On the afternoon of April 19, 1991, David Hibbs eagerly stepped off the school bus, excited to show his mother his honor roll certificate. Unfortunately, this moment never came to pass.

As he approached the back of his house in Bristol Township, Pennsylvania, the 12-year-old spotted ominous black smoke pouring from the back door, as recounted in the “Justice for Joy” episode of Dateline: Unforgettable.

He couldn’t see his mom, 35-year-old Joy Hibbs, anywhere and ran screaming to a neighbor’s house for help, then raced back to try to save his mom.

“A neighbor grabbed me and held me. I was kicking and punching and trying to escape her grasp,” David remembered. 

When the fire trucks arrived, someone quickly ushered David into the back of an ambulance while firefighters raced into the house to tackle the fire. It was then they found Joy’s body in her son’s bedroom.

David, his older sister Angie, and their dad Charlie Hibbs were devastated, but the family’s anguish would only grow after the medical examiner determined that Joy died before the fire ignited.

The devoted mom and medical assistant had been stabbed five times, her rib cage was crushed, and she was likely strangled before an unknown killer set fire to the home in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

For years, Charlie found himself at the center of the investigation into his wife’s death, as police overlooked the real killer of the mom of two.

Vandalism, threatening phone call had plagued Hibbs family

In the months before Joy was killed, the Hibbs family had been the victims of some troubling incidents of vandalism. Someone threw a brick through the family’s window and the tires to Joy’s car had been slashed. On another occasion, the back door to the house had been kicked in, leaving Joy unnerved. 

When police asked David who might have wanted to harm his mom, he could only think of one person: Robert Atkins.

Robert and his wife April had once lived a few houses down from the Hibbs family. April and Joy formed a friendship and April often spent time with her young child at Joy’s home.

But according to David, Robert had been much more volatile.

“I remember that he had an explosive temper,” David told Dateline correspondent Blayne Alexander. “You could hear him. You could hear him from our house.” 

Then, just a few weeks before Joy was killed, David overheard a phone call between his mom and Robert, a small time drug dealer. Joy had been upset about the quality of some marijuana she and Charlie had bought from Robert and she wanted to return it. Robert was furious and started to threaten her over the phone.

“I knew my mom was shaken, but I don’t think she took it serious because it’s, you know, a $20 marijuana deal,” David said. 

By the time of the murder, April and Robert had moved to an apartment about eight miles away.

When Robert was questioned by authorities, he said that on the afternoon of Joy’s death, he’d been at home and answered a phone call on the landline before taking his family on vacation to the Poconos, about two hours away.

Although Robert did drive a Monte Carlo, it was black, not blue as the one an eyewitness described being near the Hibbs family home, and police moved away from him as a possible suspect.

Focus shifts to Charlie Hibbs

Without many leads to go on, police soon turned their attention to Charlie, Joy’s husband. At the time of the killing, he’d been about 20 miles away in Philadelphia working with a construction crew in full view of his coworkers.

Although he agreed to repeated police interviews and three polygraph tests, police couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow involved and he continued to live under a cloud of suspicion for years as the investigation into Joy’s death stalled.

But the family remained committed to finding justice for Joy, with David even giving an interview to the The Huffington Post (now called HuffPost), accusing police of botching the investigation.

A break in the case

Then, in 2014, Sgt. Mike Slaughter was assigned to the case. He was surprised to find that many of the original detectives on the case were hesitant or refused to talk about the case.

After “thoroughly” vetting Charlie, he was finally able to clear him as a suspect in the murder. Slaughter then began to take a second look at Robert. April — Robert’s now ex-wife — still backed Robert’s original story about that afternoon, but she also minimized her friendship with Joy, something that struck Slaughter as odd.

Slaughter learned after confronting one of the original lead detectives on the case that investigators had been instructed to “stay away” from Robert as a suspect because he’d been a police drug informant at the time.

“To hear that this may have been a murder suspect that was traded in exchange for drug deals, which are not a dime a dozen, they’re a penny a pound. We can get drug intel all the time, it doesn’t make sense, in my brain,” Slaughter said of the stunning revelation.

After investigating, Slaughter found that Robert’s alibi quickly fell apart. Although Robert had answered a phone call that day, the caller said it may have been as late as 1:30 p.m., leaving plenty of time before that for Robert to have killed Joy and made it home. Robert’s family also didn’t reach the Poconos until nearly 5 p.m.

Police also learned that Robert had access to his grandmother’s blue Monte Carlo.

Robert Atkins’ wife reveals he came home “covered in blood” 

Then in 2016, April came forward with a shocking story. She told Slaughter that Robert had come home the day of Joy’s murder “covered in blood.” 

“He was filthy. He was absolutely filthy,” she later told Dateline‘s Alexander. “He said, ‘I stabbed somebody and lit a house on fire.’” 

April, who said she’d suffered abuse at the hands of her husband for years, said she was terrified and that’s why she never told police.

“This is our eureka moment,” Slaughter said.

But it still took years before the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office made an arrest in the largely circumstantial case.