Johnny Mayes Sr. Mary Frances Mayes (charged as accomplice)
Spouse
Teresa Mayes (charged as accomplice)
Status
Added
May 9, 2012
Number
496
Deceased prior to capture
On April 27, 2012, Jo Ann Bain and her eldest daughter were murdered in Whiteville, Tennessee and the woman's two younger daughters were kidnapped by Adam Christopher Mayes, an Alpine, Mississippi man who had known the family for many years. On May 9, 2012, Mayes was added to the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, having replaced James "Whitey" Bulger on the list. The following day, he and the two girls were spotted in a heavily wooded area; during the capture attempt, Mayes reportedly shot himself in the head and later died from his wounds.[2] The two girls were rescued unharmed.
On August 9, 2013, in a plea bargain agreement, Mayes' wife, Teresa, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of especially aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to 35 years, minus the 460 days she had already spent in prison. His mother, Mary Mayes, pleaded guilty to two counts of especially aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to 13 1/2 years.[3][4]
Murders and kidnapping
Jo Ann Bain was the mother of three daughters, Adrienne (b. 1997), Alexandria (b. 1999)[5] and Kyliyah (b. 2004).[6] Her first husband, Mark Johnson, the biological father of Adrienne and Alexandria, signed over his legal rights to the girls to Jo Ann's second husband, Gary Bain, in 2011.[7] Gary Bain had previously been married for 20 years to Adam Mayes' eldest sister, Pamela; they divorced in 2002.[8] Mayes had stayed friendly with Bain and was a frequent visitor to the home.
On April 27, 2012, a day before Adam Christopher Mayes was supposed to help the Bain family move to Arizona,[9] Mayes allegedly killed Jo Ann Bain and her oldest daughter Adrienne and kidnapped the two younger girls, Alexandria and Kyliyah. Gary Bain came home late that night and assumed his family members were sleeping. Only when he could not reach his wife by cell phone and his daughters did not return from school the next day did he report them missing.[9]
Mayes was interviewed by police officers about the Bains' disappearance on April 29. He told police he was the last to see the mother and daughters, but police found no evidence of a crime. On April 30, Jo Ann Bain's SUV was found abandoned on a country road in Tennessee.
On or around May 4, Teresa Mayes reportedly told police that her husband had killed Jo Ann and Adrienne in the Bains' garage and that the bodies were buried behind his mobile home. On May 5, investigators uncovered two "badly decomposed" bodies from a shallow grave behind the mobile home; they were identified as the bodies of Jo Ann and Adrienne on May 7.
On May 8, both Mayes' wife Teresa and mother, Mary Frances Mayes, were charged as accomplices and taken into custody.[9]
Mayes was added to the FBI's Most Wanted List on May 9.[10] He was charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, especially aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder.[1]
Recovery of Bain girls
Mayes and the two girls were missing for over a week when on May 10, acting on a tip, Mississippi highway patrolmen and state fish and wildlife officers[11] searched a heavily wooded area behind the Zion Hill Baptist Church,[9] one and a half miles from Mayes' home in Alpine.[3]
Officers saw one of the children peeking over a ridge, then spotted the second child, then saw Mayes. The officers told him to put his hands up; he raised only one hand and officers saw a gun in the other. Mayes then shot himself in the head with a 9mm pistol.[11][9] The Union County sheriff said emergency medical technicians transported Mayes via ambulance to Baptist Memorial Hospital, New Albany, Mississippi, in critical condition.[12] The county coroner pronounced Mayes dead at 8:20pm[12]
When police found the trio on May 10, the girls said that they had been in the forest for three days without food or water. They were dehydrated and had rashes from poison ivy and insect bites.[9] After Mayes' death, the girls were sent to a Memphis hospital, treated, and released.[11]
Mayes' body, after being left unclaimed and refused by family members, was donated to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville's Body Farm in June 2012.[13][14]
On July 30, 2012, the FBI announced that it had paid out reward money to several individuals for information leading to the capture of Mayes.[15]
Background of perpetrators
Adam Christopher Mayes (September 2, 1976 – May 10, 2012)[1] was the youngest of six children[8] of Johnny and Mary Frances Mayes. His mother described him as violent and controlling from an early age.[16] He and his wife Teresa lived with his parents in a mobile home[11] in Alpine, Mississippi.[3] Mayes' mother-in-law, Josie Tate, stated that she had repeatedly called police to complain about domestic violence committed by Mayes against his wife, Teresa.[11] Mayes' sister described him as aggressive and untrustworthy, but never thought he would commit such a serious crime.[8]
Both Mayes' mother and wife later wrote that they were afraid of him [17] and that he frequently carried a gun.[16]
Mayes was friendly with the Bain family of Whiteville, Tennessee, and was a frequent visitor to the house. During the manhunt for Mayes, his mother-in-law gave extensive interviews to media outlets and claimed Mayes believed that he was the father of the two younger girls,[18] a claim for which investigators found no evidence.[19] Later interviews with his wife suggest Mayes was instead motivated by an obsession with one of the kidnapped girls.[20] Mayes had been under investigation for domestic abuse and was accused of molesting a seven-year-old girl he babysat in 2010. [21]
Charges against Teresa Mayes and Mary Mayes
Mayes' wife Teresa was charged with murder and kidnapping and faced the death penalty. Her mother claimed that Adam had coerced and brainwashed the intellectually challenged Teresa into abetting his crimes.[11] On May 21, the charges against Mayes' mother, Mary, were changed from four counts of conspiracy to commit especially aggravated kidnapping to two counts of especially aggravated kidnapping. Investigators believe that she "confined" the two girls after her son and his wife drove them from their Tennessee home to the Mayes' Mississippi home.[22] The court ordered a psychological evaluation of both Mary and Teresa Mayes and rescheduled their first hearing for June 19.[23]
On October 1, 2012, Teresa Mayes appeared in a Hardeman County General Sessions Court hearing while a statement that she had given to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation during her husband's disappearance in May was read to the court. In the statement, Teresa claimed that Adam had planned the kidnappings and murders a year in advance due to his romantic interest in Alexandria Bain, then age 12. Adam sold his motorcycle to pay for the kidnapping and forced Teresa to remain hidden in their car during two aborted attempts to kidnap Alexandria and her younger sister, Kylilah, on April 25 and 26, 2012. On the night of April 26, she told officials that Adam attempted to kill the girls' father, Gary Bain, by giving him two Tequila Sunrise cocktails laced with Visine and other prescription drugs.
On the night of the murders, Teresa told investigators that Mayes told her to drive around with the two younger girls, Alexandra and Kylilah. She said that when she returned, her husband was outside the Bain house with two bodies wrapped in a tarp. He later told Teresa that he had entered the Bain house, woke Jo Ann, and told her to come out to the shop by the house because Kylilah was sleepwalking. Once in the shop, Mayes said that he hit Jo Ann with a board and strangled her with a rope. Afterward, he smothered Adrienne, age 14. Teresa and her husband drove the two younger girls and the two corpses to Guntown, where Adam buried the bodies in his mother's backyard.[24]
Following Teresa Mayes' and Mary Mayes' court appearances on October 1, the judge sent their cases to a grand jury scheduled to convene on January 10, 2013.[24]
On August 9, the two women were sentenced in conjunction with a plea bargain. Teresa Mayes was sentenced to 35 years and her mother-in-law, Mary Mayes, to 13 1/2 years for their parts in the kidnappings and murders.[3][4]
In 2016, both Mary and Teresa Mayes were moved to the Women's Therapeutic Residential Center within West Tennessee State Penitentiary due to good behavior.[25]
Related Research Articles
Matricide is the act of killing one's own mother.
Stella Stevens was an American actress. She was the mother of actor Andrew Stevens.
Richard Francis Cottingham is an American serial killer who was convicted in New York State of six murders committed between 1972 and 1980 and convicted in New Jersey of twelve murders committed between 1967 and 1978. He was nicknamed by media as the Torso Killer and the Times Square Ripper, since some of the murders he was convicted of included mutilation.
Franklin Delano Floyd was an American murderer, rapist, and death row inmate. He was convicted of the 1989 murder of Cheryl Ann Commesso, as well as the kidnapping of 6-year-old Michael Anthony Hughes, who he claimed was his son, from his elementary school in Choctaw, Oklahoma. Floyd was also considered a person of interest in the 1990 hit-and-run death of his second wife and kidnapping victim Sharon Marshall, mother of Michael Anthony Hughes. It was later discovered that before becoming his wife, Sharon had been raised by Floyd from an early age as his daughter and was kidnapped by Floyd as a child.
John McBain is a fictional character on the American daytime dramas One Life to Live and General Hospital, portrayed by Michael Easton.
Christopher Bernard Wilder, also known as the Beauty Queen Killer and the Snapshot Killer, was an Australian-American serial killer who abducted at least twelve young women and girls, killing eight of them during a six-week, cross-country crime spree in the United States in early 1984. Wilder's series of murders began in Florida on February 26, 1984, and continued across the country through Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada and California, with attempted abductions in Washington and New York. Wilder victimized attractive young women, most of whom he would entice by promising to take their pictures. After subduing them, he would torture and rape them before shooting, stabbing with a knife, or strangling them to death. Two or more of his victims were electrocuted using a makeshift electrical cord.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., aged 23, were from Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. They were kidnapped on the evening of January 6, 2007, when Christian's vehicle was carjacked. The couple were taken to a rental house. Both of them were raped, tortured, and murdered. Four males and one female were arrested, charged, and convicted in the case. In 2007, a grand jury indicted Letalvis Darnell Cobbins, Lemaricus Devall Davidson, George Geovonni Thomas, and Vanessa Lynn Coleman on counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder. Also in 2007, Eric DeWayne Boyd was indicted by a federal grand jury of being an accessory to a carjacking, resulting in serious bodily injury to another person and misprision of a felony. In 2018, Boyd was indicted on state-level charges of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder.
Alvin Howard Neelley Jr. and Judith Ann Adams Neelley are an American married couple who committed the kidnappings and torture murders of Lisa Ann Millican and Janice Kay Chatman; they also attempted a third abduction. Judith was sentenced to death in 1983, but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1999. She served her sentence at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama. Alvin was serving a life sentence at the Bostick State Prison in Hardwick, Georgia at the time of his death in 2005.
The Speed Freak Killers is the name given to serial killer duo Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine, together initially convicted of four murders — three jointly — and suspected in the deaths of as many as 72 people in and around San Joaquin County, California, based on a letter Shermantine wrote to a reporter in 2012. They received the "speed freak" moniker due to their habitual methamphetamine abuse. Herzog committed suicide in 2012. Shermantine remains on death row in San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, California.
Alpine is an unincorporated community in Union County, Mississippi.
Maria Elizabeth Ridulph was a seven-year-old girl who disappeared from Sycamore, Illinois, on December 3, 1957. Her remains were found almost five months later in a wooded area near Woodbine, Illinois, approximately 90 miles (140 km) from her home. Maria was last seen by her friend on her neighborhood corner of Center Cross Street and Archie Place with an unknown man in his early twenties who called himself "Johnny".
Holly Lynn Bobo was an American woman who disappeared on April 13, 2011, from her family home in Darden, Tennessee. She was last seen alive by her brother, Clint, shortly before 8 a.m., walking into the woods outside her home with a man wearing camouflage. In September 2014, Bobo's partial remains were found in northern Decatur County, and her death was ruled a homicide via a gunshot to the back of the head.
Samuel Little was an American serial killer who was convicted of eight murders and confessed to committing 93 murders between 1970 and 2005. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in American history. Little provided sketches for twenty-six of his victims although not all have been linked to known murders.
On the early morning of 7 May 2005, 16-year-old Mary-Ann Leneghan was stabbed to death in Prospect Park in Reading, Berkshire, UK. The previous evening, Leneghan and a friend had been kidnapped and subjected to hours of assault, rape, and drugging in a local hotel. Her friend was shot in the head, but survived.
Othram is an American corporation specializing in forensic genetic genealogy to resolve unsolved murders, disappearances, and identification of unidentified decedents or murder victims. The company offers law enforcement agencies tools and programs to infer kinship among individuals, closely and distantly related, through a combination of short tandem repeat and single nucleotide polymorphism testing, as well as forensic genome sequencing of DNA.
Michael Mullins is an American serial killer who murdered three women in Memphis, Tennessee between 1999 and 2012, and unsuccessfully tried to kill a fourth woman in Knoxville, Tennessee. On December 5, 2014, Mullins was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
