LANCASTER, Texas — Priscilla Jibben was a 31-year-old mom with three children. Her mother says she had a really big heart and trusted everyone -- maybe even people she shouldn’t have.
“She seen everybody, even bad people. She would always give people the benefit of the doubt,” said Jibben’s mother, Cheryl Harter.
Jibben grew up in Kansas, but her mother says she was always searching for love and that's how she ended up in Odessa, Texas in 2020.
“She was that type of girl that was looking for somebody to love her, somebody to show her affection. And this guy gave her a little of that attention, and she automatically thought they were going to have a relationship,” said Harter.
That relationship didn’t work out, so she got a ride to Dallas, but no one knows for sure who she rode with.
Jibben's family says she suffered from drug addiction, and sometimes that caused her to make some bad choices.
“It looks like she might have gotten mixed up with the wrong group of people,” said Harter.
Jibben ended up on the streets. She was often spotted at the Fox gas station in southern Dallas. And that’s where she met Jimmy Handsome, one of the last people to see her alive.
Four years later, WFAA went looking for Handsome, not really thinking he’d be found. But he was found living in the area near the gas station he still frequents.
Handsome is not a suspect in this case. Police say he was just trying to help Jibben the last day she was seen alive.
“Well, I was just standing over here and she came walking up this way,” Handsome told WFAA.
He walked senior crime and justice reporter Rebecca Lopez through what happened on the night of Dec. 30, 2019.
Handsome said Jibben seemed upset and wanted to call her mom but didn’t have a phone, so he let her borrow his.
“I was trying to be there for someone, someone who probably needed some help. As much as I could do to help,” Handsome said. “She just wanted to use my phone.”
Jibben’s mom, Harter, received a phone call from her daughter that night.
Jibben wanted her mom to come to Dallas and pick her up that night. But Harter couldn’t for a couple of reasons. Harter was not only in a different state, but it was the middle of the night, and she was taking care of Jibben’s kids.
“I told her I can’t go. And there was somebody in the background yelling. And she says, ‘mom, I gotta [sic] go,’ and I always tell her I love her. She always told me she loved me, and she hung up. And we never told each other that we loved each other again. That was the last time I heard from her,” said Harter as she began to cry.
On Jan. 3, 2020, some water department employees in Lancaster found Jibben’s body on Dizzy Dean Road.
Lopez went there with the lead detective on the case, Jason Tapscott.
“We were told a body had been found behind that barrier right over there and when we got here, we saw that the victim was burned,” Tapscott said. “And you walk a little bit closer, and you see she had been lit on fire.”
What happened to Jibben was horrible. According to the medical examiner, she had been stabbed nearly 30 times, possibly sexually assaulted and then set on fire.
“Her body was found just right there, and we believe she was dead before she got here. We believe she was murdered somewhere else,” said Tapscott.
Police are frustrated with the case because there is no surveillance video and no eyewitness they could find. There are three DNA profiles on Jibben’s body and only one matched, but they don’t have enough to arrest that person.
So, police sat down with Lopez to go over the case file -- which rarely happens in an open case, but they want help catching Jibben’s killer or killers.
“Somebody knows something,” said Tapscott.
Some of the pictures and files we saw were graphic. Jibben’s mother hasn’t seen them but says just knowing that she suffered was devastating.
Police have chased several tips and leads, but they’ve led nowhere.
“At the end of the day, there’s somebody out there that did something very evil that’s still walking the streets,” said Tapscott.
There’s a video that Jibben’s mom shared with WFAA. It was taken a couple of years before she was killed. She’s at a church retreat in Kansas where she had been baptized. She was trying hard to get off drugs and get her life back.
“I am grateful because it showed me how to live in the word of God,” Jibben said in the video.
When you look at that video you see a beautiful girl wanting to do better, but her family says the addiction was too much and it took her down a dark path where she met the wrong person.
If you have any information on this case, please contact the Lancaster Police Department.