I am sad to write about another woman named Jean who went missing in New Mexico. However, unlike Jean Johnson who has not yet been found, Jean Abla was found dead off of Interstate 40, north of San Jon, in May 1983.
Jean Abla was last seen on October 6, 1982. The OMI determined her body had likely been dumped in the location it was found around autumn of 1982. She was murdered by blunt force trauma to the head.
Cops thought they solved her case when Henry Lee Lucas confessed to picking Abla up from a San Jon truck stop and killing her, even giving accurate details about her C-section scar. But her daughter, Samantha Thompson, never believed Lucas was her mother’s killer. Her suspicions deepened when Lucas turned out to be completely unreliable.
Now, decades later, Abla’s case is still unsolved. Thompson is pushing for it to be reopened, but investigators are stalling. This is robbing Jean Abla and her family of justice, and it is wasting time that will make the case harder and harder to crack.
Jean Abla
Jean Abla was a mother and grandmother above all else. Samantha acknowledges her mother was far from perfect. But she also misses Jean Abla dearly. She knows that Jean loved her and her kids very much. She said that living without her mom was like staring into an abyss.
Jean Abla struggled with alcoholism. She moved to San Jon to live with family after falling on hard times. She wrote soulful yet sad poetry and loved to sing and sew gorgeous things. She was also not afraid to get her hands dirty and work on cars if she had to. Family recalls that she carried a Hot Wheels car in her purse to give to any kids that she might come across, indicating what a loving person she was. When people were hungry or needy, Abla was the first to help them out, even at her own expense.
Jean Abla was born Jean Simmons. She grew up in Erick, OK. Her dad was a mechanic and she had twelve siblings. The family didn’t have indoor plumbing or TV but they had strong values, love, and hard work ethic. When Jean was 17, she met Bobby Dee Abla at church and married him. They had Samantha in 1965. In 1969, Jean Abla had another baby but nearly died from pregnancy complications. Doctors performed a C-section and delivered her stillborn child at seven months. That led to tension and problems between Bobby and Jean.
They divorced after 9 years of marriage, which really sent Jean Abla into a depressive spiral. She began to abuse alcohol and “associate with a rough crowd.” In addition to her depression, Abla was preoccupied with her own death. She often said she would die young and she wrote in her diary about seeing her death in a dream. Her premonition was eerily accurate.
Her poetry speaks of her depression:
It is so dark, gloom completely surrounds me.
Alone I sit wondering, wondering, what is my destiny?
I have searched behind clouds, overturned rocks for a reply.
Must I go on living in confused darkness, or just die?
Here is another beautiful poem by Jean Abla that shows her lighter side:
In 1982, Abla worked as a waitress in Endee, a tiny town near Tucumcari on Interstate 40. She was only 35. The last time she was seen alive, she was drinking with friends at a bar in San Jon. She left the evening of October 6, 1982. For the next year, no one saw her or knew what happened to her. Samantha Thompson was living in Texas at the time and she was frantic to find out what happened to her mother. She said her mother was all that she had.
Law enforcement did not take the disappearance case very seriously. They felt that Abla was hiding from her recent ex-boyfriend, who had tried to strangle her in the past. However, Abla’s father and daughter both knew that Abla would have reached out to them at some point if that were true. Abla loved her family and her dog too much to just abandon them without a thought.
Then some teenagers were hunting for rabbits on May 3, 1983, north of San Jon. They found a skull that had received some type of trauma. They called police, who then located a few more bones. The skeletal remains were in a burrow pit that had been used during the building of Interstate 40. Not all of the bones have been found to this day.
The body was immediately suspected to be Abla’s, but it was officially labeled a Jane Doe until the 2000s when Samantha Thompson got DNA confirmation that the remains were indeed her mother’s. This was a bittersweet revelation for her. On one hand, it gave her closure and stopped the constant wondering about where her mother was. But on the other hand, it dashed all hope that Jean Abla had vanished of her own accord and was thriving somewhere far from home. Thompson struggled with the pain of knowing her mother had suffered in her last moments.
The Confession Killer
Henry Lee Lucas is known as the Confession Killer. He confessed to hundreds of murders in the 1980s, making him seem like the most prolific serial killer ever. Families were relieved to get answers and law enforcement was relieved to close cases once Lucas was put away.
However, diligent investigators soon discovered that Lucas was not responsible for many of the murders he had confessed to. His murders were often thousands of miles apart but committed within a day or two of each other. For instance, in the month of October in 1978, he supposedly drove over 11,000 miles, zigzagging all the way across the States in one or two days’ time, killing someone random, then doing it again the other direction. To cover that much distance, he must have been going incredible speeds without ever getting pulled over.
Sometimes work records, witness sightings, or cashed checks pinned him in completely different locations than the murders he confessed to. For instance, Lucas confessed to the murder of Debra Jackson, known for decades as simply “Orange Socks,” in Texas. But work records place him in Jacksonville, Florida, that same day. There was just no way he could have driven all the way to Texas after work to commit the murder that happened within hours of when he got off, only to turn around and return home by morning and show up at work again.
Lucas also proved to be unreliable. He once claimed he drove to Japan to commit murders. Sometimes, the details he gave for cases didn’t match up. Other times, they did, but investigators point out that he had been shown crime scene photos and had been given access to case files during interrogations.
Ultimately, he was convicted of only 11 of his confessed crimes, and I think he really only committed three (his mother, his girlfriend, and the elderly lady he was caregiving for). To understand why he made so many false confessions, you first must understand his background: He grew up extremely poor, his mother physically and sexually abused him, and his dad was a drunk, so he had brain damage and trauma that made him particularly malleable to suggestion.
When he confessed to murders, he got attention and felt valued for the first time in his life. People began to send him letters, investigators plied him with treats and special privileges, and a jail minister named Sister Clemmie began to show him more love than any woman had ever showed him in his life. Plus, he had three square meals and medical care for free in prison, so he no longer had to struggle as he had on the outside.
Basically, Lucas was an egotistical liar who enjoyed manipulating law enforcement for attention. He grinned and bragged about helping solve these crimes, when really he was destroying any chance at justice for the victims. He got strawberry milkshakes, cigarettes, and coffee in exchange for fake confessions. Sister Clemmie also heavily influenced him, when she told him he could get into Heaven and see the girlfriend he had murdered.
When Lucas’s lover, Ottis Toole, saw the notoriety that Lucas was receiving, he got jealous and began to falsely confess to gruesome killings too. With his tall tales, he painted a picture of a murdering pair that traveled thousands of miles a month to randomly kill hundreds of victims for no reason. The media ate that up.
Ultimately, Lucas and Toole caused harm to around 300 families who had lost loved ones to other killers. They prevented the real killers from being discovered. They also gave families hope, and I can’t imagine the pain of finding out that hope was false.
Jean Abla is one such case that Lucas derailed. Some investigators still believe that Lucas killed Abla. But Samantha Thompson and some others believe that he was never even in the vicinity of San Jon in October of 1982.
Henry Lee Lucas claimed that he had abducted Jean Abla from a truck stop in San Jon in 1982. He also described a C-section scar on her belly, which is eerie because Jean Abla had had a C-section. These details made investigators believe he killed Abla. Quay County Sheriff Rusty Shafer says, “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
The interesting thing about Lucas was his candor in discussing his victims. He got some sick sense of enjoyment from sketching them and describing minute details about their deaths, their bodies, and more. This made him seem legit.
In 1983, someone called Samantha’s aunt, Abla’s sister, and claimed that they had seen Abla being held at gunpoint and abducted in a vehicle. It is unclear if the tip included information about the location of the abduction, a vehicle description, or the man holding the gun. This tip made investigators believe Lucas’s confession even more.
However, Lucas was really great at reading people and studying crime scene photos and case files. Investigators who interviewed him were sloppy about letting him see too much information when they questioned him about specific cases. As a result, he was able to furnish things like details about scars. He probably learned about Abla’s C-section scar in her case file.
Investigators aren’t 100% sure that Lucas was even in New Mexico when Abla was killed. As DNA evidence, incorrect details, and timeline inconsistencies eliminated Lucas from other crimes he took credit for, doubt swirled around his involvement in Abla’s death. Thompson points out that Lucas claimed he picked Abla up from a truck stop where he saw her hitchiking, but her mother owned a car, so why would she hitchhike? Abla’s car was found abandoned after she went missing, so she had clearly been driving it the night she was killed. Lucas also claimed that Abla was wearing pigtails, but Thompson says her mother never wore pigtails.
Was Jean Abla just another victim Henry Lee Lucas falsely confessed to killing? Did someone else do it, and get away with it? If so, who? And why?
The Investigation into Jean Abla’s Death Today
Quay County Sheriff, Joel Garnett, handled Jean Abla’s case initially. Garnett didn’t feel there was enough evidence to tie Lucas to the case definitively, so he left the case open. But he also didn’t get any other leads and so the investigation stopped. It has never really resumed. Most people were content to say, “Henry Lee Lucas did it so we don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
When Samantha pushed for the Quay County Sheriff’s Office to start working the case again after Lucas was revealed to be a blowhard, they told Samantha that they just don’t have the funding or resources to reopen the case. Jean Abla is not a priority to them. With tight funding, even current cases cannot get the attention they deserve, so cold cases definitely fall to the wayside.
So Samantha sought other avenues. She has stayed determined to get closure and solve her mother’s case, with or without law enforcement’s help. Between distributing flyers, pushing law enforcement, and soliciting cold case funding and volunteer efforts, she has kept her mom’s memory alive and has made important headway on Abla’s case. She runs a Facebook page called “Remember Jean Abla” where she talks about her mother’s case and other unsolved cases, advocating for other people going through the same heartbreak that she has endured for decades. In addition, she used to run a website that appears to no longer be functional: confessionkiller.not. You can reach her with information on her Facebook page or at [email protected].
With assistance from the Cold Case Foundation, Thompson managed to get the case reopened in 2018. She also got a dog team called “Fide Canem” to search the area where her mother’s body was found. While they did not find anything new, it was a step forward in an otherwise forgotten case. She also saw to it that Abla was added to the cold case registries in 2016 and that DNA was procured to officially identify the body.
In 2019, Thompson appeared in the documentary The Confession Killer to share information about her mother’s case and try to get someone, anyone, to come forward. This documentary was “an act of desperation” to her. Though she hated appearing on camera and being interviewed, she felt it might propel her mother’s case forward or at least get law enforcement to take the murder more seriously. The Confession Killer is about Lucas’s many false confessions and the victims whose cases he interfered with. It attempted to represent the families who never got justice because law enforcement gave too much credence to Lucas’s confessions. After the documentary show came out, three cases were reopened and one was solved. The film crew traveled to San Jon to interview Thompson and film the locations where Jean Abla was last seen and where her body was found. Unfortunately, the show has not led to Abla’s case being solved – at least, not yet.
A new sheriff took over in Quay County, named Rusty Shafer. Shafer said there were no resources to investigate, but he took it upon himself to advocate for Jean Abla and to review old case files. He is still of the opinion that Lucas committed the murder. But he is also open to other possibilities and he is working with Samantha Thompson and cold-case professionals from Utah to gather more evidence. He wants to solve this case once and for all.
So Who Did It?
Thompson hinted that she has suspects after learning many new things in the reopened investigation. But she will not name them, which is undoubtedly smart. She alludes to the killer still being out there and possibly from San Jon. That is a chilling thought – the killer is just a regular person, hanging out in the San Jon area, keeping a horrible secret, possibly hurting other women.
Why did he do this to Jean Abla?
I think Abla’s ex-boyfriend would be a good suspect to start with. There was a history of domestic violence between Abla and this man. They had also recently broken up. Most people are killed by people they know and trust; people are far less likely to get murdered by a serial killer. Unless a really strong alibi can rule him out, he is probably Suspect #1.
Other suspects would be people in the “rough crowd” that she supposedly associated with. That crowd could have included someone who meant her harm. She was last seen at a bar; did cops look into the other patrons at the bar that night? Did they investigate all of her friends and associates?
Some people still believe Lucas was responsible. Given his track record, I don’t think anyone should put too much stock into his confession about Abla. But investigators should look more into it and verify where Lucas was on October 6, 1982. That’s exactly what Thompson has been pushing for. But she has encountered lots of resistance; investigators won’t take a second hard look at the case. They want to move on and focus on more current cases, which is a travesty to Jean Abla and her family.
Jean Abla was a beautiful human being with a deep, profound soul. She went through so much heartache and trauma in her life, only to die horribly. Now most people only know her as one of Henry Lee Lucas’s victims. They don’t know about her poetry, her sewing, her bad singing, or the Hot Wheels car she carried in her purse. They don’t consider her daughter, her grandchildren, or her many siblings and their children who miss her dearly. We must remember Jean Abla for who she was and we must keep her case in our awareness so that one day it may be solved. I hold out hope for a deathbed confession, new DNA evidence, or a tip that will blow this cold case wide open.
https://www.abqjournal.com/1404954/netflix-series-brings-to-light-unsolved-new-mexico-murder.html
https://www.easternnewmexiconews.com/story/2018/05/22/news/who-killed-jean-abla/157809.html
https://www.qcsunonline.com/story/2018/05/23/news/who-killed-jean-abla/19054.html