A Family Cursed

Summary

Cold Case Files: "A Family Cursed" – Episode Summary

Podcast Information:

• Title: Cold Case Files
• Host: Paula Barros
• Episode: A Family Cursed
• Release Date: July 15, 2025

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Introduction

"A Family Cursed," an enthralling episode of Cold Case Files, delves into one of the rare 1% of cold cases that were eventually solved. Hosted by Paula Barros, the episode recounts the harrowing story of Zilphia Lowry and Jeremiah Pittman, siblings whose mysterious disappearances in the early 1990s shook their Appalachian community to its core. This summary encapsulates the key discussions, investigative breakthroughs, and emotional journeys presented in the episode.

Background of the Case

In September 1992, on Interstate 40 near Marion, North Carolina, the quiet lives of the Lowry-Pittman family were shattered when siblings Zilphia (Zilphia) and Jeremiah Pittman went missing. The disappearances were initially dismissed by local authorities, who speculated that Jeremiah had voluntarily left for Texas, assuming he might warm up under the Mexican sun.

Family Member Quote [02:43]:

"Zelfia knows he did not leave town."

Zilphia, a vivacious 24-year-old with a passion for unicorns and poetry, was beloved by her family, especially her niece Carrie Gonzalez. Jeremiah, her 17-year-old nephew, was known for his quiet demeanor and close bond with Zilphia.

The Disappearances

The case took a tragic turn eight months later in June 1993 when Zilphia failed to return from her job as a waitress at a nearby truck stop. Her absence prompted a missing persons report, but local law enforcement remained skeptical, attributing her disappearance to her free-spirited nature.

Family Member Quote [07:07]:

"We had two family members missing. They was making every excuse in the world..."

The matter escalated in February 1994 when hunters discovered skeletal remains near Lake James, identified as Zilphia's through personal recognition before formal confirmation.

Detective's Observation [08:57]:

"Her skull was almost crushed completely... it was just like Zilphia's murder."

Despite the grim discovery, authorities lacked sufficient evidence, rendering the case cold and leaving the family in perpetual anguish.

Initial Investigation

Detective Dan Shook of the McDowell County Sheriff's Office took a personal interest in the case, recognizing the urgency and emotional toll it had on the family. Collaborating with Sheriff Dudley Green, Shook embarked on a meticulous examination of the fragmented evidence, seeking connections between Zilphia's murder and Jeremiah's disappearance.

Detective Shook [09:16]:

"We had two people in the same family in the same year go missing. These cases either have to be related or it is a real coincidence."

Shook's persistence led him to Rosemary Gehring, a key witness who harbored fears that Eddie Pittman, the siblings' father, might be involved in Jeremiah's disappearance.

The Breakthrough

In December 1994, a breakthrough emerged when Rosemary Gehring approached Detective Green, revealing her fear that Eddie Pittman intended to kill her due to her knowledge of Jeremiah's fate. Following her lead, the detectives unearthed Jeremiah's remains, reigniting the investigation with renewed vigor.

Detective Shook [17:20]:

"When Rosemary walked in my office that day... she had said, I think Eddie Pittman is going to kill me because of what I know."

The discovery underscored the possibility that the Pittman family's tragedies were intertwined, pointing suspicion towards Eddie Pittman.

Pursuing Eddie Pittman

Eddie Pittman's denial of involvement was unwavering. Despite his dismissive attitude during the arrest, lack of concrete evidence tied him conclusively to Zilphia's murder. The case seemed to stagnate until a ten-year anniversary marked a pivotal moment.

Family Member Quote [20:15]:

"I really thought that Eddie did it. But he got rid of Zilphia because of her suspicions of him."

Recognizing the need for fresh leads, Detective Shook encouraged the family to share any new information, leading to a crucial confession from a prisoner named Ricky, who implicated Ronald Whited in the case.

The Trail to Ronald and Robin White

Ricky's testimony introduced Robin White as a person of interest connected to Ronald Whited, who had previous suspicions about Eddie Pittman's involvement. Investigations led detectives to an abandoned trailer where Zilphia was believed to have been murdered. Despite initial setbacks in finding physical evidence, relentless efforts eventually yielded a vital clue.

Detective Shook [27:11]:

"But we weren't finding anything."

An innovative approach involving swabbing potential blood traces left by flies in the trailer's bathroom finally revealed DNA evidence linking the scene to Zilphia's murder, albeit without a direct DNA match.

The Final Confrontation and Trial

The identification of Bobby Taylor as the murderer was solidified through Robin White's confession of witnessing Taylor violently killing Zilphia. Taylor's extensive criminal history and White's testimonies provided the necessary circumstantial evidence for conviction.

Detective Shook [33:43]:

"We've got an eyewitness to a murder."

During the trial, a videotape presented by Robin White reinforced the prosecution's case, leading to Taylor's conviction and subsequent life sentence without parole. Robin Whitehead received a three-year suspended sentence for his role as an accessory.

Family Member Quote [35:26]:

"I seen the devil in his eyes."

Resolution and Aftermath

Fifteen years after Zilphia's murder, the Lowry-Pittman family finally attained closure with the conviction of Bobby Taylor. Despite the resolution, the emotional scars remained deeply ingrained within the family members, who continued to mourn their lost loved ones.

Reba Flores [36:20]:

"I loved Zilphia more than anybody in this world. The pain's still there. I still feel it."

Emotional Impact on the Family

The episode poignantly captures the enduring pain and resilience of the family as they navigate life after the loss. Dreams and memories serve as both solace and a reminder of their unrelenting grief.

Family Member Quote [36:33]:

"I have dreams of her... I really do think that dreams are given to us sometimes for reasons."

Conclusion

"A Family Cursed" masterfully intertwines investigative diligence with the profound emotional journey of a family seeking justice for their loved ones. Through meticulous research, breakthrough forensic techniques, and unwavering determination, Cold Case Files illuminates the path from despair to resolution, offering listeners a compelling narrative of hope and closure in the face of tragedy.

Transcript

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[Marissa Pinson]

I'm Marissa Pinson, and if you're enjoying this show, I just want to remind you that episodes of Cold Case Files, as well as the AE Classic podcasts, I Survived, American justice and City Confidential are all available ad free on the new A and E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple plus for just $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. And now onto the show.

[Narrator]

This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. There are 120,000 unsolved murder cases in America. Each one is called a cold case, and only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare cases.

[Reba Flores]

Zelphia went to her grave knowing a lot about a lot of people.

[Detective]

Two people, the same family the same year. Too much there to be coincidence.

[Family Member]

We live in fear. We had two family members missing. Who was going to be next?

[Detective]

We started to locate the first bone.

[Dudley Green]

You just got a cold feeling.

[Detective]

Could this be the unknown crime scene we've been looking for all these years?

[Narrator]

When an investigation runs out of leads, it becomes a cold case. Years pass, and hope fades. But for the families of the victims, these cases are never cold. The truth takes time. In the deep woods of Appalachia, nothing is what it seems. When her sister Zilphia disappears, Reba Flores is desperate for answers. Meanwhile, a detective spends decades determined to uncover the thing he knows might close the case. The crime scene.

[Family Member]

This is Reba when Zephia was born. I was just so excited because she was born a day after my birthday I was 10 years old. I made her bottles. I changed her diapers. She was just like my real live baby doll. She loved writing poems, and she loved unicorns. She collected them. She could get down to, like, a child's level always, you know, wanting to joke and play and just have fun. Everybody's kids loved her so much.

[Narrator]

Carrie Gonzalez is Zilphia's niece.

[Reba Flores]

She was my favorite aunt. I loved her with all my heart. I really think I loved her more than I loved my parents at times. I myself had an amazing bond with her, but it was nothing like Jeremiah's.

[Family Member]

Jeremiah was Zelphia's nephew. Pain was a very quiet. He hardly ever would talk much to anybody. They were sort of like brother and sister because they were so close to each other.

[Narrator]

Dudley green is the McDowell County Sheriff.

[Detective]

Jeremiah was raised in some pretty rough circumstances. His father, Eddie, was gone quite a bit, and I think it was a neglectful relationship.

[Family Member]

There was one time Zelphia and Jeremiah witnessed something really bad. They were parked at Eddie's girlfriend's house. Eddie comes and tells them to leave. Then right after they leave, he burns the house down. Zephia and Jeremiah, they didn't go to no authorities or nothing like that. They just kept it quiet, told a few family members, and that was it.

[Narrator]

It's September 1992 on Interstate 40 outside of Marion, North Carolina.

[Family Member]

My brother had been coming back to Marion, and he seen Jeremiah's truck on the side of the interstate. Jeremiah was living with his friends at the time. The boys that he was staying with said that he left and went to his daddy's, and that was the last time he was ever seen.

[Detective]

Jeremiah was missing, but there was no real evidence of a crime. There was not a lot of concern on the part of the investigators at the time. They had heard rumors that Jeremiah had probably gotten in a truck with a truck driver and gone somewhere to Texas. They had hoped he was somewhere where he wanted to be. On a beach in Mexico, you know, enjoying the sunshine.

[Reba Flores]

Zelfia knows he did not leave town.

[Family Member]

Zelfia had come to my house, and she was just really upset. She said Jeremiah would not have left without telling her. And she goes, I want to tell you about a dream that I had last night. She dreamed that Jeremiah's own daddy, Eddie Pittman, had killed Jeremiah and had buried him and put Lyme on him. It made my heart beat so fast. And she told me she was going to confront him. And I begged her to not confront him because I was scared for her life. She wasn't going to stop until she found out what happened to Jeremiah. She was not going to stop.

[Narrator]

It's June 27, 1993, eight months after Jeremiah's disappearance.

[Family Member]

Zelfia was a waitress. She worked at the truck stop, which was just a little ways down the road from her house. Zelfia would walk to work and back home sometimes, you know, if somebody didn't give her a ride one day, Zephia didn't come home after work. I filed a missing persons report. The sheriff's department didn't believe us.

[Detective]

Law enforcement at the time felt that she's not missing, she's just gone because she wanted to be gone. Zilphia was pretty much a free spirit. She liked to have a good time. It wasn't that unusual for her to decide that she was going to be gone for two or three days.

[Family Member]

We had two family members missing. They was making every excuse in the world they could to keep from looking for Jeremiah and Selfia. Everybody in that sheriff's office was awful. You could walk in and they looked at you like you was trash. Like, you know, we wasn't worthy. One time they told me to go do my own investigation to get rid of me. I go to the truck stop and I start asking questions. Nobody wanted to talk to me about it. I tried everything that I could. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted it for her. I wanted it for us, my family.

[Narrator]

It's February 5, 1994, 14 months after Jeremiah's disappearance and six months after Zilphia's disappearance.

[Detective]

There were some hunters out in a remote area of our county around Lake James who ran across the remains. There were some fragments of hair and some tissue adhering to some of the bones. But the remains were skeletonized almost completely. There wasn't any type of burial or real concealment. It appeared like that the body was just left on top of the ground. And there had been some animal activity. There was also a sheet and a towel and some clothing that was identified as Zephia's.

[Family Member]

I know it was her. I could feel it. Before they even confirmed that it was.

[Detective]

Her, she had suffered severe trauma to the head. Her skull was almost crushed completely. Her remains had been dumped there. There was another crime scene somewhere. They just did not know where that was set.

[Family Member]

Selfia's remains were found. Then they have to take it serious. They have to investigate.

[Detective]

All of a sudden, law enforcement says it's time to pursue this thing. Now we have a murder.

[Narrator]

It's now December 1994, a year and a half After Zilphia's murder.

[Detective]

Marion is a rural community at Appalachian foothills. The mountains have their own kind of culture, with our share of problems as well. I took an interest in the Lowry case early on. I was working in a small town in the neighboring county. I heard that there had been a body found. The first day I came to work, there was a case file left on a desk of one of the investigators, and that was Zilphia's case file. I've always been one that likes a challenge. And so I approached the detective captain and asked him, do you mind if I pick up that file and take a look at it? He looked at me and he said, get it, take it, solve it. The scene where Zilpha's remains were recovered is certainly one crime scene that we had. If we could locate that second crime scene, that's probably where we're going to find our murderer. At the same time I was going through that file, I was trying to digest the Jeremiah Pittman file. We had two people in the same family in the same year go missing. One of them turns up dead, one of them still missing. These cases either have to be related or it is a real coincidence. When you're taking on a case, you have to pick up the ball from where it is. It's kind of like drinking from a fire hose because there's so much information and it's coming at you like crazy. First, we needed to go back and talk to people at the last place Zilphia was seen, the truck stop. One of the individuals who discussed last seeing Zilphia said that she got in the car with someone, but nobody knew who he was or where they were going. We needed to try to get some more information. I visited the McDowell County Jail. Jails can become somewhat of a rumor mill. There were people who, for one reason or another, wanted to interject themselves into this case. One individual talked about being with some guys when they had taken a blonde haired girl wrapped up in a sleeping bag, carried her out in the woods and left her there. Another guy claimed that he had been asked by a drug dealer to take this girl away because she had been killed. I heard 11 or 12 different versions of what happened to Zilphia. It was kind of a moving target, so to speak. I arranged a sit down with several of the family members to see what information they might be able to give.

[Family Member]

We were so desperate to try to find out something. I was just happy that there was someone to listen and try to help. We had two family members Missing Zelfia and Jeremiah. To me, all signs pointed to one person. Jeremiah's daddy, Eddie Pittman. I told Detective Green about Zelfia's dream. Zelfia just knowed that that dream was telling her Eddie had killed Jeremiah. If he killed Jeremiah, he could kill her, too.

[Detective]

Reba described a dream from an investigator's standpoint, we have to deal in terms of evidence that we have, and dreams or visions are not evidence.

[Family Member]

So I said, okay, I really thought that Eddie did it, and I'll tell you why. Zelphia and Jeremiah witnessed Eddie burning the house down for his girlfriend Rosemary, so she can get insurance money.

[Detective]

If Eddie burned Rosemary's house and they had witnessed that, that could be a possible motive for murder. We felt like we had enough information to talk to Eddie.

[Narrator]

Dan Shook is a detective with the McDowell County Sheriff's Office.

[Dudley Green]

Ed was in denial of having anything to do with Jeremiah's disappearance. And he was in total denial about Zelphia doesn't know anything about her murder.

[Detective]

We've got to do something with this lid here. We've got to be able to develop it further or eliminate it. And so we just keep working at it over the next several months.

[Narrator]

It's now February 5th, 1996, two and a half years since Zilphia's murder.

[Detective]

One day the chief deputy came back to my office and he looked at me and he said, rosemary Gehring's in the lobby, wants to talk to you. And I looked at him, I said, what about? He said, I don't know. She was led back to my office and came in, and she had a concerned look on her face. And I'm like, rosemary, how can I help you today? And she said, well, I wanted to come see you. I think Eddie's going to kill me. Why do you think Eddie would want to kill you? And she said, because of what I could do. Say.

[Marissa Pinson]

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[Detective]

When Rosemary walked in my office that day, the last thing I thought I'd be doing would be driving her around while she's pointing where to go. She had said, I think Eddie Pittman is going to kill me because of what I know. We ride down to this real remote area. All of a sudden she stops. She walks over to a ditch and points in the ditch and she says, it's right there. Start digging.

[Dudley Green]

We spent quite a bit of time digging. We weren't finding anything.

[Detective]

She walked over to the ditch. She said, you're in the right place, but you're not deep enough. Continued to dig, and we started to locate the first bone. Exactly where she pinpointed is where Jeremiah's remains were found. Your heart's jumping through your chest. And so she began to tell the story of witnessing a confrontation between Ed and Jeremiah where Jeremiah ended up dead. Eddie picked up a hammer so he could finish Jeremiah off. They had taken Jeremiah's truck and abandoned it out on the interstate. Rosemary had gone with him to dispose of the body. Part of what they did in disposing of him was to pour the lime in the hole.

[Family Member]

Unselfia's nightmare came true. Her dream was gift her for a reason.

[Reba Flores]

Zilphia knew where Jeremiah was. She knew exactly where he was.

[Detective]

Whoa. Here. This is not just some abstract dream. This is real. Blunt force injury to the head. It was just like Zilpha's murder.

[Dudley Green]

Ed Pittman, for heaven's sakes, killed his own son. Killed him the same way Zilpha was killed in the same county during the same year.

[Detective]

There's too much there to be coincidence. Was it actually a dream? We don't know. But she knew what happened to Jeremiah.

[Dudley Green]

We went to Ed's house. A number of us went out there, not knowing what Eddie might be capable of.

[Detective]

Advised Eddie that we had a warrant for his arrest and that he was under arrest for murder. And I'll never forget the reaction Eddie gave me. He said, whose murder? Now we're really convinced Eddie could have killed Zilpha. I said, let me ask you a question. What happened to Zilphia? He hadn't seen her, and he didn't know anything about her.

[Family Member]

Eddie, don't confess to nothing.

[Dudley Green]

We haven't found any evidence to connect Ed to Zelfia. Nothing solid. We've got her body. That's all we have.

[Detective]

He was charged with Jeremiah's murder. He pled guilty, and there was a plea agreement to manslaughter.

[Family Member]

I really thought that Eddie did it. But he got rid of Zilphia because of her suspicions of him. I think Eddie Pittman got away with my sister's murder.

[Detective]

I think the family thought that Eddie could have killed Zilphia, but we're not finding anything. Sure, there's a lot of speculation, some suspicious circumstances, but nothing you can really hang your hat on. I started to think that Eddie Pittman had nothing to do with this. The longer a case goes, the less likely they are to be solved. You know that statistically with Zilphia, you don't have suspects. You don't have a direction to go. You don't have really any indication of what happened. The case was cold, very cold.

[Family Member]

All those years not knowing, not hearing nothing. I didn't know who killed her. But I know somebody in that town knew something.

[Narrator]

On July 27, 2004, the 10 year anniversary of Zilphia's murder, Detective Green gives a story to run in the local paper. He hopes the story might spark a confession.

[Detective]

Was trying to pull at some heartstrings there. Emotions can be a strong motivator for somebody to talk. We were approached by a prisoner in jail. His name was Ricky. He gives us a name, Ronald. Ricky thinks that Ronald may have been involved in Zilphia's death. Several years ago, Ronald had shown up in a van with a fairly significant blood stain shortly after Zilphia's disappearance. We are cautiously optimistic that this may be the break we've been looking for. And so we began trying to find that van. We found the van. We ultimately ended up finding it in a junkyard. It had been there for a long time. There were some stains in that van that appeared like they could be blood stains. There's a chemical called phenolphthalein which is a test for the presence of blood. And when phenolphthalein reacts with blood, it turns a bright pink color. They were not blood stains. And so Ronald's van was not the crime scene. But Zilphia's family came to us with a suggestion that we might want to talk with Ronald.

[Family Member]

Ronald was friends with my son. One day, Ronald had told my son that he knows what happened to my sister.

[Detective]

I remember sitting down with Ronald and pretty much one of the first things that Ronald comes with was, I can tell you what happened to Zilphia. Ronald said that at the time that Sylphia disappeared, there were two guys who lived in a mobile home near a friend of Ronald's. Ronald said that his friends had gone over there one night to ask him to turn some music down and that they was real suspicious the way they'd answered the door and wouldn't let anybody in. And then later that night, Ronald's friends actually saw two guys moving something that looked like a rolled up carpet or something of that nature. Ronald said that maybe he's hauling her body away. The first reaction is, could this be real? This story that Ronald was telling us could have just been a smokescreen to throw us in another direction. Yet at the same time, he had given a pretty good description of where that trailer was. We made a decision to try to find that trailer. And you know, it's been 11 or 12 years. Is the trailer even still there?

[Dudley Green]

Well, Dudley went out to the area that Ronald had described.

[Detective]

I found the landlady. She walked over, pointed out the trailer. Here it is.

[Dudley Green]

It was an abandoned old single wide trailer. And she confirmed that, yeah, back around 1993, there was a guy that had lived at that mobile home. And she gave us the last name of Whited, Robin Whiteed. At that point, I got a cold feeling.

[Detective]

Animals had been in the trailer. Just the sheer cold feeling that I got. Strange, very strange. I don't know, I almost wondered it. Almost had that feeling about it. I don't know. Could this really be where Zelfa was murdered? Could this be the unknown crime scene we've been looking for all these years? We weren't sure whether this was our crime scene, but we had a name. This guy Robin might be able to give us some answers.

[Dudley Green]

The landlord told us that Robin had moved back to what she thought was Richland's Virginia area.

[Detective]

We went to Virginia seeing if we could locate this Robin and have a conversation with him.

[Dudley Green]

I was able to locate where Robin was working at a car dealership. He was very polite and acknowledged almost right away that, yeah, they had partied with some girl and she had a strange name. I mentioned the name Zelfia and he said, yeah, that sounds right. Showed him a picture of Zelfia and he acknowledged that, yeah, that's the girl that he had part.

[Detective]

He remembers this blonde haired girl coming over to party one night that he had had sex with her, but the next morning she was gone. He did not know when she left exactly. And he had no knowledge or clue that she had met with any kind of foul play.

[Dudley Green]

If he'd said, I don't know what you're talking about, don't know this girl, never saw her before, he basically would have shut us down again and we would have come back empty handed.

[Detective]

But now we have direct information that places Zilpha at that trailer. And now we're walking away with a suspect. We really didn't have any physical evidence against Robin, but because of what Robin had said, we're even more convinced that the trailer is where Zilpha was murdered. We knew Zilphia had died from extensive blunt force trauma. The medical examiner had told us we likely had a blunt, bloody crime scene. So we had hoped, best case scenario, we might be able to find some blood. Even after all these years, it had been somewhat open to the elements, so we knew we were up against some pretty staggering odds. It was the ultimate Hail Mary pass.

[Dudley Green]

Myself and the other detectives were taking swabs of any place and every place that blood spatter might still be. Not likely, but you always have that hope. After several hours, every one of us was just drenched with sweat. But we weren't finding anything.

[Detective]

At this point, we had probably done 150 swabs.

[Dudley Green]

Sometimes you see something that you didn't see before. I knew that flies are naturally attracted to blood. And flies constantly excrete and regurgitate whatever they get into. They're leaving traces of that somewhere. I was looking up at the bathroom ceiling and saw these dozen or so little brown specks. I'm thinking it might be fly speck. So I climbed up on the edge of the tub and just swabbed the specks and handed those down for analysis.

[Detective]

All of a sudden, one of those swabs, it lights up. Brilliant pink. Yes, this is what we've been looking for. I mean, there were some high fives went up. Happy as we were, that still didn't say whether this was Zilpha's blood. We did not have anything to compare a sample with. Cause in 1994, when Zilpha's remains were found, DNA wasn't as prevalent a science. And so there was no sample of her DNA that was preserved. Where do we go from here?

[Marissa Pinson]

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[Family Member]

I knew we had to do it in order to get her DNA.

[Detective]

When you reach out to a family and say we're headed down this road as an investigator, that's not something you take lightly.

[Family Member]

I told them to do what they needed to do and they wanted to know if I wanted to be there when she was exhumed. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't rebury her.

[Detective]

It's something that needs to be done with dignity and respect. And yet at the same time you're on a search for evidence.

[Family Member]

Since it was just bones, they put all of her bones in a little baby casket and that's how we buried her.

[Detective]

I never will forget the look on my son's face when I went home that day and I went home to change clothes. He asked me why I got so dirty and you know, explained to him he knows what daddy does for a living, but yet didn't necessarily think about his dad going digging up a grave. You know, that's one of those things that stay with you. But it was a pretty good day. When that lab report came back, I.

[Family Member]

Was crying, I was saying, oh, my God, the DNA matched in that trailer.

[Detective]

That's when you know you're on the right road. There's no doubt there anymore.

[Family Member]

We're going to get these guys. We're going to get them.

[Narrator]

Alex Bass is a new North Carolina assistant district attorney.

[Alex Bass]

Detective Shook and Detective Green came into the district attorney's office and what they told me was that they had a suspect, Robin White. And now I've got a piece of physical evidence I could take to the jury. This is a circumstantial case. We're building it brick by brick by brick by brick.

[Narrator]

On April 25, 2006, 13 years after Zilphia's murder, murder detectives sit down with Robin Whitet at Marion County Sheriff's Office.

[Detective]

Robin, I'm just going to ask you about the death of Zilphia Lowry. I came in from work that evening. Bobby had this girl's phone number.

[Alex Bass]

And sitting on the tower here at the open party.

[Detective]

Do you say Bobby, Bobby Taylor? Yes.

[Bobby Taylor]

Okay.

[Detective]

Robin was able to give us a name, and that was Bobby Taylor. Bobby has an extensive criminal record with some violent offenses on his rap sheet.

[Alex Bass]

Robin was having sex with Zilpha. Bobby wanted his turn. But Zilpha doesn't want any part of Bobby Taylor. Bobby Taylor becomes angry with Zilpha, then slams Zilfa's head into the floor several times.

[Detective]

Robin said that he had personally witnessed Bobby beat her to death.

[Dudley Green]

We've got an eyewitness to a murder.

[Detective]

Robin was charged as an accessory. We find out where Bobby is. Bobby's in federal prison. Bobby remembered this blonde haired girl had come over to his trailer and partied one night. But his was that when he had last seen her, she was alive and well. So we started confronting him with some of the things that Robin said. And Bobby pretty well shut down. And I said, bobby, I've been doing this for 25 years. And he looked at me and he said, what you don't understand is I've been doing this for 25 years. And he was sitting in prison at the time. He was no stranger to trouble. This was something that Bobby was kind of accustomed to.

[Alex Bass]

Before the trial of Robert Taylor, Robin comes down for an interview and brings with him a videotape.

[Detective]

This is the videotape Robin White had made along about the time of Zilpha's disappearance.

[Alex Bass]

As the trial progresses, we played this videotape for the jury Jury. It's the crime scene as it was 13 years ago. @ one point, he zeroed in on the bathroom where Zilpha died, argued to the jury that Robin knows what happened, that he has a guilty conscience of it. That he did what Bobby Taylor told him to do because he was scared of Bobby Taylor. That his guilty conscience made made him this videotape. The jury has reached a verdict and the judge had Bobby Taylor stand up.

[Family Member]

When he got up, he looked and stared. Each one of family members was sitting on the seats and smiled this smirky smile at us. He had the devil in his eyes. I seen the devil in his eyes.

[Narrator]

Robert Taylor was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. Robin Whitehead pled guilty to accessory after the fact of murder and was given a three year suspended sentence.

[Detective]

When we were able to bring this case together, I felt like it was the answer to a lot of prayers. Mine too.

[Narrator]

Greene and the McDowell County Sheriff's Department finally deliver justice as Bobby Taylor is imprisoned for the murder of Zilphia. After 15 years, Zilphia's family finally has the truth. But despite the resolution, Reba and Carrie still feel the pain of Zilphia's loss.

[Reba Flores]

I loved Zilphia more than anybody in this world. The pain's still there. I still feel it.

[Marissa Pinson]

I'd like to see it just demolished.

[Reba Flores]

Get rid of the evilness.

[Family Member]

I have dreams of her. She looks the same in my dreams as she did when she was 24 years old. I really do think that dreams are given to us sometimes for reasons. In my dreams, Selfie is always smiling. And I'm just happy. Now she can rest in peace.

[Bobby Taylor]

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