This Mother Was Killed And Left To Freeze In The Snow

“A young mom vanishes during the frigid holiday season. She walked back out in front of the bank and then disappeared.”

“Where’s she at? You know it’s cold, she can’t survive out there. There was a little girl at home. We wanted to bring Patricia home for Christmas. To a family, one day is too long; you want results. Boom, yet the worry only gets worse.”

“I was determined to find out who was behind it. He robbed me of my mother. She’s not going to get to see my wedding. In a story that chills a small town to the bone, a person that commits an act like that is a monster.”

“In Runnemede, New Jersey, winter can make you want to just escape. Miserable, the skies are gray, the air is cold, it’s damp. All of us here in New Jersey would rather be in Florida when it’s wintertime. Intense cold comes and goes with little warning. When it gets cold here, it’s like down to the bone. Sometimes it’s not so bad, but when it snows, it really snows. It’s a safe place to raise a family, usually. There’s one small high school in the town, all the kids end up going there and they stay friends. It’s quiet, it’s kind of boring, actually.”

“29-year-old single mom Patricia Parkin is happy for the quiet.”

“Years earlier, she dropped out of high school, but now she’s taking control.”

“She was a good mom. She enrolled in school. She turned around and was getting good grades. She made Dean’s list. Wanted to be an X-ray technician. She loved it; she loved the subject. She wanted to go to school and help people.”

“Moving back in with her parents, she’s determined to start over with a new life for herself and baby Melissa.”

“Sadly, the baby’s father dies suddenly of heart failure. He died three days after Melissa was born. So it was kind of joyful, sad. They saw her go from having pretty much the worst time in her life to having a daughter, raising a daughter, being an amazing mother, then eventually going to college. Let me show you.”

“She would always have that book bag. That book bag was her future.”

“She’ll show everyone she’s a strong woman, responsible, steady. She’s got a thousand bucks to prove it. That Christmas, she had a lot of money set aside, so she had enough away to really give her a good Christmas for this family. Let’s put it up. It will be a Christmas season they will never forget, baby’s first Christmas.”

“December 2nd, she was going out to a meeting that morning.”

“It’s not so bad out. I’ll just walk home tonight. Okay, I love you. Listen, if you change your mind, want to ride home, just give me a call.”

“Okay, love you.”

“Love you.”

“At that time, she didn’t have a car, so she relied on my grandfather who 100% was willing to drive her there and pick her up. It’s an oddly warm day, so she’s just wearing a hoodie. Hopefully the weather won’t turn before she gets home.”

“Probably about 4:00, my father said, ‘You know, where’s your sister? I wonder why she’s not home yet.’ I said, ‘Well, she probably ran out to the diner, you know, after the meeting.'”

“But it wasn’t like her not to call home. Even when she did things like go to the diner, she would call to, ‘How’s the baby?’ My father said, ‘You know, I want to go put a report in. I believe something happened to her.’ So I said, ‘All right, I’ll take you down to the police station.'”

“When a family member wants to report another member of their family missing, there’s a time factor involved and an age factor involved. Basically, an adult can walk out the door and just leave, and that’s their prerogative.”

“The family reveals a fact about Patricia’s past that might be important: she’s a recovering alcoholic. Maybe she relapsed, or maybe she went with an old boyfriend, or maybe she just needed time for herself. 29 is generally considered responsible for their own actions. So without somebody calling and saying, ‘Hey, she’s in trouble,’ or finding her book bag, there was nothing solid for anyone to really pin their hat on. All Patricia’s parents knew was she didn’t come home tonight.”

“The meeting she’d gone to was an AA meeting. They hoped she hasn’t slipped and started drinking again. This wasn’t her character, being a sober person. You know, they knew her was very responsible. No matter what, she needs to be found.”

“My dad was very persistent. He was not going to leave there until they put a report in.”

“Detectives agree to enter Patricia into the National Missing Person’s database. The first 48 hours are very crucial. You have to jump on it right away because if something did happen, is there some kind of foul play? People are going to start covering their tracks, like the snow falling across the town.”

“While the family awaits word, they also act.”

“You just know there’s this feeling inside, you know you got to do something. To a family, one day is too long. You want results. Boom, right away. I said to my mom and dad, ‘We need to get some flowers up.’ The last time we actually saw her, she was wearing a brown hoodie, blue jeans, and she had her backpack with her.”

“They tried to retrace her footsteps. I went back to the AA meeting that she was at that morning.”

“How are you doing? How are you doing?”

“They said that she was doing good in there. They seen her at the meeting. She just came in that morning. She was working the coffee bar.”

“I like it black.”

“Next thing you know, she turned around and left. One of the guys there said that he seen her walk over to the bank.”

“Patricia shares an account with her brother, John. He learns she made a withdrawal on the day she went missing.”

“We pulled the video up and saw her come in, withdraw the money. She walked back out in front of the bank and then disappeared.”

“The amount of her withdrawal? Just $90.”

“If she wanted to escape her new responsibilities, she had plenty of cash at home. There was still $1,000 upstairs in Christmas money that she was going to spend on family and her daughter. And that puzzled me because if you’re going to go out, you’re going to take that money with you because you need that money.”

“Wherever she is, she’s not dressed for the increasing cold. She left with just a hoodie on. We’re a full-fledged winter, we’re having ice storms, and we’re like, ‘This isn’t right. Where’s she at?’ You know, it’s cold, she can’t survive out there.”

“Soon, Patricia’s family will learn dark secrets about her last known steps and realize the true danger she is in.”

“It’s the holiday season in New Jersey and college student and single mom Patricia Parkin goes missing.”

“This wasn’t the person that we knew in the last year, especially with Melissa being born. She was home every night to put me to bed. So day two, when she didn’t come home to tuck me in or wake me up in the morning, they said, ‘You know something is really wrong.'”

“All investigators know so far is that Patricia withdrew $90 the day she went missing. Her brother thinks it’s a sign of a slip in her new sobriety.”

“I believe that she figured, ‘Let me just go have a couple drinks. Let me go have that little bit of escape fun because of all this, you know, being a mom and being a student.'”

“Posters made by the family mention her tattoos. The tattoos that were identifiable was a butterfly. The tattoo that was on her arm, it was a male’s name, Eric. That was enough for me to try and find out from the family members as to who that person was, ’cause he’d be a person of interest.”

“One of the guys that my sister was in a relationship, probably the longest, was Guy. All you ever want to do is treat… First thing you try to discover, the kind of relationship they have. Was it an abusive relationship? Was it a very cordial relationship? Was it, you know, hot and cold? Who broke off with who?”

“It was off and on, off and on. I always had the feeling that he was jealous. So he was in my mind a suspect.”

“Turns out he was upset she’d had a baby with another guy. He was obviously someone we were interested in knowing more about, specifically knowing his whereabouts at about the time she disappeared.”

“Eric, I’m Detective.”

“When questioned, Eric tells police he did not see Patricia that night, but he was supposed to.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“We’re supposed to watch a football game. She never showed up.”

“The fact that he had arrangements to meet with her, of course, that’s something that plants a seed in the back of my mind that maybe he does know where she is. Maybe he’s the one that is responsible for her disappearance.”

“He says when Patricia didn’t show up, he watched the game at home.”

“He indicated to us that he spent the evening with his mother, which you kind of go, ‘Oh yeah, right, he was with his mother.'”

“Yet his mom later backs up his story.”

“We were able to confirm that he was in fact with his mother, and he could not possibly have done this to Patricia. I’ll be in touch. All right.”

“Even though he was distraught that she had a child by somebody else, he did deeply love her.”

“Turns out John’s hunch was correct. Someone who saw the missing poster calls to say they spotted Patricia going into a bar in town called the Riverman Lounge.”

“If you were not from Runnemede and you walked in there, everybody at the bar would turn like, ‘Who’s that and what are they doing here?'”

“In a bar situation such as this particular bar, you’re not going to find too many people that like the police going off.”

“I don’t recognize her.”

“Take, take a closer look.”

“Look, I don’t know her.”

“They might know she left with a certain person, but they might be friendly with that person. They know something, but nobody’s talking. I mean, you have to sit down, you have to more or less put yourself in like you’re one of them and just break the ice with them. And once you break the ice, if they take a liking to you, they will confide in you.”

“Detectives’ first good lead comes from the bartender who was working the day Patricia vanished. Eventually, they get her to talk. She confirms Patricia was there on the afternoon of the AA meeting and was with a guy named Rick Rollins, who works as a part-time employee at the bar.”

“When questioned, Rollins admits to detectives he did hang out with her that afternoon and evening. This particular friend was not encouraging her sobriety.”

“Come on, one ain’t going to hurt you.”

“I’m all right, thank you though.”

“Got this.”

“Come on, come on.”

“She had been doing really, really well and she tripped, she tripped up. It’s a common thing for those battling alcoholism, the delusion they can have just one drink, so good to see you again, then succumbing to the superficial happiness it brings.”

“Rollins tells detectives she was with other people too. She was happy-go-lucky that night, talking and smiling and laughing. He swears he didn’t do anything to Patricia. He provided them with an alibi, and of course, they checked the alibi and it checked out.”

“Just great to see.”

“Rollins claims he saw Patricia speaking with another man that night. He was sitting at the bar and she was sitting at the bar and he sees her.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Hey, I’m good.”

“Begin to speak with Lee Heitzman.”

“What’s up with the backpack?”

“Oh, I’m actually in school.”

“Okay, I want to be a radiologist.”

“A radiologist? Yeah, so that’s like, like a doctor?”

“Working on it, you know.”

“I need a new doctor.”

“Detectives follow up on Lee Heitzman.”

“We needed to talk to this individual and either keep him in as a person of interest or be able to rule him out as a person of interest.”

“Live right around the corner, not far from the bar. The detectives go knocking on the door and he’s not there, but his girlfriend is home and she’s willing to talk to us. Her name is Vanessa Peterson.”

“She says that she’s carrying his child and yeah, she had gone to the bar that night, got home about 11:30, spent the rest of the night at home. She says right now Heitzman is out of town. He worked for a moving company and him and another guy loaded up a tractor trailer and were hauling this customer’s belongings down to Kentucky, and he wasn’t due back for a few days.”

“My parents kept asking me, ‘Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?’ It’s possible she’s hiding, afraid to come home. I thought being away from her for a year and doing so well, you know, just wanting that one more party time. We were thinking, you know, is that keeping her out? Is she afraid to come home and say, ‘I messed up’?”

“So many unanswered questions and even more pressure to find Patricia. There was a little girl at home who was 11 months old. We wanted to bring Patricia home for Christmas.”

“You can’t solve a missing person’s case without finding the missing person. You hope you find them alive. We were hoping that if we could find that book bag, there was going to be answers in there.”

“Soon, investigators will find a piece of the puzzle that blows the case wide open.”

“In Runnemede, New Jersey, single mom Patricia Parkin vanishes carrying little more than her book bag just before her baby daughter’s first Christmas.”

“Investigators have ruled out Rick Rollins, a guy she was with the night she disappeared, but have not yet spoken to a second man from the bar, Lee Heitzman, who was out of town for work.”

“After several days, detectives returned to Heitzman’s apartment.”

“Can I help you?”

“He was very laid-back, very calm, cool. He pretty much said that he had nothing to do with her disappearance, that he just went down there for a couple drinks and he met her and, yeah, I met the girl in there, you know, she was nice.”

“Probably get going, I need to get home to my dog.”

“Yeah, actually, hey, you know what, I’m going to get out of here too. I got an early day.”

“Yeah, hey hold on, I’ll walk out with you.”

“When we left the bar, it was like a coincidence and she followed me outside, but she went her way and I went mine.”

“He confirms what his girlfriend said, he came home around 11:30 and stayed in the rest of the night.”

“Heitzman had a criminal history but nothing for any homicide, just small-time things, drug possessions, things like that. Nothing in there that would make me think that he was a murderer.”

“With Heitzman’s alibi seemingly corroborated, detectives look into other avenues.”

“Another lead brings them back to the Riverman Lounge where they learn about a man named Danny Silva.”

“Good.”

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah, I saw that girl up here. She was with Silva.”

“Who’s Silva?”

“Silva probably lives up here.”

“Danny was a big, heavy-set gentleman. He was not very good-looking. Patricia Parkin was a very attractive young female. He’s got a big crush on her. They were shooting pool the other night, he’s buying her drinks too. In the course of talking to other people, we realized that he had taken a little bit of a shine to her.”

“Patricia was nice to everybody, and she was nice to this gentleman.”

“Maybe a theory is she had rejected him and things got out of hand.”

“So Danny, do you know Patricia Parkin?”

“Like the other suspects, Silva swears he did nothing to harm her.”

“What’s going on?”

“I can remember him sweating profusely when we were speaking with him. He was a nervous wreck. The guy was so nervous that he actually wet his pants in the backseat of the car right then and there.”

“Throws up a red flag. Under questioning, he makes little sense. He had a very bad alcohol problem and he also had a drug problem and his account of his relationship and his meetings with Patricia was completely scrambled eggs.”

“We were shooting pool the other night up at the bar. What’s the problem? What’s going on?”

“He had dates wrong, he had times wrong. He was meeting her for drinks on days that he couldn’t possibly have met her for drinks.”

“Just tell me what the problem is. What’s going on?”

“I got to go feed my mother’s kids.”

“We were convinced that he wasn’t involved in it when we were all finished with them.”

“As the days pass, Patricia’s loved ones struggle with not knowing.”

“About 4 days before Christmas, we had to make a decision, what are we going to do about Christmas? We decided that wherever my sister is and whatever has happened to her, she would want this for her daughter. So we had Christmas.”

“Baby Melissa is too young to realize it, but she spends her first Christmas without her loving mother.”

“The kids, they got presents, Santa came, all that nine yards, but it wasn’t Christmas. You know, I look back at it as my Christmas with the big hole in it, you know. Santa didn’t give me my gift. Our whole family didn’t get the gift that Christmas. She could have been there, there was something missing and it was my mother.”

“2 days after Christmas.”

“My police department received a call that a group of kids were playing in this particular area in town. These kids were playing in the snow and they see fingers protruding through the snow and they think, ‘Oh what’s this? Maybe it’s a mannequin.'”

“So the kids start brushing the snow away and they realize this isn’t a mannequin. This is a human being.”

“My patrolman responded and located the body. It was sitting down in a ravine, and what they see is a Caucasian female, somewhere in her 20s, and she’s bruised. It was obviously a dump site. Somebody just rolled her down the side of the hill and discarded her, unfortunately, like someone would get rid of trash.”

“Seeing her body for the first time, it bothered me. I was determined to find out who was behind it and why she was there.”

“Snow’s like a blanket over the evidence. It makes it hard to canvas, scrutinize an area where the crime has occurred. We searched every inch of that area, picked up numerous pieces of what we thought could be evidence, from soda cans, beer cans, everything. Believe it or not, there wasn’t one piece that panned out. All we knew is we had a body, a frozen body, sitting there in the snow. There’s no ID and no book bag.”

“But she does fit the general description of Patricia Parkin. She wasn’t killed there so she had to have been transported and this leads police to suspect something even more ominous. More than one person might have done it.”

“Picking up and moving a dead body is extremely difficult. Maybe put in in a car, driven to another location, taken out and then discarded. Very, very difficult for one person to do.”

“The body was removed and sent to the morgue, but because of freezing cold temperatures, it had to sit in the morgue for some time to be able to thaw so they could actually do an autopsy and determine the cause of death. The medical examiner finds evidence of a beating and discovers a tragic detail. Her bladder was filled with urine. Normally when you die, everything drains out of a body, and in this case, it didn’t, which indicates that she was probably alive and just laid there down in a ravine.”

“The medical examiner determined that she died of a combination of things, blunt force trauma and hypothermia. Basically, she froze to death.”

“You have to wonder what kind of a person could leave this young woman half-dressed in the freezing cold in the snow on a hill in December. A person that commits an act like that is a monster.”

“After Patricia Parkin goes missing in Runnemede, New Jersey, children uncover a frozen body.”

“The detectives said that they need somebody to identify the body. Of course, my mom and dad, we’re going. I took him up there, but I wouldn’t let him go in. I was not going to let him go in, so I went in.”

“Yes. Oh my god, that’s my sister.”

“I could see it as vivid today as I did 21 years ago. How could somebody beat somebody like that? My mom and dad, they didn’t want to hear it, they didn’t want to believe it, you know? Why would someone kill our daughter?”

“One of the sticking points with all of us in the family was we couldn’t find our belongings, our book bag. Everywhere Patricia went, the book bag was sure to go. Where is that bag now?”

“When Patricia Parkin was identified, the news media obviously was all over it. In Runnemede, quiet Runnemede, to find a young mother of an 11-month-old child dead in the snow in the middle of the holidays, you can only imagine the kind of coverage that it got.”

“Funeral turnout could be big, which might help the prosecutor’s office. Wanted to participate in the funeral because sometimes in this kind of situation, the perpetrator would like to come back to visit the body. Very often, we will send investigators to scan the crowd and the room, see if anybody’s behaving strangely. They also hide a microphone.”

“We’re looking to see who comes up to the body, who will kneel next to the casket and actually say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry for doing this.'”

“You really couldn’t see who they were, they looked like the funeral directors. But at that time, it was a complete all-out investigation. Everybody was the suspect. You’re sitting at your sister’s funeral, your mind is constantly going on, did that person do it? You know, like you want to jump at every person that comes in there, so you know who did this. I know you know, you know, you just had to back off and you had to let people do their job.”

“Despite their efforts, the surveillance of the funeral led to nothing. No witnesses, no physical evidence. Detectives believe more than one person was involved in this sickening crime. Two people colluding to dump a beloved young mother on an icy night, and no one talking to police. But who are they? We have a big gap in this case from when she leaves the bar to when that body’s found.”

“And who did Patricia leave the bar with? Lee Heitzman, the last person witnesses place with Patricia before she died. Certain he was involved, detectives need to get him to talk.”

“We asked him if he’d be interested in taking a polygraph test, and he sure didn’t have a problem with that. We had a test set up for the next day at 3:00. Well, of course, we get a phone call.”

“I’m not taking the test now. I’ve decided to retain an attorney.”

“That was his answer. All of a sudden, the tune had changed. Lee no longer wanted anything to do with us. The cooperation ended.”

“I’m done. I’m not talking to you people. I’m getting a lawyer.”

“Once he lawyered up, we could not approach him about that again. When somebody right away asks for an attorney, I think there’s something they’re hiding.”

“Heitzman’s girlfriend, Vanessa, doesn’t want to cooperate anymore either. Authorities recall Heitzman has a trucking partner who went out of town with him after Patricia disappeared. Further investigation revealed that who the guy was, Jim Bolio.”

“So we ended up tracking him down, and when he was home one day, we knocked on the door and we were able to speak to him. We asked him if he’d be interested in taking a polygraph test.”

“Is he the second person involved? Here’s how the polygraph works: it’s going to measure your heart rate, respiratory rate. You answer truthfully, you have nothing to worry about. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Our first question, what’s your name?”

“Jim Bolio.”

“He was truthful about his name and about his address and he indicated that he and Lee had been on a long truck run. That part’s true. Every other question that he answered indicated deception. He indicated that Lee appeared fine, nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t say anything abnormal or strange to him.”

“All lies.”

“We confront him with the results of his polygraph test and he shut down on us. The trucker is now refusing to speak to us. Bolio lawyers up and stonewalls them just like Lee Heitzman and Vanessa. The problem was Lee had asked for a lawyer and we have to respect his constitutional rights, and Lee Heitzman’s girlfriend is refusing to speak to us. We don’t have any admissible evidence. We are stuck.”

“The case goes cold for years.”

“Baby Melissa becomes a toddler then an elementary schooler and she does not know who ripped her mom away from her.”

“She wasn’t there to see anything. I did. And every award I got in school, every time something big happened in my life, I would just have to silently think to myself that my mother would be proud of me, but I never actually got to see that for myself. If I never got to hug her or kiss her goodbye when I went to school in the morning, every year it was an anniversary. I watched another year go out of my mother. I watched my father age a lot, you know. I was getting tired. It gets hard on you.”

“One of my detectives came to me and asked me if it was a problem if he opened up that case again.”

“I said, ‘You know what? It’s been seven, almost seven years. People over time, they lose their friends, you know, and they’ll change their stories. Maybe they’ll come forward with the truth now.'”

“If one of my siblings was murdered, I would want the police to do everything they could, turn over every stone. I took that case apart page by page. I went over every single statement.”

“Fresh eyes and time change everything. The positive thing about the passage of time is that boyfriends and girlfriends break up, and what’s the old phrase? ‘Hell hath no fury like the woman scorned.’ Ex-girlfriends years later are a wonderful source of information.”

“Renewing the investigation into the cold murder case of Patricia Parkin, detectives find a statement from a witness about a time when suspect Lee Heitzman returned to the bar after Patricia vanished.”

“The statement that stuck out to me was the barmaid when a barmaid confronted Lee Heitzman.”

“You ready, Lee?”

“Lee, you were the last one seen with Trisha. Where is she?”

“Going to shut you, man?”

“And Lee Heitzman’s father stepped in and said, ‘Don’t you say anything to this woman.’ When I read that statement, I knew he had told people what he had done with her and her body.”

“Heitzman’s father refuses to talk.”

“They look to Vanessa now, Heitzman’s ex-girlfriend, the girlfriend who no longer lives with him.”

“We interviewed her again and explained to her that you know she’s facing some serious charges if indeed she’s involved in this.”

“And they had an additional incentive for her to cooperate. She had been caught in a lie in her original statement. Vanessa had stated categorically that Lee had been home all night with her, but suddenly here was proof he had not.”

“In the course of the investigation, we found out that Lee Heitzman had been stopped at 3:00 in the morning in a traffic stop on the night that Patricia Parkin disappeared. He didn’t get a ticket, but there was a notation on the officer’s log that stopped this car and it was his girlfriend’s. It was her plates.”

“She had told us, ‘Oh, he came home at 11:30 and he was home all night.’ Well, no he wasn’t. We have proof that he wasn’t home all night. So we haul the girlfriend back in and confront her with this.”

“And she has her, ‘hum-and-a-humina’ moment and she starts doing a little verbal tap dancing. And finally she admits, ‘Well, I didn’t actually see him in the house from 11:30 till 8:00 in the morning when I woke up. I just assumed he was home because he was in bed when I woke up.’ Finally, she breaks and tells us the truth.”

“She said Patricia came back to the apartment. They were partying.”

“Spend a lot of time in here, I bet you do.”

“Lee wanted his girlfriend to participate in the partying and she claimed that she said, ‘No, you, I’m pregnant, I’m tired,’ and she just went into the bedroom, and that’s the last she knows of anything. Since she wasn’t truthful from the beginning, she’s going to be a bad witness, and we’re not going to put all our prosecutorial eggs in the girlfriend basket. So we go back to his friend, the trucker.”

“When Lee Heitzman went on his trucking run with Jim immediately following the murder, there’s a good possibility that Jim knows a lot more than what he’s saying.”

“Once somebody speaks, then maybe somebody else will and then somebody else will. It might, it could start a ripple effect.”

“After locating the trucking partner, I told him I had the privilege of investigating the murder of Patricia Parkin.”

“And he turned pure white.”

“They tell him Vanessa is cooperating, so they know what happened, and the trucker realizes I can’t hold this in anymore.”

“Did you help me up, man? I had to wait. I’m really sorry.”

“The trucking partner told me that he confronted Lee that morning, ’cause Lee was late for work, and then Lee told him that he had a horrible night, that he actually killed a woman.”

“What are you talking about, man?”

“I can prove it to you. I wish I couldn’t, but I can prove it to you.”

“And when a trucking partner challenged him, he then took him up to Irish Hill Road.”

“And he tells the investigators how Lee Heitzman showed him the body of Patricia Parkin lying in the snow and the freezing cold of Irish Hill. You can’t make that up. He kept that secret for 7 years.”

“Love you.”

“We knew that she had a backpack and a sweatshirt hoodie. See that backpack right behind you? Yeah, that’s hers.”

“The trucker revealed that Lee Heitzman got rid of the book bag and the sweatshirt. Heitzman took Patricia Parkin’s book bag and threw it in a dumpster at a truck stop. The fact that the trucker knew there was a backpack and a hoodie lent total credence to what he was telling us. Now we had something that we could charge him with.”

“The day that we got the warrant finally signed, I had the opportunity to go be the first one at the door and had guys backing me up. I knocked on the door.”

“Can I help you?”

“Remember me?”

“He knew exactly who I was ’cause his eyes got big. He looked like a deer in a headlights.”

“Lee Heitzman, you’re under arrest for the murder of Patricia Parkin.”

“It was a good feeling.”

“There was nowhere for him to hide anymore, and he confesses.”

“He in fact brought Patricia back to his apartment. He might have tried to coerce her into some kind of sexual contact. I don’t think she was on board for whatever activities he had planned that evening, and she fought back.”

“Stay a little while.”

“I can let myself out though.”

“Hey no no no no. Hey hey hey hey. Stay a little.”

“I believe she challenged him and he overpowered her and smashed her, and then…”

“Hey, look at me. You’re going to come help me. Hey, look.”

“He likely threatened his pregnant girlfriend to make her help dispose of Patricia, who was still alive when he dumped her.”

“And then in the course of the long-haul trucking trip, disposes of the only evidence that would have linked Patricia Parkin to him or his apartment.”

“Charles Lee Heitzman pleads guilty to aggravated manslaughter. Aggravated manslaughter in the state of New Jersey is recklessly killing someone under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. And if you saw the way she was left there to freeze to death, is the picture of the definition of that legal phrase. People who commit these heinous acts cheapen the value of human life. They have no compassion for that person, not knowing what that person felt, and leaving them like a piece of garbage.”

“In exchange for their cooperation, the girlfriend and the trucking partner are not charged.”

“Heitzman gets a 25-year sentence but only serves 12. He dies in prison on October 31st, 2014, eerily on Patricia Parkin’s birthday.”

“To the Parkin family, heaven has no room for him. We all had the same thought, that I wonder how he felt when he met my sister and my sister said, ‘Nope, you got to go the other way. You, you can’t come up with me.'”

“Now he’s never apologized. Not even to his grave. To his death, he was a cold-horror killer.”

“The greatest tragedy in this case is that a little girl never knew her mother. She wasn’t old enough to have a memory of her.”

“He robbed me of my mother. She didn’t get to see me graduate from high school and she didn’t get to see my prom. She’s not going to get to see my wedding. Um, it showed up a little bit, but she couldn’t be here to help me bury my… Our parents would have been nice to have a sister a lot longer than what I had.”

“My mother definitely had a part in my inspiration to go to nursing school and become an RN. She wanted to help people and she dedicated a large part of her life to study to do that. And I also want to help people and I kind of want to fulfill her dream for her.”