CNN
 — 

On the night of October 13, 1989, Jimmie Wade Martin went for a drink at a neighborhood tavern in his hometown of Bonne Terre, Missouri. He never made it back home.

Martin’s bloodied body was discovered lying in a nearby street in the predawn hours. He’d suffered a fatal blow to the head during a bar fight that spilled outside, authorities said at the time.

His 11-year-old twin daughters, Angela Williams and Andrea Lynn, learned the horrible news when they were awakened during a sleepover in a family friend’s camper. Their father had promised to take them to a yard sale that day.

For weeks, the twins rode their pink bikes to local newspaper stands to read stories about their dad’s death. In their town of 6,000 people, once famous for its vast lead mines, murders were so infrequent that they made lots of headlines.

A man was arrested in connection with Martin’s death but later freed when the charges were dropped days before his trial, the twins said.

Months turned to years with no more arrests. Some witnesses died, while others moved out of town.  The case went cold.

And the sisters wondered: Why was justice taking so long for a crime that occurred near a popular watering hole and had several witnesses?

In 2007 the twins turned 29, the same age their dad was when he died. And their desperation to get answers took on a new meaning and urgency.

“That’s when it hit how young he really was at the time,” Lynn said. “Because when you’re 11, 29 seems so old. And then when you actually get to 29, you realize, wow, he was so young.”

They reached out to local authorities about reopening the case but said they never heard back. So armed with the autopsy, and police and coroner’s reports, they put together a binder, labeled it “Jimmie’s Bible” and started knocking on doors. They pleaded with local residents who knew anything to come forward.

“If we saw a name in the report, heard a name mentioned or heard a rumor about something that happened that night, we would just show up at someone’s house and be like, ‘Will you please talk to us?’ ” Williams said.

In late 2020 — 31 years after their dad’s killing — the twins and their two cousins, Shawn Lee Martin and Chris Hulsey, launched a podcast, “Small Town Forgotten,” with all the information they were piecing together.

A few months later, in early 2021, the St. Francois County Prosecuting Attorney’s office announced it was reopening the case.

And this month, police finally took a man into custody. The suspect, Wesley Paul Marler, 69, has been charged with assault in the first degree and has pleaded not guilty.

Bonne Terre is a small city about 60 miles south of St. Louis. At the time of the killing, it was a quiet place with one traffic light. Everyone knew each other and loyalties ran deep among locals, the sisters said.

Their father was killed on Friday the 13th, cementing the twins’ belief about the bad luck and conspiracy theories associated with the day.

“Since then, I’m very superstitious about Friday the 13th,” Williams said. “I try not to do much on that day.”

Marler, the new suspect, is being held on a $500,000 bond. His attorney told CNN that the case is unique because so many years have passed.

“Many of the witnesses of the incident are now deceased, memories are not as sharp and reliable after 35 years, and any physical evidence that was gathered has been sitting for 35 years,” attorney Christopher G. Hartmann said an email.

“We believe that when all of the evidence has been presented and reviewed that Mr. Marler will be exonerated on this charge and his innocence will come to light.”

But the twins believe that the evidence points to Marler, who was at the Coal Bin Tavern that night, they said. In speaking to Bonne Terre residents, they learned Marler had accused their father of having an affair with his wife. Their parents were navigating a rocky patch in their relationship and had separated at the time, they said.

The twins, who are 46 now and live in the nearby town of Farmington, initially believed that the man arrested in 1989 and released before trial had killed their father and eluded prosecution. But that belief started unraveling after they talked to residents and learned about their father’s tense history with Marler, they said. A few weeks before the fatal brawl, the two men had gotten into a fistfight, Lynn said.

In November 2020, the sisters issued a plea on their podcast.

“Please, if you know anything … It’s not like he got sick and died at the hospital,” Lynn said, her voice trembling. “He laid on the side of the street and bled to death. If it were me, I don’t think I could live with myself if I knew something.”

Hartmann declined to comment on his client’s alleged tense history with Martin or a presumed motive.

“Once all the evidence has been presented in the courtroom, and in the court of public opinion, my client’s innocence will be shown,” he said.

In their search for justice, the twins sent a Facebook message to the initial suspect in the case and his daughter, requesting a meeting. He agreed to talk to them. CNN is not identifying the man because the charges against him were dropped.

Although most of the documents in the case were sealed because it was an unsolved murder, the man provided the twins with batches of paperwork. As a previous suspect, he had the case file and could share previously unknown details, Lynn said.

With his help, the twins mapped out their dad’s final moments. They learned that the fight had started in the bar and then escalated outside.

“They chased each other … and they went through some people’s yard and ended up on the next street over,” Williams said. “It was such a big bar fight … I feel like there were multiple fights that night.”

The initial suspect was an out-of-towner visiting nearby family at the time. He told the twins that he saw a brawl and grabbed a piece of landscaping timber lying on the street. He swung it around to try and stop the fight, hitting an unidentified person.

He later reported the incident to the police and confessed he’d hit someone. The man was arrested despite not matching witnesses’ description of the killer, the twins said.

When investigators showed him a photo of Martin at the preliminary hearing, he told them that wasn’t the man he’d hit, the sisters said.

But he was an outsider who had a record for drug possession and other petty crimes, and he had confessed to hitting someone — which made him an ideal suspect.

“They were like, yeah, he confessed. He did it,” Williams said. “He was from out of town. You could see the tunnel vision in the police reports. It was an election year, and it was more convenient to pin it on him. “

The twins also visited the bar’s old location and the spot where their dad’s body was found. It was surrounded by houses, but none of the neighbors intervened that night.

“Witness statements said the residents were watching out the windows. They never turned on any lights,” Lynn said.

“It was eerie knowing that was the last place that he was,” she added, fighting back tears.

The autopsy showed that Martin suffered several blows that fractured his skull, but he had no defense wounds. In the podcast, the coroner who conducted the autopsy said he was likely hit from behind and lost consciousness.

“That was a hard one for me, knowing that they hit him from behind, so he had no chance to fight for himself,” Lynn said.

The sisters said their dad did not typically start confrontations but wasn’t one to go down without a fight, either. They recalled an incident in which someone said something inappropriate to their mom while he was present.

“Those two guys, my dad knocked both of them out and was like, ‘come on, Babe, get in the truck. Let’s go.’” Lynn said. “The people who killed him probably hit him from behind because they didn’t want to go face-to-face with him. They knew he could hold his own.”

After years of uncertainty, the sisters got a call in February 2021 informing them the case was being reopened. The St. Francois County prosecuting attorney at the time, Melissa Gilliam, told local media that the sisters’ podcast “was a vehicle that brought the case to our attention.”

“New leads have emerged in the case and investigators are continuing to work diligently to unearth information that could lead to charging the person responsible for Martin’s death,” Gilliam said in a 2021 statement.

The county elected a new prosecuting attorney in 2022. CNN has reached out to determine what role the podcast played in the arrest.

Earlier this month, the sisters got a call they’d dreamed about for years: Authorities had arrested Marler and charged him with assaulting their father.

“Thank goodness I was off work, because I couldn’t handle all the emotions that went through me,” Lynn said. “I laughed. I cried. I screamed. Just emotions everywhere.”

Williams said her hands and legs trembled for hours after she got the news. “You would be on cloud nine one second, and then crying the next,” she said.

It’s unclear why prosecutors didn’t charge Marler with murder. They didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

The sisters say they hope justice is finally coming after years of feeling defeated. They still grieve that their dad wasn’t around to see them grow up and get married, or to meet his four grandkids. They want the person who took him away from them to be held accountable.

Their fondest memories of their dad involve shared activities. He was lean and athletic and would randomly do backflips in their backyard, they said. He’d dive into the public pool with such bravado that strangers lined up to watch him and applauded, Lynn said.

For the sisters, justice means finally learning the truth about what happened that night. They believe their podcast has played a big role in getting the case reopened.

“We were not scared of anyone just because they killed our dad,” Williams said. “They should be scared of us.”