Rescued girl told sister: ‘Now we can go home’

GUNTOWN, Miss. (AP) — Days of searching for two young girls and the kidnapper who killed their mother and sister led to the kind of terrain that favors the hunted — high hardwoods and deep ravines near a red-brick church perched on a hill.

Specially trained officers had come up empty-handed for days but were following another lead Thursday evening after Adam Mayes was put on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

The latest led officers to the woods near Zion Hill Baptist Church, miles from Mayes‘ rented mobile home in Guntown,in northern Mississippi. There, the bodies of a 31-year-old Tennessee woman, Jo Ann Bain, and her 14-year-old daughter, Adrienne, were found buried in a shallow grave.

The officers had searched the church and later split up and set out down two old logging roads. Just 60 yards down, Mississippi Highway Patrol Master Sgt. Steve Crawford saw a little girl’s head in the dirt. Within inches, another child. A few more inches, the man who had proved so elusive.

A search that had dragged on for days ended in seconds.

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A combination image shows (clockwise from top left) Jo Ann Bain and ... more >

“Let’s see your hands,” the officers shouted.

Mayes, 35, pushed himself up to his knees, pulled out a 9 mm pistol and shot himself in the head. He didn’t utter a word and died hours later at a hospital.

Twelve-year-old Alexandria Bain and 8-year-old Kyliyah Bain sat up, subdued. Sgt. Crawford said they didn’t cry, instead looking almost relieved.

“Now we can go home,” the older girl told her sister, according to Lt. Lee Ellington, part of a team from the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.

Home — in Whiteville, Tenn., about 70 miles west of Memphis — was a place the girls hadn’t seen since April 27, when they were reported missing along with their mother and sister.

Described as a family friend who was like an uncle to the girls, Mayes supposedly had gone to the house the night before to help the family pack for a move to Arizona. Instead, police say, he killed the mother and her oldest daughter in the garage of their home, packed their corpses into a car, grabbed the younger girls and headed south with his wife to the mobile home in Guntown. Authorities have not said how they were killed or when.

Authorities say Mayes knew Mrs. Bain’s husband, Gary, and that they at one time had been married to sisters.

Mr. Bain told police that his wife and daughters were asleep when he went to bed at midnight and were gone when he awoke the next day. He figured the girls went to school and his wife had gone somewhere, too. But she didn’t answer her cellphone that day, April 27, and the girls never got off the school bus that afternoon.

At 8 p.m., he called the Hardeman County Sherriff’s Office to report them missing.

Police interviewed Mayes, who acknowledged to investigators on April 29 that he was the last one to see Mrs. Bain and the girls, but police said they had no evidence of a crime. And it first, it wasn’t known if Mrs. Bain had left willingly and taken the children with her.

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