On a spring morning in Memphis, Tennessee, the body of a woman was found tucked between a building and a staircase, covered with a yellow blanket. It was Friday, May 28, 1999, and at first, maintenance workers thought she was merely a homeless person sleeping in a downtown alcove. When they couldn't rouse her, they pulled back the covering and made a gruesome discovery. The woman, 43-year-old Beatrice Marie Cole, was dead, her head severely bludgeoned.
It was the beginning of a case that would go cold for more than a decade, the first known murder by a man who would kill again.
Beatrice Marie Cole, a female, was born in West Memphis on January 31, 1956. At the time of her death, she was homeless and had a history as a mental patient. Her life on the streets made her vulnerable, a member of a community living on the margins of society. After her death, Beatrice's family held a small funeral for her, and she was laid to rest in Marion Memorial Cemetery. For years, her violent death remained a mystery, her killer a ghost who had seemingly vanished after the brutal attack.
The initial investigation into Beatrice’s murder was fraught with dead ends. Memphis police pursued various leads, identifying at least eight different suspects over time, including men known on the street as "Ooga Booga" and "Chicken Larry." Each suspect was eventually cleared, and with no new information, the case grew cold. Semen had been recovered from Beatrice’s body, but at the time, submitting it for DNA testing was not standard procedure, so the crucial evidence was simply stored away. For 13 years, justice for Beatrice seemed unattainable as her case file gathered dust.
The break in the case came from a series of otherwise unconnected, brutal attacks. In 2008, a woman named Jessie Lee Maples was raped and bludgeoned in Knoxville, but survived. In August 2011, Valerie Ector was found raped and murdered in Memphis, her body also covered with a blanket. Then, on June 6, 2012, 67-year-old Gwendolyn Jackson was beaten to death with a brick near St. Mary's Catholic Church in downtown Memphis. At this last crime scene, investigators found a paper bag with fingerprints on it, leading them to a man with a history of petty crimes: Michael Mullins.
Once in custody, the full horror of Michael Mullins's crimes came to light. DNA evidence linked him to the 2011 murder of Valerie Ector and the 2008 attack in Knoxville. During a series of interviews with Memphis police investigators, Mullins not only confessed to the murders of Gwendolyn Jackson and Valerie Ector, and the attempted murder of Jessie Lee Maples, but he also admitted to a crime detectives had no reason to suspect him of: the 1999 murder of Beatrice Marie Cole. He told investigators he and Beatrice had been drinking and using drugs before he flew into a rage and hit her twice in the head with a concrete block.
For his 13-year span of terror, Michael Mullins, born June 28, 1961, was brought to justice. On December 5, 2014, he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and multiple counts of aggravated rape. He was sentenced to three concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole for the murders, plus additional time for the rapes. The following year, he was sentenced to another 50 years for the brutal attack in Knoxville.
The investigation that finally caught Mullins was described as a group effort by law enforcement, solved not by new technology but by a critical fingerprint and the sharp memory of a veteran homicide sergeant who connected the cases. Mullins had preyed on vulnerable women for over a decade, his crimes so spread out that no one had realized a serial killer was at work. His confession finally closed the long-cold case of Beatrice Marie Cole, bringing a name and a measure of justice to the woman found under a yellow blanket so many years before.
