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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Gratuitous detective work? At that point in the episode, you could practically hear other viewers at home yelling at the TV screen, “It’s a diner — they cook stuff on a big grill and stray pieces of food end up on your plate.”
