[Katie] Christie was one of the most caring people I had ever met.
She had the absolutely best personality.
Marcus was funny, and they kind of meshed well.
[Katie] Christie was a really good mom.
-[Christie exclaiming] -[child laughing]
You could tell that her son just made her life complete.
[Patty] So hard to know that this beautiful, smart,
loving, giving person could ever deserve
to have what happened to her.
[phone ringing]
I'll never forget this case. It was horrific.
To be able to do something like this, he has to be
some kind of monster.
They say time heals everything, but I don't think so.
[heavy theme music playing]
[mellow music playing
[narrator] Christie Holt and Marcus Garvin
are high school students in Perry, Indianapolis.
[Felicia] Christie was 15 and Marcus was 16.
But he was funny, and I liked him.
In class one day, Marcus was like, hey, you should let me
talk to your cousin.
He was kind of like a good fit for Christie, like both
the outcast in a way.
[Steve] She thought Marcus understood her.
[rhythmic guitar strumming]
Marcus sang and played guitar.
[Steve] He wrote his own songs.
He wasn't very good, but he had a huge ego,
so he thought he was great.
Marcus was not very great at the guitar,
or singing, actually, for that matter.
And what's strange is how it kind of wooed Christie,
like, oh, wow, that's so cool.
Christie liked it because she was so enthralled by him.
You don't like it because you don't understand it,
kind of attitude.
[Felicia] Christie would hype him up.
She would like put him on this undeserving pedestal.
[Steve] My parents adopted Christie into our family,
because her mom, my aunt, was struggling.
She was kind of the annoying little sister.
And then as she grew up, we found similar music
that we liked.
She loved going to bands, listening to live shows
and things like that.
She was really rambunctious.
She definitely saw humor in everything.
She was optimistic.
That's, I think, the best way to explain that.
We grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, in a place
called Homecroft.
My parents were extremely strict.
We didn't have a lot of leeway or room in making mistakes.
My parents being very restrictive,
Christie was very expressive.
She ended up being too much for them to handle.
My parents were very despondent about Christie.
Christie had a really tough time, you know, being there.
She always felt like she was treated differently.
She often asked me, you know,
what would you think if I just lived here?
Or you think it'd be OK if I lived here?
[Steve] When Christie was about 12, my dad kicked her out.
[Felicia] So she came and permanently lived with us.
Me and Christie were always really close,
like two peas in a pod.
Christie just brightened up a room.
She was silly. She was funny.
I don't know, you can't help but love her.
[Felicia] This is me and Christie.
I'd have been 23, and she would have been just turning 21.
She's standing on the toilet in this picture to look like
she was taller.
That's what we were 95% of the time doing is being goofy.
[narrator] Marcus Garvin was born in Indianapolis in 1989
and raised by his grandparents.
[Felicia] We actually were all just, like, a friend group.
Christie would call us the Terrific Three.
We always made Marcus take our pictures.
The Photographer, we called him.
[Felicia] Christie and Marcus's relationship in
high school was a fast-tracked relationship.
They rushed into their I love you's, being around each
other 24-7.
But they very much leaned on each other for everything,
and to a point where if I would try to, like, step in
and, like, "Hey, Christie, like, this is moving really
fast," Marcus would bark back, essentially, at me, make me,
like, take a step back.
One of the first times that I met Marcus, we started to have
a conversation about just things that
we find interesting.
He said, "I just like things that are grimy
and dirty and gross."
Marcus had always had, like, a thing with blood.
He thought blood was so cool.
And to me, it was, like, nauseating.
He would cut himself, and then he would, like, swirl the blood
around, and he put a C, and she thought that was just so sweet.
[Patty] There was an incident in 2008.
My youngest was about five, six years old
and won a goldfish.
Was very excited about it because to her, it's a pet.
So we got a bowl and everything and set it up in her room.
So when Marcus was at our house, he took her goldfish
and pulled it out of the water, took it outside, threw it on
the cement, and lit it on fire in front of my little sister.
He said, "How cool was that? Like, that was cool."
My little sister was just sobbing.
I mean, even Christie was like, "What in the...
Why? Why did you do that?"
And he started laughing, like an evil laugh.
Later that night, when Marcus went home, I was like,
"Christie, like, that's insane."
And she was like, "Oh, he didn't mean it in that kind
"of way, he was just trying to be funny.
Like, he was just trying to make everybody laugh."
She would always brush off Marcus.
From that point on, I realized that there was
something wrong with him.
[Felicia] When Christie and Marcus left high school,
Marcus was accusing Christie of cheating.
He was very possessive of Christie.
It finally came to a head where Christie couldn't do it
at that time anymore.
And shortly after that, they decided to kind of go
their separate ways.
[narrator] In 2009, Christie leaves Indianapolis
only to return a year later.
[Felicia] When Christie came back,
she moved right back in with me and my mom.
[Christie laughing]
That laugh, that laugh. Her laugh was so infectious.
[Christie laughing]
I think she had my favorite laugh of all time, honestly.
[Katie] Christie and I met when Christie first moved back to
Indianapolis, and it's been absolute best friends since.
We would drive around on the interstate, and we would be
drinking Polar Pops and just scream singing.
[Christie laughing]
[Katie] Christie had the best personality, you know, kind of
hyper and upbeat and just happy about even the smallest things.
About six or eight months from when she came back to
Indianapolis, Christie started seeing Marcus again.
Christie was pretty excited to rekindle that relationship.
Marcus seemed like he worked on himself.
You know, he was a little bit more empathetic towards things,
and he was understanding to why she left,
and for a good five months, it was smooth between them two.
[Katie] They ended up getting a townhome in an apartment
building close by -- Marcus was a heavy drinker.
He had a pretty bad history with it.
And then it just slowly graduated into something
bigger, where he had to have alcohol every day.
[babbles incoherently]
[Felicia] But it created way more intense arguments and disagreements.
Ew.
[Katie] Christie would get random text messages,
and Marcus would say,
"Don't respond to them," or, "Give me your phone."
And she would just do it, because Christie wasn't
really confrontational.
Marcus was very possessive of Christie, yes.
It was kind of like, you're mine,
and not a funny, joking way.
Like, he really, really meant it.
Their relationship, very quickly, just got worse.
[phone buzzing]
She would text me and say, "He hit me.
He smacked me."
I would pick her up, and we would just talk
and kind of calm her down.
I asked Christie, "Why do you want to be with him?"
And she said that she loved him, and she felt that nobody
knew him like she did.
[Patty] Regardless of what we told her,
she was gonna defend him, you know?
Even in the worst scenarios, she defended him.
You know, they say red flags. It was more than that.
It was an actual fear.
To me, he was capable of anything.
He wrote this song, I think, about my sister.
Christie could never separate herself from Marcus, no matter
how much for the better it was.
In his Myspace profile, he said, "I'm weird,"
and that was his only description.
He enjoyed dissonance in his music, the screech
in his voice.
He really liked being out of tune.
Christie liked it, because I think she knew the story.
It played on her emotions
and so was appealing to her, I think.
I found out I was pregnant in February of 2012.
Christie was so excited.
She told me how she can't wait to be Aunt Christie.
[phone buzzing]
In April, I received a call from Christie, and she was
crying hysterically and begged me to come get her.
When I first pulled up, I saw Marcus throwing her clothes
over the balcony and Christie sobbing.
He thought that Christie was cheating on him,
and so he started putting mustard all over her clothes
and set them on fire.
I thought, what is this psychopath doing?
I told her not to worry.
Just get in the car, and we're gonna leave.
Marcus comes running down and said, "Christie's not
going anywhere," and I said, "Yes, she is.
She's going with me. She's gonna stay with me."
And Marcus said no,
and he punched me in my stomach.
Marcus definitely knew I was pregnant, and that's why he had
hit so low in my stomach.
It was really scary, thinking back,
I was gonna lose my child.
Christie called the cops for me. An ambulance came.
The paramedics checked me.
They heard a heart rate, and they told me that seems
like I'm fine.
Christie didn't want charges pressed against Marcus.
She knew what he did was wrong,
but she didn't want Marcus to get in trouble.
It's like he worked his charm on her, and all of a sudden,
I'm the bad person.
Marcus did get arrested that day,
and he spent two days in jail.
I never received a call or any notification from detectives,
so I didn't know there was gonna be a court hearing.
Because I didn't show up, they dropped the case.
And that was the first time that Marcus slipped through
their fingers here in Indianapolis.
After the incident, I didn't talk to Christie for
about a year -- it was a really big blow to me.
Not only did they drop the charges, but I lost
my best friend because she chose him.
[Felicia] It was October of 2012.
Christie told me she was pregnant.
She was so excited.
She could not wait to have a baby.
[Katie] It was completely out of the blue.
The day that Christie told me she was pregnant,
she apologized for sticking up for Marcus.
I missed her a lot, and I wanted my best friend.
So we started talking again.
[Felicia] She had her son in June of 2013,
five or six weeks early.
She always called him her pleasant little surprise,
because he wanted to come early.
And it seemed like her and Marcus were adjusting well.
[Katie] She always wanted to be a mom.
You could tell that her son just made her life complete.
-[Christie] Whoo! -[child laughing]
[Felicia] But by June of 2016, it was very much Christie
by herself doing the baby stuff.
[Katie] Marcus was drinking every night,
completely obliterated.
On June 11th, 2016, Christie was at home taking care
of the baby.
Marcus was working, and he went out afterwards, drinking.
He had came home, and he was very just, like,
angry and picking a fight. -[phone buzzes]
[Katie] I received a text saying, help.
I called her and asked her what was going on, and I could hear
her panting and crying.
She said, "I need you to come get me.
Marcus has lost it, and I think he's gonna kill me."
That was really hard for me to tell her no,
because I had my son with me.
I was going to even think about bringing him around that.
So unfortunately, I told Christie no, and I'm sorry.
She should call the cops.
[Felicia] She said that he struck her in the face
and that she had kind of, like, fell back.
And he got on top of her and started beating her.
And she said, "I thought he was going to kill me."
And she said that she reached for, like, whatever
she could reach,
and she stabbed him and then called 911,
and she got arrested.
So after the hospital, she was charged with
attempted murder.
I felt that she should have never been arrested in
the first place -- she was beaten up.
She wasn't just some girl that stabbed somebody.
She was defending herself.
Marcus was on life support, but he came through
and he survived.
Christie ended up going to jail.
[Felicia] DCS took her child away, and essentially,
he got adopted out.
She shut down emotionally once they took the baby.
[narrator] Three months later, the case against Christie is
dropped because her actions are deemed self-defense.
[Katie] I was so happy that she was released.
I immediately went and picked her up downtown.
She looked completely different.
Her tooth was chipped off, because he had punched her in
the face so hard, and she was so skinny.
I got her a motel room for two weeks.
[Felicia] Christie was doing really well, she had a job.
She was thriving. She had clothes.
She seemed to be coming out of the rut she was in.
[Katie] When I went to renew the motel for the third week,
I went by the room, and Marcus was there.
It was like the final gut punch.
That was when I believe she stayed with him again for good.
[Katie] She just kept going back.
So I finally realized that I can't help her anymore.
And that was the final time that I talked to her.
[Felicia] This video was taken on her son's fifth birthday.
Hurts my heart
watching it.
She wanted to be a mom so bad.
She never deserved to feel that way, ever.
[narrator] In July, 2018, Christie, pregnant with her
and Marcus's second child, is hospitalized with preeclampsia.
It's hard to watch, but I also look at it and think, like,
why didn't she call me?
She always had a place.
I think it's because she knew Marcus couldn't come.
[Felicia] In August of 2018, Christie gave birth to her second son.
She only had him for three months before he got taken.
And I believe that was because she was homeless.
They went back and forth from homeless shelters.
They stayed where they could.
I told her, I -- she always had a home with me, always.
I just told her I could not deal with him.
[Felicia] In September of 2019, Christie had found out
she was pregnant again.
Christie went to give birth in May of 2020.
They asked about her home, and she told them that she was
homeless, and that's why they took him straight
from the hospital.
I think losing the third son is, like, the last straw
for both of them.
I know she was very defeated at that time.
I remember she told me that she didn't know what life was
worth living for.
She had totally fallen apart, and I think she really leaned
into her relationship with Marcus, just because of all that
they had shared -- she didn't want to let him go.
[Patty] I tried really hard to get them apart.
We all did.
But nobody understood that there was nothing I could say
or anybody else could say that made her think anything
but she loved him.
[Katie] In May 2020, she said,
"I don't feel like I belong anywhere,
"but at least when I'm with you, I know I'm with who I'm
supposed to be with."
It really hurts,
because he's the complete opposite of who she was
supposed to be with.
And she did belong.
He made her feel like she didn't belong anywhere
but with him.
[narrator] In October 2020, Christie and Marcus move into
a motel on Shadeland Avenue
and start working at the same gas station.
[Felicia] On December 26th of 2020,
Marcus was working third shift.
Somebody came in to use the bathroom, like people do,
and he got upset because apparently the guy was in
the bathroom for too long.
And he started banging on the door and yelling at the guy
to come out.
And the guy came out, and he was kind of like,
"Hey, man, what's your problem" type thing.
And Marcus followed the guy outside
and stabbed him.
He went back into work and said something along the lines of,
"That was satisfying,"
and put the knife in the trash
and went back to work.
Until the police came and arrested him.
His bond initially was like, I believe, $30,000.
And the judge had lowered it to $1,500 and gave him
a GPS monitor and released him.
He went right back to the motel with Christie.
I definitely felt like there's no good way for this to end.
When people write music, they're writing about
their feelings and the thoughts in their head.
That wasn't enough to tell her how he feels,
I don't know what else he could have done.
[narrator] In July, 2021, Christie breaks up with Marcus
and makes plans to move on.
[Felicia] They weren't even together anymore.
From my understanding, she was about three
or four days away from leaving Marcus.
I had a feeling something bad would happen,
but I never would have thought that it would have been this.
[phone ringing]
When the officers arrived on scene, the 911 caller directed
them down into the creek, approximately 150 to 200 feet
from the motel.
They found what appeared to be a bundle of sheets.
One of the officers starts to peel back the layers
and determined that it is a human body.
It was obvious it was a female.
That is when my homicide unit was contacted.
I arrived at approximately 6 AM.
It appeared to me that she was placed in a sheet to drag her.
She obviously wasn't killed there.
She was dumped there.
She had been dead for several days.
She had so many defects on her body.
I noticed most of them around her neck and upper torso area.
It appeared someone tried to cut her leg off, dismember it.
I was overwhelmed with just emotions of how someone could
do this to another human being.
I knew that who did this to her had to be someone very
close to her -- that was a crime of passion.
I made notes of the person's tattoos.
It was obvious to me she was white.
I couldn't tell her age or anything of that nature.
I couldn't even tell what color hair she had because of
her body being so far gone.
[narrator] Detective Howard goes to
the front office to speak with the 911 caller.
[Mark] The front desk clerk pulled up the camera.
It appeared that the subject was dragging a heavy object
wrapped in a cover or comforter from Room 210
across the driveway, east, at approximately 4:30
in the morning.
That's a very odd time of day to be dragging anything across
the parking lot into a wooded area.
[narrator] The clerk pulls up footage from a second camera.
You could tell he was struggling with it.
At one point, the left arm fell out of the covers,
and he stopped, put the arm back, and he continued dragging
the body to the tree line, looking around,
making sure nobody's watching him.
You could clearly see the subject's face because
he keeps looking back and forth over his shoulder
as he's dragging the body towards the camera.
The manager of the motel came on scene
and she said that was 100% Marcus Garvin.
I was informed that he had rented Room 210 with
Christie Holt and that they were staying together.
The manager was able to tell me some tattoos that Christie had,
and they matched.
I felt very comfortable that it was Christie.
The first witness I interviewed lives at the motel property in
one of the rooms, just a door or two down from Room 210.
Her job is to work at the front desk.
She was off duty at the time, and at about 4:40 or 4:45 AM,
she walked across the parking lot to go check on
the late shift employee from the night before.
She saw Marcus walking back from the wood line
behind the motel.
She noticed he was out of breath and that his pant legs
were wet and his shoes were wet.
And she noticed that he was dripping sweat.
She told me that they looked straight at each other in
the face before he went on into the room,
and she went across the parking lot.
The witness said she last saw Christie about a week earlier.
The last time she'd seen her, she saw red marks or handprints
around her neck as though someone had strangled
or choked her.
Christie told her that she'd been assaulted by her boyfriend
and that she was scared of him.
She said she was afraid one day she wouldn't wake up.
When the witness offered to call 911, she refused and told
her that she was scared that if they got him and he got back
out, he would come, and he would kill her.
[narrator] Detectives learn that Marcus is currently
out on bail for the stabbing incident
at the gas station and is wearing
a GPS ankle monitor.
They track his movements from the past two hours.
[Eli] The GPS coordinates showed that
he moved from the motel room to
the exact spot where the body had been dumped
and then returned back to his hotel room.
At that point, I knew we have a suspected killer
inside Room 210.
We're dealing with a very dangerous person,
an unstable person.
We chose to have our SWAT team take over the recovery of
the suspect from the room.
[narrator] The SWAT team arrives on scene.
[Mark] At 8:55 AM, they determined they were
gonna to make forced entry.
So they breached the front window and the front door.
[narrator] The SWAT team enter Room 210.
[Mark] He'd cut off his ankle monitoring device.
He was trying to figure out a way to flee,
but he had nowhere to go.
They had pulled him out of the room, then placed him in
the back seat of a police car, so he's secured.
[Mark] When I entered that room, there was a putrid odor
of a deceased person.
There was blood spatter on the walls, on the floor,
and on the bed.
In the bathroom was a knife laying on the floor
and a small garden sickle.
I felt like maybe that's the items he used to attempt to
dismember her body.
Inside his backpack, there was another knife.
You could see there had been blood on it.
So I believe that was the murder weapon.
I saw a grocery cart and a two-wheeled dolly
next to the front door.
He was probably gonna use those to transport
the body somewhere else.
I go to the gas station just down the road to nail down
the last time she was seen alive by her co-workers.
Store manager said that he and Christie had recently begun
a romantic relationship.
He last saw Christie on July the 23rd.
She was supposed to come into work the following day,
but she didn't show up.
[narrator] Marcus Garvin is transported
to IMPD Homicide Unit.
[Mark] I walk into the interview room.
As soon as I opened the door,
the smell of death hit me in the face.
I started asking Marcus where Christie Holt was.
He was lying to me the entire time.
I was getting frustrated.
The smell was making my eyes water,
and it was making me literally want to throw up.
Finally, I went to Lieutenant McAllister
and asked him if he could take over.
So I knew I had clear, compelling evidence.
I had video of him dragging a dead body across
a motel parking lot.
So my goal was to build rapport with him
and then disclose that specific evidence,
and then leave him to explain in whatever way he chose.
[Eli] We turned a corner, and he was not lying to me anymore.
It was incredible how honest he was when he saw himself in
black and white.
He describes to me picking her phone up off of her as
she fell asleep with her phone unlocked.
It was open to a conversation that she was having,
a text thread with her manager at the gas station.
And he saw they were having a romantic affair.
The fact that they were making fun of him was, according to
Marcus Garvin, the reason why he killed Christie Holt.
Marcus Garvin was the most candid and forthright person
I've ever interviewed.
He was just so casual and relaxed
that it wasn't normal.
He realized quickly that that wasn't going to be an effective
method and tried to come up with another way.
He was just kind of describing it as sort of a humorous
account of how he couldn't get this thing done.
It was very detached from
the humanity of the individual whose body
he was trying to dispose of.
[Eli] This is a truly evil, cold-blooded murder that
he committed, and he admitted to doing so.
[narrator] After the interview, Marcus Garvin is arrested
for murder
and transported to Marion County Jail.
[Katie] A mutual friend of ours had reached out to me,
and she said, "Marcus killed Christie,"
and then sent an article
where it just had a unidentified woman
found dead.
[Felicia] When I found out what he did,
I felt like he stabbed me too.
Christie saw him for what he truly was,
and she still loved him.
He killed the only person that was there for him.
I started investigating the case in August of 2021.
In the days leading up to the trial,
his defense attorneys reached out to us and said that he was
interested in pleading guilty.
Marcus Garvin pled guilty on June 2nd of 2023,
and he received a sentence of 45 years in prison.
Marcus killed Christie by stabbing her over 51 times.
She was alive for over 30 minutes, but he clearly just
keeps stabbing her over and over and over again.
That would have been an extremely excruciating
and painful death.
I'll never forget this case. It was horrific.
I think he deserved life without parole.
You know how when people say, don't use the word hate?
It's a strong word.
He's the one person I hate.
At the gas station where she worked, her manager
closed it, we had a balloon release there.
[indistinct, distant exclamations]
It was people that really knew her, people that were really
close and knew truly who Christie was.
They say time heals everything, but I don't think so.
[Steve] One thing that I find helps me
a great deal is remembering
the qualities that I had admired in my sister.
Just always looking for the compassionate angle,
always finding the good in people and the beauty in
the moment, even in the worst of times.
[Katie] I try to remember my best friend,
the one that was carefree.
[Christie laughing]
She was so happy and loving.
[distant laughter]
[Felicia] I'll always remember her as quirky,
goofy, and just very unique.