New York’s 1987 Unsolved Murder Finally Closed — She Was Buried With Her Shopping

Every summer for years, a man packed a cooler, loaded his wife and two young kids into the car, and drove to a quiet wooded spot for a picnic. He’d lay out a blanket. His children would play in the grass a few feet away, and he would check carefully without ever saying why, that the ground beneath them hadn’t been disturbed.

 Because buried there, under the same patch of earth his kids ran across, was a 16-year-old girl he had murdered. He lived 200 yard from her grave. He raised his family beside it. And for 7 years, no one, not the police, not her parents, not the town that never stopped looking for her, had any idea. In the summer of 1987, O Sable Forks, New York, was a town built on trust.

Nestled at the edge of the Aderandac Mountains, it was a place where everyone knew their neighbors and the rhythms of life felt predictable and safe. This was not a community that feared the dark, the danger was always assumed to be somewhere else. 16-year-old Carrie Lynn Nixon was a fixture in this small town life.

 An above average student, an avid singer, and an aspiring writer, she was also the pitcher for her high school softball team. a beloved daughter with deep roots in her community. There was nothing in her life to suggest she was in any kind of trouble. Her world was small, but it was safe. Or so everyone believed. That sense of security was irrevocably shattered on the evening of June 22nd, 1987.

It began with a simple request. Car’s father, Gary, asked his daughter to make the short trip to Thomas’s Country Store, a familiar market just a few blocks away. Carrie left her own money on her dresser, a detail that would later speak volumes to investigators, and took the $20 her given her instead. She walked out of her family’s home at around 9:30 p.m.

 into the quiet evening air. What should have been a brief errand would become a one-way trip into a 7-year mystery. Kar’s last known movements are tracked by a series of familiar small town moments. The store clerk knew her by name and remembered ringing up her groceries at 9:55 p.m., a bill of just over $3. She left the store and began the short walk home.

 At 10:05 p.m., she was seen for the last time exchanging greetings with a neighbor just a short distance from her house. 5 minutes later, at 10:10 p.m., a group of teenage boys walked down the same empty street. In that narrow window, in the space of just a few hundred feet, Carrie Nixon vanished.

 When Car’s mother, Kathy, woke up at 6:00 a.m. and found her daughter’s bed had not been slept in, her first reaction was terror. Frantic calls to friends yielded nothing. The police were called and the nightmare officially began. The initial search was massive with volunteers from local fire departments and a nearby air force base joining police to canvas roughly 50 square miles around the town.

They combed fields, searched out buildings, walked the banks of the Oel River. But the search yielded absolutely nothing. Not a single piece of physical evidence, not a trace. For a town that measured danger in the abstract, the silence was its own kind of horror. There was no scene to process, no witness to press, nothing at all to work with except the last known minutes of a girl’s life.

 Investigators quickly dismissed the theory that Carrie was a runaway, though it wasn’t dismissed without cause. Friends told police that Carrie had written to them on at least three separate occasions about wanting to leave Oable Forks. First, it was Hawaii, then Florida, then more recently California once she turned 18. For a moment, it seemed to offer investigators a thread to pull, but the thread led nowhere.

 She had no money beyond what her father had given her that night, no history of running, and no reason anyone could find to disappear on her own. Captain Robert Lou of the New York State Police was unequivocal, stating, “My theory on this case is Carrie Lynn Nixon was abducted. She’s walked off the face of the earth as far as we’re concerned.

” The case grew cold, and the numbers behind that coldness tell their own story. Over the following years, investigators would chase down roughly 70 reported sightings of Carrie across the country, conduct more than 1,500 interviews, and examine over 200 sets of unidentified remains, searching for a single confirmation that never came.

 For Gary and Kathy Nixon, life became a torturous cycle of hope and despair. Months after Carrie vanished, a bizarre and ultimately cruel false lead emerged. An anonymous letter from Michigan claimed Carrie was living in Utahville, South Carolina. Though the family had no connections there, they traveled nearly 1,000 m, desperate for any possibility.

Several residents were certain they’d seen a girl matching Car’s description, but the trail went cold, and the sightings were never confirmed. It was another wave of hope that crashed into disappointment. Then in 1991, the case took a turn that would catapult the local tragedy into the national spotlight centered around the musical group New Kids on the Block.

 2 years earlier in June 1989, the band had filmed concert footage in Los Angeles for their Hanging Tough music video. While watching that footage, Carrie’s family saw a girl in the crowd who they believed was their missing daughter. Investigators didn’t just take their word for it. They had an enhanced photograph made from the video and compared it against a recent picture of Carrie. The similarities were striking.

Hair length, hair color, face shape, even the exact placement of her piercings. Four earrings in one ear and two in the other, matching what was known about Carrie down to the last detail. The resemblance was strong enough to ignite a desperate sustained hope. The story had already been featured on Unsolved Mysteries back in 1989, and now band members Jonathan and Jordan Knight made a personal televised appeal.

 Jonathan pleaded with the girl in the video to come forward, and Jordan asked anyone who might have seen her at a concert to call police. For months, the family, investigators, and a legion of teenage fans held their breath. But the truth, when it finally came, was crushing. In 1993, the girl in the video was identified as Lynette Melanchon, a young woman from California with no connection to the case.

 The phantom in the crowd was not Carrie. For her parents, this resolution extinguished the last most public flicker of hope that Carrie was alive somewhere. It solidified the darker reality that the answer wasn’t across the country. It was waiting to be found, buried in the familiar landscape of home. For seven long years, the case file gathered dust.

Then, in January 1994, the break finally came from an entirely unexpected direction. Police arrested a 29-year-old carpenter named Robert Anthony Jones for a string of bank robberies. Jones was a native of O Sable Forks and at the time of Car’s disappearance, he had been living hundreds of miles away in Bar Harbor, Maine, back in his hometown that week only for a family visit.

 During interrogation for the robberies, an accomplice told authorities that Jones had confessed to abducting and murdering Carrie Lynn Nixon. In other accounts, it was Jones’s own wife, Teresa, who told police her husband had confessed to the killing. Faced with the accusations, Jones’s attorneys contacted authorities, stating he had information on the Nixon case.

His confession laid out a narrative of opportunistic predatory violence. He was 23 years old on the night it happened. He told police he had seen Carrie at the store while buying beer and fueled by anger over his wife’s infidelity, decided to abduct her. He forced her into his car at gunpoint, drove her to his father’s remote cabin in the nearby town of Jay, and raped her for hours.

 He then tried to strangle her, and when that failed, he shot her. The next morning, he buried her body in a shallow grave in the woods near the cabin. What happened after may be the most disturbing detail of all. In 1990, 3 years after the murder and 4 years before his arrest, Jones moved his own family back to the Oable Forks area, settling into a home only about 200 yards from where Carrie’s body lay buried.

 For years, he lived a short walk from his victim’s grave. All while the Nixon family and the entire town searched for her, put up flyers, and prayed for her return, never knowing that the man responsible was raising his own children just down the road. Every year he took his wife and two young children on a picnic to that same wooded spot, not out of remorse, but to check that the grave hadn’t been disturbed.

 It is one thing to imagine a killer as a distant stranger who strikes and vanishes. It is another to picture him spreading a blanket over the exact patch of earth where he’d buried a 16-year-old girl, unpacking sandwiches for his own kids a few feet from where hers had been dumped.

 On January 28th, 1994, as part of a plea deal, Robert Jones led troopers to that wooded area. There, after 7 years, they finally found Carrie Lynn Nixon. Buried with her remains were the groceries she had bought that night. The final chapter of Carrie Nixon’s story did not come with a dramatic trial, but with a confession and a somber plea agreement.

 To secure his confession and the recovery of Car’s body, and in a deal that would also keep his wife from serving prison time for her role in the robberies, Jones was sentenced to 18 years to life for Car’s murder. This sentence was to be served concurrently with the 15-year sentence for his federal robbery charges, meaning he might only serve an additional 3 years for the murder.

 While prosecutors were frustrated, they felt it was the only way to guarantee a conviction and most importantly to bring Carrie home. Theresa, whose infidelity had set the tragedy in motion, was later sentenced to two years probation for her role in the robberies. She and Jones eventually divorced. In the years since, the community has fiercely opposed Jones’s release each time he has become eligible for parole.

 He has been denied multiple times, most recently in 2023, and a 2018 appeal of his conviction was rejected by the courts. For the Nixon family, the confirmation of Car’s death was the end of one agonizing chapter and the beginning of another. a lifetime of grief carried by people who had already given so much of themselves to finding her.

 Richard Cypek, the state police investigator who spent decades chasing leads across the country on K’s behalf, would later say he had come to know her like one of his own daughters. When Car’s story first aired on Unsolved Mysteries in 1989, it was her own younger sister, 15-year-old Lorie, who portrayed her in the reenactment. a family so entwined with the search that even its retelling couldn’t be separated from them.

 The grief did not end with the conviction. Car’s brother, John, died in 2007 at the age of 29, strikingly the same age Robert Jones had been the night he killed her after a year-long battle with ALS. He named his own daughter Carrie Lynn in honor of the aunt she would never meet. Car’s father, Gary, passed away in 2011 at the age of 63.

 In Car’s memory, her parents established a scholarship fund, ensuring her name would be associated with helping others long after they themselves were gone. There is one more thread to this story, one the Nixon family never asked for and never wanted, an eerie coincidence that still unsettles those who know both cases. A young woman named Kathy Hobbs was born just 12 days apart from Carrie Lynn Nixon.

 On July 23rd, 1987, exactly 1 month after Carrie was murdered, Kathy Hobbs was killed in Las Vegas. She too had been walking home late at night from a neighborhood market when she was attacked. The cases are entirely unconnected, separated by thousands of miles and no shared perpetrator. Investigators on both sides have confirmed there is no link between the two men responsible.

And yet the parallel remains an unexplainable echo between two girls who never knew each other. Born less than 2 weeks apart and killed almost exactly a month apart. Both on their way home from buying groceries in the dark. Both cut down in the last few hundred feet of an ordinary errand.

 This is the legacy of Kari Lin Nixon’s case. It is a story about a community’s loss of innocence. A cautionary tale that changed how a generation viewed their safety. Parents in Oabul Forks who once let their kids walked to the store alone without a second thought began waiting by the window, watching the clock, counting the minutes until they heard the door.

 It is a testament to the persistence of law enforcement embodied by an investigator who followed hundreds of dead-end leads across the country for 7 years rather than let the file go cold. And it is a testament to a family’s love that outlasted 7 years of silence that traveled a thousand miles on the strength of an anonymous letter that watched a stranger’s face on a concert video and dared to hope it was their daughters.

 Above all, it is a chilling reminder of a tragedy defined by proximity. The few hundred feet Carrie never got to cross. The 5-minute window where her life was stolen, the 200 yd between a family’s picnic blanket and a grave they claimed not to know was there. And the 7-year search that ended just a few miles from where it began.