Do you know who murdered Robert Charles Pickle in 2017? Robert Charles Pickle, 51, a White man, was found dead on September 19, 2017, inside his home on McSpadden Street in Knoxville, Tennessee. It began as a welfare check that drew investigators to 1417 McSpadden Street, where they discovered him lying deceased inside the residence—an abrupt, grim ending in a place that should have been safe and familiar.
As the news spread, police treated the death as a homicide investigation and moved quickly into the work of tracing his final hours—who had been with him, who had reason to come to the house, who might have left a footprint in the silence afterward. The address became a focal point as detectives tried to reconstruct what had happened behind the closed door, and the neighborhood became a canvas of questions: the last sighting, the last call, the last person to cross his threshold.
Within hours, investigators publicly identified someone they wanted to question: Mark Edward Phelan, described at the time as 30 years old, and sought as a person of interest connected to the homicide of the McSpadden Street resident. The request wasn’t framed as an arrest announcement, but as an urgent plea for help locating him—an appeal that suggests investigators believed he could explain what happened, or at least lead them toward the truth.
By the next day, police reported that Phelan had been located at a relative’s home outside Knox County and taken into custody on unrelated charges. Investigators said he was interviewed in connection with the death, but he was not charged in the homicide at that time, leaving the case suspended in an uneasy space—close enough to a lead to feel tangible, but not close enough to be resolved.
Years later, the killing still appears among Knoxville’s open cases: Robert Charles Pickle’s name remains listed with the same date and location, a stark entry that signals the investigation has not been closed with a publicly identified offender or a final court outcome. If there have been additional suspects, arrests, indictments, or convictions connected to his death since those early updates, they are not reflected in the publicly available case listing and the contemporaneous police statements that were released when the investigation first unfolded.
