podcast Hell and Gone in 2018 and used local radio and social media to push the case back into view, tips poured in. Among more than a hundred leads, two people who did not know each other independently reported the same thing about William Alama Miller, the cousin of Gould's boyfriend. Those tips, combined with reinvigorated police work by a new Arkansas State Police investigator, led to Miller's arrest in Oregon on November 7, 2020. He confessed, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on October 18, 2022, and was sentenced to 40 years in the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Sabrina Underwood
Sabrina Lynn Underwood was a 19-year-old woman from Huntsville, Arkansas, who vanished on January 20, 1991. Her mother dropped her off near Bear Creek in Boone County, where Sabrina planned to hitchhike roughly 70 miles east to Calico Rock to visit an inmate at the North Central Unit prison. She never arrived. When the man she planned to visit called asking why she had missed the visit, her family reported her missing. Three months later, on April 8, 1991, two turkey hunters discovered a bundle of clothing and human remains near the Gum Springs Cemetery in Fulton County, about 140 miles away. The Arkansas Medical Examiner identified the remains as Underwood, but the cause of death was initially ruled undetermined, and the case went cold for more than three decades. It was solved not by forensic science but by a criminal informant: in July 2022, a fellow inmate at the Varner Maximum Security Unit, where Rick Allen Headley was serving a life sentence for murdering his estranged wife, told Arkansas State Police that Headley had confessed to killing Underwood in a written letter. Investigators interviewed Headley on August 24, 2022, and he admitted to writing the confession letter and described in detail how he picked Sabrina up while hitchhiking, stabbed her, hid her body, and disposed of the knife and his clothes. A second person also told investigators that Headley had confessed to get the killing off his chest. Headley was charged with first-degree murder on October 17, 2023, and on December 11, 2023, he pleaded guilty in Fulton County Circuit Court and was sentenced to 40 years in the Arkansas Department of Corrections.