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Death in the Fridge
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The city of Lawton in Comanche County, Oklahoma lies between the Wichita Mountains to the northwest and the rolling prairie of the Great Plains to the south. It’s a prosperous city, partly due to the continued growth of the nearby US Army base at Fort Still. On Halloween 1977 the streets of Lawton, just like many other American cities, echoed to the sounds of groups of happy children trick or treating...
One child who wasn’t taking part was Nima Louise Carter. But then Nima was just nineteen months old and still a little young to understand what was going on. At around nine thirty in the evening her mother, Rose, put her down to sleep in the crib in her bedroom. Around 10:30 her father George checked on her, and she seemed to be peacefully sleeping.
Her parents slept, as usual, in the living-room of their small house. They woke the next morning, later than usual. Generally, Nima woke them early. Her mother went through to the little girl’s bedroom and was horrified to discover the crib empty and no sign of Nima. After an increasingly frantic search of the house revealed no trace of their daughter, the Carters called in the Comanche County Police.
Detectives were quickly on the scene and it didn’t take long for them to discover that there was no sign that any windows or doors had been forced from the outside. The windows to Nima’s room in particular were still securely locked. Initially this led to speculation that her parents may have been involved in her disappearance, but further investigation revealed the horrifying fact that Nima’s abductor had been hiding in the closet in the little girl’s bedroom when she was put to bed, and must have remained there while the Carters fell asleep.
Then, this unknown person had crept out of the closet, taken the sleeping little girl from her crib and crept quietly out of the house with her. This suggested an audacious intruder who had knowledge of the Carters house, but initial enquiries provided no clues as to who this might be.
Nima and her parents were of Indian descent, as were many of their friends and family in Lawton and the Indian community in Lawton was horrified by the abduction of the little girl. Searches were undertaken and people provided as much assistance to the Police as they could, but there was no trace of Nima, no obvious motive for her abduction and no clues as to the identity of her abductor. The Carters stumbled through from day to day in a haze of numb uncertainty, buoyed only by the faint hope that their only child might one day be returned to them alive and well.
That hope was finally dashed twenty-three days later when some boys were playing in a dilapidated, empty duplex apartment four blocks from the Carter’s home. One of the boys opened the door of a large refrigerator in the apartment’s kitchen and then fled in horror as he first became aware of a terrible smell and then a tiny body tumbled out...
Police were called and quickly identified the partially decomposed body as that of Nima Louise Carter, still wearing the red tee-shirt and diaper she had been put to bed in. An autopsy proved that Nima had died as a result of suffocation after being locked inside the refrigerator. She had no other injuries.
Photo: inkknife_2000
It appeared that her abductor had taken Nima from the Carter house, carried her the four blocks to the abandoned duplex and had then deliberately locked her inside the refrigerator and left her to die slowly of suffocation, her cries muffled by the airtight refrigerator seals. It was a brutal and callous murder, but it was also one without an obvious motive.
Nima had not been sexually assaulted or harmed in any way before being locked in the refrigerator and there had been no attempt to extort a ransom from the Carters. Detectives were baffled until they recalled a case from 1976 which had a number of disturbing similarities...
In April 1976, three year old Mary Elizabeth Carpitcher and her twin sister, Augustine Lena "Tina" Carpitcher, were abducted from their Grandmother’s house a few blocks from the Carter’s house. Two days later, children playing near an abandoned house heard faint cries and, when they investigated, found the two girls trapped inside a locked refrigerator. Tina had managed to survive by breathing through a small hole in the casing of the refrigerator but Mary was dead of suffocation.
Like the Carters, the Carpitchers were a family of Indian extraction and the abandoned house in which the twins were discovered was less than a mile from the duplex where Nima Carter’s body was later found.
Officially, the abduction of the Carpitcher girls and the murder of Mary was still part of an ongoing investigation in Halloween 1977, but Detectives privately believed that they knew who was responsible. When she was rescued, Tina Carpitcher had first said that "Jackie Burnett" had put the two girls in the refrigerator. A local young man named Jackie Burnett was extensively questioned by Police but they were able to rule him out of the investigation.
However, during further extended questioning by Police child interview specialists, Tina named the person who had put her and her sister in the refrigerator as Jackie Roubideaux, a seventeen year old girl who was a friend of the Carpitcher family and had sometimes acted as a babysitter for the twin girls.
Jackie Roubideaux was also of Indian extraction and the Roubideaux, Carter and Carpitcher families were all friendly – Jackie Roubideaux had often gone to the cinema with the Carpitcher twins, their Grandmother and their Aunt and the Carter family was also friendly with the Roubideaux family.
On the day that they were abducted, Jackie Roubideaux had spent time playing with the Carpitcher twins and Police had located a witness who had seen an “Indian woman” dragging two young girls across a piece of waste ground in the vicinity of the abandoned house in which they were eventually found.
Police asked the Carter family if they also knew Jackie Roubideaux. They said that they not only knew her, she had babysat Nima on perhaps a dozen occasions, the last being the night before the little girl disappeared. Jackie Roubideaux lived in the area with her mother, Sherrie Roubideaux and her grandmother, Winnie Haloo. Both her mother and Grandmother were in poor health and Jackie spent much of her time looking after the two older women. The family struggled to get by on welfare payments and the money that Jackie was able to make from babysitting was a welcome addition to the family income.
So, police had a suspect who was familiar with Nima Carter’s house, had been with the little girl less than 24 hours before she disappeared and who had some involvement in a similar case which had led to the death of one other young child in similar circumstances. However, what they didn’t have was any shred of motive or anything other than circumstantial evidence. The only direct witness testimony which linked Jackie Roubideaux with the crimes was that of young Tina Carpitcher.
Jackie Roubideaux was finally charged with the murder of Mary Carpitcher in October 1979. She wasn’t formally charged with the murder of Nima Carter, but, when the case came to trial in 1982, the prosecution linked the two cases and highlighted the similarities and the connection of Jackie Roubideaux to both. However, Jackie denied all charges, the jury wasn’t certain and the trial ended in a mistrial when it was unable to agree a verdict.
In May 1983, Jackie Roubideaux was tried for the second time in the Comanche County District Court for the murder of Mary Carpitcher. As in the previous trial, the prosecution also made reference to the murder of Nima Carter and the similarities between the two cases. The court was also told how Jackie Roubideaux was also under suspicion for raising a number of false fire alarms in the area of the Carpitcher house prior to the abduction of the twins.
As before, Jackie denied all charges but, this time the Jury were convinced by the prosecution case and Jackie Roubideaux was found guilty of the murder in the First Degree of Mary Carpitcher. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence which was upheld despite an appeal placed in 1985.
Jackie Roubideaux, aged twenty-four at the time of her conviction and mother to a three year old child of her own, spent the rest of her life in prison. She died in 2005 of liver cancer. However, she always maintained that she was innocent of the murder of Mary Carpitcher and vehemently denied any involvement in the death of Nima Carter.
Despite her denials, it seems almost certain that, as a teenager, Jackie Roubideaux did kill both Mary Carpitcher and Nima Carter. What we can never guess is what led her to do these things. There was certainly no obvious reason or motive - she had no reason to resent either the Carpitcher or Carter families in general or their children specifically and she made no attempt to profit in any way from either crime.
All we know is that, for reasons that will most likely never make sense, on Halloween 1977 she made every parent’s nightmare come true. The Carters put their little girl to bed believing that she was in a safe place.
Just imagine how they felt when they later discovered that, as they did so, her abductor and murderer had been hiding in the closet, waiting for her opportunity to strike...
