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

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December 2, 2008, a trailer outside Tatum, Texas.

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A 911 call from an 18-year-old guy who said he just found his girlfriend's baby dead.

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What deputies walked into that morning got described later as the worst case of brutality,

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the medical examiner has ever seen in his career.

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And the story behind it is somehow stranger and sadder than the headline ever made it sound.

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[Music]

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Okay, so I want to take you to a place in East Texas you've probably never heard of or ever thought about.

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We're in Piney Woods, about 15 miles southeast of Longview, in a town called Tatum.

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It's December 2, 2008, and there's a trailer sitting off of a rural road at 1037 in the morning.

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A kid named Blaine Mylam picks up a phone and dials 911.

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He's 18 years old so I guess technically he's not a kid.

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But the first thing he says is, "My name is Blaine Mylam and my daughter. I just found her dead."

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Now the baby in that trailer was Amora Bain Carson. She was 13 months old and she was not Blaine's

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biological daughter. She's the daughter of his girlfriend Jessica Carson, also 18 years old.

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And what the deputies found when they walked into that bedroom, I'm not going to put you through

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in great detail. But I will tell you that the medical examiner who handled the case later said that

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it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his career. I'll tell you the assault on that baby

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went on for an estimated 30 hours. And I'll tell you when the first deputy got there,

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he saw circular bruises on the body and thought they were from a coat can pressed against the baby's

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skin. They weren't. They were human bite marks. They were 24 of those. I'm telling you this case

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slowly because the headline version of it has been in the news for 17 years. And the headline is

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"Exorcism murder." And when you say "exorcism" people picture a horror movie and they stop thinking.

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What was actually going on in that trailer was much sadder and much weirder. And it starts with two

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kids who both lost their fathers. But let me back up. Blaine Milam was born in Greg County, Texas

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in 1989. His childhood was by every measure, a wreck. His dad was a mechanic who got sick when

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Blaine was little and instead of going to school, Blaine became his daddy's caretaker. He left

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school for good in the fourth grade. His mom said later on the stand that her son never emotionally

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matured past the age of 12. That was around the time his father started really declining.

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When his dad did finally die, Blaine tried to kill himself. Twice. He told people he wanted to go

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be with his daddy. His mom tried to get him committed for psychiatric care after one of the attempts.

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It didn't happen. The system just sort of looked past him. When he was tested years later,

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his IQ came back anywhere between 68 and 80, depending on the day and the examiner. His adaptive

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functioning, meaning basic life skills stuff, put him in about the level of an 8 and a half year old

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child. This is 2008, by the way, rule East Texas. The meth epidemic out there is rolling and Blaine

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was using. He had been since he was a young teenager. And before he ever even met Jessica,

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Blaine had already been arrested for a sex offense involving an 11 year old neighbor. He got six

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months in jail and probation. As a condition of that probation, he was not allowed unsupervised

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contact with children outside of his family. He should not have been living with a 13 month old.

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But he was. Now Jessica. Jessica Bain Carson was from Alabama. Her father had died when she was

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about 11 or 12 years old. Around the same age that Blaine was when his father got really sick and

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started to decline. And his mother said that he never really mentally went past that. That was his

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maturity level around that age. They met in January of 2008. He proposed to her on prom night.

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Which, if you went to prom in a small town, you can picture exactly the energy of that. By the

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spring she had moved in with him. By the summer, according to her mom, something had shifted in her.

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She'd come into a small insurance settlement from her father's death and she got really withdrawn.

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She got in her mom's words, "Holo." One friend who knew her said that looking into her eyes was

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like looking into a dark space. By the fall, she had completely cut off contact with her own mother

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completely. In September of 2008, three months before all this happened, Blaine's father died.

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And that is when whatever fragile structure was holding these two together just collapsed.

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Blaine started heavily using meth again. He stopped going to work. And as I mentioned, the two

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suicide attempts. And somewhere in there, they got a hold of a Ouija board. They started using it to

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try to talk to their dead fathers. Two grieving 18-year-olds with no parental supervision, no money,

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meth, a baby in the trailer, and a Ouija board on the coffee table. And the belief system that came

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out of those sessions is where this gets clinical. A psychiatrist would later call what was happening to

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them, "Folly a do." Shared psychosis. You have one person who develops a paranoid belief system,

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and a second person who was isolated, dependent, and vulnerable enough to absorb it as truth.

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They moved out of an apartment because Jessica decided that it was possessed. They moved in with

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Blaine's mom. Jessica then decided that Blaine was possessed. She said she could see it in his face.

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Blaine told investigators that after the demon entered him, he could talk to God. And then in the days

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before December 2nd, the delusion landed on Amora, the baby. On the morning of December 2nd,

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before that 9-1-1 call, surveillance footage from a pawn shop over in Henderson shows the two of

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them walking in and pawning a chain saw and an air impact tool. They were trying to raise money.

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According to the story that they would later tell, they were trying to scrape together enough to

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hire a priest to come over to perform an exorcism on the baby. And apparently they didn't make enough

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money selling that stuff for the priest. Whether you believe that exorcism story is its own question

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and we'll get back to it. The DA never bought it. He thought it was a cover story dreamed up after

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the fact. And that what really happened was that a convicted sex offender with access to a baby

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did what convicted sex offenders sometimes do. The defense says it was both at once.

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Both can be true. The drugs, the delusion, the prior history, the meth psychosis, the grief,

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the isolation, the Ouija board. None of it cancels out any of the rest of it.

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When the deputies arrived, Blaine had been kneeling on the floor next to Amora. He was calm enough

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that they almost believed him. He told them they'd left the baby alone for a bit to go to meet a

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man named Clark about clearing some land. That story fell apart within hours. Nobody named Clark

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had a meeting with him. A few weeks later, a Texas Ranger interviewed Jessica. She started off crying.

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Then her demeanor changed sharply. She stopped calling Amora by her name and started calling her

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that baby. And then a month after that, in January of 2009, a jail nurse named Shirley was making

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her rounds at the Russ County jail and found Blaine crying in a cell. He handed her a note.

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He said, "I'm going to confess. I did it. But, Miss Shirley, the Blaine you know, did not do this."

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Forensic teams eventually found a pipe wrench wrapped in a plastic bag and shoved through a hole

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in the floor of the trailer bathroom. It had Amora's DNA on it. The lead came from Blaine's own

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sister who'd visited him in jail and then told their aunts that she needed to go get something from

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under the trailer. The aunt, obviously, immediately called the cops. Essentially, Blaine was trying to

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get a sister to go and recover some evidence from the trailer on the down low, told the aunt about it,

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and the aunt told the cops. Blaine was convicted of capital murder in 2010. Got the death sentence.

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Jessica was tried separately. The state did not seek the death penalty for her. Under Texas law,

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to send someone to death row, the jury has to find they'd be a continuing danger to society.

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And the court said ruled that a mother who kills her own child is only a danger to her future children.

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Amora was gone. So Jessica got life without parole. She's still in a Texas prison. Blaine spent

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17 years on death row. His appeals were a masterclass in how complicated this all was. The bite mark

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evidence that helped convict him got dismantled by the scientific community in the years after his

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trial. The state's original expert on his intellectual disability later changed his mind and said,

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"Yes, this man does qualify. Do not execute him." The court found a new expert who used a partial

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IQ score instead of a full one and disagreed. Werner Herzog made a documentary about him and later

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said that the case is part of why he stopped making death row films. On September 25th, 2025,

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Blaine Milam was given a cheeseburger of infried potatoes, green beans, and biscuits. In his final

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statement, he thanked his supporters. He talked about Jesus and invited everyone listening to

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accept his faith so they could meet again. He never once said Amora's name. She would have been 18 this year.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories. Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host,

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and as you can tell, I'm almost past this cold thing that I've got going on. It won't be

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long now before I'm back to normal. I feel mostly back to normal, but I still have this congestion here,

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and it's driving me crazy. I'm sure it sounds terrible and I apologize for that, but I'm doing the

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best I can here. Hey, here's an email. Subjects a question from the hardware store. Hey, Joe,

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I was wondering around the lumber aisle at Lowe's and listening to your show and pretending that I

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knew what I was looking for. I didn't. It got me wondering what's the most adult thing that you're

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surprisingly bad at? Kevin and McKinney, Illinois. Kevin, it's pretty similar to what you're talking

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about here. I'm terrible at fixing things. I'm not handy at all. Now, I can put IKEA furniture

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together. If you've got a set of instructions, I can follow instructions pretty well and I can put

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things together. But if something breaks and it needs to be repaired, I'm useless. My dad has

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always been handy and I grew up as a kid helping him fix things. But by helping him fix things,

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I only mean that I was standing there holding the flashlight and then retrieving the

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wrenches that he would throw into the yard. If he was fixing the car, he'd bang his knuckles on

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something, say a cuss word and throw the wrenches in the yard and say, "Go get that." That's how I

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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

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possess. My brain does not work that way. And there are people that can do it and are

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very good at it and make a good living at doing that. That's just not me.

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Javbo, thank you for the email and thank you for listening. Hey, if you listening to me right now,

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this is your first time listening. Welcome in. Make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening to

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search that up or check the show notes of this episode. And that's going to do it. That's your

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episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10-minute murder. See you next time.

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[Music]