FORT SMITH – Charles Ray Vines, a Fort Smith resident who was convicted of murders in both Sebastian and Crawford Counties in the early 1990’s, has died in prison.
- The first season of ‘Murder By Numbers’ takes a look at Charles Ray Vines' crimes in Sebastian and Crawford counties. A serial killer show,' but that it does try to answer what defines a.
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- Play as Wolverine, the most iconic member of the X-Men and fight to restore peace and justice in the city of Tokyo. With his sharp claws and his uncommon agility Wolverine will be dreadful against the Ninjas who took control of one of the most populated city in the world.
- The Times Record reports the first season of 'Murder By Numbers' takes a look at Charles Ray Vines' crimes in Sebastian and Crawford counties. Vines was convicted of two capital murder charges.
Father's Convictions Still Haunt Son
By Amy Sherrill
Monday, May 2, 2005 8:37 AM CDT
Times Record • Asher...@swtimes.com
Tyler Vines expresses mixed emotions as he talks about his dad,
convicted killer and rapist Charles Ray Vines.
He remembers how his dad used to take him hunting and fishing,
something Tyler Vines, 19, of Barling still likes to do. He remembers
that his dad helped people whenever he could. For instance, if a
friend or neighbor needed help building a fence, his dad was there.
Tyler Vines is like that too. He likes to help others.
'I know he did have issues and problems, but he was a pretty good
dad,' Tyler Vines said.
Charles Ray Vines, 41, is serving life without parole in the Arkansas
Department of Correction for murdering Ruth Henderson of Crawford
County in 1995 and Juanita Wofford of Fort Smith in 1993. Authorities
linked him to the murders after he was caught raping a 16-year-old
Crawford County girl in 2000. Vines also admitted to raping an elderly
Fort Smith woman in 1993 months before he raped and killed Wofford.
Crystal Winton of Pocola, Charles Ray Vines' ex-wife and Tyler's
mother, said her ex-husband used to do nice things for her.
'He'd build me a flower garden, and you know it was beautiful,' she
said.
Charles Ray Vines was the kind of guy a person would want to have as a
next door neighbor, said Anita Hudson of Barling, his
ex-mother-in-law.
'He would take things out of his garden and give to his neighbors,'
Hudson said. 'He would come over and do things for people.'
And when Vines and Winton divorced in 1989 after four years of
marriage, he never missed sending a child support check for his two
boys, Tyler and Kyle.
'He always paid child support, all the way up until he got put in
jail,' Tyler Vines said. 'It was there every week.'
But the darker side of Charles Ray Vines caused his family a lot of
pain.
Tyler Vines was beaten up, threatened with a gun and stabbed with a
knife by his dad. He rolled up his sleeve during a recent interview at
the Times Record to show the scar on his elbow from when he was
stabbed.
Once the two went squirrel hunting following an early morning
argument. Tyler Vines guesses that his dad was still mad at him.
'It was a .410 (shotgun) and I was a pretty good distance away, but I
still got peppered pretty hard with pellets right in my lower back,'
Vines said. 'He hit me and, boy, I hit the ground.'
Winton said her ex-husband started abusing her shortly after they got
married in 1985. She waited until after their second son, Tyler, was
born and then she left him, she said.
A Rocky Marriage
'He did beat her up a lot when I was younger,' Tyler Vines said. 'Oh
yeah, I seen it. He's pulled a gun to her head. When she was pregnant
with my little brother he threw her off the porch. He used to lock her
up in his shop. He used to lock her in the house where she couldn't
get out.'
Winton hadn't know Vines very long when she married him. They met in
Charleston, where she grew up, she said. He came along just as she had
broken off a nine-year relationship. Vines was very different from her
previous partner.
'Everything he wasn't, Charles Ray was,' Winton recalls. 'He was a
biker. It was a different life than I'd ever known. I just rebelled
and I married him, and I didn't know what I got into.'
After they got married they rarely shared a bedroom, she said. She
wonders now if maybe she was just too young for him because he seemed
to have an inclination toward older women.
Vines went on to later marry a woman who was several years older than
he, but the marriage lasted only three months.
Hudson, Winton and Tyler Vines all agree that they are lucky Charles
Ray Vines didn't kill them.
Winton and her eldest son can't remember how many times Vines pointed
a loaded gun at them and threatened to shoot.
'One night he pointed a gun at me, and told me he ought to just kill
me,' Tyler Vines said. 'I said, ‘Just do it if you're going to do it.'
He'd kind of laugh and carry on about it, and then he'd go back
downstairs. I didn't think he'd ever do it. Sometimes he was a
blowhard. But I thought if he does it, he just does it. There ain't
nothing I can do to stop him.'
Alcohol And Drugs
The dark moods and the violence occurred more often when Charles Ray
Vines drank alcohol. In his confession to local authorities, he said
that's when he raped and killed too. Sometimes he added illegal drugs
to the mix.
'I seen him drink enough times to know that he liked the effect that
the alcohol gave him,' said Hudson, who works in alcohol and drug
rehabilitation. 'It made him a big tough guy. He was a bully at that
point.'
Although she saw Charles Ray Vines abuse alcohol, she doesn't believe
he was ever dependent on it.
'I didn't see a dependency, but I saw the abuse and he drank for
effect,' she said. 'He wanted to feel that way. And the alcohol done
that for him.'
She also believes he would have never committed the heinous crimes he
did if hadn't been drinking.
'I don't think he would have ever done it sober; he didn't have the
guts,' Hudson said. 'I just think that the drinking was the cause of
it, but, you know, he chose to drink.'
Drug abuse was something his ex-wife and mother-in-law never saw.
But Tyler Vines witnessed it and was even forced to participate.
'It really messed with my head pretty bad that he made me do stuff
like that,' he said. 'I knew it was wrong at the time, but if I didn't
do it something bad was going to happen.'
When Vines was arrested in 2000, his two boys suffered excessive
teasing at school. Their house was vandalized, Winton said. And life
got rougher in a way.
Tyler Vines, who was living with his dad and going to Cedarville
schools at the time of Charles Ray Vines' arrest, moved to Pocola
where he got into a lot of fights over comments made about his dad.
'Everybody told me I was going to end up being just like him,' Vines
said. 'At school people would do that, and they would see how mad I
would get because I have a pretty bad temper. I'm kind of like my dad
in that way, but I'm not going to go as far as kill somebody. I mean,
that's just not sane.'
Eventually, he got hardened to the insults, and he heard them less and
less.
After he graduated from high school, he went to work in oil field
industry where he works on natural gas compressors and gas wells.
Constant Reminders
For the most part, he doesn't hear the taunting about his dad that he
once did in high school. But there are always little reminders of who
is dad is.
On April 19, A&E's 'Cold Case Files' presented a 30 minute segment
about Charles Ray Vines and his crimes.
'Why his story?' Vines asks. 'Why did it have to be on A&E?'
Knowing many of the people his dad hurt makes things worse for Tyler
Vines.
The 16-year-old rape victim went to school with Tyler. The first rape
victim, an elderly Fort Smith woman, went to the same church as Tyler,
his dad and his dad's parents.
'My dad did go to church with us for a long time over there, and then
you know about the time that happened to (her) he stopped going to
church,' he said.
At the time, Ruth Henderson lived just a quarter mile from where his
dad was building his house on Dripping Springs Trail.
'All the people up there that I knew, we'd talk about it (the
murder),' Vines said. 'I thought, man, that's crazy. It happened right
there and this whole time it ended up being my dad.'
Hudson said Charles Ray Vines frequently visited a neighbor of
Wofford's in Fort Smith. Vines knew her because he worked on
motorcycles with a friend who lived nearby.
'These women could have been his own grandmother,' Hudson said.
Hudson said Vines is where he needs to be because if he were out he'd
just drink and do more harm.
She keeps in touch with him because she told him just after he was
arrested that she would support him if he confessed and took a plea
bargain, so the boys and the victims' families would not have to be
put through anything more. She told him if he pleaded out she would
help him in any way she could.
Every so often, she writes him, updating him on his two boys. Vines
also calls collect about once every month or two, and she accepts the
calls.
'He's always pretty cheerful unless he's felling bad, but he's usually
pretty cheerful.'
Hudson said she also supports her two grandsons no matter what
decision they make about writing or visiting their father. She thinks
they should make up their own mind.
'I don't particularly have a lot to do with my dad because of what
he's put me through — all the pain and anguish,' Tyler Vines said.
But it doesn't bother Vines to talk about his dad. In fact, it even
helps, he said. That way he doesn't keep it all bottled up. Counseling
helped him with that and his anger-management problem, he said.
What does bother him is being judged for what his father has done.
'It does hurt because a lot of people know about it,' he said. 'I wish
people would judge me for me and not for what he has done.'
Even though he shares his father's first and last name (Tyler is his
middle name), many of his facial and physical features he hopes that
one day people will get past who his dad is.
http://www.swtimes.com/articles/2005/05/02/news/news01.txt
--
Anne W.
indigoace at goodsol period com
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Charles Sobhraj, the famousserial killer has revealed that he doesn’t wear rings as they don’t fit him.But he is married – though that hasn’t stopped him from all the famous loveaffairs he has had so far! Sobhraj, currently spending his life sentence in thenarrow room in Kathmandu’s Central Jail, said that once he gets released (so,he still has hopes to get out) he will return to Paris and get himself the finestengagement and wedding ring possible!
Do you know that the latestshow, The Serpent is based on the life of Charles Sobhraj? The show mainlyportrays his relationship with girlfriend, Marie-Andrée Leclerc, also known asMonique. But what the show doesn’t cover is his notorious relationship andultimately marriage with Nihita Biswas – the daughter of his lawyer!
His life has always beendramatic, but no one knows how the 64 year old serial killer, serving his lifesentence, managed to get a 20 year old Nepalese stunner fall in love with him.This was, of course, his second marriage.
Charles Vines Serial Killer Fort Smith
Back in the 60s, he was knownfor running a network of passport forgery and this is how he used to conwestern tourists. He ended up marrying Chic Parisienne and even has twodaughters from his first marriage – one of them is eight.
Do you know that Nihita Biswasis actually a pretty smart and talented woman? Also, Sobhraj and Chantal (hisfirst wife) are friends even after their divorce? In fact, she continues tohelp him out and has helped him before when he had to leave Paris suddenly.
Chantalwas even followed by one of the Chinese girls Sobhraj once lived with beforehis deportation from India.
His first marriage ended backin 2003, when he got arrested for the murder of an American tourist in 1975! This is what Sobhraj said abouthis first wife: 'I did not love her.For me to fall in love, the woman has to be intelligent.'
He further said that his loveaffair with Nihita was instantly a love at first sight! She had apparentlywalked in the prison three months before he made this confession, and was theinterpreter for his French lawyer.
Interestingly, the law was noteven in Nepal when Nihita had gone to meet Sobhraj in prison. But she had aneffect on him, a wild chemical stimulation that made him want to see her againand again!
Nihita once revealed thatSobhraj used to call her again and again with excuses of another assignment. Heeven gave her a huge shopping list – full of mostly canned stuff. This mightsound strange and unbelievable considering they were both surrounded by massiveprison guards at the time. But it’s so absurd to know that their romanceblossomed in that environment!
She was once asked how shemanaged to understand him, to which she said that all she had to do was lookinto his eyes and read his lips.
One question that is oneverybody’s mind is how the massive age gap didn’t matter. Nihita is apparentlyunfazed by the whole situation. She doesn’t care about his criminal backgroundand accepts him for whoever he is - even with his eight year old daughter.
'Idon't know what he was. What he is now is important. He is a good man, I haveseen the way he cares for his family. We have a good relationship. He'sinnocent. There's no evidence against him.' - Shesaid.
Charles Vines Serial Killer Childhood
Both twisted minds have acceptedtheir love for one another and exchanged rings. They haven’t gotten married asof
yet, but they plan to do the official ceremony once they get out. They alsowant to write a book together, in which they want to express how they foundlove in the most absurd timing and circumstance.
Anyway, if you find this story intriguing,do give our Facebook page a like!