By Tim Stelloh -
NBC News
He had been trying to talk to the former police chief for almost a year.
Suburban Philadelphia Police Detective Sergeant Mike Slaughter wanted to interview retired Chief Thomas Mills about an unsolved homicide that had occurred decades ago. The detective said he had repeatedly gone to Mills' house and asked intermediaries to help arrange a meeting. But Mills refused, he said.
Finally, in December 2015, the former chief agreed to a recorded interview and, after about an hour, Slaughter claimed, emerged stunned by what Mills told him: When he was still a detective in the early 1990s, the former chief had was instructed to “stay away” from a possible suspect in the unsolved murder due to the man's status in the Bristol Township Police Department. He was a confidential informant. His contact was a narcotics detective.
That suspect, Robert Atkins, 58, was ultimately charged, convicted and – earlier this year – sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Joy Hibbs on April 19, 1991. But the revelation that authorities allegedly “ "protected" Atkins, in Slaughter's words, left the detective baffled and Hibbs' family furious.
“Why would a person who could be a murder suspect be protected only because of his role as a drug informant for our police department. That doesn't make sense in any kind of police calculation,” Slaughter told
Dateline
in an exclusive interview.
“I will say this until my last breath,” he added. “You never trade a murder suspect for a drug informant.”
For David Hibbs, Hibbs' son, there was only one explanation for how the case had been handled.
“They looked the other way and covered this up,” he told
Dateline
.
Mills died in 2017. Messages left at phone numbers listed for his relatives were not returned. Another narcotics detective who was identified in charging documents against Atkins as his handler died in 2018.
During Atkins' trial, another officer who initially worked the case – the lead homicide detective – testified that he had been ordered to stay away from Atkins as a possible suspect and allow narcotics investigators to deal with that part of the investigation. That detective said he had been told that narcotics investigators did not want anyone to “mess up our drug businesses.” (The detective declined to speak on camera with
Dateline
.)
Another former police chief who the homicide detective says gave those orders is dead.
In a statement to
Dateline
, an attorney for the Bristol Police Department said local officials are aware of the allegations surrounding the investigation into Hibbs' murder, but cannot comment because none of them worked for the municipality in 1991. .
The release notes that in 2015, a new police chief was tasked with restructuring and reorganizing the department. Two years later, the department was accredited by the state.
The chief “assures the Bristol Township community that all criminal investigations are handled with the utmost professionalism, integrity and compassion,” the statement said.
Twenty dollars for drugs and a brutal murder
David Hibbs, 45, had long believed Atkins had something to do with his mother's murder.
Atkins had lived two doors down and his wife, April, often spent time with the victim. David Hibbs commented that Atkins had a bad temper: he could hear his neighbor screaming from his house. A few weeks before his mother's murder, he said, he heard Atkins yelling at his mother over the phone.
When he pressed the woman for details about the argument, he said, she reluctantly told him it was over the quality of a small bag of marijuana she had bought from Atkins.
“My mother was shocked by that conversation, but I don't think she took it seriously because it was a $20 marijuana deal,” David Hibbs said.
Then, on April 19, 1991, authorities responded to a fire in the family's home. Inside, firefighters discovered the victim's body. Hibbs was severely burned, and authorities initially believed she had been the victim of an accidental fire, according to grand jury documents in the case. But the autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed, beaten and probably strangled, according to the documents.
When investigators asked the victim's son if he knew anyone who would want to harm his mother, he gave them the name Atkins.
“He's the only person that came to mind,” David Hibbs said.
In the following months, authorities seemed more focused on the father of David Hibbs – the victim's husband – than on Atkins. Charlie Hibbs told
Dateline
that he was questioned on several occasions and subjected to polygraph tests, even though he had been working in construction in Philadelphia at the time of the murder and had multiple witnesses who could confirm where he had been.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, David Hibbs attempted to obtain case documents from the department in 2006 with the goal of having someone else review the evidence. He stated that the authorities refused to hand over the file, but a police lieutenant offered his opinion on who he believed was responsible for the murder.
“In his opinion, it had been my father,” David Hibbs recalled the officer telling him. “I was sure my father was the culprit.”
David Hibbs indicated that he had never before believed that his father had killed his mother, but this new information “made me question everything.”
He said he never asked his father directly about the issue. But for a time, she had no relationship with him, Charlie Hibbs recalled.
“He completely pulled away,” she said of her son. “We barely communicated.”
“
The case was never supposed to be solved
”
When Slaughter was assigned to re-investigate the murder in 2014, the case was “frozen,” the detective said. “It was a block of ice.” He didn't think he could solve it, but he thought that at least he could update it properly: organize it, categorize it, and identify everyone who was still alive.
When Slaughter began reviewing the case file, he said, he realized there were no recorded interviews – just some handwritten and typewritten records – and little forensic evidence. Many of them had been damaged by the fire or by efforts to extinguish it. He eventually came to the conclusion that Charlie Hibbs had nothing to do with the murder and that people who said otherwise “had no idea what they were talking about,” he said.
Slaughter had seen Atkins' name in the file, the detective said, but investigators' contact with him was documented in what he described as a brief paragraph or two.
In his conversations with police at the time, Atkins denied having anything to do with the crime, Slaughter claimed. He told authorities that he had received a phone call from his wife's co-worker that day – a Friday – before traveling to the Poconos with his family, Slaughter recalled.
Investigators at the time never brought Atkins to the apartment for questioning, nor did they obtain phone records to corroborate the call or when it occurred, Slaughter said. And there was nothing to show Atkins' wife had been interviewed without him being present, Slaughter said. That was something he considered “very suspicious.”
“That would be the opposite of what we would want to do,” he stressed.
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]
Not long after he began reexamining the case, Slaughter interviewed Atkins again. In the April 2014 conversation, Atkins repeated his account from 1991 and acknowledged being a confidential informant—he had used and sold methamphetamine—for the police department, according to grand jury documents. Atkins also confirmed that he had had a dispute with the slain woman about the quality of the marijuana he had sold her, but denied it had anything to do with her murder, the document stated.
In another interview, Atkins' wife said she barely knew the victim and had nothing to do with his death, Slaughter recalled.
In addition to reviewing the case file and conducting interviews, Slaughter said he had also contacted the original detectives, who by then had retired or moved departments. But the majority refused to talk to him, he stressed.
Finally, in December 2015, Mills revealed details about Atkins that were nowhere in the case file, including the fact that Mills had been told not to investigate him as a suspect, Slaughter said.
Slaughter was disappointed with what he had discovered. He said he had affection for the officers who trained and hired him – Mills had been chief when Slaughter started working for the department – and he loves the department and those who now lead it. But no one “ever stepped forward and went to the attorney general's office or the state police or some other agency and said, 'Hey, we have to look into this,'” Slaughter said.
“This case was never supposed to be solved,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to get anywhere.”
A new revelation
After the interview with Mills, Slaughter explained, he shared what he had learned with a lieutenant and a sergeant. So, she referred the case to the district attorney's office.
More than two years after first interviewing Atkins' wife, she showed up at the police department and said she needed to talk about something “really important,” Slaughter recalled.
Slaughter ran to the police station. In the interview that followed, April Atkins – who had since divorced Atkins – told him that on the day of the murder, her husband came home with blood on his clothes.
“I looked at him and said, 'What happened to you?'” April Atkins told
Dateline
in her first interview about the case. She “she came up to me and said, 'I stabbed someone and set a house on fire.'”
Atkins told her to miss work that day and prepare her two young children for a trip to the Poconos, she said. The next day, when they went for a walk, he was carrying a bag, and at one point he told her and the children to stop while he disappeared for a moment.
“When he returned, the bag was no longer with him,” he said.
In her interview with Slaughter, April Atkins explained that Atkins' sneakers could have been in the bag. She didn't know who the victim was until a detective came to her house after her murder, she told
Dateline
, and later pressured her husband to turn himself in. She told
Dateline
that he hit her when she brought it up and threatened to frame her for her murder if she continued. (Atkins' attorney stated that her client “absolutely” denies the allegations of mistreatment.)
April Atkins said she remained terrified of her husband, even after their divorce in 2006, but eventually reached out to Slaughter after a series of deaths in her own life.
As with the Mills interview, Slaughter indicated that he relayed what he learned after speaking with the woman to the district attorney.
It was not until May 2022 – more than five years after his revelations to Slaughter – that Atkins was arrested and charged with the murder of Joy Hibbs. Matt Weintraub, a Bucks County judge who in 2022 was the county's district attorney, declined to comment on why it took years to charge Atkins, citing "the pending and imminent nature of post-conviction issues."
After Atkins' arrest, Weintraub told reporters that there was "no big or specific reason" for the delay. “We have a lot of cases, and some tend to take priority over others,” he explained.
During the press conference, a reporter asked if Atkins' alibi had been thoroughly investigated in 1991.
“Maybe other people who were in a different situation back then accepted his alibi and maybe didn't look under every rock and as thoroughly as we have now,” Weintraub responded.