I’ve dwelt in the true crime cave for far too long, though it seems I will never “grow out” of my fascination with the worst people can do and those willing to do it. Over the last ten years, I’ll go a good while without falling down a true crime rabbit hole and it takes something shocking or bizarre to pull me in. The case of Tristan Brübach was such a case, as was the Idaho Four. Today’s case has been a morbid fascination for me for a few years because it is full of bizarre details that, if not wholly unique to the case, are so rare that even with my near-encyclopedic knowledge base, I can’t think of another case that has the same set of details.

In Lawton, Oklahoma on April 8, 1976, three-year-old twin sisters Mary and Tina Carpitcher were visiting their grandmother when they went missing. One moment they were in the house, watching television, and the next they were gone. Two days later, neighborhood children were playing in an abandoned house and heard noises coming from the refrigerator. Inside the children found Mary and Tina. Mary had died of asphyxiation but Tina had been able to breathe through a small crack in the seal on the refrigerator. Tina also had bite marks all over her arms, though some reports indicate she was bitten several times on just one arm.

Tina’s family insisted that she did not have any bite marks on her arms before she disappeared, implying that, for whatever reason, the person who abducted her had bitten her hard before placing her and her sister into the refrigerator. Tina told the authorities who had done this to her – a friend of her aunt’s named Jackie Roubideaux – but authorities dismissed her account because she was a toddler and therefore her testimony was unreliable, and there was little to no corroborating evidence to justify arresting Jackie Roubideaux.

A year and a half later, Nima Louise Carter, 19 months old, went missing from her home in Lawton. It was Halloween night, 1977, and her parents, George and Rose, subscribed to the parenting method of letting their child cry it out when she became upset at bedtime. Lots of parents follow similar advice, with the belief being that it enables children to learn how to self-soothe. George and Rose later regretted their decision to let their little girl cry alone in her room because she was missing when Rose went to wake her the next morning.

Initially, the police focused on George and Rose Carter as the primary suspects, as is common in such cases. However, their stories never changed and both passed a lie detector test. There were other suspects, among them the family babysitter, Jackie Roubideaux.

I have never been able to find details of the investigation that eventually led to the arrest of Jackie Roubideaux, but she was arrested at some point in 1978 and went to trial in 1979. She was only arrested for the attack on the Carpitcher twins, however. Nima Carter’s case never went to trial because the district attorney felt it would be too expensive to pursue it. Roubideaux’s first trial ended in a mistrial as the jury could not agree on a verdict but her second trial resulted in a conviction. Tina Carpitcher gave testimony at both trials, and defense attorneys tried to dismiss her testimony as being coached, that a small child could not have possibly remembered all the details that Tina gave on the stand. It’s impossible now to say how much Tina’s memory was affected by her age and overhearing details from others, but her story had a ring of truth, and once it was on the record, other people finally came out and gave details they failed to give the police in 1976 because they did not want to get involved.

Tina said that she and Mary were watching television at their grandmother’s home when Roubideaux walked into the house and urged them to come with her. The girls recognized her, as she was a friend of their Aunt Thomasine, and initially seemed happy to accompany her. However, the two girls began to offer some resistance, as a neighbor reported seeing Roubideaux pulling the two girls by their arms as she walked by with them. The neighbor, the wife of the town fire chief, did not come out with this admission until Roubideaux was suspected in the Nima Carter abduction and murder. Once inside the abandoned house, Tina said that Roubideaux insisted they explore the house and when they finished looking around, she forced the girls into the refrigerator. She played it off as a game, telling the girls that when their aunt Thomasine found them, she would take them out for ice cream. The girls remained in the refrigerator for two days until older children who were playing in the abandoned house found them. If Tina herself indicated that Roubideaux had bitten her, I could not find testimony to that effect, but evidently she gave a fairly detailed account of what happened to her, so detailed that the defense attorney tried to impugn her testimony on the basis how young she was when the attack occurred. Testimony from very small children is always seen as suspect but Tina, who was nine and ten when she testified against Roubideaux, claimed she remembered these details with no prompting. Ultimately, the jury believed her in the second trial and sent Roubideaux to prison. She died in prison from liver cancer in 2005.

Although Roubideaux was sent to prison for the Carpitcher case, Nima Carter’s case technically remains an unsolved cold case. However, the circumstantial evidence in this case is compelling. Jackie Roubideaux was a babysitter who often cared for Nima when George and Rose Carter would go out on the weekends. George Carter said that Nima loved Roubideaux and would run to hug her whenever she saw her. But there were signs that perhaps Roubideaux was not as wholesome as she seemed. Nima’s grandmother said that Roubideaux always seemed odd and rubbed her the wrong way. A friend of Roubideaux’s reported that shortly before Nima was abducted and murdered, Roubideaux was angry that the Carters had used a different babysitter. She said the family had told her that she was their main babysitter. Angry, she proclaimed that if the Carters wanted it that way, so be it.

The Carter case was an unholy cross between a locked room mystery and urban legends come to life. The Carter home had been locked up that evening, but there was a back door that did not lock properly. Roubideaux, who was a frequent visitor to the home, knew about that door. Nima had been unusually upset that evening and cried for a very long time. Her exhausted parents stuck to their guns regarding letting her cry it out once it was established that she wasn’t hungry or in need of a diaper change. When Nima finally settled down, they fell asleep on the couch. When they woke the next morning, Nima was gone.

George is haunted by the notion that if they had only just checked on her, they might have interrupted or prevented entirely what happened to their daughter. There is an uneasy belief that Roubideaux had crept into the home much earlier and had hidden in Nima’s closet, waiting for the elder Carters to fall asleep. Once they crashed on the couch, Roubideaux is thought to have carried the little girl out of the house. Nima was taken to an abandoned duplex and placed alive in a refrigerator, where she was found almost a month later. The abandoned duplex was less than a mile from the abandoned house where the Carpitcher twins were found. Since Roubideaux was arrested after two attacks, there’s no way to say that she had a “signature.” A signature in this regard means a series of specific actions meaningful to the killer that connects the killer to the crimes, as well as linking together the crimes as being the work of one killer. However, there were some very interesting overlaps between the Carpitcher and Carter cases.

–The Carter and Carpitcher families were of Native descent. In the 1980s census, Comanche County, which included Lawton, only 4.9% of the population were of Native, Alaskan or otherwise indigenous heritage.

–The children in both cases knew Jackie Roubideaux.

–The children were taken to abandoned homes.

–The children were placed in abandoned refrigerators while still alive.

–The murder sites were within a mile of each other, indicating a killer operating in a specific area where he or she felt comfortable.

–Both times, other children found the girls in the refrigerators.

Though forensic psychologists cannot pin a signature on the above facts, we laypeople can safely say that these facts are unusual enough that it is very unlikely that two different people killed children in such a specific manner in such specific places focusing on such a specific ethnic group knowing children would likely find the bodies.

One of the most unpleasant potential signatures were the bites found on Tina, but the investigation is muddled enough that I don’t feel comfortable speaking about it. The bite marks were not photographed well, and at least one forensic expert said the bites resembled what one would expect from another child, speculating that Mary bit Tina several times as they struggled to get out of the refrigerator. This is not uncommon. In several cases where children were suffering and left to die (the Hinterkaifect case and several incidents where toddlers were accidentally left in sweltering cars immediately come to mind), children bit themselves and tore out their own hair. It does not seem impossible that Mary bit Tina when they were crammed into that refrigerator.

The bite marks are especially awful to discuss because if you research this case, you come across people who actually blame Mary’s death on Tina, speculating that Mary bit her sister because Tina would not permit her access to the small amount of air coming in on Tina’s side of the refrigerator. I guess those commenters think that three-year-old girls crammed in a refrigerator have the logical skills to figure out how to move positions continually to maintain access to air and that one of the toddlers decided to kill her own sister rather than share. It reminds of me all the idiocy that surrounds the Tristan Brübach case wherein people think a thirteen-year-old boy must have been a seasoned male prostitute who was killed by a john simply because he was a latchkey kid and rumors swirled around insisting he received terrible anal injuries in the attack.

George Carter maintains that he does not believe that Roubideaux killed his daughter. He just doesn’t think she had it in her to be so violent and cruel. He’s the only one who feels this way. His own mother said that she absolutely believes that Roubideaux took Nima and left her in that refrigerator. I can’t attest to why George believes that Roubideaux did not abduct his daughter and leave her to die but I have some theories. One is that often men have a hard time believing a woman – any woman – would do such a thing. After all, his daughter loved Roubideaux, so she must have been a good woman, in George’s eyes. Another is that if he believes that Roubideaux did, in fact, abduct his daughter, he has to also admit there is a good chance that Roubideaux was already in the house and that her presence in the dark scared his daughter so much that she stayed up crying for hours, and he and his wife made the decision to ignore her cries. That’s a heavy burden for a parent to carry and it makes perfect sense that he would want to imagine a master criminal did this to his child and not the dumpy babysitter he willingly let into his home many times before.

Of course, every parent of a crime victim can play the moral accountant and find all kinds of reasons why they could have prevented harm to their child if they’d just done something different. The Carter family back door did not lock, but Lawton at the time was a small big town, if that makes sense. The town had about 80,000 people, but it was a simpler time in a simpler place. It’s easy to see why a broken back lock would not be immediately repaired, especially since only people close to the family would have known about the lock. No one in the family bears any responsibility for what happened to Nima. In fact, the broken lock may not have mattered in the long run because Mary and Tina were abducted in broad daylight after Roubideaux let herself into the house. The back door just enabled her to abduct the girl at night when there would be fewer witnesses.

Tina Carpitcher never deviated from her story that Jackie Roubideaux was her abductor and the murderer of her twin sister and Jackie Roubideaux never admitted any guilt. There is, of course, a chance that Roubideaux was innocent but the circumstantial evidence doesn’t really point in that direction. In the end, two little girls died terrible deaths, in a dark confined space, unable to get air. Perhaps I am looking for comfort in believing Roubideaux killed Mary and Nima because someone has to pay for such a crime, but I sincerely believe that Tina, at age three, had the capacity to say that Roubideaux was her abductor. She knew the woman, she had enough language acquired to convey that Roubideaux abducted her and her sister, and she accused Roubideaux from the very first time someone asked her what happened to her.

This story brings with it parallels to a couple of urban legends that maybe aren’t so legendary after all. For example, consider the stories about a stranger lurking in a child’s closet, secure in the belief that parents won’t come investigate because they will dismiss any fears as “there’s no monster in your closet, now go to sleep.” That actually has happened in real life more times than I can link to. People are always told to remove the doors from old refrigerators and freezers when they are thrown away because children can crawl in them and die, and of course these instructions only came on the heel of many small children suffocating inside old appliances.  This case was a perfect storm of how it is that the weird, creepy stories we get told about a friend of a friend’s cousin’s niece have some basis in reality and it’s hard to feel safe in a world where just wanting your child to sleep through the night can be the reason they are killed.

In the end, Nima Carter’s Halloween night abduction may ensure parents double checked their locks and reminded their children of stranger danger, but ultimately it drove home a far more frightening fact: in the right circumstances, someone you trust could creep into your home, take your child and spirit them away without making a noise.