MONDAY SEPTEMBER 22 Hello! This week kicks off with the amazing story of the Walmart text messages that drove a man to confess to murder. Our protagonist: Matthew Gibson, a 55-year-old North Carolina man who, as police told the Charlotte Observer, embarked on “a frantic, sleepless trek to Arizona, where he confessed to a murder that happened 17 years ago.” Details come from Detective Alicia Marquez of Arizona’s Winslow Police Department, who today told the Observer how she met Gibson last June, after she found him sobbing in the police department’s lobby. “He told Marquez a bizarre tale,” reports the Observer. “He met a woman in Bullhead City, Ariz., late one night [in 1997]. They went back to his trailer. She became loud and obnoxious. He told her to leave and she wouldn’t. He finally bludgeoned her to death with a Maglite flashlight, dumped her body by the Colorado River and kept quiet for years.” Flash forward to 2014, when Gibson—now a resident of Watauga County—says he began receiving text messages and voice mails from Walmart, informing him that Anita Townshed’s prescriptions were ready for pickup. “Gibson later received an envelope with a Walmart advertisement in it but no return name or address,” reports the Observer. “Gibson’s conclusion: Townshed must have been the woman he killed.” (Helpful fact: The Observer describes Townshed as “a former cocaine and methamphetamine addict.”) Certain he was being hunted for the long-ago killing, Gibson drove from North Carolina to Arizona, where his paranoia drove him into the Winslow police department, where he confessed to the nearly two-decades-old killing. “Gibson didn’t know the name of the 38-year-old woman he’d killed in Bullhead City in 1997,” reports the Observer. “But it wasn’t Anita Townshed. It was Barbara Brown Agnew.” In closing, police say they never would’ve found Gibson had he not confessed, and Gibson told police he’s ready to plead guilty to manslaughter and eager to begin his 10-year sentence. Congratulations to the crime-busting butterfingers working at that North Carolina Walmart, and condolences to the loved ones of Barbara Brown Agnew.

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