GUILTY AZ - Barbara Brown Agnew, 38, murdered, Bullhead City, 26 June 1997

OkieGranny

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http://www.mohavedailynews.com/news/bhc-cold-case-nearing-resolution-man-makes-cross-country-journey/article_545f58ec-eee2-11e3-9af9-0019bb2963f4.html

A man with an apparent guilty conscience has been arrested for a slaying that occurred nearly 17 years ago, heating up what had been one of the Bullhead City Police Department’s oldest and coldest unsolved cases.

Matthew Gibson, 54, turned himself in to authorities in Winslow, Ariz., last week and allegedly confessed to the 1997 murder of Barbara Leone Brown, whose body was found near Rotary Park less than a week after she was reported missing from her Kingman home but whose death had baffled investigators ever since...

Brown’s body was found July 1, 1997, in a thicket of bushes in Section 30, an undeveloped area near Rotary Park. An autopsy concluded that she had suffered injuries from blunt-force trauma, including multiple skull fractures.
 
Slow moving conscience? I really hope that he has enough solid evidence/detail of this murder to prove he actually did it.
He probably did, I just find it bizarre that his conscience is just now motivating him, at the age of 54. :waitasec:
 
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/guilty-conscience-man-drives-country-arizona-confesses-1997-murder-cops-article-1.1822447

“The details that Gibson provided police coincided with the cold case murder of Barbara Brown,” Emily Fromelt, a spokesperson with the Bullhead City Police Department...

Gibson allegedly told investigators that he killed the woman during an argument inside his home, but police did not reveal any more details about the killing.

Gibson was charged with suspicion of first-degree murder and ordered held in the Navajo County Jail in Holbrook. He was waiting to be extradited to Mohave County on Monday.
 
http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/3ca7b3d9cb794624a0c2d939a8bd98c6/AZ--Cold-Case-Sentencing/

A 55-year-old man who drove to Arizona from North Carolina to turn himself in for a 1997 killing has been sentenced to 10½ years in prison.

Matthew Gibson had pleaded guilty in August to manslaughter in the killing of 38-year-old Barbara Leone Brown in Bullhead City, where Gibson used to live.

Defense attorney Ron Gilleo said that his client found religion and the crime weighed heavily on him.
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...elf-in-this-would-still-be-an-unsolved-crime/

A guilt-racked man who recently drove across the country to confess to a 17-year-old homicide in Arizona, a case that had long gone cold, likely never would have been caught if he hadn’t come forward.

That’s according to Mohave County Assistant Prosecutor Jace Zack, who told the Associated Press that Matthew Gibson wasn’t even on the radar of authorities who investigated the 1997 death of Barbara Leone Brown.

“His name was never in any report,” Zack told AP on Tuesday. “We didn’t even know he existed.”
 
Whatever his motivation, at least the victim's family can have some closure, and maybe some answers.
 
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/09/22/5192999/killer-thought-wal-mart-texts.html#.VCFZrPldV8E

Gibson, Marquez said, thought someone knew about the murder in Bullhead City and was toying with him. The 55-year-old told the detective that he began receiving text messages and voice mails from Walmart telling an Anita Townshed that her prescription was ready... Gibson later received an envelope with a Walmart advertisement in it but no return name or address. He felt someone was monitoring his calls, he said. Gibson’s conclusion: Townshed must have been the woman he killed. Now he felt someone might have put “a contract on his head”...

Gibson, a former cocaine and methamphetamine addict, didn’t know the name of the 38-year-old woman he’d killed in Bullhead City in 1997. But it wasn’t Anita Townshed. It was Barbara Brown Agnew. His attorney, Ron Gilleo, said Monday that Gibson told him he’d found religion a few years ago, and the killing had been gnawing at his conscience. “He felt bad,” Gilleo said. “It was weighing on him.”

But Gibson shared a different story with Marquez. He turned himself in, he said, because he was scared. If it hadn’t been for the messages and the letter from Walmart, Marquez said Gibson told her, he wouldn’t have said anything. Marquez said Gibson had deleted the text messages and voice mails, and she couldn’t confirm the validity of the letter.
 

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