Two Dead Fathers and a Demon: The 2008 Texas Exorcism Murder

0:00 December 2, 2008, a trailer outside Tatum, Texas. A 911 call from an 18-year-old guy who said he just found his girlfriend's baby dead. What deputies walked into that morning got described later as the worst case of brutality, the medical examiner has ever seen in his career. And the story behind it is somehow stranger and sadder than the headline ever made it sound. [Music] Okay, so I want to take you to a place in East Texas you've probably never heard of or ever thought about.

0:53 We're in Piney Woods, about 15 miles southeast of Longview, in a town called Tatum. It's December 2, 2008, and there's a trailer sitting off of a rural road at 1037 in the morning. A kid named Blaine Mylam picks up a phone and dials 911. He's 18 years old so I guess technically he's not a kid. But the first thing he says is, "My name is Blaine Mylam and my daughter. I just found her dead." Now the baby in that trailer was Amora Bain Carson. She was 13 months old and she was not Blaine's biological daughter. She's the daughter of his girlfriend Jessica Carson, also 18 years old.

1:34 And what the deputies found when they walked into that bedroom, I'm not going to put you through in great detail. But I will tell you that the medical examiner who handled the case later said that it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his career. I'll tell you the assault on that baby went on for an estimated 30 hours. And I'll tell you when the first deputy got there, he saw circular bruises on the body and thought they were from a coat can pressed against the baby's skin. They weren't. They were human bite marks. They were 24 of those. I'm telling you this case slowly because the headline version of it has been in the news for 17 years. And the headline is "Exorcism murder." And when you say "exorcism" people picture a horror movie and they stop thinking.

2:20 What was actually going on in that trailer was much sadder and much weirder. And it starts with two kids who both lost their fathers. But let me back up. Blaine Milam was born in Greg County, Texas in 1989. His childhood was by every measure, a wreck. His dad was a mechanic who got sick when Blaine was little and instead of going to school, Blaine became his daddy's caretaker. He left school for good in the fourth grade. His mom said later on the stand that her son never emotionally matured past the age of 12. That was around the time his father started really declining. When his dad did finally die, Blaine tried to kill himself. Twice. He told people he wanted to go be with his daddy. His mom tried to get him committed for psychiatric care after one of the attempts.

3:10 It didn't happen. The system just sort of looked past him. When he was tested years later, his IQ came back anywhere between 68 and 80, depending on the day and the examiner. His adaptive functioning, meaning basic life skills stuff, put him in about the level of an 8 and a half year old child. This is 2008, by the way, rule East Texas. The meth epidemic out there is rolling and Blaine was using. He had been since he was a young teenager. And before he ever even met Jessica, Blaine had already been arrested for a sex offense involving an 11 year old neighbor. He got six months in jail and probation. As a condition of that probation, he was not allowed unsupervised contact with children outside of his family. He should not have been living with a 13 month old.

4:01 But he was. Now Jessica. Jessica Bain Carson was from Alabama. Her father had died when she was about 11 or 12 years old. Around the same age that Blaine was when his father got really sick and started to decline. And his mother said that he never really mentally went past that. That was his maturity level around that age. They met in January of 2008. He proposed to her on prom night. Which, if you went to prom in a small town, you can picture exactly the energy of that. By the spring she had moved in with him. By the summer, according to her mom, something had shifted in her. She'd come into a small insurance settlement from her father's death and she got really withdrawn.

4:43 She got in her mom's words, "Holo." One friend who knew her said that looking into her eyes was like looking into a dark space. By the fall, she had completely cut off contact with her own mother completely. In September of 2008, three months before all this happened, Blaine's father died. And that is when whatever fragile structure was holding these two together just collapsed. Blaine started heavily using meth again. He stopped going to work. And as I mentioned, the two suicide attempts. And somewhere in there, they got a hold of a Ouija board. They started using it to try to talk to their dead fathers. Two grieving 18-year-olds with no parental supervision, no money, meth, a baby in the trailer, and a Ouija board on the coffee table. And the belief system that came out of those sessions is where this gets clinical. A psychiatrist would later call what was happening to them, "Folly a do." Shared psychosis. You have one person who develops a paranoid belief system, and a second person who was isolated, dependent, and vulnerable enough to absorb it as truth.

5:52 They moved out of an apartment because Jessica decided that it was possessed. They moved in with Blaine's mom. Jessica then decided that Blaine was possessed. She said she could see it in his face. Blaine told investigators that after the demon entered him, he could talk to God. And then in the days before December 2nd, the delusion landed on Amora, the baby. On the morning of December 2nd, before that 9-1-1 call, surveillance footage from a pawn shop over in Henderson shows the two of them walking in and pawning a chain saw and an air impact tool. They were trying to raise money. According to the story that they would later tell, they were trying to scrape together enough to hire a priest to come over to perform an exorcism on the baby. And apparently they didn't make enough money selling that stuff for the priest. Whether you believe that exorcism story is its own question and we'll get back to it. The DA never bought it. He thought it was a cover story dreamed up after the fact. And that what really happened was that a convicted sex offender with access to a baby did what convicted sex offenders sometimes do. The defense says it was both at once.

7:06 Both can be true. The drugs, the delusion, the prior history, the meth psychosis, the grief, the isolation, the Ouija board. None of it cancels out any of the rest of it. When the deputies arrived, Blaine had been kneeling on the floor next to Amora. He was calm enough that they almost believed him. He told them they'd left the baby alone for a bit to go to meet a man named Clark about clearing some land. That story fell apart within hours. Nobody named Clark had a meeting with him. A few weeks later, a Texas Ranger interviewed Jessica. She started off crying. Then her demeanor changed sharply. She stopped calling Amora by her name and started calling her that baby. And then a month after that, in January of 2009, a jail nurse named Shirley was making her rounds at the Russ County jail and found Blaine crying in a cell. He handed her a note.

7:58 He said, "I'm going to confess. I did it. But, Miss Shirley, the Blaine you know, did not do this." Forensic teams eventually found a pipe wrench wrapped in a plastic bag and shoved through a hole in the floor of the trailer bathroom. It had Amora's DNA on it. The lead came from Blaine's own sister who'd visited him in jail and then told their aunts that she needed to go get something from under the trailer. The aunt, obviously, immediately called the cops. Essentially, Blaine was trying to get a sister to go and recover some evidence from the trailer on the down low, told the aunt about it, and the aunt told the cops. Blaine was convicted of capital murder in 2010. Got the death sentence.

8:42 Jessica was tried separately. The state did not seek the death penalty for her. Under Texas law, to send someone to death row, the jury has to find they'd be a continuing danger to society. And the court said ruled that a mother who kills her own child is only a danger to her future children. Amora was gone. So Jessica got life without parole. She's still in a Texas prison. Blaine spent 17 years on death row. His appeals were a masterclass in how complicated this all was. The bite mark evidence that helped convict him got dismantled by the scientific community in the years after his trial. The state's original expert on his intellectual disability later changed his mind and said, "Yes, this man does qualify. Do not execute him." The court found a new expert who used a partial IQ score instead of a full one and disagreed. Werner Herzog made a documentary about him and later said that the case is part of why he stopped making death row films. On September 25th, 2025, Blaine Milam was given a cheeseburger of infried potatoes, green beans, and biscuits. In his final statement, he thanked his supporters. He talked about Jesus and invited everyone listening to accept his faith so they could meet again. He never once said Amora's name. She would have been 18 this year.

10:07 Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories. Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host, and as you can tell, I'm almost past this cold thing that I've got going on. It won't be long now before I'm back to normal. I feel mostly back to normal, but I still have this congestion here, and it's driving me crazy. I'm sure it sounds terrible and I apologize for that, but I'm doing the best I can here. Hey, here's an email. Subjects a question from the hardware store. Hey, Joe, I was wondering around the lumber aisle at Lowe's and listening to your show and pretending that I knew what I was looking for. I didn't. It got me wondering what's the most adult thing that you're surprisingly bad at? Kevin and McKinney, Illinois. Kevin, it's pretty similar to what you're talking about here. I'm terrible at fixing things. I'm not handy at all. Now, I can put IKEA furniture together. If you've got a set of instructions, I can follow instructions pretty well and I can put things together. But if something breaks and it needs to be repaired, I'm useless. My dad has always been handy and I grew up as a kid helping him fix things. But by helping him fix things, I only mean that I was standing there holding the flashlight and then retrieving the wrenches that he would throw into the yard. If he was fixing the car, he'd bang his knuckles on

11:38 something, say a cuss word and throw the wrenches in the yard and say, "Go get that." That's how I helped fix things when I was a kid. I don't know how to fix things. It's not one of the skills that I possess. My brain does not work that way. And there are people that can do it and are very good at it and make a good living at doing that. That's just not me. Javbo, thank you for the email and thank you for listening. Hey, if you listening to me right now, this is your first time listening. Welcome in. Make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening to me right now. You can also go to 10minutemerder.com. Get the listen links and also links to where you can follow 10-minute murder on social media. If you like 10-minute murder but you wish the episodes were a little bit longer, great news for you. True Crime Blueprints. It's another podcast that I host and create. It's called True Crime Blueprint, available in almost every place that this one is. Just go search that up or check the show notes of this episode. And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10-minute murder. See you next time.

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