Rachael Mullenix: A Thankless Child

A Teenager Overkills Her Mother
(“Runaway Love,” Forensic Files)

Note: Updated with a development from October 2022

The story of Rachael Mullenix brings to mind a couple of descriptive terms: pure evil and bad acting.

Rachael Mullenix before her mother Barbara Mullenix's murder
Rachael Mullenix

With the help of her boyfriend, 17-year-old Rachael stabbed her mother 52 times, then headed to Florida for some R&R.

That’s the evil part. The bad acting came during her police interview.

Rachael’s weepy explanation about why she’s the real victim is more excruciating than your friend’s cousin’s one-woman off-Broadway show.

Forensic Files told Rachael’s story in the 2010 episode “Runaway Love.”

Barbara Mullenix
Barbara Mullenix

For this post, I checked on what’s happened to Rachael since then and also looked for some background information on her late mother.

So let’s get started on the recap along with additional information drawn from internet research:

On September 13, 2006, a member of California’s Newport Beach Yacht Club spotted a dead body in the water.

Police could see it wasn’t the work of a shark or barracuda. A killer had left a butter knife embedded in the victim’s eye.

The body was in a degraded condition, but investigators managed to identify the victim as Barbara Mullenix from the serial number on her breast implants.

Members of the Newport Beach Yacht Club were unaccustomed to finding homicide victims in their midst

Barbara, 56, lived in an apartment in Huntington Beach, California, with her ex-husband, Bruce, and their teenage daughter, Rachael.

The couple had divorced years earlier in Oklahoma City, where Rachael Scarlett Mullenix was born in 1989, but ended up sharing the condo in California for financial reasons.

Photo of the book Forensic Files Now
Book available in stores and online

Barbara had dreams of stardom (which probably explains the implants) as an actress. She snagged work as an extra on films and TV shows, including several episodes of her favorite series, CSI.

Sources vary on whether Barbara, who was born on May 29, 1950, had been married once or twice before she met Bruce. She definitely had a son named Alex from a previous husband. Her obituary mentions a daughter named Traci.

Multiple media accounts report that Barbara was raped as a teenager. One story said that the attacker had impregnated her and she gave up the resulting baby for adoption. It’s not clear whether Traci was the daughter.

Rachael was the only child she and Bruce had together.

Ian Allen was Rachael Mullenix’s boyfriend

The mother-daughter relationship had highs and lows.

Rachael said home life was, on one hand, fun-filled “like Disneyland,” but on the other, stressful, with drinking and arguments about money between her parents, according to CBS News.

Although Barbara was understanding when Rachael got pregnant at age 15, she was none-too-supportive when, at 17, Rachael acquired a 21-year-old boyfriend named Ian Allen.

Barbara threatened to file statutory rape charges against Ian. She also showed up at Ian’s home and made a big embarrassing scene, according to Rachael. When she broke curfew, Barbara grounded her, preventing her from gallivanting around with Ian.

The lovebirds wanted to dispense with all the restrictions and run off together. After all, they’d known and loved each other for three whole months.

They decided murder was the best solution.

Days after Barbara made a commotion at Ian’s place, she turned up floating in the harbor. Bruce Mullenix had a solid alibi, so police turned their attention toward his daughter.

Happier times

Rachael and Ian had disappeared after the murder, but they left enough forensic evidence to keep investigators busy.

In the Mullenix condo, they uncovered traces of cleaned-up blood splatter in a bedroom and Rachael’s DNA on a bloody sponge. They found fingerprint evidence from both Rachael and Ian.

They took note of an empty bed frame in Barbara’s room. A missing mattress is a veritable blinking sign that says Foul Play.

The kitchen contained knives that matched the one found in Barbara’s eye.

Detectives found that someone had withdrawn $300 from Barbara’s credit union account right after the murder.

They traced Rachael and Ian’s escape route from Florida to Louisiana, where authorities arrested the couple. A secret recording device in the backseat of a police car caught Rachael encouraging Ian to plead insanity.

LA Times clipping of Rachael Mullenix and her lawyer at the sentencing hearing
Los Angeles Times clip

The pair had left a mile-long electronic trail by texting each other dozens of incriminating messages about their plan. “After what my mom has done 2 U you can do what you want as long as U don’t get hurt or in trouble,” said one of Rachael’s texts.

But for criminal boyfriend-girlfriend duos, it can be a short trajectory from committing capital murder for the sake of love to turning against each other in legal proceedings. (Diana Haun and Sarah Johnson.)

Rachael fell first.

Once detectives got her alone in an interrogation room, she whined out an unconvincing story about how Ian killed her mother and she tried to stop him, but she was knocked unconscious and woke up bound and gagged in a hotel room with Ian.

As mentioned, it was a performance far worse than any high school production of Our Town.

And speaking of drama, prosecutor Sonia Balleste found out that Rachael had made a failed attempt at slashing her mother to death two years earlier, in 2004. Balleste suggested that the incident made Rachael realize that killing Barbara was a two-person job.

Rachael also made sure to be better-equipped her second time. Detectives determined that the couple used three different knives during Barbara’s murder.

Rachael Mullenix with boyfriend Ian Allen
Really worth murder?

Once completed, the murder didn’t seem to weigh on Rachael’s mind too much. Her jury got to see security footage of the couple acting friendly during their post-homicide victory tour in the south. She didn’t look like a kidnap victim.

At first, however, Ian backed up Rachael’s version of the story and accepted all the blame. But he did a 180 later and said it was Rachael alone who had killed her mother.

“He did the not-so-smart but chivalrous thing by saying, ‘I did it. I killed her,’ ” public defender Julia Swain told the jury, the LA Times reported on October 16, 2008.

Ian contended that Rachael committed the homicide in a fit of rage over Barbara’s years of verbal abuse and mean drunkenness — and that he only helped cover it up. Rachael couldn’t put the body into a cardboard box and throw it into the Pacific Ocean by herself.

While Ian betrayed Rachael, her dad stayed loyal. Bruce Mullenix denied that his daughter would ever kill her mother despite that his ex-wife could be abusive toward Rachael. As the Huntington Beach Independent reported:

“When she was drunk she would say things like, ‘I’m going to go up to school and go to class and embarrass you,’” [Bruce] said. “‘I’ll call up your friends and say things that humiliate and embarrass you.’ … You have to understand she was a completely different person when she was drunk.”

Nonetheless, the jury found Rachael guilty of first-degree murder.

After Rachael’s trial, a victim impact statement from one of Barbara’s friends denounced the teenager as having a “black heart” and throwing out her mom like “garbage,” the LA Times reported on October 11, 2008.

Rachael, wearing French braids for the sentencing hearing, looked like “a school girl with a broken heart,” the Orange County Register reported.

Little Rachael Mullenix and mom Barbara Mullenix
Rachael and Barbara Mullenix

When the judge gave her 25 years to life, her grandparents broke into tears and her grandmother cried out, “She’s innocent!”

Two years later, in 2010, Rachael lost an appeal claiming prosecutorial misconduct.

When I first wrote about the case, Rachael was residing in Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, with parole eligibility for 2027 at age 38.

But, according to a source close to the situation, Rachael Mullenix was released from prison on October 14, 2022 and is with her father, Bruce, in Southern California. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation no longer lists her as an inmate.

Ian Allen, also found guilty and given 25 years to life, is in Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe and eligible for parole in November 2024.

Rachael’s half-brother, Alex, apparently had no involvement in the legal proceedings and didn’t speak to the press, although he and Rachael weren’t strangers. They lived in the same house in Oklahoma before the divorce.

It’s sad that his mother was robbed of a chance to shake off her troubles and try for a second act in life.

You can watch the 48 Hours about the case on YouTube.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. RR

P.S. Rachael’s brother, Alex Hagood, reached out to Forensic Files Now and defended Rachael in a subsequent interview.


Watch the episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

Book cover
Book in stores and online

43 thoughts on “Rachael Mullenix: A Thankless Child”

  1. I genuinely don’t know how I feel about this one. This episode was so stacked and biased to be as sympathetic as it could to the victim. I grew up with a verbally and physically abusive alcoholic mother. I’ve been a lot of places mentally and emotionally that I didn’t expect to remember while I was watching this episode. I don’t think Rachael’s heart is as black as everyone would like to believe.

      1. I actually feel bad for Gypsy Rose Blanchard and am not convinced that she had the tools necessary to realize that what she was doing was wrong. Maybe she did. But she likely doesn’t have the same sort of tools the rest of us have. I don’t believe that people who murder should be free but because of the way she was raised and the years and years and years of abuse, did Gypsy really know wrong from right? I hope this story tells the “powers that be” that children who are supposedly so sickly should be checked out by someone to make sure that what we are being told is the truth. Had someone investigated this case years ago, Gypsy could have been spared and her mother not killed.

        1. I feel bad for Gypsy, too. Her mother victimized her pretty much from Day 1, so Gypsy had no framework for extricating herself in a lawful way.

    1. Don’t be fooled. It is as black as it is portrayed. No one gets an excuse for murder. Especially, not for being the child of an alcoholic mother. There are plenty of us out there who do not murder, including the ones who gave us life. Make a decision to be a better person…not one who is worse. And not to mention the manipulation…she is 100% responsible for this murder and should never have received the possibility of parole. Don’t be fooled by a monster bc that is what she and everyone of them like her lives for.

      1. Agreed: whatever the circumstances, there should be very little scope indeed for sympathy for the perp of premeditated murder. Where there IS very limited scope, it lies in such scenarios as (misguided) motive of protection of others deemed weaker than oneself (abused siblings, for example), and if mental illness applies to the perp (not affecting knowledge as to wrongness of action) – not induced by drug abuse.

        Walk away / seek help (if you claim abuse) must always be the potential perp’s first recourse.

        Mullenix strikes me as a wicked brat – period.

        1. Wrong in some instances. If one has a father who constantly beats their child and the system who won’t do anything about it which is the normal happening, then yes drastic action is sometimes needed. It’s not so simple just to walk away as the authorities will simply return the child to the home to get beaten some more or even killed. It always works that way.

    2. “You will know them by their fruits.” – Matthew 7:15-20

      M: Regardless of ‘what’s in her heart’, which we cannot know, what we DO know is that she committed a terrible crime – and that’s all we can judge by. It’s pointless speculating over what we cannot know but might be – certainly for the law. No-one’s saying she’s irredeemably wicked, only that she committed a very wicked act, which reflects a capacity for wickedness which very few of us have.

      The difference between your good self and Mullenix is that you didn’t murder you mum (your feelings being irrelevant – the actions being significant). That and that alone is the morally sufficient criterion for wickedness.

      Save your sympathy for those who suffer… and don’t murder their tormentor. There are far more than do!

      1. I was very shocked by her behavior and her boyfriend’s behavior. As a daughter, I couldn’t imagine how her mother was stabbed more than 50 times, with two deadly stabs to the neck and one into the eyeball. How much hatred do they have about the victim?! They slaughtered the mother in an unimaginable cruel way than slaughter pigs and dumped her like a piece of trash in a card box. It’s beyond humanity. Personally I think they don’t deserve to live. That’s just my opinion. I read through all the comments above and felt agreeing with those who mentioned despite having an abusive parent, there’re better ways to deal with the trauma than to slaughter the mother. Animals don’t even do such cruel behaviors to other animals. What they’ve done is irreversible and unforgivable.

        I have to say I feel very emotional about this case as a daughter who needs to understand the pain a mother has gone through to give birth, to feed and to raise her up. It’s her mother, even if an abusive one. She must at some point love her baby girl. One lesson that can be learned is that their action is irreversible and no matter what they say they do, they need to bear the consequences and dead people are dead and all the beautiful things that could have become of them will never come back. So think about the consequences and be rational and responsible for your action.

    3. She stabbed her mother 52X and left the blade stuck in her eye socket! It’s hard to excuse this behavior (short of intense physical or sexual abuse) based on a 30 minute TV crime magazine.

    4. She murdered her mother. She took her life. She was 17. All she had to do was move out and never speak to her again if she wanted to. Murdering her was pure spite, and yes, evil.

      1. She left her sick father who stayed loyal to her and married a child molester, William Dean Laureles, 20 years her senior. She now goes by the name Rachael Laureles. They got married the same week she killed her mother. They dumped her mother’s ashes back in the same water she dumped her body in. She’s on probation and he’s on Megan’s law’s sex offenders list. They’re currently residing in Sacramento, Ca. with a dog. Supposedly, they are trying to conceive a baby and she had a miscarriage only a few months ago. Ian has not been released but he will be appearing before the board of parole hearing soon. He will probably get released within the next year or two. Rachael will try leave her husband to be with Ian, but Ian is no longer under her spell.

  2. M: It’s reasonable to state that however harsh/cruel one’s parent is (and that’s yet to be established in this case), there can never be anything approaching justification for Mullenix’s dreadful actions. I’d allow some mitigation for her age (17) – that’s it. There appear to have been two attempts on the mother; and Mullenix tried to blame the boyfriend. She’s quite a piece of work. It’s not really significant how biased or not FF was: these were matters the court found. But what are your grounds for stating that FF was biased? 25 years for Mullenix – if she gets parole then – seems quite reasonable to me…

  3. Stabbed over 50 times and a butter knife to the eye is overkill. I don’t care how abusive mom was, she didn’t deserve that.

  4. The father witnessed the abuse and didn’t step in and protect his daughter? I think he’s lying.

    I don’t think the victim verbally abused the daughter but probably angry that Rachael was disobedient when the mom was probably providing for not just Rachael but the husband as well.

    Your daughter’s boyfriend is 21 and your daughter 15? Yeah, she was acting like a momma bear.

    I find it so odd she was an alcoholic yet could hold down a job as well as provide for Rachael.

    Rachael is not a victim. She could have easily gone to the courts, tell of her “abuse” and lived with other family members. She should stay in jail for life. A butter knife in the eye? Phew.

    1. You are blind & have not listened to any of the court transcripts, she did NOT support Rachael financially, ever, thats is why she used RACHAEL to move back in with her ex-husband. She was an extra in some films episodes of CSI, she did not earn enough to support herself, let alone Rachael!!! Oh yes the abuse was proven by her father & her own son that she had little to do with, the son also reported that he too was abused by his mther; Barbara!!! She self-injured to the point of making herself bleed & said to her son if you leave me (he quite understandably wanted to move out & get away from his abusive, drunken mother) I will call the police & tell them you did this to me, now IMAGINE a mother doing that!!! He did stay for awhile!!!

  5. “I find it so odd she was an alcoholic yet could hold down a job as well as provide for Rachael.”

    Functioning alcoholism is well-known…

  6. Rachael got what she deserves. She should have gotten life! A knife in the eye? Stabbed 52 times? Come on that is definitely overkill and you’re evil!

    1. A: The ferocity of the crime seems to imply hatred; but what’s unclear is whether both perps stabbed, and if so, how many times each. The knife in the eye could have been the BF… but I think it more likely it was Mullenix.

      That this woman had used knives twice against her mum suggests she’s very dangerous if provoked. I hope a close eye is kept on her when released. She may have changed – but prison isn’t known for softening violent impulses, dog-eat-dog that it is…

      1. Marcus if you have actually read the court documents, they state that the BF’s DNA was not recovered from any of the knives. There was no male DNA found on anything — only Rachael’s. I think that speaks pretty clearly as to who actually committed this murder.

  7. My parents grounded me many times when I was young but I never even thought of murdering them. Typical “me millennial, me get everything, I deserve it” behavior. The generation that made mass school shootings a “viable” option!

  8. RR – The Gypsy Rose Blanchard case is about the only exception I can think of. She was subject to the most insane, intense child abuse that was physical and psychological: being told from day 1 that you have all kinds of diseases, having tubes surgically inserted in your stomach, taking medications that make your teeth fall out. And then realizing you can walk after being told for God knows how long you can’t. It’s insane what her mother did to her. It was abuse beyond Munchausen’s by Proxy. I don’t know if she has to serve the 10 years she got but I thought even that was steep. Thankfully she has a loving, stable father. Yikes. Probably the most insane case I have even seen.

  9. I am so upset by their sentence. 25 years to life means that Rachael could be just 38 when she is released on parole. All the other episodes of Forensic Files I’ve watched, first degree murders like this have been life without parole or the death sentence.

    I am so sick of people getting away with being evil pieces of trash just because they’re young. So what? They made the choice to take a woman’s life out of spite, in Rachael’s case her own mother – why should they ever see life outside of a prison ever again?

    Ugh.

    1. The difficulty is that with 50 states, all with their own laws, you can’t expect uniformity. The response to your point about her youth is that it is claimed that the brains of people of her age are not fully developed in terms of judgment, impulse-control etc, such that this is mitigation. I’m inclined to agree that, other things being equal, a youth should receive a lesser sentence or one permitting the possibility of parole v LWOP. In the latter case, when older and the questioned judgment deficit doesn’t apply, if poor behaviour continues in prison parole is denied. I think a min 25-yr sentence for a 17-y-o is reasonable – a third of a healthy lifespan.

      It’s irrelevant as such how old she’ll be on potential release: that’s merely a function of her youth at perpetration (sentences can hardly be *lengthened* because the per was young!) Plenty of murderers in the US serve less than 25 yrs. One takeway from FF is there appears to be no rhyme nor reason to the variation with which equally egregious crimes are treated: 50 states, death penalty exists or not, plea deals, buying better defence, etc.

  10. I concur with you, we all have breaking points…not that murder is OK at all, she was a terrorized kid, whose mother was mean, nasty, a drunk who used Rachael so she could live the high life & move back in with her, Rachael & her ex-husband!! She also tormented Rachael & was both physically & mentally abusive to her!!!
    ~Kimberr

  11. Rachael was actually one of my friends for a while when i was a kid…. until I moved out of the NW part of OKC. we eventuallly just lost touch. But her mom actually tried running me and a couple others over one time after school as we were walking home… She was pretty insane. Rachael would go to her grandparents to stay most of the time just to get away from the bullcrap she’d have to deal with at both parents houses. Her dad, Bruce, and her mom, Barbara, didn’t live together back then. Rachael dealt with quite a bit of stuff, I remember. I also remember one time being at her dad’s house with her and one of our other friends and he made her ask if we’d watch Girls Gone Wild with him….. so yeah. like i said. She dealt with A LOT of bullcrap! Her grandparents were her safe haven and the only place she knew she was safe. Just wanted to give you people a little more background info. I dont believe Rachael Mullinex is evil and honestly from all of the stuff I witnessed in the short time we were friends, SHE was the victim! It makes me sad that she is going to sit in prison until shes 38, and posssibly even longer…

    1. If Mullenix isn’t evil I can’t conceive of the monster that is in your book… There’s NO justification or explanation for what she did – period. However madly/badly behaved her mother was gets nowhere near this appalling act. And to suggest that Mullenix is more of a victim than the murdered, dumped victim is perverse. Talk about victim-blaming!

      1. Marcus – it’s comments like yours that make me wish the REAL story about this case would be published, rather than this “Romeo and Juliet killed the mom so they could be together” b.s. that the media loves to push. I know the people in this case and it’s not as black and white as you’re making it out to be. Yes, I do agree that Barbara did not deserve to die the way she did… (I don’t think anybody deserves to die, let alone in such a brutal manner). But the real story is a bit more complex than the media portrays. What the media doesn’t tell you is that Rachael became pregnant around the age of 15 or so (this was back when she was living in Tampa with her mom, prior to meeting Ian) and Barbara assaulted Rachael to the point where she lost the baby, which was exactly Barbara’s intention. Barbara was fixated on ensuring that Rachael would support her for the rest of her life because it was her “obligation as a daughter.” (Funny how the media never mentions that Barbara’s older two kids had nothing to do with her). This was when Rachael first attempted to kill her mother, and it was on the exact same as the actual murder two years later. Coincidence? I think not.

        Personally, I’ve known people who have had abortions and even when they knew it was the best choice for them at that time, they still had a very hard time going through the process because it’s a rough thing to go through even when it’s the mother’s choice. (And don’t get me wrong – I’m VERY much pro-choice, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s an easy thing for people to go through). Having seen how hard it is even for mothers who are making the choice to have an abortion, I can’t even imagine how damaging it would be for someone to be FORCED into an abortion when they didn’t want it, especially a 15-year-old girl who already had some mental issues from her toxic upbringing. Not that I’m justifying Rachael’s actions, but I can’t even imagine how much it would screw a person up if they were forced into terminating a pregnancy that they wanted to carry to term by the woman who is supposed to love and nurture you, your mother, but instead has brought you into the world as a meal ticket and puts you through a lifetime of unimaginable pain.

        I’m in no way a fan of Rachael’s, but I think if there were an honest conversation about the true driving force behind the tragic death of Barbara, it would actually perhaps help prevent future tragedies like these from happening in the future. This case is really more of a very extreme, very tragic example of why law enforcement should’ve done their job in protecting Rachael at least one of the many times throughout her childhood that they were called to intervene due to Barbara’s abuse, rather than just taking the “easy route” and writing her off as a “spoiled kid” not wanting to listen to her mom or whatever lazy excuse they made up to justify their failure to protect an abused child. Again, I’m not saying Barbara deserved to die but the more you staunchly push this “black and white” narrative of Rachael being a spoiled, evil kid who reacted badly to a protective momma bear when that really wasn’t the true story — you’re not doing any justice to Barbara’s memory. I think putting the TRUTH out there, and maybe advocating for some change in regard to how law enforcement handles cases regarding parental abuse, can maybe help prevent future tragedies like this — and that would be the best way to honor Barbara’s life, since you seem to be such a huge advocate for it. I understand your point of view, but you’re doing no favors to anyone, not even Barbara, by ignoring the mitigating factors in this case.

  12. Rachael deserves 25 to life. I grew up in poverty with a physically, mentally, emotionally abusive mother who was bat shit crazy religious on top of it. She was a hypocrite and drank and smoked in front of me. I hated her but even though she was controlling like Barbara was I didn’t decide to take her life. And I thought about it a lot. She’s just an entitled spoiled little brat and deserves to suffer in prison for as long as they keep her. She isn’t a victim, she’s an accomplice with her dumb boyfriend. She’s an idiot who left so many clues behind and only feels sorry she got caught for her horrible acting. I don’t feel bad for her. I feel bad for the father and the dumb boyfriend who believed his stupid princess brat girlfriend. She was never a hostage, there’s surveillance of it. She deserves LWOP

    1. Kudos to you Mike for enduring such a traumatic childhood – you are further, living proof that we all have choices over our behavior. Hoping that you continue in your healing process.

  13. This case is redolent of that of TAYLOR MARKS (aka The Spoiled Brat Killer, c 20 at the time, so a little older than Mullenix), who in ’09 lured her mother to her stabbing death, having been stabbed 16 times, by TM’s boyfriend, per plan of TM – ‘murder-for-hire.’ That’s one parallel – she planned it, roping her boyfriend in – with others being her hope that an unknown attacker would be blamed, and the motive seemingly being anger with/estrangement from her mother, plus insurance and/or inheritance accrual.

    Like Mullenix she protested she ‘loved my mother’, and also – almost inevitably – that the b/f should be under the bus ‘cos it was ‘his idea’ (yet there was evidence she’d solicited a number of people to perform the killing). She got life without parole, as did the b/f.

    For those who might think there must be something in the parent’s treatment of their child that explains (never justifies!) such appalling, apparently desperate, behaviour (some suggest this of Mullenix’s mother – I think unjustifiably), there was no evidence whatsoever that the victim had been other than a good parent. Indeed, she’d been set up on an errand of mercy to the daughter who ambushed and killed her. Some kids are just bad…

    Fortunately TM and her b/f were as dumb as Mullenix and hers: police had no problem speedily solving this case.

  14. I’m not justifying Rachael’s behavior by any means, and I think the way she manipulated her boyfriend and threw him under the bus is despicable as well. But I feel like it’s just not as black and white as some of you people make it out to be. Obviously Barbara did not deserve to die, especially not that brutally, but to completely dismiss and disregard the abuse she inflicted on her children (Rachael & her older son) is problematic, to say the least. I see a lot of comments on this case like “So what if Barbara wasn’t a perfect mother; that doesn’t mean she should die!” And “why didn’t Rachael just wait until age 18 and leave?” Clearly people don’t understand the damage a narcissistic parent inflicts on their children. (Barbara displayed many signs of narcissism). My dad is very similar to Barbara and leaving him was nearly impossible, even as an adult. I tried to get away from him in my 20’s and tried moving to another state but he still managed to send people after me and make my life hell. It’s really not as easy to get away as people think. It’s sad that Rachael resorted to such extreme measures, but brushing off Barbara’s abuse by saying “okay, so what if she wasn’t perfect!” is why so many people get away with abusing their children. My dad had the cops and CPS called on him many times throughout my childhood and they never did anything, even when the evidence against him was crystal clear. Someone should’ve stepped in and intervened and gotten Rachael out of there years ago, and this tragedy may have been prevented. I think this case should be used to show the most extreme outcome of how truly dangerous narcissistic parents can be. However, the media has run with this bogus twisted “Romeo and Juliet” type story and sensationalize the narrative to make it more salacious, but I think they’ve completely missed an opportunity to bring awareness to a serious issue that needs to be addressed (abusive/narcissistic parenting). The fact that there was a previous murder attempt on the mom (on the same date 2 years prior) shows that this murder wasn’t motivated by Ian and he wasn’t as involved as the shows have you thinking. It’s a shame he was caught up in it but I wish they’d show this story for what it is. Also I wish people would stop commenting as if they know completely what it’s like to be in the shoes of an abused child. Again, it’s a sad case, but it’s not as black and white as people want to make ir out to be.

  15. “Even though Ian betrayed Rachael…” Ummm what? The dude tried to take the entire blame for the crime even though it was mostly Rachael who did it. The show doesn’t mention this but Ian was offered a plea bargain in exchange for testifying against Rachael; he could’ve taken a plea for manslaughter and been out in 5 years, but he did not want to testify against her. He is about as loyal as they come. I don’t like the implication that Rachael is some sort of victim of betrayal. What was Ian supposed to do, just continue to take the entire blame for a crime he only minimally contributed to? (If you read the actual court documents instead of going off of what these dumb shows say, you’ll see that Ian’s involvement was actually very minimal. Rachael was the main perpetrator). Ian’s not the one to be hating on here.

    1. Ian is no longer under Rachael’s manipulation and spell. He will be released within the next year or two. Rachael, who just got married to a convicted child molester, will probably leave her husband to try to manipulate Ian into going back to her. Thankfully, unlike Rachael, Ian really has changed. He still hates himself for what he’s done so he stays humble and grateful for the people and things he now has because he feels he’s undeserving of anything good.

    1. Unfortunately, she has been released in 2022. She is now married to a child molester and goes by the name Rachael Laureles.

  16. Is Rachael a killer? Yes. Do I feel sorry for Barbara? No. Doesn’t take a genius to see that woman was a manipulative, dangerous narcissist. And if few people are sorry that you’re dead? That says a lot about who you were when you were alive.

  17. Nikki: You can’t suggest that ‘few people are sorry’ (the conditional is irrelevant): you have no idea. *I* am sorry and I don’t know the victim from Adam; sorry at the horror this poor woman endured — from her own, wicked, daughter! — as she was dying. There can be few worse deaths. It is morally bankrupt remotely to suggest she deserved it. Thankfully the vast majority of people would almost certainly disagree with you — including the jury who put her away for a long time. If ‘bad mothers’ (and that’s assuming she really was) got what you suggest they deserve, millions would be slaughtered each year.

  18. Just facts. Rachael Mullenix is now Rachael Laureles. She was released in October 2022. She received a 10 year probation. She recently married a convicted child molester, William Dean Laureles. He is required to register as a sex offender for life. They live in Sacramento, Ca.

    Ian went before the board of parole hearing recently and got denied. However he will be going back within the next year and mostly will be released on parole.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *