Hell and Gone

In 2012, six years after 21-year-old college student Nina Ingram was strangled at her apartment in Fayetteville, there was an arrest and a man named Rico Cohn was charged with Nina’s murder. But after a key witness died suddenly, the criminal case against Rico was dismissed. 

His legal team filed a CIVIL LAWSUIT against the Fayetteville Police Department, suing several officers who worked on his case as well employees as the Arkansas State Crime Lab. 

They alleged that the case against Rico Cohn was weak, basically nonexistent - that there was no physical evidence against Rico Cohn and that the witness, Randee Applewhite, told them that she was NOT at all sure that Rico had committed the crime. 

Eventually, the lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed. And the ENTIRE case against Rico Cohn was sealed by a judge. Now as we said last week the lawsuit is obviously only one side of the story. But there are a lot of details in the civil lawsuit about investigations that were done by Rico’s attorneys for both the civil and criminal lawsuits - and about leads that the Fayetteville Police Department allegedly failed to follow up on.  

One of them was a person described as Person of Interest B - who, from reading through the events of the case file, appeared to match the description of Jarvis Allan Harper, a man who worked with Nina Ingram at the Sixth Street Walmart at the time she was murdered. 

So we went back and tried to figure out how did Jarvis's name first come to the attention of the Fayetteville Police Department and if there were other leads that should have been investigated. 

What else did the police miss?

Sometime after ten pm on April 21, 2006, 21-year-old college student Nina Ingram was brutally murdered inside her apartment in Fayetteville, Arkansas. 

The cause of death was ligature strangulation, and The Arkansas State Crime lab ruled the death a homicide. Despite  the fact that detectives interviewed dozens of Nina’s friends, coworkers and her significant other, they had no viable suspects for years. 

The Fayetteville Police Department considered this a cold case, their only unsolved one at the time since the 1970s. But then in 2012 they arrested and charged  26-year-old Rico Tavarous Cohn with Nina’s murder. 

But the case against Rico Cohn was not as solid as it appeared to be on the surface. He spent over three years behind bars, and then, the case against him was dismissed.

Three years later in 2018, Rico filed a civil lawsuit against the Fayetteville Police Department detectives and employees at the Arkansas State Crime Lab who he alleged violated his civil rights. 

This lawsuit claimed that there were several people of interest who police interviewed who were potential suspects...suspects that the lawsuit alleges were overlooked. 

The person who murdered Nina has never been found. This person is still out there. Could the answers to finding Nina’s killer be there and is this person still out there?  

Sometime after 10 p.m. on April 21, 2006, 21-year-old college student Nina Ingram was brutally murdered inside her apartment in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It became big news, at the time it was one of only two unsolved murder cases in Fayetteville since the 1970s. 

Police interviewed Nina’s neighbors, her boyfriend, her friends and family but failed to identify a single suspect. 

Her case went cold. Until six years later in 2012 when a 26-year-old man named Rico Tavarous Cohn was arrested and charged with Nina’s murder. 

If you have a case you’d like the Hell and Gone team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. 

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It was April 21, 2006, and 21-year-old college student Nina Ingram was coming home after a long day. 

Nina had a very busy life. She was two years into her business degree at Northwest Arkansas Community college in Bentonville, Arkansas and also worked full time at Walmart, part of the loss prevention team, basically a security officer. 

That night, Nina had worked her shift, ate dinner at her boyfriend's apartment, and then drove back to her apartment complex a little after 10 pm. 

Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. But the next day, no one heard from Nina. 

At around 2 pm her other brother, Noah, and his partner, Chad, drove over to Nina’s apartment to check on her. 

They knocked on the door, but Nina didn’t answer. So her brother climbed through an open window into the kitchen. 

Chad waited outside while Noah unlocked the door and the deadbolt, which were both locked. Seconds later, he heard Noah scream. 

Chad went in through the now unlocked front door and raced into Nina’s bedroom in the back of the apartment; he and Noah saw her lying face up on the bed with what Chad described as very visible red scratches and bruises around her neck. Chad told police that he knew immediately that she was dead.  

Was Nina Ingram murdered by a serial killer, was this a random attack, or was it someone she knew?

If you have a case you’d like the Hell and Gone team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.