Another death on remote Mosier Valley Road, and a new cross for Our Garden of Angels

Amy Robinson never wanted to be alone.

So 19 years after the Arlington teenager was abducted off a bicycle and murdered, her memorial garden on Mosier Valley Road now has 131 crosses for brutally slain children.

Her grandmother was watching TV news Thursday, worried Kaytlynn Cargill would be No. 132.

“She was found in that trash dump right down the road across from the garden — they threw her out like trash,” Carolyn Barker Maifield of Grand Prairie said by phone.

“This brings back a lot for me. That’s how Amy was found, and right by that road. They threw her out like trash, like her life didn’t mean anything.”

In 1998, Robinson was last seen alive riding her bicycle on West Division Street in Arlington. She was missing 17 days before her body was found on what was then a remote back road off Texas 10 in far east Fort Worth.

Killers Michael Wayne Hall and Robert Neville, her co-workers at a supermarket, bragged and laughed on TV about killing her. They were eventually put to death.

“When they found Amy, I heard it on the TV news and just started screaming,” Maifield said.

“My neighbors called the doctor and had to get me some help because I was just constantly screaming. It was like a part of me was gone. I can’t imagine what this girl’s family is going through.”

In 2000, the Our Garden of Angels memorial opened at the site where Robinson’s body was found. It’s about 2 miles west on Mosier Valley Road from the giant Republic Services landfill in far north Arlington where Cargill, 14, was found.

Today, a six-lane Trinity Boulevard carries commuters past the neat rows of crosses in the garden. Trees planted in 2000 have grown big and shady.

But the number of memorials also has grown.

“The garden is a place where children are not going to be forgotten,” Maifield said.

She reeled off the names of children killed in heinous ways — “those kids drowned in Houston, and Vern, and Chad, and two little kids that their stepdad burnt up — there’s just so much cruelty in the world.”

Maifield and a team of volunteers tend the garden. It costs about $200 a month to maintain, with mowing help from county deputies.

“It’s not a place about death,” she said: “It’s a place to remember their lives.

“Every one of these children had so much life ahead.”

We wish we never had to add another one.

This story was originally published June 22, 2017 at 7:29 PM with the headline "Another death on remote Mosier Valley Road, and a new cross for Our Garden of Angels."