Unsolved Mysteries: 13 Minutes

Warning: If you haven’t watched the episode yet, don’t read ahead, there are spoilers.

The second episode of Netflix’s reboot of Unsolved Mysteries, “13 Minutes,” is at least a little more straight forward than the Rey Rivera story from episode one. That is, we know Patrice Endres, a hairstylist and mother from Cumming, Georgia, was murdered in 2004. We just don’t know who did it, how they did it, and why they did it.

Based on telephone records, we know, as the title namesake tells us, that there was a 13-minute window (it looks like during her lunch break) when something happened to Patrice.

Naturally, the cops look at a couple notorious serial killers operating in the area and who may have had contact with Patrice, like Jeremy Jones. But I’m always skeptical of that because serial killers want the notoriety, so of course, often with the help of the police, they will want to add to their notoriety with an additional body count. Fortunately, it looks like this one was a wild goose chase, and the police realized as much.

For more on this, watch The Confession Killer on Netflix. It’s mind-numbing and alarming.

So, then, who do we turn to? There’s always the stranger opportunist, as the detective from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation postulated. After all, the salon is on a busy stretch of road and strangers would often come into the salon. However, I’m not convinced of this, given the 13-minute window. Someone had to know that lunch break window to take advantage of the situation, presumably. Unless they got extremely lucky.

Which leads you to the likeliest suspect in any spousal killing: the other spouse. The fact of the matter is that one of the most dangerous thing a woman can do is leave her husband or boyfriend. Period.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a 2017 study of murders of women in 18 states from 2003 to 2014, representing 10,018 deaths. Of those, 55 percent were intimate partner violence-related, meaning they occurred at the hands of a former or a current partner or the partner’s family or friends, according to The Atlantic’s reading of the study. Of those, 93 percent, the culprit was a former or current romantic partner.

Stranger killings remain quite small.

Interestingly, 12 percent of the deaths were associated with jealousy. Which brings us to Rob, the husband of Patrice, who was 20 years older than her. And by the accounts of family and friends, and importantly, his own admission, he was fiercely protective of her. So protective that he creepily teddy bear-swooned her ashes.

This is another case where someone looks like an asshole, but it’s hard to know if it rises to the level of being criminal. Again, going by his own words, Rob hated Pistol, Patrice’s son. For some reason, at age 15, Rob was already writing Pistol off as a lost cause. And 16 years after the death of Pistol’s mother, Rob still seems to have palpable disdain for Pistol.

That’s what I would consider an alarming, and informative “tell.”

After Patrice died, Rob was done with Pistol effectively. He kept him out of the house, didn’t let him have the ashes, and seemingly never spoke to him again. He had Patrice, albeit her ashes, all to himself. Pistol was out of the way.

If he didn’t personally kill Patrice (we don’t know enough about that “airtight alibi” to know), it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he had someone kill her since he would know about her schedule. Again, that’s something he acknowledges, that the killer would need to know her schedule. A contract-killing is harder to keep under wraps all these years later, such as concealing a paper trail or some sort of evidence pointing to a contract-killing. But it’s obviously possible.

If Rob didn’t kill her and didn’t hire someone to kill her, and is completely innocent, he’s an abject asshole, but an innocent asshole. It’s hard to understanding being that much of a dick to a 15-year-old, especially in the aftermath of his mom’s disappearance and death, though.

So if Rob didn’t kill her, those aforementioned serial killers didn’t, and the stranger possibility while possible is not as likely, then who? I suppose it’s possible a client, who was in frequent contact with her and would know her schedule, could have. Maybe the client became obsessed with her and one day decided to kill her in their warped mind. Who knows.

But I return to the husband because it’s usually the husband, and when the husband is being a dick and about things of his own admission (hating the son, overly-protective), then that lends even more credence to him as the culprit.

Gah, it’s frustrating to not know. Who do you think killed Patrice?