At around 7:00 a.m. on June 16, 1998, Barton McNeil, a thirty-nine-year-old divorced father, woke up on the couch after a muggy, stormy night. It was the beginning of one of those long summers in Bloomington, Illinois, the air so heavy you could chew it.

The evening before, he and his girlfriend, Misook Nowlin, had broken up. They’d gone out to Avanti’s, a local Italian restaurant, and gotten into it yet again. The previous year, Nowlin had been convicted of domestic battery against McNeil, and he was due in court the next day to testify at her sentencing hearing.

Nowlin wanted McNeil to speak on her behalf, and , at first, he’d planned to. Even though he’d testified against her at trial, he felt sorry for her and didn’t want her going to prison. But at the restaurant, his feelings had changed. She’d confessed that jealousy had driven her to snoop around his garbage and his phone records, convinced he was having an affair. He ended the meal early and left, furious. Besides, it was his night with his three-year-old daughter, Christina, and he had to pick her up at his ex-wife’s house.

Mulling the fight over in the morning, McNeil couldn’t shake the image of Nowlin trembling with anger as they paid the check, or of her pleading with him to talk it through as he rushed from the restaurant. She’d even followed him out of the parking lot. When he stopped the car and demanded to know what she was doing, she said she wanted to warn him his tailpipe was smoking.

McNeil, medium height, lanky, and balding, stretched out on the sofa and felt his lack of sleep—after the fight, he’d been up late online chatting with a woman in the Philippines. Now he heaved himself upright and stumbled to his desk to check his email. Nothing of interest.

McNeil traipsed to the bathroom and called out to wake Christina in the bedroom next door. It was time to get up and get dressed. She didn’t stir. McNeil, a prep cook at the nearby Red Lobster restaurant, had less than an hour to drop Christina off at daycare and get to work.

He smoked a cigarette on the toilet and called to Christina one more time. Still nothing. So he took a shower, then checked his email again, and finally crept into the bedroom. There she lay, wrapped in the swirl of her flower-patterned sheets, a copy of Go, Dog. Go! beside her. Her eyes were open, her skin clammy and the color of slate.

McNeil froze. His stomach churned. Panic took the wind out of his lungs.

He scrambled for the phone and dialed 911.

“911, what’s your emergency?” answered the dispatcher.

“I need an ambulance! I need it fast. 1106 North Evans. My daughter is dying . . .” McNeil wheezed.

The dispatcher’s voice was monotone. “Okay . . . you got to help me out here now.”

McNeil whimpered in agreement.

“Try to stay calm. How old is your daughter?”

“Three . . . . I think she’s dead!”

McNeil attempted CPR, but blowing into Christina’s mouth made a hideous, whining sound; blood ran from her nose, and her body sagged in his arms. “It’s Christina, it’s Christina, it’s Christina!” he howled. “Ohhhhhh, Christina!”

The paramedics arrived minutes later, and McNeil sank to the kitchen floor, stupefied. They shouted instructions to each other over the thud and clatter of their work. Patrol officers trampled through the living room. McNeil could still see Christina lying in his Red Lobster T-shirt and her white underpants with the word MONDAY written across them.

Paramedics remember him wailing, “frantic,” but that they saw “no tears.” When officers asked him for the number of Christina’s mother, his ex-wife Tita McNeil, he had trouble remembering it, even though he called her home almost daily.

According to police, when she eventually arrived, she screamed at McNeil, “What did you do to my child?” (McNeil does not recall this.) She then crouched next to Christina’s limp body and began stroking her daughter’s arm. McNeil sat beside her, staring, disconnected, disbelieving.

Just after 9:19 a.m., the coroner’s office removed the girl’s body from the apartment. Less than fifteen minutes later, believing they’d seen nothing suspicious, the police released the scene.

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The place was empty. Friends had taken Tita away, and the authorities were gone. McNeil sat on his porch smoking cigarette after cigarette. How could he go back inside and face the things Christina had left behind? Her nebulizer. The book she had been looking at the night before. The tiny white dress hanging on his bedroom door that she would have worn that morning to daycare.

From the front porch, McNeil thought he saw—could it be her?—Nowlin. She’d shown up earlier that morning while the police were there and he’d asked her to leave. Now she was back. Nowlin pulled over a few doors down from McNeil’s home and approached him. She was cold and matter-of-fact, which wasn’t at all like her. But the strangest thing of all came next: McNeil claims she said, “Well, could Christina have been murdered?” (Nowlin denies having said this.)

After a brief conversation, which Nowlin says took place inside but McNeil insists happened outside, she left for work, as if nothing unusual had happened.

McNeil was confused. Had Christina been murdered? What was Misook saying? But he was also anesthetized by shock, unable to think straight. And, anyway, he couldn’t stand to be at the apartment any longer, so he headed for the home of his ex-wife, Christina’s mother, the only person in the world who he trusted was in as much pain as he was. But he found little respite there. His mind kept returning to the breakup and the hours after. Why had Misook called him last night, asking if he was home with Christina and where she was sleeping? (Phone records confirmed that Nowlin called McNeil that night, but she later said she could not remember the call.) Why had she arrived unannounced that morning and stayed until after the police left?

Could Misook have killed Christina?

McNeil’s mind raced. It wasn’t likely that anyone entered the apartment through the front door; he was sleeping on the sofa next to it. Besides, anticipating that Nowlin might return wanting to keep arguing, McNeil had secured the screen door the night before, which he didn’t usually do.

He could only imagine that she might have entered through Christina’s bedroom window. Come to think of it, there had been something off in Christina’s room that morning. He just couldn’t figure out what . . . . The fan. When he entered Christina’s room that morning, it had been on the floor, not mounted to the window, where it had been most of the spring. But, McNeil thought, to get to the fan, the killer would have to first get past the latched window screen. Opening the screen from outside would be impossible without damaging the window.

McNeil excused himself from Tita’s and returned to his home on North Evans Street. He walked up a narrow cement path lined with bushes and messy shrubbery, toward the window of Christina’s bedroom. He saw holes in the storm screen’s lower corners, and the screen appeared completely off its track.

At 5:16 p.m., ten hours after he’d found Christina dead, he called 911 again. “My name is Bart McNeil,” he told the dispatcher. “My daughter was found dead by me this morning at this address. The detectives were here, the coroner, everything. I need a detective—the homicide detective. I have reason to believe she was murdered. . . .”

Read the rest of the article at Esquire: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a46744805/barton-mcneil-murder-appeal/