The Columbus Poltergeist Kid

On October 23, 1969, a child came into the world and straight into a life raging with difficulty. Christina Boyer’s mother was a drug addict and when she found herself suddenly responsible for another, fragile human life, she decided that she couldn’t take good care of it. When she was just a baby, the Franklin County Children’s Services removed Christina from her family home and sent her to live with John and Joan Resch.

By that point, John and Joan were experienced foster parents. They were established within the community and became a home for over 250 children in need throughout the years. At one point they even had six foster children living with them at once. Christina was only about two years old when she moved into their busy but strict household. As she grew, she came to view the Resch’s as her own family and started going by the name Tina Resch.

But tragedy wasn’t far on the horizon. When Tina was only twelve years old, one of her older foster brothers began molesting her. Like many victims, especially when they are children, it took a while for Christina to find the courage to confide in the people she saw as her parents, but what she says happened then was anything but the reaction a loving foster family would provide. 

“Finally, I did tell them, but they didn’t believe me and slapped my face,” Christina later said, and the trust between them all was broken.

Only two years later, Christina began talking about other strange and unnatural experiences that she was having. Experiences that she described as something like telekinesis. According to Christina, whenever she got angry, upset or had big emotions, objects around her would start moving on their own. It was possible, Christina thought, that she had the supernatural ability to move things with her mind.

Or it was possible that there was something else going on entirely.

An astonishing number of people believed Christina and believed that she had this gift. As word got out, the media, parapsychologists and paranormal investigators arrived by the dozens, all for their chance to examine the “Columbus Poltergeist kid.” She was even featured on the popular TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

I did say poltergeist, because it was now mostly accepted that Christina was haunted by a poltergeist, who was in turn reacting to her anger and frustration by moving inanimate objects around her. 

One parapsychologist and his assistant believed in Christina so much that they ended up actually moving into the Resch family home. Bill Roll was determined to get to the source of Christina’s powers and later wrote that Christina had “one of the most convincing cases of poltergeist activity” he had ever seen.

Desperate not to lose what he believed to be one of the biggest investigations of his life, Bill then invited Christina to come and live with him in his home in North Carolina. Christina was only fifteen years old when Bill approached her with this proposition and, like any teenager, she was vulnerable and was having a hard time with her foster parents.

“My adoptive father had stopped speaking to me, and my adoptive mom and I argued all the time. Bill was like someone who was saving me from drowning in my family,” she later said, and she agreed to move in with Bill.

There Christina found herself the center of attention once more. Bill first introduced her to Jeannie Lagle, a psychiatrist and hypnotherapist, and together they began to medically examine Christina, test her abilities, and took her to a parapsychology conference.

But then the Reschs asked Christina to come home.

Christina agreed to but only for a moment. Shortly after arriving back at the Resch family home, and when Christina was only sixteen years old, she met and married a man named James Bennett, someone she later described as a complete “monster.”

James would beat Christina until she lost consciousness, he would often gag and rape her. Whenever Christina would try to run away, he would chase her down, beat her again, and threaten her life. At one point, he even burned all of her clothing in an attempt to make it impossible for her to leave him again. When Christina did finally manage to escape, James would continuously stalk and harass her. 

Understandably, all of this was too much for Christina to bear and she became very ill. She couldn’t eat or sleep and when she couldn’t even keep water down, she ended up going to the hospital. There she was confronted with startling news, news that would forever change her and the course of her life. Then 19 year old Christina was told that she was pregnant. 

Others may have viewed the pregnancy as another hardship to contend with, especially considering who the child’s father was and how they came to be, but to Christina, it was a blessing. She later said that finding out that she was pregnant actually saved her life. She was no longer fighting to keep herself alive, but she was fighting for her child and that made everything so much clearer.

Christina was now determined to do better and be better so that her child wouldn’t have to go through the same hardships that Christina had growing up. She got herself a job and a new place to live and shortly after that, she welcomed her daughter Amber Gail Bennett into the world.

Christina then met and married a man named Larry Boyer, but what had looked like a fresh start and a new hopeful beginning quickly turned sour. A familiar pattern began to emerge when Larry turned abusive, but this time Christina didn’t stick around long enough for things to get worse. When Larry was in jail one night, Christina packed up Amber and their things, and moved to Carroll County, Georgia. 

It was a quiet and highly conservative town. The people there thought that Christina was a wayward sinner, or at the very least an incredibly unusual woman, who’d shown up without her husband and with a team of parapsychologists hot on her tail. Bill Roll and Jeannie Lagle actually ended up following Christina to Carroll County, still determined to get to the bottom of the poltergeist activity that supposedly still happened around her.

But Bill and Jeannie brought with them their own problems, problems that Christina found herself caught in the middle of. Jeannie claimed to have been taking on most of the workload while Bill hogged the limelight. He allegedly started going to parapsychology conferences without Jeannie, claiming all of the research and evidence they had collected together as his own.

But the final straw came when Jeannie found out that Bill had been writing a book about Christina behind her back and it was after that, that Jeannie decided to take matters into her own hands.

She approached Christina and struck up a deal where Jeannie could write her own book about Christina and their research, and Christina agreed to help her. In return, Jeannie paid Christina five dollars an hour to type up her research notes and the two of them got to work. The extra money helped Christina out around the house and it was a house that now had more mouths to feed.

Somewhere along the way, Christina had met David Herrin, a man who also had a daughter the same age as Amber. When he and his child moved into Christina’s trailer, they brought with them a fresh start and a new sense of opportunity. David could now look after the children and Christina could pick up more hours working with Jeannie, both typing up her research notes and working on the book that they hoped to later sell.

But there was still trouble on the horizon.

Christina later said that she would often have to remind David that Amber was different from his own daughter. Amber was energetic, almost hyperactive, and often got herself hurt because of it. Amber would get the usual bumps and bruises that most toddlers do, but in the spring of 1992, she also took a dive out of the back of the car when she was over excited about getting out of her carseat. Amber hit the pavement and ended up with a large swollen forehead that had Christina desperately calling her foster mother Joan for advice about.

Joan told Christina that Amber was probably fine and just to keep an eye on the swelling on Amber’s forehead and her behavior. Christina breathed a sigh of relief and went about her days. As the swelling went down, she felt comfortable enough to leave Amber alone with David and headed out to work.

But when she came home later that day, David was standing in the driveway.

He told her that something was wrong and Amber wouldn’t wake up. Christina rushed inside to find her daughter unconscious, her skin already turning a sickening shade of gray. By the time they’d reached the hospital, it was already too late for little Amber.

Christina was distraught, but within moments, she was escorted down to the local police station, not to give a statement, but to be questioned about her daughter’s death.

It turned out that Amber’s death hadn’t been an accident, but a result of another blow to her head. A blow that was later determined to have happened while Amber was at work and more than likely the result of a beating.

The question the investigators then put to Christina was if she’d known that David had been abusing her daughter or not.

Christina denied everything and denied that David had ever hurt Amber.

The authorities didn’t believe her and prosecutors later argued that if Christina had taken Amber to hospital sooner, like when she first started showing signs of bruising, it was more than likely that Amber would still be alive. They said that Christina had a role to play in her daughter’s death, one that revolved around protecting her daughter’s abuser instead of her child.

The death penalty was now on the horizon for Christina.

Not wanting to risk it, her lawyers advised her to take an Alford Plea. This is a plea that people can make, where they plead guilty without actually saying they are guilty of the crimes they’re being charged with. Essentially, they are saying that they are innocent, but they would rather go to prison than risk going to court, being found guilty and then sentenced to death. 

Christina was put away for life and is still behind bars to this day. David Herrin was somehow found not guilty of murder but was sentenced to twenty years for child cruelty. He was released in 2011.