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When working on a cold case, there is no guarantee that a murder will be solved — and even if it is, it often takes years or even decades.
In the case of Atlanta mother Melissa Wolfenbarger, it took 25 years – with the help of a podcast, and in a bizarre twist, her serial killer father.
The 21-year-old was last heard from by her family on Thanksgiving 1998. Her dismembered remains were found five months later, in close proximity to her husband’s place of work.
It was 2003 before the remains were identified as Melissa – only after her father Carl Patton was arrested for a string of unrelated killings from the 1970s known as the Flint River murders.
“His arrest is what finally identified her remains,” Melissa’s mother Norma Patton told The Independent. “If he had never been arrested, we might have never known.”
Melissa’s death was not at the hands of her father, who had been cleared in her murder, but what happened to her and the identity of her killer has remained a mystery for decades.
Her case only began to gain some traction in 2017 when Crime Scene Investigator Sheryl “Mac” McCollum got her hands on it when Melissa’s mother came to her for help.
“You can’t give up. You just keep going. Talk to anyone who will listen, because you don’t know who that person might be to help,” Norma said. “That’s what Sheryl did for us. She opened the door and helped us walk through it.”
Melissa’s case was the first one to be featured on McCollum’s podcast Zone 7, when it launched in February 2023.
In a stunning turn of events, over a year later in April 2024, a listener who heard the episode reached out to McCollum and shared a crucial bit of information.
“I had a gut feeling,” McCollum said, recalling the moment she received the tip.
She told The Independent that the person had witnessed behavior between the couple, but said she could not give further details.
McCollum sent the information to the lead detective and, after more than two decades of no answers, the case picked up steam and shot through the next few months at lightning speed.
Three months later in August 2024, Melissa’s husband Christopher Wolfenbarger was arrested and indicted by a grand jury for her murder.
“I was just tickled pink. We waited so long for this,” Norma told The Independent. “It’s been a long, hard road. But it finally happened.”
What happened to Melissa Wolfenbarger?
Melissa was last heard from on Thanksgiving 1998 when she called her family to make plans for Christmas that year. But she never showed up.
“There was no phone call, and she never showed up,” Norma explained about her daughter missing the holidays. “I immediately panicked. But she was an adult. Married with kids. Not much we could do.”
“But when my birthday came and went with no call, I knew something was very wrong,” she added.
After Norma’s missed birthday in Februrary, they drove to Melissa’s house in Atlanta from their home in Locust Grove, Georgia.
But the Wolfenbarger family was gone. Neighbors told them they had moved away but their address was unknown.
The family reported Melissa missing and authorities tracked down her husband Christopher Wolfenbarger to question him.
He told police that Melissa had left on her own to pursue her dream of starting a new life in California, the Atlanta Police Department told Dateline in 2021.
On April 29, 1999, a severed human head was found in a black trash bag in close in proximity to Wolfenbarger’s place of work. At the time, officials misidentified those remains as belonging to another missing person, a man.
But then on June 3, 1999, more dismembered human remains were discovered in black trash bags near to where the first remains had been found. A torso was never found.
The remains were not identified until 2003 – only after Melissa’s father Carl Patton was arrested in connection to an unrelated murder.
DNA testing led to Patton being convicted for the killings of Fred Wyatt, Liddie Matthews Evans, and Evans’s boyfriend Joe Cleveland in Georgia, in the 1970s, known as the Flint River Murders. He pleaded guilty and was given a life sentence.
He was also a suspect in Melissa’s murder, but Tina said her father would have never hurt Melissa, according to 11Alive. “Dad loved us,” she said. “He was devastated. Just like us. He broke down and cried.”
But it was his arrest that led to answers for the family.
“My mom was able to convince him to say something about my sister,” Tina said, according to local outlet 11Alive. “And somebody in Atlanta saw it in the paper the next day and said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s some remains over here in the morgue. And the address, the vicinities are kind of close to where this girl lived. So let’s go get DNA.’”
DNA positively identified the remains as belonging to Melissa and cleared Patton of her murder.
But Melissa’s killer was still out there. And Norma continued to put all her time and effort into getting justice for her daughter.
In 2017, she met McCollum – and everything changed.
‘My daughter was beheaded and I need your help’
McCollum remembers the exact moment she first saw Norma Patton.
It was at a formal dinner for a Wine and Crime event she was hosting.
McCollum, who is the founder and Director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute (CCIRI), often hosts the popular program that takes an in-depth look at unsolved cold cases.
While McCollum was on stage talking, she noticed a woman walking into the event wearing Bermuda shorts and a hat “looking like she had literally walked in off the beach.”
After the event, McCollum said the woman came up to her and said: “My daughter was beheaded and I need your help.”
Without any hesitation, McCollum agreed to hear her story.
And Norma certainly had one to tell. Armed with binders full of information, she was ready to talk.
But there was a twist.
“She touched both binders, looked me in the eye and said, ‘My husband is in prison for murder and I helped him.’”
Norma had testified against him, which played a substantial role in the case, testified Lt. Col Bruce Jordan of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Department.
“It is my opinion she saved the taxpayers a lot of money,” Jordan said, adding that he requested the "deal" that gave Norma immunity from any murder charges relating to the four killings, according to local outlets at the time.
After hearing Norma’s admission, McCollum was not alarmed.
“Melissa’s case is separate from the sins of her father,” she told her.
But McCollum said she needed to speak with Patton to do a complete victimology. In 2021, they started corresponding by writing letters.
“What became clear to me was their loyalty,” McCollum said. “Their loyalty to Carl, their loyalty to each other and their loyalty to getting justice for Melissa.”
In the letters, one man is clearly named as the suspected killer: Melissa’s husband – Christopher Wolfenbarger.
Through McCollum’s own investigation, her correspondence with Melissa’s family, and the letters, she had her own theories, but told The Independent that it was time to bring in the experts.
“Because at the end of the day, who cares what I think, but if I have Nancy Grace, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dr Angie Arnold telling me it’s Wolfenbarger,” McCollum said. “And they’ve done their own independent research, they’ve looked at the case file by themselves. I will stake my reputation on it.”
At that point, a new district attorney was coming to the fore – Fani Willis. She launched a task force and McCollum was on it. One of the first cases on the agenda was Melissa’s.
The first thing McCollum did was take Assistant District Attorney Adriane Love to the area where Melissa’s head had been found and the close proximity of it to the front door of his business.
“That is critical,” she said. “You’ve got to show them, they’ve gotta walk it.”
But working the case took time.
Justice for Melissa
Melissa’s husband Wolfenbarger was arrested earlier this month, on Tuesday August 6.
A press conference was planned for the next day where his arrest would be announced to the public.
The original lead detective on Melissa’s case wanted to contact her father himself, but the inmate would not have phone privileges until Thursday.
McCollum told The Independent that Detective Calhoun did not want him finding out on the news.
Back in 2003, Det Calhoun made an effort to tell Patton himself that his daughter’s body had been identified.
“He drove to the prison to tell Carl in person – daddy to daddy,” McCollum said.
So this time, the detective went out of his way to call the warden and have someone deliver the news to Patton.
“He had been devastated when he found out she had been murdered,” Norma said about her husband. “But he was deliriously happy as soon as he found out Chris had been arrested.”
At the press conference last month, Det Shephard, who took over the case several years ago, said Wolfenbarger had been a person of interest from the beginning, and that “probable cause” is how they were able to finally make the arrest.
When asked what specifically linked Wolfenbarger to the murder, he said, “I want to protect the integrity of the case going forward, so I can’t disclose certain evidence, but we look at everything when it comes to a cold case.”
Melissa’s sister told the media that day that their family always believed Wolfenbarger was responsible for her murder.
“From day one, we knew it was Christopher,” she told reporters. “There was never, ever any doubt in our minds, who did this. My mom has said I don’t know how many times, that when she first met him, there was just evil in his eyes,’” she continued.
Both Norma and Tina said they never heard from Wolfenbarger again after Melissa’s disappearance.
Melissa had left her husband the summer before she disappeared, according to her sister, after saying her husband hit her and dragged her by the hair down a sidewalk.
“But when [Wolfenbarger] went in front of the judge, he asked the judge to let him talk to her alone, and she went back to him,” her sister said.
Norma told The Independent she hopes Melissa’s story will help other women in domestic violence situations.
“It’s always been a domestic violence issue from day one,” Norma said. “She had already left because of his abuse. I think she went back to him but at one point said, ‘I’m gonna call mom and I’m going home.’ And maybe that’s when he lost it.”
“You don’t know what the final straw was – that caused him to do what he did to her,” she said.
“He’s the only one who has the real answers.”
Wolfenbarger is currently being held in Fulton County Jail on murder charges.
Norma tearfully told the crowd that she will finally, after all these years, stop watching the news.
“I don’t have to watch the news anymore, because we got him,” she said. “He’s in jail and, Lord help me, he stays there.”
