A well-dressed woman’s body surfaced in Newport Harbor on a warm September afternoon, wrapped loosely in a sheet and bearing the unmistakable evidence of a furious, personal attack. She was nude, floating among the yachts of one of California’s most affluent waterfront communities, and when the first officers arrived, they found more than a corpse. Tangled in the sheet was a folded knife, still stained with blood and what looked like human tissue. The body was taken to Orange County forensic pathologist Dr.
Shaun Enyart, who had performed more than two thousand autopsies. His external examination counted fifty-two stab and slash wounds distributed across the woman’s upper chest, neck, back, and face. He would later describe it as the most severe and aggressive attack he had ever witnessed on a human being. There was rage in every wound, and it had to be personal.
This was not a random killing. The first challenge was simply identifying the dead woman. Her fingerprints were distorted by time in the water, and there was no dental match. With no name, detectives had no starting point.
They had no idea who her enemies were, where she had been last, or who might have wanted her dead. The case was running against the clock, and the medical examiner’s office became an essential part of the investigative team. During the autopsy, Dr. Enyart found a way forward.
The woman had breast implants, and some silicone implants carry serial numbers that can be traced to the manufacturer. The numbers were sent to detectives, who were also scouring the harbor for anything the killer might have left behind. Among the debris, they recovered a broken cardboard box floating in the water. It still bore markings from a television set and a readable barcode.
The implant serial numbers led to the victim’s identity: Barbara Mullenix, fifty-six years old, from Huntington Beach, a short distance up the coast. The credit card records linked to the television box produced a second name: Bruce Mullenix, Barbara’s ex-husband. Detectives immediately began investigating the family home. When officers searched the two-story condominium, the downstairs appeared unremarkable, but upstairs told a different story.
In a bedroom that clearly belonged to a teenage girl, the dresser drawers were empty and her clothing was gone. In the master bedroom, blood spatter covered the wall, the headboard, the nightstand, and the floor, and a clear blood transfer marked the wall, likely from a hand. There was no doubt someone had been murdered in that room. The victim was almost certainly Barbara.
While investigators processed the scene, Bruce Mullenix walked up to the perimeter and identified himself. He showed little emotion at the sight of his home surrounded by police tape. When told a homicide investigation was underway, he paused and asked, “Is it Barbara or Rachel? ” He seemed to instinctively know that someone in his family was dead.
He explained that he had been unable to reach either his ex-wife or their seventeen-year-old daughter, Rachel, for two days, which was unusual because Rachel was constantly in touch by text or phone. Bruce’s living situation was unusual. He and Barbara had divorced years earlier in Oklahoma City, and after a failed move to Florida, Barbara and Rachel returned to California to live with Bruce. They shared the house as divorced co-parents, each with their own room.
Investigators found this arrangement strange, and Bruce became an immediate suspect. But his alibi was strong. He claimed to have been in Fresno for a work conference from September 12 through the afternoon of September 14. The body had been found on September 13, squarely within that window.
To test the alibi, investigators needed a time of death. Dr. Enyart estimated that Barbara had died a few hours to a few days before discovery. Since the body had been in water, decomposition had been slowed, but the estimate was too broad to be useful.
Then neighbors provided the key. One resident reported being awakened around 2:00 a. m. on September 13 by the sounds of a struggle.
Another heard what sounded like a box being dragged along concrete around 2:30 and saw two people placing something in the back of Barbara’s station wagon. With that time frame established, Bruce’s alibi held. The drive between Fresno and Huntington Beach took four to four and a half hours each way, and witnesses at the conference confirmed his presence. It would have been nearly impossible for him to commit the murder, clean up, dispose of the body, and return on time.
Bruce was eliminated as a suspect. That left Rachel. She had vanished. Detectives feared she had been abducted by the real killer, or worse, that she too was dead.
They pressed Bruce for details about his daughter’s life. He explained that Barbara had had a difficult past and that Rachel was the center of her world. The two were deeply codependent. Rachel had stopped attending school and stayed home with her mother most days.
Barbara, by all accounts, was social and fun, but she was also an alcoholic who became verbally and physically abusive when she drank. Rachel, Bruce said, had a new boyfriend named Ian Allen. Ian was twenty-one, four years older than Rachel. The couple appeared deeply in love, but Barbara was fiercely opposed to the relationship.
She made threats against Ian, telling him she would report him to his employer as a drug dealer and to the district attorney’s office for statutory rape. Rachel had responded by having her parents sign a document purporting to grant Ian permission to have sex with her, an attempt to sidestep California’s age-of-consent law. Ian, however, had also disappeared. His parents told detectives they had last seen him and Rachel about six hours before Barbara’s body was found.
They described Ian as a good kid whose worst offense was a speeding ticket, but they also revealed that a . 38-caliber revolver was missing from their home. Worse, a friend of Ian’s said that days earlier, at a beach party, Ian had drunk a few beers and declared he was going to kill his girlfriend’s mother, drive her car into the desert, and blow it up. A friend joked that he would just throw her into the ocean instead.
It was now clear to Investigator Steve Mack that Ian Allen was the prime suspect. The brutality of Barbara’s death supported the theory. Dr. Enyart noted that many of the fifty-two wounds were shallow and clustered on the upper back, where they would not be fatal.
Wounds on the hands and forearms were defensive. Two wounds on the throat, however, had cut the carotid artery and jugular vein, and either would have been lethal within minutes. There were also wounds inflicted after death, including a knife driven into the skull between the eye and the eyelid, hammered in so deeply it did not cut the eyelid or burst the eye. Enyart had never seen anything like it before or since.
The autopsy revealed another crucial detail. The folding knife found with the body could not account for all the wounds. Some injuries were wider and deeper than the blade could have made. A kitchen knife missing from the Mullenix home matched a knife removed from Barbara’s skull.
That meant at least three knives had been used, which suggested more than one attacker. Twenty-four hours after Barbara’s body was found, investigators still worried about Rachel’s safety. Then Ian’s parents allowed detectives to search their computer and found MapQuest directions from Huntington Beach to Florida, where Barbara and Rachel had once lived. Phone records showed calls to Tampa, and a friend there said Rachel had contacted an ex-boyfriend, asking for a place to stay for a few days.
Rachel had sounded happy and excited, not like someone fleeing a kidnapper. Credit card records showed Ian’s gas card being used in Sulfur, Louisiana. Detectives called the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, and a roadblock was set up on Interstate 10. Ian yielded and both he and Rachel were taken into custody.
Steve Mack flew to Louisiana to interview them. Rachel insisted she had been kidnapped and held against her will. She claimed she had been asleep the night of the murder, heard her mother scream, and ran into the room to find Ian stabbing her. She said Ian had knocked her out when she tried to stop him.
Mack told her he did not believe her. He pointed out that she had been talking and crying for twenty minutes without a single tear falling. Rachel denied everything. Ian, however, confessed.
He admitted to going to Rachel’s house around one in the morning with a small pocketknife, then grabbing two additional knives from the kitchen because the first was not enough to frighten Barbara. He described holding the knife to her throat and the struggle that followed. But he insisted Rachel was innocent, claiming she had been kidnapped and should be sent home to her father. Mack told him he was lying.
Surveillance footage from a gas station in Louisiana showed Rachel walking freely through the mini-mart, paying for a drink, and approaching Ian lovingly while he used the ATM. She showed no signs of trauma. Dr. Enyart’s analysis further undermined their story.
At least three knives had been used in the attack, meaning it was far more likely that two people were involved. The evidence supported a finding that the murder was committed by more than one perpetrator. In August 2008, Rachel Mullenix was found guilty of first-degree murder. Two months later, Ian Allen was convicted as well.
Both were sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Investigators noted that Rachel had had numerous opportunities to stop the crime if she had truly been unwilling. In the days leading up to the murder, there were 464 text messages between Rachel and Ian, the final ones exchanged after Barbara’s death, reading simply, “I love you. ”
For Steve Mack, the case remained among the most unique and horrific of his sixteen years in homicide investigation.
The wounds on Barbara’s hands and arms told him she had fought for her life all the way to the end. The greatest tragedy, he believed, was not the violence itself, but that the betrayal had come from her own daughter.