Insets, left to right: Tracy Mannon (Muskogee County Sheriff's Office) and Linda Barnes (Jones-Harkins Funeral Home). Background: Home in Wilburton, Oklahoma, where Mannon killed Barnes (Google Maps).
A woman in Oklahoma is headed to prison for decades after she fatally beat her 75-year-old mother with a portable vacuum cleaner and stabbed her with multiple knives — and then washed dishes in the kitchen sink until cops came.
Tracy Mannon, 53, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for the murder of her mom Linda Barnes. Mannon pleaded guilty in April to second-degree murder in Indian country. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Oklahoma prosecuted the case because the murder occurred on Choctaw Nation land and both Mannon and her mother are members of the Cherokee Nation.
According to a criminal complaint, a neighbor called the Wilburton Police Department around 4 p.m. on Feb, 26, 2024, when she heard Mannon screaming at her mother "before silence ensued."
Cops arrived to the scene and knocked on the front door but no one answered. They went around back and looked through an open door where they saw Barnes on the ground with "organs" and "tissue" spilling out of her body. She also had injuries to her face and arms. Medical professionals pronounced Barnes dead at the scene.
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Officers then saw Mannon at the kitchen sink, where she was apparently doing dishes. Mannon was taken into custody and admitted to killing her mother. She said she used two knives and planned to use one of them to chop up her mom's body and stuff the remains in a tote container but it was "too dull to complete the task." Mannon also bludgeoned her with the vacuum cleaner.
She then took her blood-stained clothes and wrapped them in carpet before placing them in her bedroom closet.
Barnes' daughter and Mannon's sister spoke at the sentencing hearing. Even at 75, the victim was "the life of the party" who loved playing games while displaying a competitive edge.
"She still was [at] game night, she would fight and fuss with us, argue over rules, try to cheat. That's just who she was. And so much fun," her daughter Melissa Junell told local CBS affiliate KOTV.
Junell said her sister has been violent for years and has always blamed mental health problems while not seeking treatment.
"She said that if she gets out, that she would take her meds and be responsible," said Junell. "She said that she's learned her lesson, which I don't believe any of that."
In her sentencing memorandum, Mannon's attorneys said she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder when she was in her mid-20s. She also was sexually assaulted multiple times, including once while she was in jail, which resulted in the birth of her daughter.
Mannon had been living with her mother and daughter while working at an ice factory, but she stopped taking her medication, which caused her mental health to become "increasingly uncontrolled." She also started using drugs. On the morning of the murder she tried to quit her job and went home.
"By the afternoon she was delusional enough to kill her mother for no rational reason and in a way too bizarre to be anything but the product of her untreated mental disease," her lawyers wrote. "Tracy killed her mother because she was having a delusion that her mother had been replaced by an identical robot which was going to detonate a large explosive device under the property."
But Junell said mental health problems were no excuse to kill their mother.
"I know that she loves Tracy. But there is a measure of right and wrong. And today, the atrocious wrong that was committed against my mother by her own daughter, it was avenged," Junell told KOTV.