Rachael Mullenix’s Brother Speaks Out

Alex Hagood’s Perspective on Barbara Mullenix’s Life and Death
(“Runaway Love,” Forensic Files)

Updated with information from October 2022

When a jury contemplated the young couple who ended Barbara Mullenix’s life, the term “mitigating circumstances” probably didn’t come to mind.

Rachael Mullenix in a black and white head and shoulders shot
Rachael Mullenix

Barbara, a 56-year-old dreamer still hoping for an acting career, sustained dozens of stab wounds from at least two weapons, including a dining utensil left deeply embedded in one of her eyes.

The attackers placed her body in a cardboard box, which they slid into the water at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, nine miles away from her home in Huntington Beach, California, in 2006.

Afterward, the perpetrators took a joy ride through Florida and Louisiana.

The murderers were Ian Allen, 21, and his girlfriend of three months, 17-year-old Rachael Scarlett Mullenix — Barbara’s daughter.

To most viewers of “Runaway Love,” the Forensic Files episode about the case, the homicide seemed like a betrayal of biblical proportions, a woefully entitled girl snuffing out the life of the woman who gave her life.

But as it turns out, Barbara’s son, Alex Hagood, thinks Rachael was more a victim than a predator.

Alex, who is Rachael’s half brother, would like the world to know that there’s a lot more to the story than the 22 minutes of true-crime TV that vilified Rachael for all the world to see.

Photo of the book Forensic Files Now
BOOK IN STORES AND ONLINE!

In a phone interview with ForensicFilesNow.com, Alex discussed his tumultuous home life with his mother and his love for his younger half-sister:

What was your sister like? Growing up, Rachael was a good kid. She made good grades. She was on a couple of basketball teams, she did ballet, and she did gymnastics. The press tried to portray her as this horrible person, and she wasn’t.

Rachael said that your mother could be a lot of fun at times. Did you find the same? I’d have my friends come over and they’d think my mom was cool. She would buy us popsicles or root beers or whatever. And then the minute they were gone, I thought, they didn’t know her.

Rachael and Barbara Mullenix embracing happily
Rachael and Barbara Mullenix

She could be like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. My girlfriend at the time could see it.

Was your mother trying to protect Rachael from Ian by attempting to stop them from running away together? Before my mother’s death, there were lots of drugs and alcohol around — she liked Skyy vodka and took uppers and downers, and she would party with Ian and Rachael.

BOOK IN STORES AND ONLINE!

My mother realized that Rachael and Ian wanted to go away. She couldn’t make it on her own without alimony and child support, so she didn’t want Rachael to leave.

You’ve said that you doubt the allegations that Rachael had already attacked your mother with a knife in a failed murder attempt in 2005. Why? I moved in with my mother in 2003 when she lived in Oklahoma. A couple of times when I was about to leave, she self-inflicted wounds and threatened to say I did it. She chased me around with a baseball bat. Rachael told me about this same kind of behavior.

Barbara wanted to be the creator and control everyone. She wanted to be the center of attention. If you have children, it’s not like, let’s make a movie – you can’t just push reset.

Emotionally and mentally, she choked Rachael.

Alex Hagood with a colleague
Alex Hagood, left, works as a mechanic in Oregon

Do you believe the contentions that Barbara would deliberately try to embarrass and humiliate Rachael? My mom would call our jobs, our bosses and start problems for no reason. She did it because she felt she was losing control of us. But you can’t do stuff like that. Bosses will fire you.

My stepfather traveled a lot for his job, so he wasn’t always around for Rachael. I tried to protect her. But I had to get out on my own and away from my mother. I moved to Oregon to let everything cool off. I thought my mother would never find me there. She found me in two weeks and she’d call my job.

I’m shocked that the murder happened, but then I’m not. You can’t go around treating people like that and think nothing will happen. At any time, anything can spin out of control.

Do you think Rachael participated in the murder? If anything, Ian was the one behind planning everything. He had a third person.

Were things ever good between Rachael and your mother? The first few years of Rachael’s life, yes, my mother was calm. She dressed Rachael in the best clothes and taught her the best manners.

Ian Allen in a headshot with spiky hair
Ian Allen

How have you yourself coped with the murder? It’s taken me 10 years to work through it. I went back to college, got associate’s degrees, one in psychology. I wanted to see what I could make of myself in the aftermath.

Would you like to see Rachael released from jail? Absolutely. She’s suffered enough. I haven’t been able to hug her since 2005.

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

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


Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi

Book in stores and online!

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