Did Mullins choose his victims at random?

"I think he knew them. I think he had the type of personality where he was very friendly to anyone he met," said Gerald Skahan, now a judge but then the public defender specializing in murder cases who was appointed to represent Mullins. "I think he did know all his victims prior to them being killed and something along the way set him off to do that. I don't know if it was ever determined what did that."

Mullins lived in West Memphis with his father for a while, and was four years younger than Cole. There's no evidence he knew her, but it's not an impossible they encountered each other there.

Mullins lived two floors above Maples and it is likely he would have seen her coming and going from the Isabella Towers on one of her miles-long walks.

There's no proof Mullins and Ector met, but they were both homeless addicts living around Downtown Memphis, so it's possible their paths intersected at some point.

Mullins was well aware of Jackson, however. His family members say Mullins talked about her often, pointing her out when they passed her in a car. Once, Harris said, Mullins asked him for $20, told him to stop the car, then ran over and gave the money to Jackson.

But according to Ron Bezon, who manages the St. Mary's soup kitchen, Mullins and Jackson got into a spat a couple of days before she was killed. Mullins — as he often did — tried to jump line at the soup kitchen, but this time he tried to do it to Jackson. She was having none of it.

"One day Michael got in front of Gwen. Probably two or three days before (the murder) happened. They had an altercation, which I didn't think anything of. It was just somebody being belligerent," Bezon said. "He didn't want to conform to the simple rules that we had. It had to be his way, doing whatever he wanted to do."