Joy Hibbs' murder case went cold until Pennsylvania police asked questions of their own

The revelation that fellow authorities allegedly “protected" an alleged murderer left detectives baffled — and Joy Hibbs’ family furious.

He’d been trying for almost a year to talk to the former police chief.  

Sgt. Mike Slaughter, a police detective in suburban Philadelphia, wanted to interview the retired chief, Thomas Mills, about a decades-old unsolved homicide. The detective said he had repeatedly gone to Mills’ home and asked intermediaries to help broker a meeting. But Mills refused, he said.

Finally, in December 2015, the former chief agreed to a recorded interview and, after roughly an hour, Slaughter said he came away stunned by what Mills told him: While still a detective in the early 1990s, the former chief had been instructed to “stay away” from a possible suspect in the unsolved killing because of the man’s status with the Bristol Township Police Department. He was a confidential informant. His handler was a narcotics detective.

That suspect, Robert Atkins, 58, was eventually charged, convicted and — earlier this year — sentenced to life in prison in the April 19, 1991, murder of Joy Hibbs. But the revelation that authorities allegedly “protected” Atkins, as Slaughter put it, left the detective baffled — and Hibbs’ family furious.“Why a person who could be the murder suspect would be protected just because of their role as a drug informant for our police department — that doesn’t make sense in any kind of cop math,” Slaughter told “Dateline” in an exclusive interview. 

“I will say this to my last dying breath,” he added. “You never trade off a murder suspect as a drug informant.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/joy-hibbs-murder-robert-atkins-pa-police-rcna147291

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