Replay: Jimmy Don Robinson
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It was just complete hell. It was fear. It was loss. It was grief. Not getting any help. Feeling like you had to go into the shadows to look for your son because of what was the rumors that were around town.

You know, all the way from the cops involved and the sheriff and just horrific rumors. And then I went through school with the scary stories that the other kids would tell. It became like an urban legend. Don't go swimming in the lake because, you know, all of a sudden headlights will come on and the ghost of Jimmy Don Robinson. And you go through hearing rumors, being blown apart with a machine gun, acid being used, being burnt.

I mean, you hear all these things. To become urban legend, to be a storytime scary movie in October for your Halloween thrill or whatever you want it to be. That was my brother. This is the Otis Coe case of Garvin County. It's been a mystery to this day to each and everybody, and it's a weekly that I have people ask me, did you ever find out what happened to your brother? I heard this, I heard that, and that's all we have.

On October 1st, 1976, Jimmy Don Robinson disappeared from Elmore City, Oklahoma, just days after his 21st birthday. At the time, Jimmy was no longer living at his family's home, but he stopped by around midnight. His mom had just gotten home after working a late shift and was up cooking some dinner for herself.

Jimmy briefly spoke to his family, and they noticed that there was a man in the passenger seat of the car that Jimmy was driving. They didn't recognize the man, and Jimmy didn't mention who he was. All he said was that he was going to drop the man off and would be back in about 30 minutes. But Jimmy never returned, and nearly 46 years later, Jimmy's family is still searching for answers.

I'm Marissa, and from Wondery, this is episode 351 of The Vanished, Jimmy Dawn Robinson's story.

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That's greenlight.com slash vanish to get started. Greenlight.com slash vanished. Sometimes stories come to us in unusual ways, and this is one of those stories. We were contacted by Jimmy's nephew, Josh. Josh had never met Jimmy, nor did he grow up with the Robinson family. Josh told us that it was through a DNA test that he found out that he was one of the Robinsons, and then found out about this baffling family mystery.

To get into it, I have to kind of go through the gist of how I came upon it myself. He was my uncle, but I only found out these people existed about two years ago. Through 23andMe and Ancestry, I knew pretty much my entire life that my dad wasn't my dad, that I was raised with still as my dad, but my parents never talked to me about it. It was kind of obvious.

But my mom left my dad about 15 years ago. At that point, I finally was courageous enough, I guess, to ask my mom why she never said anything to me about it. And then she told me, well, I was really young. She had me when she was 14. She married this guy and he took care of us and raised us and all that kind of stuff. So, but she, the guy she told me she thought it was with the guy that was her boyfriend at the time. And I never reached out to him, but I found him on Facebook and I've already got one dad. I don't need another one kind of thing. You know, I don't want to be that guy that shows up and like, Hey, I'm your son, you know?

So I took the DNA stuff my wife and I both did, who I thought, I guess, was my biological father, who I have never met either. Like there was no one popping up with his last name. And there was a cousin that showed up and sent me a message and was like, you know, who are you? And I was like, who are you? Next thing you know, you know, we're talking and finding out where we live and things like that. And she was in Oklahoma City. She's like, oh, my God, you're a Robinson.

I'm like, okay, well, that's great. And so, and then we came to find out that the guy that was my biological father was her uncle.

And he passed away when I guess I would have been about three years old in a car crash. Six siblings, Jimmy was the oldest, went missing when he had literally just turned 21 a few days before. So I kind of came into being introduced to everybody and it kind of naturally came up right away. Like, oh yeah, we had a brother that went missing and heard so much about the story. It was almost kind of like you couldn't get together and talk without it just kind of

falling into that. So that's kind of my introduction to it. And what I found out was this guy had been missing. It's been 45 years. October 1st was 45 years. Josh was welcomed into the Robinson family and began learning all about the Robinson family history. Jimmy Ray and Jorah Robinson had six children, Jimmy, Gary, Lois, Vicki, Johnny, and Phyllis.

Josh's biological father was Johnny, who tragically passed away in a car accident in the 1980s when he was just 21 years old. But Josh was thrilled to meet all of his other family members. By this time, only Lois, Vicki, and Phyllis remained. Jimmy had disappeared in 1976, then Johnny passed in 1985, and Gary in 2006.

Josh took an immediate interest in his missing uncle's case. Josh works as a screenwriter and had gone back home to Texas during the COVID quarantines, when much of Los Angeles was shut down. He was now much closer to Oklahoma and able to make trips there to do some digging into the mystery of his uncle Jimmy's disappearance.

just with this case, my experience with this, and I'm a writer, I'm a screenwriter. I work in Los Angeles and that's kind of what drew me to this. It was, had it not been during COVID when everything's been shut down out there, I probably wouldn't have taken the interest in it as much as I did. But at the time I was like, you know, I'm not working on anything. And this seems like a really good mystery. Let me start digging into it. And next thing I know I'm going over there every chance I've got and trying to

talk to people and figure out what we can do to find him, you know, or find remains of him, possibly.

Jimmy Don Robinson and his siblings grew up in the Elmore City area. Elmore City is about an hour's drive south of Oklahoma City, and according to census data, had a population of about 582 people in 1980. Elmore City's claim to fame is that the 1984 movie Footloose is based on the town, which had banned dancing since the city was founded. In 1980, high school students petitioned to lift the ban so that they could have a prom.

This was quite the controversy in Elmore City. Church leaders spoke out against this, and locals predicted a rise in teen pregnancy if the ban were to be lifted. But the students at Elmore City High School were victorious. They won by a narrow vote of 3-2, and they got their prom.

One would think that with all of the moral outrage over something as simple as dancing in this small-town atmosphere, that if someone disappeared in Elmore City, there would be a similar level of outrage, or at least an effort from the community to seek answers. But that wasn't the case. Just four years before Elmore City made national headlines over the dancing controversy, a young man named Jimmy Don Robinson disappeared from Elmore City.

22 days later, there was a short article in a local paper about his disappearance. And that was it. Jimmy Don Robinson's case went ice cold. The family tried to seek help from local law enforcement, but they felt intimidated. They were scared for their own safety.

We're going to begin by taking a look back at Jimmy's life to try to understand what may have led to his disappearance just days after he turned 21. Jimmy was the oldest of his six siblings, and we spoke to his sisters, Lois, Vicki, and Phyllis. Lois told us what it was like growing up in the Robinson household.

Well, I was born in 59 and he was born in 55. We were born in Paws Valley. We lived in Winnie Wood and in Elmore City. Our dad worked in the oil field. My mother and dad got married like at 17, 18 years old. We had a very close family. We lived on the same land as my grandpa Robinson and them on Indian Meridian. All of our lives, you know, we had a very supportive mother. She worked at Glow Light in Paws Valley.

And Jimmy Dawn, like I said, he was the oldest. My mother, she said her kids were her lives, and we were. And my mother, she would just take in. We never met strangers. People would come to our house and they'd always offer them coffee, you know, to drink. And it was just like lots of people, and we always were around a lot of people, and people would come and stay with us. So we had a loving family is what I'm going to say to you. Our family wasn't rich. It didn't even matter because it made you want to.

One, you do things more in life. But it's almost like you wanted to achieve, be better and all that. Like I said, again, we had a really good mother that was very supportive of us. And it didn't matter what you did. She still loved us and she'd tell us that she loved us. And we were huggers.

it was during their childhood that their father was in a devastating accident that left him disabled the family stepped up to care for him and with jimmy being the oldest he took on the role of the man of the house at a young age

My dad had been in a car wreck whenever he was 36 years old. So Jimmy Dawn more or less just took over as a sort of a father figure to help my mom and them because my dad was paralyzed on one side and, you know, he couldn't hardly talk. And after his car wreck, they had sent him to Oklahoma City and they sent him back home to Falls Valley, literally to die in a nursing home. And my mother and us, we took him out and we all took,

Lois explained to us that she has such fond memories of her big brother. He was always there for his siblings and wanted to help his family out in any way that he could. Jimmy Don was a very proud person. He always liked to look nice. He always dressed nice.

He wasn't very tall. He's like 5'5", 5'7", right in there. He loved the girls, and they loved him. Growing up, him and my brother, Gerlion, would ride bicycles all over town in Winniewood, and, you know, everybody knew him. He ran track. Jimmy Don was a serious person, and whenever, you know, stuff happened, I mean...

To us and our family, I mean, he took it to heart, and he was always engaged when he went into the military. We wrote letters to him. I did, every week for sure, if not every day. We hated for him to have to leave home because we were all close. Jim Don was very loving. He loved animals.

It's really interesting how you sit here and you think about your brother and what you, the best things about him was that he was a good big brother. He was never mean to, you know, me or my siblings or it's just like he's very protective. Another sister, Vicki, had similar memories of her brother's character and personality.

He was the only sibling, so he was our boss from mom and dad were out. We respected him. Jimmy Dorn was a very, very sociable person to get along with anybody and sell the wheels off of vehicles that didn't have any. He was just a very convincing, strong-minded, self-willed leader.

He was small structure in his size, but that didn't stop him. He was like a dynamite stick. He could hold his own. I'll put it that way. He had goals and dreams in life, and he was very successful in whatever he chose to do. He just had that, I guess you'd say, charisma with the women, and he had the salesman attitude and was very convincing and very nice looking, and he had a whole future ahead of him to be successful.

The youngest sibling, Phyllis, was just three when her father was paralyzed after the car accident and six when Jimmy ultimately disappeared. She doesn't have as many memories of him as the others, but she told us that she cherishes the memories that she does have.

I just know that it was always a welcoming. You know, when Jimmy Don was down, it's like all the kids was excited. And when dad got paralyzed, Jimmy Don kind of took the role of being not only the eldest child, but my dad's namesake. And he was one that always wanted to

improve our lives, to help mother out because he knew the pressure that my mother was under. And another one of my parents were college educated. He opted to go into the army to have a fast income and to send back home to help us. He was very close with my dad. And it was also very hard to see my dad in a hospital bed. I mean, he was sent to the nursing home to die. He

He's really, my dad was a miracle that he lived. But I always say, man, dad, we kind of learned to walk and talk and all that because I was three. We kind of learned to walk and talk and all of that together, you know? During high school, Jimmy had a girlfriend named Sharon, and the couple ended up having a child together while they were still teens. They named their son Eric. Jimmy and Sharon got married, and Jimmy decided to enlist in the military to help support his young family.

He got Sharon pregnant, and then he joined the military in 1974. And then when he came back home, she moved in with us while he was gone because he was telling us about her, about Eric, his son. I mean, he had known that she was pregnant with him, but about how he was going to come back and she was a good girl and all this. I mean, he really cared about what we thought as a family. When he got back from the military, it was more that

He got married, but he didn't want to really get married. But we loved Sharon, and she was just like a sister to us.

Jimmy and Sharon's marriage didn't end up working out, and the two later divorced. In the lead-up to Jimmy's disappearance, he was renting a room at a place in Moore, Oklahoma, about 50 miles north of his family's home in Elmore City. He had recently gotten a job not far from Moore at a car dealership in Dell City. Jimmy was about to get his first paycheck from the car dealership, and he was really proud because he had sold a bunch of cars.

Vicki explained that Jimmy had told his family that he would be coming down to visit them on Saturday, October 2nd. He was waiting until he had his paycheck in hand. But something changed, and no one's quite sure exactly why. But Jimmy ended up showing up at the house earlier in the day on Friday instead of Saturday.

You go through every step of that day. From where we got up, we got ready for school, went to school. It was the week before homecoming, so we thought, oh, my goodness, we've got to get ready for homecoming next week. We're going to be off floats and da-da-da. We got off school and come home and usually had our chores to do. And we had got a phone call saying he wasn't going to be coming down, but he showed up within an hour and a half later. Said he was going to wait until Saturday to come down so he could get his check first.

Somebody must have got him to Elmore for a reason.

Then he shows up and everything's good. Lois asked him, "I thought you weren't coming down until tomorrow?" He said, "I'll come on down today." But he didn't tell us why he'd come on down today. He took my dad out for a little while, riding around. Then he came back to the house and took a shower and got dressed up like he was going to go on a date because he was dressed in his very nice disco clothes. He left.

and then show back up at 1230 at the door. I don't know what he did between the time he dropped Daddy off and didn't show back until 1230. I don't know who he was with or who he was going to see or anything.

All of these years later, no one knows where Jimmy went that night, but he was dressed up in nice clothes when he walked out the door. Then he came back late that night around midnight. His mom had just gotten home from work and was cooking in the kitchen. There was a male passenger in the vehicle that Jimmy was driving, and to this day, no one knows who that man was. Jimmy seemed to be in a bit of a rush. He said he had to go drop this man off somewhere, but promised to be back in 30 minutes.

Vicki had already gone to bed for the evening, but she sat up when she heard Jimmy's voice again.

I rose up out of bed 12:30 that night. My mother was in the kitchen cooking. Jimmy Dawn showed up at the doorway. I heard him talking to mama, so I raced forward in the bed and I could see him. He only had his head looking back toward the kitchen around the door. He did not have his whole body in the doorway. The door was not open all the way, six inches at the most. Mama tried to get him to come in and eat and he said, "No, mom." He said, "I got this dude in the car and I'm going to get rid of him in 30 minutes. I'll be back."

And she said, well, I want to show you my check. And he said, how much is it, Mom? And she said, $98. He said, wait until you see mine. I sold 10 cars. I'll have $1,000 coming. He told my mom he'd be back in 30 minutes. That is within a 14-mile radius all the way around from our house and back. So whoever was in the car that night didn't live too far away.

Jimmy asked his mom to move his laundry from the washer to the dryer because he needed clothes for work the next day and promised to return in a half an hour. Jimmy didn't come back in 30 minutes as promised, and his family never saw him again. They weren't immediately concerned that night.

Jimmy had just turned 21, and maybe he decided to go hang out with friends longer. Or perhaps he had gone back to the place he was living in Moore, so that he could pick up his check the next morning. The car that Jimmy was driving that night was not one that he owned. It was a green and white 1974 Toyota Celica that he had borrowed from the car dealership that he worked for. Lois told us that it wasn't until Jimmy's boss started calling to ask if they knew where Jimmy and the car were, that they realized that something was wrong.

We all thought that he had went back, you know, that night, which was a Friday night. And he was talking about getting his paycheck. I guess he had only worked there, you know, first paycheck. We didn't know until they made that phone call. His boss calling, you know, where Jimmy Dahl was at, and he hadn't returned to work. You know, his boss called and said that they were looking for the car, and it was a 1974 green and silica Toyota.

And then that started people, like I said, hearing things around town, you know, and all that. We're looking for Jimmy Dawn. And whenever he became missing, it was a nightmare is what it was. I had started to OU and in that fall, I started OU.

And I just couldn't even focus on school at all because the only thing that my family, what we were going through, because he was Mama's first son. And a lot of people might not understand that, but that was very important in how much he helped the family. But whenever I did go to OU and everything, all I could focus and I could not do my job, my schoolwork because of it, crying myself. It was really hard.

And I didn't want my family to know that I wasn't doing good either. It was just one of the things because I was the first one to go to college. All I could think about was my brother and what he would want me to be doing. All my thoughts was to finish for him. He always wanted me to do good and help us. And that was one of the biggest things that I can remember about my brother because he was very supportive and he just wanted to protect me.

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Jimmy's family is confident that something happened to him the night they last saw him on the doorstep because he seemed so motivated to go pick up his big paycheck. Here's Vicki again. He moved to the city and went to selling cars and had sold 10 cars that week. And he was supposed to have got that check, but he never got the check because he never showed back up to get the check. He was telling my mother at the front door that he had sold 10 cars and his check was going to be $1,000.

Phyllis was so young when Jimmy disappeared, but she remembers a distinct shift in her world, which had previously been filled with so much happiness. Their family didn't have much, but they had each other, and her days had been full of so much laughter and fun. But now things seemed dark and scary.

I remember we lived in a three-bedroom house. There was three girls, three boys. So three girls shared a room, three boys shared a room. Very close family, very loving family. Do we have a lot? Absolutely not with our needs met abundantly. Love, mother was the best cook, the family meals, the laughter. Oh my God, the laughter.

That was something that I miss and the memories of. It could be us back then singing with a hairbrush, doing karaoke or playing games and charades and acting out things. We didn't have no technology back then. So we had to be very creative. If it was outside basketball, you know, going fishing, we just lived, I don't even think it's a half a mile from the Elmer City Lake on Shirley Street, you

And I think often about that little house on Shirley Street because nothing from that night on stayed the same. Laughter become tears, lightness become darkness. The fear, oh my goodness, the fear of living in a town of 600 and several of the people that were named as suspects being

Being at the four-way stop sign and being eye-to-eye or seeing them drive by your house and just stare at you is something that to be so young and to be subjected to that, of course it's going to affect you emotionally. And that's something that people don't talk about out of fear, retaliation, intimidation. And I think that's why the town felt silent. Everybody was hush-hush. To this day, 45 years later,

This case is uniquely complicated. Despite pleas from Jimmy's mother, law enforcement didn't look for Jimmy or investigate his disappearance for decades. As we work our way through Jimmy's story, you will learn why that may have happened. But for now, we're going to go over what we know about Jimmy's disappearance and where that information comes from.

As we do with every case that we cover, we filed a record request for Jimmy's missing persons file. We received about 200 pages of records that consist mostly of handwritten notes that the family had made about their search efforts over the years. There are no official law enforcement records until 2010, when OSBI began looking at the case. They wanted to get familial DNA into the system to compare to John Doe's.

after a skull was found in a field in a neighboring town. This gave Jimmy's family a renewed sense of hope, but it didn't end up being Jimmy. The next police records pick up in 2014, when one of Jimmy's sisters called to try to get law enforcement to look at his case again. We've jumped through a lot of time here, but there's a reason for that.

Jimmy's case was never investigated until that skull was found, and they were looking for a missing person in the area to compare it to. With that passage of time, evidence has been lost, records destroyed, and so on. Lois told us that Sharon, Jimmy's ex-wife and the mother of his son, and one of their brothers spent a lot of time trying to investigate this on their own, since the police department refused to do anything.

The thing of it is, is my sister-in-law, Ms. Sharon, she and my brother, they went and they were doing a lot of investigation. Later on, they worked for Dusty Mahoney and Mahoney's Communications and Lindsey, which was my cousin, but he's passed away. But, you know, he paid them to go, you know, researching and everything. And him, Dusty and Uncle Don, I guess they had went to California and

to look because there was supposed to be rumors that Jimmy Don was out in Compton, California. And we had never heard of Compton. The California lead didn't pan out. But Sharon kept talking to people. We can see in the files what appears to be Sharon's handwritten notes.

Sharon passed away many years ago, just shy of her 30th birthday. So she isn't here for us to ask any further questions about her notes or interviews. But it appears that one thing Sharon spent a lot of time on was trying to track down the car that Jimmy was driving the night he disappeared.

Sharon spoke to the managers at the dealership Jimmy worked for, and according to her notes, they claim that they reported the vehicle stolen shortly after Jimmy failed to return with it. They were paid in full by the insurance company for the loss of the vehicle. However...

They said the car was later recovered in Oklahoma City, but that it was now the property of their insurance company because they had already paid out for the loss of the car. Next, Sharon called the insurance company and was told that records had since been destroyed.

and all they could tell her was that the car was recovered by the Oklahoma City Police Department and towed to G&R Salvage at the request of the insurance company. Sharon seemed to be going in circles, calling around and getting the same basic information from different agencies and companies.

We weren't able to find any information about exactly when this car was recovered and what condition it may have been in. In 2014, law enforcement tried to find out more about the car, but they too were told that records were destroyed. The police department in the town where the car was reported stolen said that they had purged all of their records prior to 1980 except murder cases. They went to the Oklahoma City Police Department to see if they had any record of the car, but they couldn't find anything.

The investigator then went to the auto theft unit, and an officer there said they must have the incorrect VIN number. One letter looked to be wrong. This has been very confusing for Jimmy's family. They had been told for years that the car was found, but now they were left to wonder if it really was. And if it was, what condition was it in? Was it crashed? Was it just abandoned? The car dealership and insurance company had told Sharon years ago that the car had been found.

But why are there no records of that today? Were they just lost or destroyed at some point along the way? Are they unable to find them because of the incorrect VIN? So the car remains a question mark today. And that is something to keep in mind as we go through the rest of this story.

Part of the reason that this case is lacking so much in terms of records is that law enforcement didn't take the case seriously from the beginning. The family often felt intimidated when they went to the police to ask for help. Josh stepped up to assist with this case many years after Jimmy disappeared. He has interviewed family members and spoken to law enforcement officers from various agencies in Oklahoma. He explained to us how the ball seems to have been dropped in this case.

There wasn't a missing person file. There wasn't anything until 2010. So when somebody goes missing, unless there's like a crime scene or something like that, it's hard to, especially small town police force, I guess the thinking would be, oh, if they left, they'll show up. The guy probably just took off and we don't see a crime. Was somebody just disappearing? And that was the thing. There wasn't even a report that he was missing. What was interesting about it was this

This is Elmore city, Oklahoma. There's 600 people in this town. So it's,

They've got a couple city cops, and then most of the law is through the county, the sheriff's department. There was never a report taken by either the police or the sheriff's office. When that was brought up, it was pretty much like, oh, well, that was so long ago that everything was handwritten at the time, and they didn't keep all that. The mother who's passed away now, there'd be times where she would go to the sheriff's house and knock on his door.

And say, why aren't you doing anything to find my son? And his response was, quote, you've got five other kids. Leave it alone. How are you supposed to take that? So I've been told that. I'm like, okay, yeah, that sounds like a threat, right? But then I'm like thinking about it more and more. And I'm like, okay, if I'm a sheriff and I'm, and this guy was like 30 at the time, right? He's not an old, old timey sheriff. He's a younger guy. And I've been working all day, right?

and I'm at home eating dinner or taking care of kids or doing whatever, if somebody comes and knocks on my door and asks me why I'm not doing my job, they're going to get a cold response. So what was the context of his response? I mean, he could have had a bad day. It's tough. Of course, that guy passed away also, so you can't go ask him that now. But there were always things like that where the family seemed to live in fear that somebody

The police wasn't on their side. They couldn't seek out help. They couldn't ask questions because there was always little instances like that where somebody would say something to deepen their fear of something happening to somebody else. Even Phyllis now, who I speak to Phyllis the most, when you talk to her, she's afraid to speak anything negative about the local law enforcement in that area because she still lives there. She's like, I have to live here.

And one year became five and five became 10. The family hired PIs in the 80s. We do know from an article that was published in a local newspaper 22 days after Jimmy disappeared that a tip was called in to police. The tipster said that she was Jimmy's grandmother and that Jimmy was in the Toyota in a local lake. The county sheriff said that he looked around the lake but found no evidence of the vehicle or Jimmy.

Even stranger still, the call came from Missouri, and both of Jimmy's grandmothers live locally in Oklahoma. The family had no relatives in Missouri. The call is believed to have been a hoax. But who would call all the way from Missouri about Jimmy, when the case hadn't even made the news before the call was made? This little newspaper article was the first time Jimmy's story had been published. Phyllis remembers a story about the lake haunting her mother for years.

With the call coming in from Missouri to Dale City Police Department saying that Jimmy Don could be found in Elmer City Lake. The Elmer City Lake isn't even half a mile from our house, our home place. And, you know, my mother would walk around the lake with us, kids and grandkids, and just talk to her son, you know, looking over the waters. We couldn't get nothing done.

She'd get us out of bed. She would drive and drive. Could he be here? Could he be there? Look in person, not one effort of being done with law enforcement, not even a file. After that article was published 22 days after Jimmy went missing, it would be another 35 years before any more articles would ever be published about Jimmy. We will return to this story about the lake a little later on in the episode, so keep that in mind.

We don't know what else law enforcement officials may have done back then to look for Jimmy, because there are no records remaining that document any search or investigative efforts. When Josh joined the search in recent years, he decided to do what he could on his own. He began by starting with the place that Jimmy was last known to be living at in Moore, Oklahoma.

I feel like my number one thing is like, okay, you guys have had all these kind of theories in your head for 40 years, but you've never acted on them. Everything's always been kind of like, you've been too afraid to do anything. Nobody's been proactive. I'm like, it's not hard to go and talk to somebody that you think knows something. Phyllis has got like a list of 50 names where she thinks, okay, they were maybe involved, but if not, they know something. Okay, then look right down the road. Let's go talk to them. And so we've been doing that. And we've been beginning to cross paths

keys and dot I's, and we're not so much finding out new information. We have a little bit, but we're eliminating possibilities. He was living in Moore, Oklahoma, which was about 45 or so minutes up the road, just south of Oklahoma City. And then he was working in Dell City, which is on the eastern side of Oklahoma City at a car lot.

and had just started there, had been there for like just short enough to where he was about to get his first paycheck. And so there's kind of three different jurisdictions that it could have fallen into. We found out where he lived. His sisters had his address forever. And it's like, okay, well, let's look into that and see if we can find out maybe who his roommates were at the time and go and talk to him, right? So we did that. We found out the guy that lives at the address where he lived when he went missing,

still lives there.

45 years later to this day. And we went, we knocked on the door and it was the most eerie thing you've ever, you felt like you were in an episode of one of those true crime shows. You know what I mean? Where you're like, this guy's definitely a suspect, that kind of vibe. And he's super like religious, but it's in kind of a weird way. But they, his story was, is that they worked together briefly. They had gone to bootcamp together. They both were in the army about the same time. This is kind of the tail end of Vietnam. Yeah.

I think this was a few years later that they kind of crossed paths and worked together. And the guy told us he needed a place to stay. He asked. I said, sure. And I always kind of had a revolving door of people that were staying with me or whatever. Like my mom gave me the house when she moved to Alaska. So it was kind of a whole weird thing. But there was nothing really to go on other than he seemed to know everything about it, but he was really reluctant to talk to us. He told us nobody ever came and asked me anything. He's like, I got it.

phone call like on the Monday or something like that from his work asking if he had seen him because he had taken a car from the dealership he's like other than that nobody ever came by I didn't ever have any police or family or anything he didn't have many belongings so it's kind of like he just kind of wondered all these years like what happened to that guy but he also knew that he went missing there were some things where he was kind of letting us know he had checked in on him at some point because he knew certain details that he wouldn't know if he

If he hadn't Googled it. So we gave that info to the sheriff's department. He's kind of like, yeah, I need to go talk to that guy. But to us, we're like, why haven't you already? But she said that was the thing. That's kind of what the family was dealing with for 30 years was there was an activity from the police and even further worse is like there's thoughts that there was something that they were helping to cover up.

Small towns often have the most active rumor mills. And one thing that Josh was hearing was that Jimmy was involved in selling small amounts of marijuana. There's no solid evidence to back this up. It could just be a rumor. Josh told us what he knows.

There was thinking that Jimmy was doing something illegal, whether it was drugs or whatever. There's kind of different thoughts on that. He didn't have an arrest record. Small town. It's kind of like he had a maybe had a bad reputation among people that he was a punk or something like that. Everybody's like, oh, he was a good guy. Then you hear someone was like, yeah, he was he was doing stuff. He was selling a little bit of weed or whatever here and there. It's like, was that enough for somebody to make him disappear on that kind of level? So we're everywhere from theories on what happened to him that it was illegal.

Small town, kind of a rivalry with other people, and something happened between him and somebody else, or he was involved in something bigger, perhaps trafficking. I had a guy that knew him at the time said that he was running cars to Mexico that had drugs in them. Something happened, and they took him out.

Going back to the car for a moment, since the car is a very unclear detail in this case, with the insurance company and dealership saying it was found in Oklahoma City years ago, but law enforcement struggling to confirm that today due to confusion over records and the proper VIN, many rumors still swirl around the car.

If you ask anybody in Elmore, they think that the car is in a lake nearby and that he got shot and is in the car somewhere. So we're constantly checking lakes. As recent as October, we were with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations doing a

sonar check of the lake that we were told by somebody that was an associate of this guy that was a suspect. You know, that guy told him that's where it was. And of course, we didn't find anything. But yeah, you know, just different things over the course of 30 years where law enforcement there in the area, the vibe was that they were maybe kind of one of those things where you're like, maybe it's better for the family if they don't know what happened to them. Like, we kind of got that vibe a little bit because you hear this whole story and you're thinking, okay, in a town of 600 people, A, nobody's going to get away with a perfect murder, it's

Especially when you're hearing about all the guys that maybe were involved were in their early 20s. And B, there's no way that if whatever happened to him that everybody in the town doesn't know besides the family, like a secret kept from them. But there's no, there's nothing concrete on any of the theories on what happened to him to where...

It gives you enough to where you're like, okay, this is the most likely scenario. But we do know he seemed to be involved in some illegal activity. That may have been why the police, that was another thing that the police said. Another sheriff later on that held office after the sheriff that was there at the time that he went missing, it was either the mother or one of the sisters asked him why they never did anything. And it was, we never did anything because your brother was on the wrong side of law.

It's like, OK, well, it doesn't matter what the crime is that's been committed or whatever. If somebody's doing something, they're still kind of supposed to get their due rights. It doesn't matter who the person is. If something happens, at least look into it. It has been difficult to get the ball rolling with any investigation into what happened to Jimmy all those years ago. But they have been able to pick up a little bit of steam in recent years.

other than him being in the NamUs and the Charlie Project and different things like that. All that's been more recent, though. It's all been in the last five to 10 years. And that was because there was a skull found in the area, I think around 2009 or 2010. And it went to the cold case detectives. And so they kind of fumbled around and found out that there was a guy missing from that area from 40 years ago and thought that maybe it was him. So they basically tracked the family down. And Phyllis will tell you this, at the time,

It's like these guys heard, okay, about this guy, but she couldn't even prove that she had a brother that went missing because there was no files on it. So she had to go through all this stuff, like, you know, pull out all the old pictures of him and everything and go through that whole thing. And she had one newspaper article. There was one newspaper article that was in the local Elmore City newspaper, right, that had a circulation of maybe two or three hundred people three weeks after he went missing. We met with the

Now retired head of the OSBI cold case, Marvin Akers. He's a professor in Chickasha. But he met with us a few months ago and kind of went through the case with us. And he was like, this is one of the craziest cases I've ever seen. The fact that there was no files on it. We started from scratch 30 years after this guy was missing and put together the DNA profile, what leads there might have been. So you're kind of going back and you're like, okay, well, this guy's dead. This guy's dead.

The stories or rumors have been all over the place in this case. Josh told us about some of the stories he heard while talking with some extended family members. We know an uncle of his.

named Don Robinson that's still alive, and I went and talked to him for a couple hours, says that they were involved in illegal activity, drugs, things like that, running drugs, and that they took him out because they couldn't get to him. Get to Don. That's what his story is. Don told us this. He said this as early as the 90s to Phyllis.

And he always showed up, like had more money than everybody, flashy clothes, nice cars, always had different businesses, whereas seemed to be flush with cash and different things like that. But he was always involved in stuff that was illegal too. And it was just kind of like, okay, they'll talk to him if you don't have to. And there's a thought that maybe the family had

There was something that Phyllis and I both say that he had a few uncles. They were all involved in weird stuff. Maybe they had something to do with it. We went and talked to a different uncle. Mike somehow had his wallet after he went missing. And we're like, how the hell would you have his wallet if he was missing? If you never went to his house, that kind of eliminates the whole, maybe he left it at his house when he went that night. Of course,

Of course, you ask him about it. He's like, I don't know where it is now. Apparently, the three brothers, the other guy's name was Larry. He actually just recently passed. So Don, Mike, Larry, they were his three uncles. They apparently took off for like a week or two right after he went missing and went looking for him. And that's all we could get from him. It's kind of an odd thing. It's like, okay,

You don't seem to remember what you did or where you looked or what happened or anything, but you remember you had his wallet because you told us that. I think if one of my nephews went missing and we took a week off for work and went looking for him, I would remember that. That's not something that happens often. That's like a once-in-a-lifetime. You would remember, oh, yeah, we drove to this city. We stayed the night there. We looked around. We talked to his roommates. You know what I mean? You would have some vague recollection at least of

what you did and where you looked who you talked to and all that and so there's this kind of weird thought that maybe the family had some you know the uncles had something to do with it he seemed to be working for that uncle that the one that dawned that was involved in the drugs or whatever he they were taking trips to Dallas and to New Orleans and things like that and there's just a lot of weirdness about that when you talk to the sheriff now you're like you know you tell him all this he's like yeah

We should talk to them, but he doesn't ever go talk to anybody. That's kind of the problem we have is if we get something definite like, hey, this guy said the car is in the lake, this lake. You pinpoint it, they'll help you and they'll go do that. But if it's just like, hey, we got a lead on something that may have happened to them, they're so busy. And he'll tell you this too. It's not an active investigation. We don't care who did it. It's a recovery mission, basically. It's foreclosure for the family. And so Phyllis and I spend...

all our time talking about the who's what and where and all that, trying to figure out what happened. And we get something credible that we think is like, wow, this is something that you should, you know, like we found the guy that he lived with. It seems like that should be textbook 101. That would be the first person you would talk to, right? We know he saw him the day he went missing and like nobody ever went and talked to him. And we told, we told the sheriff that and he's like, yeah, I should probably go talk to him. Six months later and he hadn't talked to them.

While speaking with various family members, they explained to us that they believed one of their uncles may have been involved in some shady stuff back in the day. And they think that might be why law enforcement treated the family the way they did when Jimmy disappeared. Almost like Jimmy was guilty by association. Statements have been made to family members over the years claiming that Jimmy was on the wrong side of the law. But Jimmy didn't have a criminal record.

Jimmy was still just a young guy who was by all accounts doing what he could to help his family get by. Phyllis struggles to understand why actions of her uncle would fall onto Jimmy. The sheriff at the time

He did not like my Uncle Don. It was like good guy, bad guy. And Uncle Don and I know there was shady stuff going on just from being a kid and seeing, you know, Lincolns and guns in the trunk and all that kind of stuff. So my brother, he went to the army. And when I think of the wrong side of the law, is he a felon? Was he in jail? He wasn't. Was he doing things?

that maybe he shouldn't have been doing. I'm sure he very well possibly, it is very possible, trying to help the parents out, trying to help mom, trying to get money back to them. I think my uncle showed him some things that he probably shouldn't have had. And I don't want to take away from my uncle because he was just trying to play the dad role to Jimmy Don when my dad wasn't. It was just his lifestyle. Was it right? Absolutely not. But I guess he thought he was doing the best that he could do.

But the victim here is Jimmy Don. He was in the prime of his life, just turned 21. He was driven. He was ambitious. He wanted to help his family. You know, I don't think anyone can say, you know, he was on the wrong side of the law. I talked with his teachers and they always said how respectful and loving and kind Jimmy Don was. It was just so uncalled for. Whatever could have happened, it surely could have been prevented. My uncle used to say,

They couldn't get to me, so they got to him. And a lot of times that's how things were dealt with.

Springer was something else entirely. A respected Midwestern politician, the progressive mayor of a major Rust Belt city, a man many saw as a future leader in democratic politics. How did this idealistic rising star, with his lofty political ambitions, take a turn in such a radically different direction? You can find the whole series available now on Audible. Just search for Final Thoughts Jerry Springer on the Audible app or go to audible.com slash Springer.

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There's a man named Edmund Walker, who some people have suspected from very early on. There were various stories about a possible motive he may have had. Josh told us more. Ed Walker, and he was maybe two or three years older than Jimmy. They had a history. The story is that they both dealt weed.

And they did some kind of transaction or something. I think, you know, the story is Jimmy was owed some money for some weed or something and they didn't give it to him. So he was trying to get it and they weren't going to do it.

And so that was the reason why everybody thinks that that Ed Walker guy killed Jimmy. And the OSBI guy, Akers, that we talked to that had the case for 10 years, spoke to Ed Walker, who died in 2013, complications of AIDS, said he spoke to him on his deathbed.

and did not get a confession. Said that he was on so many medications and things at the end, like if he'd done like a polygraph, it wouldn't have been useful. But he said that he didn't think that he did it. He kind of was like, that's everybody's get right with God moment. And he's like, this guy swore up and down he didn't do it. The thought is, and we kind of agreed on this, is we thought that maybe this guy went missing and it's a good way for me to kind of get some kind of macho street clout amongst my friends here in town or something. So I'm going to just tell everybody I did it.

That's kind of the vibe we got from everybody we talked to. We talked to his sister. She swore that she was never told anything. She's like, we didn't get along. He was mean to me. So if he did anything, I would tell you if I knew. It's like, I'll tell you other stuff that he did.

We also saw stories in Sharon's notes about Edmund Walker. That people had seen him with Jimmy the night he disappeared. And another story that Edmund had ripped Jimmy off for an ounce of weed. We don't know if any of these things are true. But here's the thing about Edmund Walker. He's a person of interest in another case. His 77-year-old aunt was murdered in 1989. She was strangled in her own home. The motive appeared to be money.

evan was the person who called 911 to report that his aunt wasn't answering the door police found her strangled inside investigators found money missing from a floor safe in the garage

A May 1990 article in the Oklahoman says the following about the money. Police reported empty envelopes inside five glass jars were found in a floor safe in the garage of the property. The envelopes had money figures on the outside. Walker went to the bank with 10s and 20s that had a musty, stale odor.

possibly rust stains and dates from 1928 to 1950, with most from 1934. Walker used old bills to purchase $4,000 in traveler's checks.

Walker attempted to exchange $30,000 in old 10s and 20s for newer $100 bills. Walker decided to exchange $9,500 after the bank told him a currency transaction report would have to be filed. While Edmund was never charged or convicted of this crime, he was charged with crimes related to the money. Financial institutions must report transactions over $10,000 to the IRS.

Edmund was accused of and later pleaded guilty to structuring cash deposits at various financial institutions so they would be just under $10,000 so that he could evade the reporting requirement to the IRS. Josh has been researching Edmund Walker, and he's not 100% convinced that he's behind Jimmy's disappearance.

He apparently was the main suspect in a relative's death. And he did end up getting in trouble. And I want to say it was like tax evasion or something like that. But he did spend some time in a federal prison.

And there's all kinds of little coincidences that make you feel like, okay, this guy could have been the whole thing with the – maybe the police did something to help cover it up at the time. He was also police himself. And he had just three or four months before Jimmy went missing got fired because he was selling dope out of the back of his cop car. So a lot of little bitty kind of things like that where you're like, okay, maybe he had something to do with it.

Looking through Sharon's notes from the years after Jimmy disappeared, she had interviewed a friend of Edmund Walker who told her quite a story. Lois told us more.

He said that no one, and he told this to my sister-in-law, Sharon, that literally no one would find him because he's so full of hoes. They might find the car, but they'll never find him. And that's literally what it says on paper. Yeah, and it's in her paper. She's passed away now, honey, and it's in her paper that she written. The story was that somebody, you know, Jimmy Don had some pot and that somebody had stowed him out a pot. Evan Walker was a cop in Stratford before being a car dealer. Was she?

The sheriff at the time told my mom that he's the one that said to leave it alone. And he's the one that said not to investigate it or anything else. He did not want to investigate or have or question Eamon Walker because of personal reasons. And that's what she put down to for personal reasons. And I don't know what the personal reasons are, but I'm sure it's something that maybe he knew about on him.

Phyllis explained that in their small town, many people are connected through blood or marriage or their jobs. And it seems to have complicated the investigation into her brother's disappearance. Some people seemed untouchable. Well, it happens to be that the number one suspect, Ed Walker, used to be a cop in Stratford, which is just like 25 minutes and still in Garvin County.

And he was a city cop for two years, from 74 to 76. His stepdad that he lived with in Elmore City was an Elmore City cop. At the time, Jimmy Don't Come A Missing. So nothing could get done in Elmore because the number one suspect's stepdad's a cop. And I talked with Mr. Burks. He's like the lead detective with the Caucasian in Oklahoma City. He more or less said that it was really kind of

It was so weird when I called him. And I said, you know, Mr. Burks, this is Phyllis Hines. I said, I have a brother that's been missing, and I understand that you're with the co-case unit. And he said, you know, what's your thoughts? And I said, you know, started dealing with the rumors, and I started out with Devin Walker. And he goes, wait a minute.

He said, say that name again. I said, Edmund Walker. He said, Phyllis, you wouldn't believe this. He goes, right before you called, I put Edmund Walker's chart right out in front of me. I have it right here. And he got talking about a jaw hitting the floor. What a coincidence. Anyway, he said, yes, he was the number one suspect in his aunt's death. He was never convicted and that he did get charged with tax evasion. 2013, October 7th is when Edmund died.

Earlier, we discussed the prank call that came in from Missouri, not long after Jimmy went missing. Someone claiming to be his grandmother saying that he was in a local lake. Josh told us about a weird connection between Edmund and the phone call. Another thing that we found out recently by talking to somebody else was...

Initially, there was a call that came in a couple weeks after he went missing from Jimmy's grandmother in Missouri that he could be found in the Elmore City Lake, except they didn't have a grandmother in Missouri. And it was a prank call. And this guy told us.

He ran around with both guys at the time. Ed Walker told him, hey, look out, there's going to be a call coming in from Missouri, you know, that he can be in the Elmore City Lake. And that was before the newspaper article came out stating that. So there's no way that he would have known that unless he did. Right. So there's like little things like that.

Phyllis has a strange memory from right after Jimmy disappeared. Remember, she was just six years old at this time, and she's not quite sure what to make of this memory.

As a little girl, I observed everything. That's really all I could do. I didn't understand. I knew when my mother was crying or my sisters were crying that that was related to pain. That's pretty much what I knew at six, you know, but just observing everything. There was two men and it was evening dusk that pulled up and they were in suits. And they came in and they went through our kitchen closet where mother had hung up Jimmy Don's clothes from the dryer.

And they went through everything, turned them inside out, pockets and others. So, you know, they have been laundered. But I mean, they went through every pocket, every blazer, every flack, every shirt.

And there's nothing on file that there was any OSB agents that was supposed to have been in our home. Now, who were the two men that showed up? I know that they were there because you just didn't see men in suits in Elmore City. You know, I was like, oh. And then a strange deal to that is Edmund Walker's mother, my best friend was a little waitress down at the dairy team. Edmund Walker's mother was telling her that two men had showed up at their house one

wanting to question Edmund about that Jimmy Robinson's disappearance. So I'm thinking, okay, that's strange that two men were supposed to have showed up there, but it wasn't the OSBI, but that's who they were claiming to be.

There's no solid evidence linking Edmund Walker to Jimmy's disappearance, just a few witness statements and other circumstantial evidence. But there was someone else from the local area that the family had wondered about who was later convicted of murder. His name is Glenn Kuniff. Glenn was convicted of the 1987 murder of Jerry Dean Herring. Jerry disappeared from a truck stop in September of 1987. His truck was later found with blood inside and a broken tooth.

It wasn't until 1991 that a tip led them to finding Jerry's remains buried in a barn.

Kuniff's son and another man had helped conceal Jerry's body in the barn and stated they were in fear for their lives. A May 30, 1991 article in the Daily Oklahoman states that law enforcement agencies had been looking at Kuniff for multiple homicides in the area for 13 years and that they were given more information suggesting that there may be more bodies buried there, but further searches came up empty. Josh told us what he knows about Glenn Kuniff.

There's some guy that got arrested and convicted for murder. His name's Glenn Kunis, 10 miles away from their house. But he claimed to kill like a dozen people. They searched where he had one body buried, and the dogs didn't pick up any scents.

And the story apparently is where he supposedly buried all these bodies. When they went to search, they could search part of the area, but they couldn't search all of it because there's a Walmart distribution center there. This guy may have possibly been who say when the guy in the car or something else happened or just because he happened to be active in the area around and the time, I don't know if the timing lines up completely, but possibly, uh,

So he's still locked up. He's like 85 years old. Phyllis told us that she became interested in Glenn Kuniff as a potential person of interest after learning about his past.

miles from Elmore. It's a road called Airline Road. There's a Walmart DC there now, but in front of it, it's still open. There was an O-10 barn there. This name of Glenn Tuniff, he was convicted of killing a Jerry Herring from like the Davis-Sulfur area, a young man in

And there was two other people involved with him. But to read his criminal history, wow. Anyway, so basically one of the guys turned on CUNA and said that they could find his body buried in this barn. And one of the detectives said he had been investigated over a 13-year period over many homicides. And that there's also talk of being a hitman in this article.

article that I read online said that he even confessed that, yeah, there will be more bodies. The dogs hit on two other areas and they were supposed to have dug it up, but didn't find enough evidence to continue with the digs. So he's a hit man. He has a criminal past. He's already a murderer. He's a confessed murderer, convicted murderer. And he's openly said there's multiple people that he's killed. He lived in Norman. He

He frequented the bar that Edmund Walker was at, always. Glenn Kuniff isn't known to have any direct ties to Jimmy. But since he's still alive, Jimmy's family thinks he is someone who should be interviewed before he too passes away. Josh got another tip from a local who was a child back when Jimmy disappeared. He claims that he came upon a frightening scene one day when he was just about eight years old.

This guy claimed that when he was like eight years old, there was a well. They had a tow rope that would climb down and cool off in the spring water. He said, "When I'm eight years old," same time period, "I went out there and it smelled terrible." They peeked over the side and they could see the side of a head in the water. They called the sheriff and they never heard anything else from that. Never heard anything. It wasn't ever checked. He's like, "This is the last time I ever went out there." He's like, "I still lived across from that property on the next property right away."

And so we go and we look at this well, and I think it was either April or June. It was six, eight months ago. We go look at it. It's full of sand and dirt. And when you look down into it, we're expecting it to be 30 feet, and it's only like eight feet deep. And there's like twigs and rocks and things like that. And you're like, oh, I could just like literally hop over this and look around in there and see if there's anything in there.

So we go to the sheriff, and the sheriff's like, oh, it's been kind of wet. We'll wait until it dries out. We'll get an A-frame. We'll lower a guy in there to sift through it. Well, that was in June, right? So we're still waiting. When we finally go back out there and look at it about a month ago, and all the sand in that thing is lower. Now it's like 20, 25 feet, but it still looks the same at the bottom, but somehow it's lowered. And we don't know how or why. I've talked to like three or four different people, oil field type people that –

mud engineers, different kinds of people that do fracking. Nobody seems to know why it would do that, but that's the place that we have a serious lead on, and we're just waiting, I guess, for the sheriff to think that it's dry enough for us to go look at it. So that's one thing we're doing. It's likely that it's not him, but it might be somebody.

Josh and Phyllis have been doing a lot of boots-on-the-ground types of searching together, while the family had once been scared into silence. With Josh stepping up now, they feel like they aren't alone anymore.

Me and Joshua, we have knocked on doors. We have pounded the pavement. I've bought a magnet. I've bought a drone. My nephew has a boat. Thank goodness. We've dropped magnets in ponds and lakes. And I've got a metal detector. Anything that I can do because there was nothing done for so long. And I know we're behind the eight ball, but it does...

offers so much hope with how much everything has evolved from social media, with law enforcement, getting grants for code case units and detectives and the DNA. And then to, of course, get on and hear all of the code cases that have been solved from sonar and right down to GoPro camera. You know, I was watching a story the other day that someone was swimming with a GoPro and found, you know, a car and it happened to have remains in it.

There's one odd thing that we noticed in the records we received that we wanted to briefly mention, and this again goes back to the car that Jimmy was driving that night. In 2016, investigators were attempting to find out if the car was found for sure or not, and they went and spoke to the man who owned the dealership in 1976.

He said that a supervisor loaned Jimmy the car to drive home, but then he kept repeating that he knew nothing. He said that he was never contacted by law enforcement about Jimmy until now, but that he had been contacted by family members over the years. He then contradicted what he had previously said about Jimmy needing the car to drive home and claimed that he didn't know why he needed the car and said that he had never said that.

The report states that the man's son came in halfway through the interview and was extremely defensive. The son said that he had been a police officer and knew how things worked.

and he was trying to protect his father. The investigator explained that his father was not being accused of anything. He was just there to track down more information on the Toyota Celica that Jimmy was driving in order to try to establish if it was in fact found. The men continued to act defensive, which seemed to really confuse the investigator. Phyllis told us what she knows about this interaction. The OSBI did go in and talk with Padgham,

And pageant steps on what used to be a cop shut down the interview and more or less told him to get the hell out. Because I'm just here to ask some questions, you know, nothing's going to be asked. You can get the hell out. So that interview was shut down. Throughout the story, you've heard Jimmy's family discuss various people who had acted strange in one way or another. It has always led them to wonder about who knows what and who was covering something up.

Josh thinks about what is known about the night Jimmy disappeared. He showed up with an unidentified man in his car and said that he would be right back in 30 minutes. He asked his mom to switch his laundry so that he would have clothes for work. This sounded like someone who planned to be back, so he would be ready to go to work in the morning and get that big check that he was waiting for. What could have gone wrong that night?

You could go down this thing like this rabbit hole. I'm sure it's like this with every single case, different theories, different possibilities, you know, how he pulled up and it was midnight. He had a guy in the car. Nobody knows who the guy in the car was said he had to go drop him off and he'd be back in 30 minutes. And,

That was it. Never showed up. Did something happen to him then? Did he decide he didn't need the clothes that he had in the laundry and go back to Oklahoma City and something possibly happened to him that weekend? There's a million different possibilities. Hitchhiking was a big thing during that time. Now you would never think I'm going to pick this guy up, right? But back then, it seemed to just kind of be more than normal. Like, oh, this guy needs a ride. Pull over. You know, where are you headed? Okay, no big deal. That's...

to me, I feel like is maybe one of the likeliest things is there was a guy in a car with him when he went missing. Nobody knows who the guy was. He didn't want the guy getting out and going into his mom's house. She actually invited them in. She was in there. She had been working late. She was making some late supper. It was like 11 o'clock or whatever, midnight, whatever it was. And she said, you guys want to come in, bring your friend in and make you guys some food. He's like, no,

He didn't want him coming in. Instead of saying, I got to go take, it's my friend Dave. I got to take Dave home or whatever. He said, I got to go drop this dude off.

And it was kind of like he didn't use his name and he didn't want him coming into the house. And we've analyzed that every different way. It's like, OK, maybe he knew something bad was about to happen. And that was his. They said you could go by and say goodbye to your mom without saying goodbye to your mom kind of thing. But don't go inside because he stood at the door, didn't come all the way in. And the sisters will tell you that was really odd that he didn't come in because they were like a really they hugged each other all the time.

That was the first time he'd seen his mom that day. And for him to not to go in and give her a hug, say, I love you, to just stand at the door was an odd thing. So that theory of that being just some random guy,

that was in the car, but you know, like, hey, I got to go drop you back off at the highway. Because again, if you look at Elmore City on the map, it's 15 miles away from the interstate. I'm going to take this guy back over there. He's like, I'll be back in 30 minutes. So that makes sense. 15 minutes there, 15 minutes back. Go drop him off. I'll be right back. Maybe that guy, you know, who knows, did something to him, took the car, disappeared. That to me seems more plausible than this whole story of this Edmund Walker guy. All-town revenge and all that stuff is just... Because what's the first thing

It seems as though finding out who was in the car with Jimmy on the night that he disappeared could be the key to solving this case. Who was this mysterious figure in the passenger seat? Why didn't Jimmy want him to come inside his family home?

If that person had nothing to do with his disappearance or no knowledge of what happened to him, why have they never come forward? Phyllis explained that it always haunted her mother, that she didn't ask or go see who was with Jimmy that night. I remember mother, the thing out of Jimmy Dawn saying, you know, in the door, I'll be back in 30 minutes, but I've got this dude that I got to get rid of.

And that was the last time he was ever seen. So for us other five kids, I mean, as far as the protective mode and, I mean, always hugging each other. I don't care if we're going to be gone five minutes. I love you. It's a hug. It's where you're going to be at and when you're going to be back. It's who are you with? My mother lived with that regret of not going to the door to see who he was with.

But, you know, like I said, she just got home from work. She was cooking over the stove. He came in and, you know, more or less, she regretted that for the rest of her life because she only knew who he was with or who was with him. Jimmy Ray and Jorah Robinson outlived all three of their sons. Jorah passed away in 2012 and Jimmy Ray in 2013 without ever knowing what happened to their first son, Jimmy. Lois told us that her mother always had faith.

Throughout the years, the family received strange phone calls that seemed to feed their sense of hope.

Well, my mama was a Christian. She was a Sunday school teacher and everything like that. My mama really believed that God was going to bring Jimmy Dawn home. There were so many things told to my mom after my brother started missing. Not go looking because you've got five other children still at home and things like that to scare. There were phone calls coming into our home. And sometimes there would be nobody answering.

And a lot of times it'd be during the holidays.

And she would think that it would be my brother calling and just, she'd just sit there and she'd think, you know, she'd tell me, she'd say, I know it's you, you know. She wanted to believe that and she wanted to know that that was going on. I even lived whenever it was the summer, it was 78. And long story short, I was living with a family up there on Tinker Air Force Base. My best friend, her dad was a sergeant in the military.

And there was a phone call that came in there and asked for Jimmy Don Robinson. And her dad was a, he was like a security or, and you know, it was really weird because we were on the base. And I told my family about that and it was just the weirdest thing. But that's how things happen like that.

Vicki expressed to us, too, that their mother seemed to lean on her faith to get through the hard times. She had struggled after her husband became paralyzed and then lost all three of her sons. But for Vicki, she feels like finding Jimmy would help her heal after living through 45 years of not knowing.

Very strong Christian lady in her faith, very strong. And she told us kids that the Lord spoke to her and told her that he was with Jim and Dawn and he was with the rest of her kids. She felt at peace about Jim and Dawn was taken care of, but she didn't take it any further than if he dead or alive, she just knew that the Lord told her he was okay. The closure we're looking for is to give a brotherhood

brother a proper burial place if he had a sibling missing when he's out there in the middle of nowhere somewhere maybe not even buried a lot of people that you know it's been 45 years have passed on that might have could have given some answers but maybe someone's still out there that knows what happened come forward let us have closer that's what we're praying for

Every member of the Robinson family has lived through so much trauma. The youngest sibling, Phyllis, was just three years old when their father was paralyzed, just six when Jimmy disappeared, and 15 when Johnny died in a car accident. Phyllis grew up entrenched in trauma.

I was born in 1970. There's 15 years. Jim and Don was born in 1955. I pretty much lived it. I was the one left at home. You know, I'm the one that all of the emotions and the grief and pain and mom and dad. So Lois moves off. And then, of course, you know, everyone's older than Lois. And he's in and out of the home for the majority of my life. Vicki, she gets married and everybody moves off. But like I said, through the years,

I lived it. And that's not taking anything away from them whatsoever at all because they got as far as the closeness and the memories. And I have very few memories of Jim and Don. And that's something that is just heartbreaking to me because I know how close I was with my other two brothers and what protectors they were. And I just felt...

I lost was not really getting, because he had been in the Army, and that takes me back to about four years old, you know, and then he's living in the city, and we're still in Elmore. So, I mean, it's just very few memories, but the memories I do have, I wouldn't trade or give away for nothing, you know. And Johnny Dean, Joshua's dad, me and him were real close, but he got killed in a car wreck when I was 15. He was 21.

Looked just like Jimmy Don almost and such an eerie resemblance. A lot of people had to take devil looks to think that it was Jimmy Don. My mother's tears, I just wanted them to stop. I wanted the laughter to fill the house. I wanted what I knew as a child back. It kept a family close and to understand the value of life and what each day means and not to take for granted the last time that you're going to see one.

a friend, one that you love, to always be willing to share that with them and to tell them that. You know, that's the value that I see, and that is life. And even before, so we was a close family, but it did bring us closer. But there was this always a void, a silence. I look at an empty chair and tears start falling.

The Robinson family seems to have been hit by one tragedy after the next. As the years pass, the losses continue to pile on. Jimmy's son Eric passed away in 2001 at the age of 26. As horrible as all the trauma and loss has been for the Robinsons, the not knowing in Jimmy's case continues to nag at them even 45 years later. From the very beginning, law enforcement seemed to take a very hands-off approach when it came to Jimmy's disappearance.

They made comments to the family about Jimmy being on the wrong side of the law, or that they wouldn't investigate for personal reasons.

Some of the comments scared his family into silence. But the rumor mill continued to churn over the years. And there were a lot of stories about what happened to Jimmy Robinson, but no solid clues. Today, Jimmy's family is getting more assistance from law enforcement. Phyllis and Josh keep hunting down leads in town and talking to locals. They feel like people are finally starting to talk. But many of those who were rumored to have known something or to have been involved have since passed away.

They're hopeful that someone out there still remembers what happened that night back in 1976, when Jimmy told his mom that he would be back in 30 minutes after he dropped off this mysterious man in his car. Was that man a friend of Jimmy's? Was he a hitchhiker? And that's why no one has ever identified him. Could that person have harmed Jimmy that night? Was Jimmy targeted because of the sketchy activities of his uncle? Or was it Edmund Walker who wanted to get rid of Jimmy? Or what about Glenn Kuniff?

If you have any information about the disappearance of Jimmy Donn Robinson, please contact the Garvin County Sheriff's Office at 405-238-7591 or Garvin County Crime Stoppers at 1-855-211-STOP. You can follow Jimmy's case on Facebook at WhereIsJimmyDonRobinson or on Twitter at WhereIsJimmyDon and Instagram at WhereIsJimmyDonRobinson.

I've written so many chapters to this book, and I just pray to God that one day we'll find the ending because to this, it's open-ended. It goes on and on and on and on. And it can literally, there's just such a mental anguish with just thinking of it. You know, what could happen here? What could be here? We know that most of the people, if not everybody that was involved, is probably dead now.

But people talk, you know, and that's what we're hoping is that we can find someone that may have been told something, whether it's a brother or sister, a son, a daughter, a friend, neighbor, anything. Like somebody knows something somewhere. You would have to think. Unless it was something just completely random, like I said, a hitchhiker or something like that, that just happened upon him and it was the worst kind of luck possible for that guy that day.

No, I was hoping that somehow or somewhere, some way, someone would give us a phone call and give us a, "I know where your brother is, that he's alive." And no, none of that's happened. Used to when my mother was still alive and she was young, like first probably couple years after my oldest brother came up missing, someone would call, but no one would ever say anything.

But that didn't last maybe a couple years. And, you know, you got teenagers that make prank calls, but there would be nothing. Nothing was said. Nothing. Well, I'm a rural carrier. I work on a mail rack. And I'm all over the southern part of Garvin County carrying...

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That brings us to the end of episode 351. I'd like to thank everyone who spoke with us for this story. If you have a missing loved one that you'd like to have featured on the show, there's a case submission form at thevanishedpodcast.com. If you'd like to join in on the discussion, there's a page and discussion group on Facebook.

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Last year, long crime brought you the trial that captivated the nation. She's accused of hitting her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, with her car. Karen Reed is arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The six-week trial resulted in anything but resolution. We continue to find ourselves at an impasse. I'm

I'm declaring a mistrial in this case. But now the case is back in the spotlight. And one question still lingers. Did Karen Reid kill John O'Keefe? The evidence is overwhelming that Karen Reid is innocent. How does it feel to be a cop killer, Karen? I'm Kristen Thorne, investigative reporter with Law & Crime and host of the podcast, Karen, the Retrial.

This isn't just a retrial. It's a second chance at the truth. I have nothing to hide. My life is in the balance and it shouldn't be. I just want people to go back to who the victim is in this. It's not her. Listen to episodes of Karen, the retrial, exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+.