The Justin Barnett missing-person cold case is solved at last, now that a lap dancer has confessed to luring the youth to her pad so she and a beau could mug him, in a 1995 robbery scheme gone gruesomely amok.
Ex stripper Tricia Abney, now 40, is in police custody for the brutal knifing and dismemberment of her 23-year-old naive client, but her unnamed male accomplice killed himself late in July in order to avoid prosecution.
According to investigators, they weren’t even aware of the crime until a third witness finally came clean about it earlier this year, in an effort to purge his own guilty conscience.
"He said he knew of a murder case that happened twenty years ago,'' Cold Case Unit detective Jonathan Ross told reporters. "He had dealt with it for twenty years and it was eating up his conscience."
Abney’s ex boyfriend had married and moved to Mobile where he was contacted by investigators for questioning last month. A week after they first knocked on the obviously troubled man’s door -- and the very day his former stripper girlfriend was arrested -- he committed suicide.
The sole surviving suspect, however, who has accumulated a slew of other felonies as well as aliases over the years, apparently never had any nagging regrets about Barnett’s murder and cover-up.
In fact, Tricia Abney carried on in the two decades since then just as if it had never happened at all, recently posting an inspirational Facebook update:”Never let your past determine your future.”
Ironically, Abney’s future on death row for her awful betrayal and killing of young Justin Barnett when she was only 20-years-old is all but assured, even if her dead ex was the only one who knew where Barnett’s mutilated corpse was hidden.
“They dismembered his body in the apartment and drove the remains to Centreville in Bibb County,” said Detective Ross. “They buried the remains and then came back to the apartment and tried to clean it up.”
Cadaver dogs have been used to regularly search for the dismembered victim’s unmarked grave, but to no avail; and, now that Barnett’s gravedigger is deceased too, that aspect of the missing person cold case may forever remain unsolved.
“Nobody knew the exact location except for the guy who killed himself,'' Detective Ross said. “He was the one who dug the hole.”
