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The Watch Stopped at 4:47 - The Arm in the Embankment · True Crime: Killer Confessions

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 6.40 in the morning on December 11, 2023, a
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: 14-year-old girl on her paper route stopped walking. The temperature
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: was 22 degrees. The Harwick Bypass construction corridor had stripped
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: the hillside bare, and from a nine-foot embankment, a forearm
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: bone extended upward at an angle, radius and ulna, still articulated,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: still wearing a flowered blouse, it looked to Sarah Roberts.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: like something reaching. The arm had been there for 32 years,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: and on its wrist sealed in clay and silence, a
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: watch was still keeping the moment it stopped. That watch
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: would eventually answer the question a family had carried since
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: December of 1991. Not all of it, but enough, enough,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: to finally put a name to the arm, a face
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: to the bones, and a verdict on the man who
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: put them there. There is something specific about this case,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: that resists easy understanding. The facts are plain. The evidence
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: is extraordinary. But what stays with you is smaller than
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: either of those things. It is a woman who called
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: ahead that afternoon to say she was bringing a lemon
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: cake and never walked through the door. Christine Phillips was
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: 53 years old in December of 1991. She lived in
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: a two-bedroom ranch house on Orchard Bell Road in Mercer Township,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Calloway County. The house had a sunroom at the back,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: She had converted it into an office. From that sunroom
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: she ran a small tax preparation business. She kept books
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: for several local accounts. She was precise with numbers and reliable.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: With deadlines, the kind of person clients called first when
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: something did not add up. She drove a beige Oldsmobile.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: She organized the church potluck rotation. Every Thursday evening she
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: played Pinocchio at a neighbor's house. And she was never late.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Her mother, Vivian Oakes, had given her a Seiko watch
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: years earlier. Cream face, gold tone case, tan leather band.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Christine wore it regularly. In early November of 1991, five
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: weeks before she disappeared, she walked into a pharmacy in
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Mercer Township and bought a replacement band. Burgundy rubber, sports style,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: the receipt stayed in her bank records. She replaced the
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: band on a Tuesday. She wore the watch the following Thursday.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: She wore it the Thursday after that and the Thursday
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: after that. Her son Marcus was 22 that year. He
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: was living nearby. They spoke often. People who knew Christine
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: described the same qualities in the same order. Organized, warm, dependable.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: No one described a woman preparing to leave. No debt
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: had been found in her records. No suspicious withdrawals. No
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: signs of a relationship in collapse, by every measure visible
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: to the people around her. Christine Phillips was exactly where
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: she intended to be, in Mercer Township in December, planning
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: to walk into a Thursday night card game with a
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: lemon cake. That is the detail that anchors everything that follows.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: She called the Pinochle host that afternoon. To confirm she
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: was bringing it. She had already baked it. She was
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: planning ahead for an ordinary evening. The way she always did.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: She never arrived. The following morning, her beige Oldsmobile turned
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: up in a gravel lot behind the post office on
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Cooper Street,. 8 miles northwest of her house. Her purse
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: was on the passenger seat. Her wallet was inside it,
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: with $ 43 cash still in it. No signs of struggle
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: anywhere near the car. The post office was in the
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: wrong direction. The Pinochle Club was south. The car was northwest.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Investigators at the time noted this, and moved on. Detective
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Boyd Arnett classified Christine as a voluntary missing person within
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: 24 hours. His reasoning rested on a superficial similarity to
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: a prior case in the county, the theory hardened into
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: the official record. No one interviewed a freelance HVAC contractor
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: named Kent Hughes, who had worked twice at a cooperative
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: property in the area that year and shared a bookkeeping
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: client with Christine. His name did not appear in Arnett's file.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Arnett retired in 2004. He died in 2019, five years
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: before a road crew opened the hillside at Harwick Bypass
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: and a teenager stopped mid-route on a frozen morning. Christine's
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: sister Vivian kept a photograph on her refrigerator. It was
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: from a press conference held outside the Callaway County Sheriff's
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Office in the spring of 1992, poorly attended, small local coverage.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Vivian isn't it. She is holding a sign with Christine's name.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: She kept it there for 32 years, the watch was
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: still on her wrist. That was the first thing Glenn
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: Fleming registered when the forensic team cleared the embankment soil
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: away from her left arm. A psycho. Cream face, gold-tone case,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: burgundy rubber sports band, crystal intact. Secondhand stopped at 447.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: After 32 years in the ground, the watch had survived
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: in better condition than most things people keep in a drawer.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Fleming had been with Callaway County for 14 years. He
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: had inherited Christine's file from a cold case storage box,
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: sometime in the previous decade, read it once, and set
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: it aside. There was not much to read. Boyd Arnett's
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: original classification, voluntary missing, had calcified into the record with
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: almost nothing beneath it. No persons of interest, no follow-up interviews.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: A theory built on similarity to another case, not on
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Christine herself. Standing at the embankment on the morning of
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: December 11th, 2023. Fleming was looking at evidence Arnett never had.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: The recovery took three days. What emerged was nearly a
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: complete skeleton, the floral blouse fragile but identifiable, and one
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: rubber-soled boot, size 7, still laced. The boot had been
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: displaced by the tree-clearing machine that opened the embankment. Everything
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: else was where it had been placed. Then there was
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: the watch. A conservator, who examined it later, described the
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: survival as, quote, about as unlikely as finding a cork-sealed
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: bottle intact after 30 years. The burial zone was unusually dry.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: The clay-heavy soil and the rubber band had combined to
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: create a near-air-tight anaerobic pocket around the watch face. The
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: battery had run until the early 1990s and then stopped.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: Whatever moment the second hand had been marking when the
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: battery died, 4.47, That is where it stayed. The crystal
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: never cracked. The case never corroded through. The question that
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: no one could answer yet was which 447. There is
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: a receipt in Christine's bank records dated November 8th, 1991.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: She walked into a pharmacy in Mercer Township and bought
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: a burgundy rubber sports band. The original band on the
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: watch was tan leather, a gift from her mother. Christine
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: replaced it herself. five weeks before she disappeared. That new
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: band sitting snug against her wrist is exactly what created
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: the seal. A small practical decision she made on an
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: ordinary Tuesday afternoon became the reason the watch survived three
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: decades underground. The dental comparison that confirmed her identity came
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: back December 20th, nine days after Sarah Roberts stopped her
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: paper route at the edge of a frozen embankment. Fleming's
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: next task was to build what Arnett had never built,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: a picture of who was actually in Christine's life. In
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: the months before December 5th, she ran her bookkeeping and
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: tax prep business from the sunroom of her house on
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Orchard Bell Road. Her clients were small local operations, a
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: feed cooperative, a fuel delivery subcontractor called Garrison Supply, a
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: few others. Her schedule was structured. Thursday nights, Pinnacle. Church
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: potluck rotations. The lemon cake call to the host that
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: afternoon was entirely consistent with how she operated. She planned ahead.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: She confirmed things. What Arnett's file had never explored was
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: Garrison Supply. Christine had been Garrison Supply's bookkeeper until the
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: fall of 1991. That same year, a freelance HVAC and
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: boiler contractor named Kent Hughes had been hired twice, spring
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: and summer, at a feed cooperative property in the area.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: He also did work for Garrison Supply. His name did
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: not appear anywhere in Arnett's original file. He had never
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: been interviewed. Hughes was 44 years old in 1991. He
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: was 65 when Fleming's investigation found him. Living 60 miles
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: east of Callaway County, there is a detail about Christine's
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: car that had always sat in the record without resolution.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: The gravel lot behind the Cooper Street post office was.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: 8 miles northwest of her house. The Pinnacle Club was south.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: If Christine had been driving to the card game that
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Thursday evening, she was heading the wrong direction entirely. Arnett's
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: notes acknowledged the discrepancy. His conclusion was that it was
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: consistent with a voluntary departure, someone leaving town on their
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: own terms. But look at that line. from a different angle.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: The post office lot is not a destination. It is
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: a place you pull into because someone asked you to.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: It is the kind of location you agree to. Because
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: it is close to your house. Because it is a
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: place you know. Because meeting someone there does not feel alarming.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: The purse was on the passenger seat. The wallet had
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: $ 43 in it. She had not taken her money. She
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: had not taken anything. She had just stopped the car
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: and gotten out. Fleming requested aerial survey records for the
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Harwick Bypass Corridor and the area behind Garrison Supply's property.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: What he found in late 1980s imagery was a fire
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: maintenance track, a narrow unpaved access lane running from behind
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: the Garrison Supply lot back into the tree line toward
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: what would later become the Harwick Construction Corridor. By 2023,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: that track had been grown over for years. In 1991,
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: it was accessible. The burial depth was approximately four and
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: a half feet. That is not a panicked, improvised grave.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: That is a hole that takes time and physical effort.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Someone had planned where, and had the means to get there.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: When Kent Hughes agreed to speak with detectives after his
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: attorney confirmed that physical evidence was already in the crime lab,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: he did not deny being with Christine on the evening
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: of December 5th. He described a brief relationship in the
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: fall of 1991. He said she had ended it. He
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: said he went to her house that evening to talk.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: He said things became heated. He said she fell. He
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: could not or would not describe how she fell. or
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: what had happened in the moments before, the medical examiner
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: had already answered that question. The hyoid bone, a small
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: horseshoe-shaped structure at the base of the throat, had been
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: recovered intact. It showed bilateral symmetric fracture. The medical examiner
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: testified that this pattern is consistent with sustained manual compression
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: of the throat. It is not consistent with a fall.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Picture Christine's house on Orchard Bell Road at dusk on
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: December 5th. The sunroom where she kept her files and
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: her adding machine. The lemon cake on the counter, already baked,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: already waiting. She had confirmed she was bringing it that afternoon.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: She was going to that card game. Then Kent Hughes arrived.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: His account reaches that point, the heated exchange, the claim
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: that she fell. And stops. No mechanics. No sequence. Just
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: the shape of a story that ends before the most
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: important part. Walk it against the physical record and the
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: version collapses. A fall does not produce bilateral symmetric fracture
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: of the hyoid. That pattern requires hands. It requires sustained pressure.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: The medical examiner was unambiguous on this point, and the
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: jury heard it. Now consider the car at the Cooper
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Street lot. If Christine had simply fallen inside her own home,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: the car has no explanation. It had to move. Someone
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: drove it to a location eight-tenths of a mile away.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: and left her purse on the seat and walked away. Or,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: more likely, had a second car waiting. The post office
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: lot is between her house and the Garrison Supply property.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: It sits near the route someone familiar with that area
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: would use to reach the fire maintenance track behind the treeline.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Hughes knew that property. He had worked there twice in 1991.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: But here is where the picture shifts in a way
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: that was not visible until late in the investigation. Detectives
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: working the referral from Callaway County found employment records placing
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Hughes at an apartment complex in a neighboring county six
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: weeks before a woman named Patrice Wynn disappeared in the
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: fall of 19-teen. 88. Patrice Wynn's case is still open.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Her remains have not been located. Hughes has not been
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: charged in connection with her disappearance. What that record does
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: is reframe the shape of the questions. Hughes's account to
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: detectives was that December 5th was an unplanned confrontation, an impulse,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: a terrible decision made in a heated moment. But the
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: depth of Christine's grave was the depth of Christine's grave,
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: the accessibility of the burial site through a track he knew,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: and the formal documentation of a prior connection to another
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: missing woman. Together, those details point towards something that does
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: not look like impulse. The jury deliberated for 11 hours.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: They came back with convictions on all counts, including first-degree murder.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Nine days after the jury returned its verdict, dental records
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: confirmed what detectives had suspected since December of 23. The
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: remains recovered from the Harwick Bypass Embankment belonged to Christine Phillips.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: She had been missing for 32 years. Kent Hughes was
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: arrested on February 3, 24. He spoke to detectives after
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: his attorney informed him that physical evidence was already inside
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: the crime lab. His account came in pieces. He admitted
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: he had gone to Christine's house on the evening of
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: December 5th. He admitted things became heated, he admitted he
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: had panicked, made a decision, and carried it with him
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: for 32 years. What he did not admit... What he
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: would contest through every stage of the proceedings was that
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: he had intended to kill her. The eve of trial,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: he entered a partial guilty plea. He acknowledged being present
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: at Christine's death. He acknowledged disposing of her remains. He maintained,
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: on the record, that her death was accidental. The hyoid
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: bone said otherwise. Bilateral symmetric fractures of that bone do
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: not result from a fall. The medical examiner was direct
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: in testimony. That injury pattern requires sustained manual compression of
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: the throat. The jury heard the plea. The jury heard
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the medical examiner. They deliberated for 11 hours. On a
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Tuesday in October 24, they returned convictions on all counts,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: including first-degree murder. The judge sentenced Hughes to life in
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: prison without the possibility of parole. The Patrice Wynn file
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: remains open. Investigators in the neighboring county have formally documented
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: the employment overlap. Hughes performing HVAC work at her apartment complex.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Six weeks before her disappearance in the fall of 1988,
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: her remains have not been located. Hughes has not been
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: charged in connection with her case. The referral sits with
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: that jurisdiction, active. There is a detail from the sentencing
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: that does not appear in any official record. It lives
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: only in what people who were in that courtroom that
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: day chose to remember. Marcus Phillips drove in from two
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: states away. His teenage daughter sat beside him in the gallery.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: She never knew her grandmother. She sat in a room
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: where a jury had just decided what Christine Phillips' last
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: minutes looked like, and she listened to a sentence delivered
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: by a judge to a man who had spent 32
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: years going about his life while her dream father spent
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: 32 years not knowing. The watch was returned to the
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: family after trial. Marcus kept it. The battery remains unreplaced.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: The second hand still points to 447. That time has
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: never been publicly confirmed as the moment of Christine's death.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: What is confirmed is that the watch stopped, that a
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: burgundy rubber sports band purchased at a Mercer Township pharmacy
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: on November 8th, 1991, five weeks before Christine disappeared, created
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: a near airtight seal in clay heavy soil. dry enough
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: to preserve a crystal face and a cracked but whole
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: band for more than three decades. The conservator called it
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: about as unlikely as finding a cork-sealed bottle intact after
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: 30 years. Christine bought that band herself. It kept time
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: on her wrist. It kept time in the ground. It
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: stopped and it waited. Vivian Oakes, Christine's younger sister, had
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: kept a photograph on her refrigerator for 32 years. It
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: was taken outside the Callaway County Sheriff's Office in the
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: spring of 1992. A press conference that drew small attendance
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: and smaller coverage. A family asking questions in a parking lot,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: a case already hardening into a file. The evening of sentencing,
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Vivian removed the photograph from the refrigerator. She had kept
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: it there because looking away felt like agreeing that Christine
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: did not matter. She took it down because, after 32 years,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: the answer had finally arrived. Christine Phillips was a bookkeeper
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: who organized church potlucks and made lemon cake for Thursday
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: night card games. She was 53 years old. She called
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: her friend that afternoon to confirm she was on her way.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: She never got there. And for 32 years, the ground
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: held what the investigation could not find. until a 14-year-old
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: on a paper route at 6.40 in the morning, in
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: 22-degree cold, looked up at an embankment and saw an
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: arm reaching toward the light. This show is made by
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Oboe Media.