Jurors heard unsettling testimony this week from the daughter of slain Georgia woman Melissa Wolfenbarger, as she recalled the chilling moment her father, who is on trial for her mother’s murder, described how a killer could successfully hide a body.
Christopher Wolfenbarger was arrested in 2024, more than two decades after Melissa’s decapitated head was found bleached and stuffed into a black trash bag behind a glass company where her husband worked.
The couple’s oldest child, Christina Garrett, now 30, testified against him at his murder trial in Atlanta on Wednesday, revealing a shocking statement he allegedly made to her when she was just a teenager.
Garrett told the court she had no memories of her mother and barely had a relationship with her father, but when she was a teenager, one thing they did bond over was true crime shows.
“Any time there was a case that seemed interesting, we’d talk about it,” she said. But she told the court that there was one time in particular that caught her off guard.
The father and daughter had been talking about a murder, and Wolfenbarger allegedly criticized how the killer disposed of the body. Garret said he told her that’s “not the way they should’ve done it” and that the killer should have hidden the body under a house.
“It was a murder case and the person had been free several times,” Garrett explained. “Like it was a very old murder case that he had been found on. Chris said that wasn’t the way he should have hid the body to begin with, and that ‘if you go out there when they’re about to build a new house and put it under where the foundation of the house is gonna go. And so when the crew comes back to lay the foundation the next morning, they’re just gonna continue building the house.’”
The comment caught her off guard, prompting her to confront her father.
“It sounds like you’re talking about my mom,” she recalled herself saying.
“That’s when he told me he didn’t know where my mom was. He didn’t know if she was in Heaven, hell, Stockbridge, but he wished that he did,” Garrett added.
She also testified that he once suggested he could escape authorities entirely if “they come looking” for him.
Garrett didn’t have much of a relationship with her father, who she said told her as a child that her mother “ran off” to California. She grew up believing her paternal grandparents, who raised her, were her biological parents, she told jurors, while her father lived in another part of the state.
When she later uncovered photos of her mother and began asking questions, she said the family discouraged her from pursuing answers, citing the notoriety of her maternal grandfather, Carl Patton. Known as the “Flint River Killer,” her grandfather was convicted of multiple murders in the 1970s — and therefore that side of the family had to be avoided.
“We were told they were bad people, and we didn’t want to talk to them,” Garrett said.
It wasn’t until Melissa’s funeral in 2003 that Garrett recognized her maternal grandmother from past visits to the family’s yard, when the woman had stood outside asking where her daughter was.
“That was essentially when we pieced together that the woman from the front yard was our grandmother, and the woman she had been talking to [about] was our mom,” Garrett testified.
By 2013, Garrett had cut ties with her father entirely, instead connecting with her mother’s family and searching online for information about Melissa’s case.
But the true crime conversations with him left her unsettled, she said.
Wolfenbarger, who is currently being held in Fulton County Jail, was indicted by a grand jury on charges of murder and felony murder.
