The Wrong Mother: How Julie Rea Was Convicted of Killing Her Own Son

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A 10-year-old boy is murdered in his bed in the middle of the night.

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His mother survives the attack and tells police exactly what happened.

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And within days, law enforcement has already made up their minds about who did it.

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What they didn't know, what nobody knew was the actual killer was already several states

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away, and he was going to spend the next seven years carrying this secret until a true

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crime author asked him exactly the right question.

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October 1997, Lawrenceville, Illinois, population around 10,000 people, kind of small.

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Everyone knows everyone, which also means everyone's knows is in everyone else's business.

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And when something terrible happens, the rumor mill is already running well before the

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police tape goes up.

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Julie Ray is 35 years old at this point.

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She's a PhD student in educational psychology at Indiana University, a field literally

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dedicated to understanding how children's minds grow and develop.

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She has a 10-year-old son named Joel Kirkpatrick.

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And by every account, from people who actually knew him, Joel was one of those genuinely

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special kids, brilliant and sweet, gifted and loving.

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The boy who made adults around him feel like maybe the next generation was going to be

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okay, after all.

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He had that energy.

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Julie and her ex-husband, Lynn Kirkpatrick, had been divorced since 1994 and were in the

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middle of a real custody dispute.

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Joel was at Julie's place for a visit on October 12 into the early morning hours of October 13,

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1997.

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He went to sleep in his room.

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His mom went to sleep in hers.

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At four in the morning, Julie woke up to screaming.

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She ran into the hallway and came face to face with a masked intruder.

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She didn't have any framework for what was happening.

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It's four in the morning.

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She's been pulled out of a sleep by a scream and her brain is genuinely trying to catch up,

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figure out what her eyes are actually seeing.

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She grabbed for him.

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She fought.

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She got dragged across the carpet, out through the back of the house, and struck in the face

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in the backyard before the intruder disappeared, often to the dark.

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When she got back inside, she found Joel.

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He was gone.

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He had been stabbed multiple times with a steak knife taken from their own kitchen.

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The scene was devastating.

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When law enforcement arrived, they noticed one thing and essentially built their entire theory

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around it.

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No forced entry.

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No busted door frame, no broken window.

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And for investigators in Lawrenceville in 1997, that detail functionally closed the case

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before it even had a real chance to open.

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Their working assumption became that Julie had done this herself, that the custody dispute

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had pushed her to a point where she decided if she couldn't have Joel, nobody would.

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The problem was the evidence, or really the complete absence of anything connecting her

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to it.

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Julie's clothing had no blood spatter.

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A nurse who treated her that morning documented what appeared to be rug burns on Julie's legs,

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which is exactly what you'd expect from someone who'd been dragged across the carpet, which

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is exactly what Julie said happened.

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The only blood in her clothing was a contact transfer pattern, consistent with someone who

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had touched their child after finding him.

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But the no forced entry argument stuck.

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It stuck because it fit a story that was simpler and more emotionally satisfying than

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the alternative.

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Nobody in Lawrence County was seriously considering the profile of a nomadic opportunistic

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killer, someone who travels consistently, targets homes with unlocked doors, and deliberately

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uses weapons found inside the house specifically to avoid carrying anything traceable.

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That profile was real and well documented.

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It just wasn't on anyone's radar there.

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Julie was arrested.

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Her trial in 2002 was moved to Wayne County, Illinois.

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At some point during the prosecution's preparation, someone made a decision that tells you everything

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about their actual strategy.

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They introduced testimony suggesting Julie had once considered terminating her pregnancy

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with Joel.

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Her own OB-GYN testified this was false.

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Julie had in fact been placed on bed rest during her pregnancy specifically to prevent losing

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him, but the implication had already been heard by the jury.

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Wayne County in 2002 was deeply socially conservative, and the suggestion landed exactly

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as they intended.

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Combined with photographs of Joel and the custody-battle narrative, it was enough.

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Julie was somehow convicted and sentenced to 65 years in prison.

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Now we need to talk about Tommy Lynn Cells, because understanding who he was matters enormously

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to understanding how this all happened.

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Tommy was born in Oakland, California on June 28, 1964, and his childhood reads like a clinical

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study in every condition we now understand to produce profound psychological damage.

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His twin sister died of meningitis when they were 18 months old, his mother then sent him

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to live with an aunt in Holka, Missouri, and those three years with Antboni turned out

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to be, by Tommy's own account, the only genuinely happy stretch of his life.

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His warmest memory was riding his tricycle on the sidewalk outside of her house.

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That's the lone memory that he holds on to.

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Since Tommy was five, his mother discovered the aunt was planning to adopt him and came

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and took him back, not out of affection, but out of spite.

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He returned to neglect and instability.

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By seven, he was skipping school and stealing alcohol from his grandfather.

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At eight, he was being sexually abused by an older man named Willis Clark.

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At 13, his family packed up and moved away in the middle of the night without telling him.

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Just left.

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At 14, Tommy Lynn's cells started drifting across the country and essentially never stopped.

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Spending two decades working carnival jobs and manual labor and killing people along the

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way.

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Investigators would eventually attribute a significant number of murders to him across

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multiple states, though the full scope of his crimes was never really completely established.

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He became known as the Coast to Coast Killer.

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On October 11, 1997, a man named Alan Berkshire encountered a twitchy disoriented drifter in

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the Lawrenceville Drive-In.

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He remembered him specifically because the man was difficult to be around, nervous and

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biting his nails, who's hard to read.

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The man mentioned having a family in Arizona and having recently worked in St. Louis, both

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of which turned out to be true of cells at the time.

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Berkshire watched him walk off toward the railroad tracks.

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His tracks led directly to the neighborhood where Julie and Joel lived.

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On October 13, Joel Kirkpatrick was murdered.

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On October 15, Tommy Lynn's cells killed a woman named Stephanie Mahaney in Springfield,

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Missouri.

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In May of 2002, ABC's 2020 aired a segment on Julie Reis case.

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A true crime author named Diane Fanning happened to be watching.

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She was writing a book about Tommy Lynn's cells and corresponding with him regularly while

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he sat on death row in Texas.

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When she heard the prosecutor dismiss the intruder theory as garbage, she stopped cold.

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An opportunistic stranger, an unlocked door, a weapon grabbed from inside the house.

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That was Tommy's entire method and she knew it.

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She wrote to him, she asked if he had ever committed a crime in Illinois where a woman had

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been blamed for her son's death.

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She gave him no specific date.

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His response was to ask whether it happened, quote, "Maybe two days before my Springfield,

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Missouri murder, maybe on the 13th."

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Joel Kirkpatrick was killed on October 13.

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Investigator Bill Clutter with the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project then spent years

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building the corroborating case around cells confession.

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He found Alan Berkshire who placed a man matching cells description in Lawrenceville

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two days before the murder.

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He found Sandra Worth, a Greyhound ticket agent in Princeton, Indiana who remembered selling

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a ticket on October 14 to a frantic, disheveled man who said he needed to get to his mother in

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St. Louis.

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The ticket was for Assyrian Nevada, a location Texas Rangers confirmed that Tommy Lynn had

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passed through.

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A meteorologist reviewed weather data and established that there had been no due on the

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ground that morning, which dismantled a deputies' earlier testimony about there being no

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visible footprints on the yard.

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His due is what would have made footprints visible in the first place.

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Cells ultimately provided more than 50 cooperating details.

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The specific light-colored night shirt Julie was wearing, the layout of the kitchen, the

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location of the knife block, and the detail of Julie clean to his leg as he dragged her across

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the floor.

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That last detail had never been made public.

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Julie had described it to investigators in 1997.

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The rug burns on her legs were the physical proof.

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The jury was described the same moment seven years later without being given a single prompt.

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On July 26, 2006, after a retrial, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

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On December 1, 2010, the circuit court of Lawrence County issued Julie Ray a certificate of innocence,

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a rare formal declaration that she bore absolutely no responsibility for what happened to her

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son.

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Jimmy Lynn Cells was executed by the state of Texas in 2014.

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Joel Kurt Patrick was 10 years old.

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He was brilliant and sweet, and he deserved so much more than what he got.

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His mother spent nearly a decade fighting a system that had already reached its verdict.

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And the only thing that finally moved the needle was a death row killer who decided, for

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whatever reason, to tell the truth.

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That's a strange and heavy thing to sit with.

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And it's one of the reasons this case sits with you so long after you've heard it.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories.

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My name is Joe.

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I'm the host.

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I.

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Here's a quick email, subject, case study curiosity.

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Hey, Joe, I've noticed sometimes you choose cases that aren't the obvious headline grabbers.

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Do you intentionally look for stories that haven't been covered much?

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Or does it just work out that way?

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I like discovering cases that I haven't already heard 10 times.

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Mara in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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And Mara the answer is going to be kind of confusing because it's both.

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Think about for a second how many episodes of this podcast I put out.

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It's always at minimum two, sometimes three, and up to four episodes per week.

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That's a lot of cases.

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I do make a conscious effort to talk about cases pretty often as often as I can that aren't

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the norm that a lot of people aren't talking about.

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But also if you don't talk about the Ted Bundy's, the John Bene Ramsey's, etc.

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Then people are going to be like, ah, I don't know.

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People want to hear cases that they know all the details about already.

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I don't know why that is.

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I'm the same way, but I'll listen to a podcast episode about a case that I've done on this

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podcast just to hear how someone else tells the story.

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See if I missed any details, that kind of thing.

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So it's a little bit of both.

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Mara.

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I hope that answers your question.

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Hey, if you're a new listener to this podcast, welcome to you.

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Pick up your phone wherever you happen to be listening to this podcast and press subscribe

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If you like the app, that is if you like this podcast.

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Let me I should have started with that.

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I'm sorry.

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If you like this podcast, hit subscribe.

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Also, send me an email there.

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And if you aren't sick of me talking already, I have another podcast where I talk even more

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about true crime.

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To go check that out and follow true crime blueprint.

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And there's a motorcycle going by my house.

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A loud one.

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Normally I would stop and be like, well let me retake that last line but I'm not going to

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do that this time.

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We can listen to the motorcycle together.

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All right, that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10minutemurder.

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See you next time.