Robin Lynn Farnsworth was fifteen when she left for school in Bald Knob, Arkansas, on January 27, 1995, and never returned. A quiet, friendly student and a new mother to a nine-month-old daughter, her family reported her missing on January 31. Police initially treated her as a runaway because she had left home before, delaying entry into national missing-persons systems and large-scale searches; her family insisted she would not have abandoned her infant.

In March 1995 another Bald Knob student, Kenyatta Haynes, was murdered. Two local teenagers, seventeen-year-old James Derrick Grubbs and eighteen-year-old Donnie Ray Tempel, were arrested, tried, and convicted for Kenyatta’s killing. In April 1995 Tempel told a jailer that Grubbs had shown him Robin’s badly beaten body hidden under newspapers in an old barn; a subsequent search of the barn area recovered a decomposition patch, a few finger bones, buttons, and a purple fingernail. On December 28, 1997 a hunter found further remains about 100 yards from that barn — a skull, a red sweater, brown shoes, and purple-painted fingernails. Those remains were finally identified by the FBI in 2004 as Robin’s.

Grubbs and Tempel remain the primary persons of interest and circumstantial evidence links them to the killing, but prosecutors have not filed charges related to Robin’s death. Anyone who knew Robin, her movements in January 1995, or who has information about the area where the remains were found is asked to come forward.