20/20: The Barefoot Witness - Full timeline of Lyntell Washington’s 2016 gruesome murder

ABC's The Barefoot Witness is bringing light to another devastating murder case, one that did not crack open because of forensic science or a lucky break in surveillance footage, but through a 3 year old child.

The 2016 murder of Lyntell Washington, a beloved Baton Rouge schoolteacher, was solved in no small part because of a three-year-old girl who couldn't keep a secret. What investigators uncovered behind that parking lot discovery was a tangle of lies, a hidden pregnancy, a double life, and a killing so cold-blooded it stunned an entire community. ABC's 20/20 is now revisiting the case on The Barefoot Witness. Here's a timeline for everything that happened.

Lyntell Washington- the woman behind The Barefoot Witness

Lyntell Washington was 40 years old and working as an instructional specialist at Brookstown Middle Magnet Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Despite a flourishing professional life, her personal life had not been without difficulty. After a relationship with a man named Darren Glasper fell apart, partly due to his alleged struggles with addiction, she relocated from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to build a new life as a single mother to their young daughter.

She was starting over, and by most appearances, doing it well. The story that The Barefoot Witness told started with a woman just rebuilding her life.

At Brookstown, Washington crossed paths with Robert Marks, who served as an assistant principal at the same school. The two began seeing each other in secret but the problem was that Marks was already married.

He allegedly assured Washington that his marriage was essentially over, that he and his wife occupied separate floors of a two-story home, and that divorce was on the horizon.

Soon enough an affair started, followed by a pregnancy and more lies

Washington eventually learned she was carrying Marks' child. A week before she vanished, she told a colleague, Jamicia Pink-Fisher, another assistant principal at Brookstown about the pregnancy. According to Pink-Fisher, Washington was already talking about confronting Marks' wife. This is what The Barefoot Witness emphasized: The thing Marks feared the most was being exposed.

What shattered any remaining trust was a photograph. Washington came across a picture on social media showing Marks and his wife, Kala, together on a cruise. When she went to confront him at the address she had for his home, she found not a two-story house but a trailer. Nothing about the life he had described to her was real.

Furious and pregnant, Washington began sending text messages demanding answers. She wanted to know where things stood and whether he intended to support her and their unborn child and those texts would later become evidence. They documented a woman who was not going to disappear quietly and that, as The Barefoot Witness also explained, was precisely why Marks decided to make her disappear permanently.

The two agreed to meet on the night of June 8, 2016. Marks admitted to police that he and Washington met that evening, and that Washington's toddler daughter was with them during the encounter. He claimed the meeting lasted only about half an hour and that he then left on his motorcycle, later ending up at a local bar called Twin Peaks to watch a basketball game. No surveillance footage confirmed any of it.

The morning of the murder

On the morning of June 9, 2016, Washington failed to show up to work and alarm bells started ringing. Then, a passerby named Leslie Parms found something that made those bells deafening: Washington's three-year-old daughter, alone and barefoot in a parking lot near their one-bedroom apartment and the child's feet were covered with dried blood. This is what gave The Barefoot Witness it's name.

Parms kept the girl calm and called 911 and what happened next is one of the most quietly devastating moments in the case. During the call, the little girl said aloud:

"Mr. Robbie put the blood in my car. I heard a bang. My mama started shaking. My mama's asleep by a lake."

She was three years old and she had no concept of what she was saying or who might be listening but she had just described a murder.

Nearby, Washington's car sat in the parking lot. Blood was splattered across the front seat but Washington herself was nowhere to be found. A missing persons investigation began immediately.

Five days later, on June 14, 2016, sugar cane workers made a grim discovery: human remains lying in a drainage ditch on the edge of a sugar cane field. The decomposition was so advanced that dental records were needed to confirm the identity: It was Lyntell Washington.

She had been shot in the head and a medical examination later concluded that the fetus she was carrying, at seven months along, might have survived outside the womb had it received timely medical intervention.

What later investigations revealed

Detectives brought Marks in for questioning almost immediately. He acknowledged the affair, acknowledged meeting Washington that night, but denied any involvement in her death. His alibi, the bar, the basketball game could not be verified by any security footage from Twin Peaks or the surrounding streets. Anyone following The Barefoot Witness will know this is where the case turns from a tragedy to prosecution.

Then the cell phone data came in. Records placed both Washington and Marks in the same isolated area in the northern part of the parish, near Southern University, on the night she disappeared. Investigators theorized that Marks drove with Washington to that location, killed her there, and then disposed of her body at the sugar cane field.

Soon enough, a woman named Tramica Jackson came forward and told police that Marks had called her that same night, asking her to come pick him up from near the very parking lot where Washington's daughter had been found alone the next morning. This proved that his alibi was a lie.

The case was eventually moved to Iberville Parish, the place where the body had been found, after the defense successfully argued about jurisdictional complications. Six years back in 2020 a grand jury in Iberville Parish indicted Marks on charges of second-degree murder, first-degree feticide, kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping of a child, obstruction of justice, and multiple counts of illegal use of a weapon. The bail was set at $885,000.

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Marks is currently incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, a maximum-security facility where he will remain for the rest of his life. The Barefoot Witness ends with a form of heaviness, that justice arrived, but the woman it was meant for never got to see it.

The Barefoot Witness is available to watch through ABC.

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