Shownotes Transcript
This is Deborah Roberts. You're about to hear what happened to Holly Bobo. In this series, ABC News' Eva Pilgrim will take you through the twists and turns of a murder case that captivated Tennessee and the nation. Here's Episode 1.
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On Saturday, April 9th, 2011, Tennessee's wildflowers were in full bloom. Its rolling hills were a vibrant green, and that weekend, winter seemed long gone as temperatures soared into the 80s. It was the perfect setting for one of the most beloved traditions in western Tennessee, the annual raccoon hunt in Decatur County.
The hunt dates back to 1976 and is billed as the largest in the world. Throughout the weekend, dogs chase after raccoons and are rated on their performance, including how fast they can track down the raccoons.
The winning dogs and their owners get prize money, which is donated to St. Jude Children's Hospital. There are country and bluegrass performances, auctions, and lots of local food vendors serving barbecue and pies. Every April, thousands gather at the county fairgrounds for the hunt.
But in 2011, less than a week after the hunt, the quiet community on the banks of the Tennessee River, where it feels like everyone knows everyone, was shaken. Somebody has my daughter. They have kidnapped her. Please get there now. They're on their way.
The caller was Karen Bobo. She and her family had deep roots here. They lived on quiet Swan Johnson Road for decades in a home tucked away in the woods.
Holly was 20 years old and studying to be a nurse while living at home with her family. Okay.
Holly was led into the woods, and then she vanished. It was an all-out search. Local and federal law enforcement, Holly's friends, neighbors, former classmates, and complete strangers. Thousands of local volunteers, people from all over this tight-knit community, came together to find one of their own. But Holly would never be found alive.
It would take years for her remains to be found. And what started as a missing persons case became a horrific, complicated murder investigation that would tear apart relationships between neighbors and families and change the small Tennessee community forever. I'm ABC News Senior National Correspondent Eva Pilgrim.
This story has a long history. Before I got to ABC News in 2016, I remember hearing about it. The shocking crime, the long investigation. Reporters from across the country had made their way to Tennessee to cover it. In 2017, the case seemed to be finally closed after a guilty verdict.
But years later, I was sent to Tennessee to cover new developments in a story that just keeps unraveling. Once I got to Tennessee and started talking to people who knew Holly and who had worked on the case, I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Here was a girl who was doing all the right things. She was close with her family who described her as responsible and caring. And she was studying to be a nurse. If this could happen to her, this could happen to anyone.
Usually, the more I dig into a case, the more I feel like I'm solving the puzzle. But this time, the opposite happened. As I learned more, I had more questions. How could someone just vanish from a house like hers, tucked so far away in the Tennessee woods? How could you commit a crime this brazen and get away with it for years?
When police sprung into action and so many people joined the search for Holly, how could no one find her? And after so many years, why was it so hard to find answers? I want to take you with me through the twists and turns in a case that captivated Tennessee and the nation.
And let's not forget, there's a young woman at the middle of all of this. This was a case that would leave her family and community brokenhearted and forever changed. I'll go back to the very start of the investigation on that otherwise unremarkable spring morning in 2011, and I'll walk you through the latest developments more than a decade later.
Someone will be given a life sentence for Holly's murder, but that won't stop the questions for some. Did they find the right people, or could Holly's killer still be out there? To this day, there's a rumor mill that flows. The first time I interviewed him, I was like, oh my God, this guy did it. This guy did it. Why speak up now? Because it's been years. I've always spoken up. Nobody's ever asked me.
From ABC Audio in 2020, this is What Happened to Holly Bobo? Episode one, A Scream on Swan Johnson Road. To understand the Holly Bobo case, you have to understand Decatur County, Tennessee. It's the kind of place where locals can tell you're not from there. Literally, my first day there, my producers and I went to a restaurant and they asked me, where are you from? And we laughed because
It was just so obvious we weren't from there, not because our clothes were different, but because it's rare in a place like this for a stranger to walk in, let alone a whole table full of them.
I grew up in South Carolina, and it reminded me of the small southern towns I knew. There is a tangible warmth that comes from a history between people that goes back generations. Neighbors truly help neighbors. They care about each other. And even if you don't like someone, you know them. Decatur County runs right along the Tennessee River. If you look up the county on Google Maps, you'll see mostly green.
The vastness of the woods is interrupted just once in a while by a church, a sawmill, or maybe a gravel company. There are two main roads and then a few smaller ones that pass by farms and big towering pine trees. The county has a lot of creeks which look like long skinny fingers on the map.
And then there are the few small towns in the county which stand out as gray splotches from above. Keith Byrd is the former sheriff of Decatur County. It's rural. Our eastern boundary is along the Tennessee River. That's probably our biggest natural resource, and people move there to retire.
The biggest employers in the county include the local government, a construction company, a manufacturing company, and a trailer company that employs 36 people. Many people in the county also work in agriculture and logging. According to the U.S. Census, 94% of the county is white and nearly 20% of its residents live in poverty. That's almost double the national average.
Decatur County is small. The population of the entire county is just under 12,000 people. Everybody pretty much knows everybody. Recently, we've had an influx of people from other states moving in. Our property values and taxes are pretty low. And the new people that have come in, it won't be long till a lot of people will know them. And, you know, it's
It's a small town. Everybody knew Holly and her family. When Holly went missing, people were shocked that this kind of crime, a kidnapping, could happen in a place like this. This case is probably the most serious news-creating case that's been in that county for probably two or three generations.
I know it's a trope to talk about a place where people trust their neighbors and say, "Nothing this bad ever happens here." But the setting of Holly's disappearance is surprising for reasons beyond that collective sense of security. This isn't a place where you could just stumble upon someone's home by accident. You'd have to know how to get to the house. The area around their home was a forest.
Some of it was agricultural land, some of it was pastures. In the town of Darden, where the Bobo house is, there aren't many street signs. The roads are largely one-way, unlit. There are also unmarked logging roads used to haul trees out of the forest.
Cell phone reception is spotty, and without GPS, it would be very easy to get lost if you haven't driven around here before. Houses can be miles apart from each other. The best directions to get around come from landmarks, that bright mailbox, that little furniture store.
Investigators said to find the Bobo house, you'd really have to know the area. You'd have to basically be targeting the house, targeting Holly. Their house is at the end of a long driveway. At the time, it was marked by a black mailbox with a green wooden sign under it that read, The Bobos. It's a ranch-style house, sit back in the woods.
There wasn't a lot of residences on that road. As a matter of fact, their house was the last house on that road. My wife at that time was the rural mail carrier for that area. She carried their mail for years before and after Holly's abduction.
The house is on 23 acres of land and has a private pond for fishing. It's normal to see wildlife, deer, turkeys, and squirrels. The house has a carport that's basically a garage but without a door, a back deck, and a pool. It has dark brown siding and brick with white window shutters.
Holly's parents, Dana and Karen Bobo, built the house with Dana's father in 1982. Karen and Dana raised their two kids, Holly and Clint, there. My former colleague, Elizabeth Vargas, interviewed Karen and Dana back in 2017. Holly was an absolute joy from the day she was born. It just seemed like there was something special about her. She was always kind to people and appreciated the small things in life.
She was a real caring of other people. I think that's why she wanted to be a nurse. Dana Bobo worked for a tree cutting company where he operated the mowing machine. Karen Bobo was a teacher at Scotts Hill Elementary School. She had Holly and her brother in her class. I taught plant in the sixth grade and I had Holly in the fourth grade. What was that like? Yeah.
Well, Holly was the perfect student. Always wanted to get her work finished and had everything ready ahead of time. Clint, I had to tap on his desk just about every day. And then when we'd get in the car, he'd say, why are you always tapping on my desk and no one else's? And I said, because everybody else is paying attention. Holly had an especially close relationship with her mom. If something went wrong, she would always call me.
We shared a bond that she would sometimes look at me and say, that's scary because we could finish each other's sentences. You were always that close? Always that close. From the time she was born? Pretty much from the time she was born. We enjoyed doing the same things. Like what? Riding horses, listening to the radio. When Holly got her driver's license years earlier, she would drop her mom off at the elementary school and then head to the high school.
She said, well, that's silly for us both to drive. You could just ride with me. It's kind of a joke around school, like, carry your rides here. After graduating high school, Holly attended a local community college and then began her nursing studies at the University of Tennessee at Martin Parsons Center. Karen says her future was bright. She planned to get her nursing degree and marry her boyfriend, Drew, who had given her a promise ring the Christmas before she disappeared.
You know, even talked about could they live close to us and things like that. But on April 13th, 2011, Karen left for work and she would never hear from her daughter again. The morning Holly disappeared, Karen and Dana got up around 5.30 for work, like they usually did. Karen went to check on Holly, who was preparing for an upcoming test in one of her nursing classes.
She was sitting up against the wall on her bed and had her books in her hands, and she said that she'd been up since about 4:30, studying for the test. It was Wednesday, which meant Holly had class later that day. Karen made Holly's lunch, a sandwich, some bite-sized candy bars to satisfy Holly's sweet tooth, and water. She packed it in a white lunch bag with black polka dots and a blue "H" sewn on the front.
Before Karen left for work, Holly came to the kitchen to eat breakfast. So that morning I got her muffins out of the refrigerator, put them on a plate and stuck them in the microwave. She was sitting at the kitchen table studying and I kissed her goodbye and told her I loved her just like every other morning. Holly's parents went off to work.
Karen Bobo was with her class of second graders in the cafeteria when the school secretary came up to her and told Karen something that would change her life forever. She didn't want to alarm me, but the neighbor had called and thought they heard screams coming from the house. The neighbors weren't close to their house. In the spring, with the trees blooming, they wouldn't even be able to see each other's houses.
So the fact that the neighbor heard screams and that he then called his mother, who was alarmed enough to call Karen at work, it says something. It was undeniably a sign of trouble.
Karen didn't bring her phone with her to the cafeteria. She had left it in her classroom. The nearest phone she could think of was in the school's office, but she thought she saw too many people there to make such a frightening call. So she went to the library instead to call Clint, who was home.
He tells her he saw Holly in the carport with a man he assumed was her boyfriend, Drew. But Karen knew it couldn't be Drew. Karen had spoken with him that morning, and he was turkey hunting around 20 miles from the house. So when Clint told you on the phone, Holly and Drew just walked off into the woods. I said, that's not Drew. Get a gun and shoot him. And Clint said, you want me to shoot Drew? And I think that's when I hung up and called 911.
You know, when things like this happen, everybody's like, oh, I would have done this, I would have done that. The truth is you don't know what you would do or say. So I never got the words out. I've talked to Drew on the phone because I am in a full-fledged panic by then. There wasn't enough time for you to explain it all. No, I was just trying to get someone over to the house.
So she left the library and ran to the school's office to call 911, but it went to the wrong county's dispatcher. And I collapsed to the floor and everybody trying to say, it's okay, Karen, this is all just a mistake. But see, they didn't know what I knew that morning. Which was? Drew was not in our house. It couldn't be Drew. And that the neighbor had heard a scream. No one in that office knew that.
Karen's coworker helped her off the floor and walked her to the parking lot so that she could drive Karen home. Karen called 911 again. This time, it went to the right dispatcher in Decatur County. Karen and her coworker sped through the county's winding roads. I'm trying to take her the fastest route.
So I'm up on the window, you know, saying hang a right, hang a left. I don't know how fast we were going, but fast. Fast, as in what's usually a 25-minute drive, took only 15 minutes. When they pulled up to the house, Karen says a couple cop cars were already there. When I get there, I don't remember what order everything went in. Ran through the woods, calling her name, and then more people come up.
One thing that has been described is that that scene in those first moments outside your home was chaos.
You had people showing up. You had police arguing with other police from over who had jurisdiction. You were running through the woods yourself. At one point, you even told the police she was younger than she was in the hopes of getting an Amber Alert. I did, because I kept asking them to put out an Amber Alert, and they're like, we can't. And I did not know the stipulations for an Amber Alert.
Someone told Karen Bobo that law enforcement doesn't issue Amber Alerts for people over 17. Holly was 20. So I do remember when a TBI agent got there, I ran straight to him and told him she was 17.
Investigators from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, local sheriff's offices, and police departments showed up to the house. The FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, FEMA, and Homeland Security did too. Everyone was asking the same questions. Where is Holly and what happened to her?
By the time Dana Bobo made it home from work about 40 minutes away, he remembers between 50 and 100 people being at the house already. They filled the property. The driveway and the road were full of cars. When I got there, I had to pull way past the driveway of the house. And what stuck out to him as he ran up the driveway is that his son, Clint, was in the back seat of a patrol car.
And I was trying to talk to him and ask him what went on. We talked for just a few seconds. He said he'd seen somebody walk holly into the woods or walking out of the yards toward the woods. And that's about all I got out of him. He was writing his statement. He said, Dad, I've got to write my statement out.
Clint was the only one who caught even a glimpse of what happened. He was the last person to see Holly before she went missing and the person who saw her disappear into the woods. She's made up her mind. It's pretty smart.
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This isn't about who's next, who's now different. The NBA Playoff is presented by Google. Continue on ESPN ABC. On April 13th, 2011, Clint Bobo had the day off. He was working part-time and studying to become a social worker at the University of Tennessee at Martin. In 2017, he told ABC News that his plan for the day was to sleep in and spend the day doing homework.
Well, I woke up, I heard our little house dog named Rascal and I heard him barking. And his barking is initially, I believe, what woke me up. But I was able to fall back asleep.
Clint says he did not hear screams, just Rascal's barking, and Rascal kept barking. So that was a little bit unusual. I thought that enough time had passed that whoever was there, you know, whatever, had time to check the meter or deliver the package and then leave, or if it was someone driving by. But he just continued to bark, so I decided to get up, you know, to see what he was barking at.
groggy and disoriented from being woken up earlier than he expected. Clint says he walked from his bedroom on one end of the house to the living room at the other end where Rascal was barking. He looked out the windows to the front of the house and didn't see anyone. Then he walked to the back of the house and didn't see anyone there either.
But he did see Holly's black Mustang was still in the carport, which was strange. She should have left for school already. He called and texted his mom to ask why Holly's car would still be there, but didn't get a response right away. What he didn't know was that his mother didn't have her phone on her. She was at school and had just been told that the neighbor heard screams.
Clint says he went to a different window to see the carport more clearly. He still didn't see anyone, but he says he heard people talking. So I listened just briefly and I could tell it was a male and a female voice. He says he believed he heard the voices of Holly and her boyfriend, Drew. That's when his mom called him back and confirmed Holly did have school and that nobody should be coming to pick her up.
Clint says he then told his mom that Holly and Drew were outside. And then I believe it was at that point that I had raised up the blinds slightly, and I could see a silhouette of what looked to be Holly and a man dressed in camouflage. Well, I knew that I expected Drew to be dressed in camouflage because Drew and I had talked the night before, and he told me he was going turkey hunting that morning.
His mom said it couldn't be Drew outside, but didn't explain how she knew that before she hung up. So Clint kept thinking the man in camouflage was Drew. But minutes later, his mom called Clint again and reiterated that man was not Drew. She said, that's not Drew. Clint, get a gun and shoot him. And I said, so you want me to shoot Drew? And I think that's when she hung, she must have hung the phone up again.
Clint got a .38 Colt revolver and went from the window to the back door. That's when he says he saw Holly and the man in camouflage walking into the woods behind the house. He says Holly was walking on her own and did not appear to be hurt. And there's a trail that Holly and I are both very familiar with. There's a trail in the woods right there, and that trail leads you to a logging road.
Clint stepped outside and saw a pool of blood by Holly's Mustang. It was right where he says he had seen the two silhouettes. He wasn't panicked. He wasn't sure something horrible had happened to Holly. He just figured the blood may have been from a turkey Drew killed and brought back with him. But while Clint was outside, the neighbor showed up. That's when Clint called 911 too.
But he was still confused, still thinking there was a chance the man he saw with Holly was Drew. And if not, maybe it was their cousin Richie. Richie also hunted and could be wearing camouflage. As Clint tried to figure out what was going on, police cars started arriving. And then his mom made it back to the house. How did your mom look when she showed up? Very panicked.
She was very painful. I remember her coming up to me and shaking me. And she said, Clint, why didn't you do something? To be honest, I'm expecting Holly and Richie to come back to the house. And Holly's going to be so mad at me because I've called 911, the police. We've made such a big deal out of nothing. That's what I was expecting to happen. But that didn't happen. The man in camouflage was not Drew and was not Richie.
Clint ended up spending the rest of the day with law enforcement, answering questions and writing down everything he remembered for the police. That's why his dad saw him in the patrol car when he first got back to the house. Former Sheriff Keith Byrd was at the Bobo house when the search for Holly began. The day that it happened, we had some small search teams that were put together to look into the woods where she was led away from her house.
You know, that was probably a couple hundred people that day. And we were scattered out 10 yards apart where you could see the people on either side of you. And we were sweeping this area of woods.
Over the course of the search, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation sent pilots to fly over the woods to look for Holly. Water teams went into four different ponds and parts of the Tennessee River. Dogs were sent out to search for her. 75 wells were checked.
And every day, more and more local volunteers signed up to look for Holly, too. Eventually, thousands of them were part of the effort. An army of volunteers have searched every day for the missing 20-year-old nursing student on foot and on four-wheelers, hoping to find a sign. The community was shocked.
It's kind of like we're all living this nightmare with them. We've just come together as a community, even people outside the community from Memphis, Jackson, everyone surrounding us has just brought us closer and just shows that we really care about each other. A command center was set up for volunteers with tents and long plastic folding tables for passing out food. Lines of people in camo and boots stood in parking lots to sign up for the search.
You drive by the fairgrounds and you would, except for the carnival rides, you would think the fair was going on. There were so many people there. And, you know, Tennessee's known as the volunteer state. And that's what happened. Everybody volunteered and came to help. And, you know, Granny and her church ladies, you know, they couldn't go out and
beat the bushes looking, but they kept everybody well fed. And I mean, everybody pulled together. When Holly disappeared, the weather was mild. But weeks into the search, violent storms flooded Decatur County and caused widespread damage to roads and buildings. The storms brought the search to a temporary halt.
Eventually, volunteers were able to go back out in the foggy and damp weather. They put on yellow ponchos and raincoats that fell beneath their knees. They brought binoculars, walking sticks, and their dogs. There was so much land to cover, and much of it had tall grass and thick mud. I asked U.S. Marshals agent John Walker about what the search was like.
You know, anytime you come up with an area that you thought something might be in, there would be volunteers show up by the hundreds to go search. To see if they could find something else? See if they could find something. A few days into the search, they did find something. It was hanging off a big stick in a creek. Holly's lunch bag. The one her mom had packed for her the morning she disappeared. The sandwich her mom made her was still inside.
It was a potential breakthrough. Was this something that could lead to more of Holly's belongings or to Holly? Agent John Walker decided to follow the creek. And within 30 minutes, he came upon another clue, Holly's school notebook. But investigators didn't find anything else that day. The lunch bag and notebook seemed to be dead ends.
The massive investigation has turned up nearly 300 new leads, but still no Holly. Volunteers say they don't plan on stopping until she is found. The searches went on for weeks. They covered over 200 miles of roads in Decatur County and over 1,000 square miles. They canvassed six neighboring counties as well.
While the volunteer army continued their search, investigators from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies were gathering leads. As those leads poured in, the agents were just trying to wrap their heads around the basics of the case. They sent the blood in the carport for DNA testing to see if it was Holly's. They found a shoe print on the floor and a handprint on Holly's car, and they hoped that
This might lead them to answers. But their attention also turned to a range of people in the area who they considered potential suspects. Everybody was a suspect at the time. We did not know. All while the Bobo family was waiting for answers. It was like our whole life became an open book and we were just, everything just totally changed. That's next time on What Happened to Holly Bobo.
What Happened to Holly Bobo is a production of ABC Audio and 2020. Hosted by me, Eva Pilgrim. The series was produced by Camille Peterson, Julia Nutter, Kiara Powell, Nora Hanna, and Meg Fierro, with help from Audrey Mostek and Amira Williams.
Our supervising producer is Susie Liu. Music and mixing by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Janice Johnston, Michelle Margulies, Sean Dooley, Christina Corbin, Kieran McGurl, Andrew Paparella, and Emma Pescia. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Laura Mayer is our executive producer. Marvel Studios Thunderbolts is an MCU game changer. Look where you are leashed. A must-see in IMAX. I'm talking!
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