After 25 years of searching for answers, Atlanta police said they have found what they needed to arrest the husband of a young woman whose severed head was found in a trash bag in 1999.
Melissa Dawn Wolfenbarger’s family last heard from her on Thanksgiving 1998 when she called from her husband’s grandparents’ home, according to a police report at the time.
“I love you, and you know where I am if you need me,” were Norma Patton’s last words to her daughter that day.
In April of the following year, a severed head was found in a wooded area near her home in southwest Atlanta, and more severed remains were found nearby in June. However, they were initially misidentified as belonging to a man. In 2003, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed them to be Wolfenbarger.
Her husband, Christopher Wolfenbarger, never reported her missing or told her family of her disappearance, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported. It was her mother who filed the report in January 2000.
On Wednesday, Patton stood by another daughter, Tina Patton, and Atlanta police homicide detectives to announce Christopher Wolfenbarger’s arrest. They wore shirts that Norma Patton made when her daughter disappeared, each featuring a photo of Melissa. Tina Patton’s shirt read: “Justice has no expiration date.”
“We have finally made it,” Norma Patton declared. “He’s in custody, and now we just need to get over the last hurdle and get him convicted.”
Police did not disclose what evidence they uncovered that finally led them to the arrest, but Christopher Wolfenbarger had been a person of interest from the beginning, Detective Jarion Shepard said. No cause of death was released.
Early in the investigation, police learned that Melissa Wolfenbarger, a 21-year-old mother of two, hadn’t been in contact with her husband since December 1998. It wasn’t until 2000 that he told investigators that he “saw her walking down the street near their home in March or April of 1999,” a police report stated.
Norma Patton said she never heard from her son-in-law after her daughter’s disappearance or after her body was identified.
“From day one, we knew it was Christopher,” Tina Patton said at the news conference. “There was never, ever any doubt in our minds who did this.”
The family said that during the summer of 1998, Melissa Wolfenbarger left her husband and took her children to live with her mother. She moved back in with him later that year. At the time, her family had been frightened for her safety “for a long time,” Norma Patton said.
Tina Patton urged people in similar situations to seek help escaping abuse.
“I hope anybody who’s in a domestic violence situation, please get out. Don’t take it, because this — it could easily be you. It could be your sister, could be your mother,” she said.
Norma Patton said she hopes Melissa is remembered for her loving nature. “If she loved you, you would know it, definitely.”
She said her daughter’s love for her children was what drove her back to her husband.
”She loved her kids, and there’s no way on this earth that she would leave them,” she said. “That’s why she went back to him. That’s why she kept going back to him.”
On Wednesday, Christopher Wolfenbarger was booked into the Fulton jail on one count of murder.
“Christopher Wolfenbarger knowingly and intentionally killed Melissa Dawn Wolfenbarger and dismembered her body,” investigators wrote in an arrest warrant obtained by the AJC.
In an unexpected twist, Melissa’s father, Carl Patton, pleaded guilty in 2003 to a string of five serial killings in the 1970s, referred to as the Flint River murders, and was sentenced to life in prison. He was not a suspect in his daughter’s death, according to authorities at the time.
Carl Patton is incarcerated at Coastal State Prison, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.
From our archives in 2003
Remains of killer’s missing daughter found in morgue. Published March 19, 2003
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