Turned myself in next door at the sheriff’s department for a a crime I was involved in years ago.
And somebody lost their life. It was murder. I’ve been through hell. My whole life because of this.
The camera is already rolling when he walks in. He does not look at it.
He asks for a cigarette and a soda first, and someone brings them, and he sits down with the quiet of a man who has been rehearsing a silence he is about to break.
The studio is small. The room is still. Outside, Reading, California, moves through an ordinary Tuesday morning, January 9th, 2018.
Inside, Brian Hawkins puts down the cup. He stares at the floor. Then he starts talking.
He says he has been through hell. He says every minute of every day has been a nightmare.
He says he is going to walk out of this building, cross to the sheriff’s department next door, and confess to a murder.
A murder that happened 25 years ago on a dirt road past two mountain lakesward Lane near Shingleton, California in the dark, 24 miles east of this city.
He does not say the name of the boy who died there. Not yet. But we will because that boy deserves to have his name said out loud by someone who is not trying to take something from him.
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Now, let’s talk about Frank Mallister. Frank Wesley McAllister was born on September 20th, 1973 in Lynwood, California.
He came into the world already himself, loud in the way only happy children are, curious, a tease, the kind of kid who figured out early that making people laugh was the easiest way to keep their attention and used it without restraint.
His mother would say later that there was never a stranger in his life. He made friends the way some people breathe without thinking, without effort, without noticing.
It was a skill not everyone had. What he loved most was fishing. Not just the catching, the whole ritual.
As a small boy, he would sneak into his father’s garage, pull out a rod, and practice his cast in the backyard, reeling in nothing, happy with the motion of it.
There was something in that image that says everything about the young man Frank McAllister was becoming.
Patient, purposeful, content with the practice of a thing, even before the reward arrived. When Frank was 8, his parents separated, his father Doug brought him north to Reading, pressed against the Sacramento River in the shadow of Mount Shasta, where the summers run long and hot and everyone eventually finds the water.
He and his father spent those summers at a swimming hole they called their own.
They brought food, stayed all day, jumped from the banks, they fished. Doug would show him where the fish held in the current, and Frank would watch his father’s hands on the rod, the way children watch when they are learning something they don’t know they are learning.
They were close in the way fathers and sons can be when circumstances leave only each other.
By 19, Frank was a cook at a local wedding restaurant. He was engaged to a young woman named Denell Tadich.
They had a plan, Reno, a wedding, a life. In March of 1993, Frank survived a car accident.
2 months later, the insurance settlement arrived, $4,500. He held that check and saw his future in it.
He was not wrong, too. He was only wrong about what other people would see when they looked at it.
Frank Mallister cashed that check on May 6th, 1993. It was the same day he died.
By early afternoon, Frank had borrowed Dell’s car. He had a plan, not a good one, but a young man’s plan, the kind that makes a certain desperate sense before you follow it all the way through.
He told Denell he wanted to buy a bulk quantity of methamphetamine, sell it at a markup, and use the profit to build the life they’d been planning.
He was not a drug dealer. He had no history in that world. He was a cook who had just come into more money than he’d ever held, and it didn’t feel like enough.
So, he was going to make it more. He drove to a part of Reading where he knew some people, three of them.
Brian Hawkins was 19. On and off with a girl named Shana Culver. Shana was 17.
Her brother Curtis was 21. Frank knew them the way you know people in a city this size.
Casually enough to trust them with a transaction. He had no reason not to. What Frank did not know, what no one would tell him, was that before he ever pulled around to pick them up, Shauna Culver had already made a decision.
She knew Frank had the cash on him. She had told Brian Hawkins what they were going to do with it.
They were not going to sell Frank anything. They were going to take everything. All four got into the car.
Frank drove. Hawkins settled directly behind him. Curtis took the front passenger seat. Shana sat behind her brother.
During the drive, Hawkins told Frank he knew people in Shingleton, a supplier up in the hills who could move what Frank was looking for.
Frank turned the car east on Highway 44 and headed into the mountains. He was driving.
He was choosing the road. He had no idea the three people behind him had already decided where it ended.
Alward Lane runs east of Shingleton through Pine Forest and Granite Country, past two mountain lakes, Grace Lake and Nora Lake.
In May of 1993, it was remote enough that four teenagers could pull into a dirt turnout and sit in a parked car for 2 hours without seeing another person.
That is what they did. They talked about what exactly was never fully accounted for.
2 hours is a long time to sit with someone you have already decided to rob.
Long enough for doubt. Long enough to look at the boy in the driver’s seat and change course.
None of them did. At some point, Shana Culver reached into her purse. She removed a knife.
She handed it to Brian Hawkins and told him what to do with it. Hawkins took it, but Curtis moved first with a different knife, his own, and what happened next inside that car was swift and irreversible.
Frank opened the door and fell to the ground outside. All three got out after him.
What followed, Hawkins described to investigators in plain terms. He straddled Frank Mallister on the ground and stabbed him in the throat, in the chest multiple times.
He told investigators he stabbed him a lot of times. He said Frank did not appear to be alive when he stopped.
Curtis Culver then picked up a rock roughly the size of a basketball by his own account and dropped it on Frank’s head.
Curtis would later tell investigators he did it out of mercy, that Frank was already dying and he wanted it over faster.
Frank Mallister was 19 years old and he was gone. Shana and Curtis dragged his body into the treeine 20 to 30 yard from the road.
They left him in the dark in the pines beside those two lakes. Then all three got back into Dell’s car.
Hawkins drove. On the way back to Reading, he grabbed a newspaper and tried to wipe the blood from the interior.
He left the car in the Costco parking lot, window down, keys in, unlocked. While Shana and Curtis went inside to call a taxi, Hawkins sat in the quiet of the parking lot with what had just happened.
When the Culver came back out, they counted cash and handed him several hundred. He knew where it had come from.
It had blood on it. He kept it anyway. Every case on Crime Watch Central is weeks of digging, court records, police reports, real people’s stories.
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There is more to tell. Stay with us. Dell Tadic woke on the morning of May 7th, 1993, and Frank still hadn’t come home.
She had paged him through the night. He did not call back. She said it wasn’t like him.
She filed a missing person’s report with the Reading Police Department that morning. That same night, Costco employees reported an abandoned vehicle.
A service officer responded and found what no one could explain. Blood on the outside of the driver’s door.
Blood on the armrest. Blood down the inside panel. A white t-shirt baldled behind the driver’s seat saturated.
A backpack with bloodied newspaper stuffed inside. Mud on the wheel wells. The plate traced to Denell Tadic.
Lead investigators from the major crimes division arrived. The detective who walked that lot had worked enough cases to understand what this volume of blood meant.
They treated it as a homicide from that moment forward. Frank’s mother received a call from Denell.
She and her husband drove through the night certain Frank would be there when they arrived.
He was not. Investigators moved quickly. Shana, Curtis, and Hawkins were identified as the last known people with Frank.
All three came in and told identical stories. Frank had picked them up, driven around, gotten a page, said he needed to go meet someone and dropped them at Waterworks Park.
They took a taxi back. That was the last they saw of him. No visible injuries on any of them, no cracks.
Then all three stopped cooperating entirely. They stopped returning calls. They went silent. Investigators had blood.
They had a missing man. They had three people who were with him last. They did not have a body.
Three separate tips surfaced naming a local drug dealer, Brian Bennett. Investigators pulled him in, examined his truck, verified his alibi.
Everything held. The lead collapsed. While investigators filed it away and looked for somewhere else to turn, Frank’s mother was still driving those hills.
She and Frank’s uncles and his father searched for months. Hope changed shape along the way.
It became something quieter. Just find him so we can put him somewhere. Just give us a place to go.
In April of 1994, 11 months after Frank disappeared, two people on foot in the forest near Shingleton found human remains, scattered bones, a skull, vertebrae, a pair of dark jeans, dark tennis shoes, a single sock, and an ID card in the dirt.
Dental records confirmed the identification within days. Frank Mallister had been found. He would have turned 21 that September.
The autopsy findings arrived shortly after. Two knife wounds, one on the jawbone, one on an upper vertebra, evidence consistent with a throat wound delivered from behind.
Additional marks on the spine indicated downward stab wounds through the chest. Investigators made another approach on the Culver’s and Hawkins.
Shana was still a minor. All three cut contact entirely. Without physical evidence linking anyone to the scene, the case could not move forward.
By 1995, the file went cold. Here is what the years cost. Frank’s mother counted his birthdays.
September 20. Every year, she turned a number in her head. 22, 25, 30, 35.
32 years of them counted alone. She had a dream once where he was 8 years old again and his hair was the way she used to comb it.
He looked at her and said he was okay. She woke up and tried to believe it.
Doug Mallister, who had taken his son to the river every summer, who had built a life in Reading around a boy who loved to fish, grew older with the same unanswered question.
He never stopped waiting for something to arrive. In Red Bluff, Shana and Curtis kept living.
They built routines, kept the 1993 story locked. Brian Hawkins, by his own account, delivered years later on camera, spent every one of those years in something he called hell.
Every minute, every day, a nightmare that did not end when he woke up. At some point before 2018, Hawkins drove to the Mallister family home.
He was going to tell them what happened on Alward Lane. He was going to ask for forgiveness, not from a courtroom, not from a camera, but from the people who had loved Frank.
He wanted to look them in the eye and say it. When he got there, Frank’s father, Doug, had already died.
He never heard it. He never got to decide what to do with the truth.
Silence had taken that from him as well. Hawkins drove home. He sat with it longer.
25 years became something he could no longer hold the same way. On a Sunday morning sometime before January 2018, Brian Hawkins walked into a reading church and approached a man he knew, Tony Propasso, whose granddaughter worked in local news.
He said he had something to talk about, something to pray about. Tony called his granddaughter Courtney, a reporter 6 months into her first job at KRCR.
She almost didn’t take the call. She had work. She heard him out. On January 9th, 2018, Hawkins arrived at the KRCR studio.
Frank Mallister would have been 44 years old. Hawkins was 45. Before they rolled, Hawkins asked for a cigarette and a soda.
Someone brought them. He sat down, took his time, and put the cup on the table.
He did not look at the camera. He looked at the floor. Then he started talking.
He said God had pressed him to do this. He said 25 years of living with what happened had become unbearable.
He named the culvers. He described Shana’s plan decided before Frank ever pulled up to get them.
He described the road, the lakes, the turnout. He said Frank never got to have a life.
He said almost to himself that he hadn’t really had one either. Not after that day.
News director Jennifer Scarboro called the Reading Police Department while Hawings was still in the building.
Investigators confirmed two other people were involved and asked KRCR to hold the interview for 24 hours.
Time enough to find the covers before the broadcast warned them. The station agreed. Detectives Rusty Bishop and Eric Garnner had one day.
Within hours, both siblings were tracked to Red Bluff. Curtis agreed to come in. Shaana refused and was arrested.
Somewhere in Reading that same morning, Frank’s mother did not yet know any of this was happening.
Bishop sat across from Shaana. She gave the 1993 story word for word waterworks park, the page, the taxi.
She held it. Then Bishop turned a laptop toward her and played the KRCR footage.
She watched Brian Hawkins confess on camera. Down the hall, Garnierro interviewed Curtis. Curtis held his story until the polygraph.
He failed it. Then he started talking. The account diverged on one central point. Curtis said Hawkins did the stabbing.
That Curtis had only held a knife out of fear, and that when Frank fell from the car, it was Hawkins got on top of him.
Curtis said he picked up the rock not to kill, but to end something that was already beyond stopping.
Hawkins said Curtis used his own knife on the throat first before Hawkins moved. Both men were present.
One account may be closer to true. Perhaps neither is complete. What neither disputed, Frank Mallister was stabbed to death on that road.
All three of them walked away. All three suspects were arrested within 24 hours of Hawkins sitting down in that studio.
The Shasta County District Attorney’s Office noted something that deserves to be said plainly. Law enforcement did not crack this case.
25 years of investigative work could not do what one man’s guilt eventually did. Hawkins received no deal for coming forward.
He stood before a judge and took what he was given. In November of 2019, Brian Hawkins plead guilty to first-degree murder, robbery, and special allegations.
He was sentenced to 25 years to life. On January 14, 2022, Shana and Curtis Culver entered please in Shasta County Superior Court, not murder, but voluntary manslaughter, robbery in concert, and multiple assault charges.
Shana received 20 years. Curtis received 35. The gap between murder and manslaughter is a legal designation, not a moral accounting.
Frank Mallister is not less gone because of how a charge is categorized. His mother waited 29 years for a courtroom.
She got one. She also received a truth she had carried in her bones since the night she drove to reading and he wasn’t there.
She said she wanted justice. Then she said what justice felt like from where she was standing.
It could not bring him back. The math is this. Frank Mallister cashed a check for $4,500 on May 6th, 1993.
He believed it was a starting point. Three other people decided it was a target.
What they took from him, not measured in dollars but in years, was everything that would have come after 19.
His mother already knew that. She had known it since the night she drove to Reading, and he wasn’t there.
There is an image worth sitting with before we leave. Frank McAllister, small enough that the rod was nearly as tall as he was, standing in the backyard of his father’s house in Reading, practicing his cast, throwing the line out into the yard, reeling it back in, catching nothing, needing to catch nothing, just happy with the motion.
Patience was something he was still learning and he didn’t mind the learning. He never taught that to anyone.
He never stood at a riverbank with a child of his own and showed them how to read the water, how to wait, how to hold on to something worth holding.
He never got to be 40. He never got to be old. Frank McAllister was 19 years old the day he drove downward lane.
He would have turned 51 this year. That distance between 19 and 51 is the weight of silence.
32 birthdays. His mother counted everyone. A father who died never knowing. A truth that lived in three people for 25 years before it finally had to come out.
That is what silence costs. If Frank’s story stayed with you, if it was the road past those two lakes, the blood stained money, or the moment Hawkins pulled up to that house and found Frank’s father was already gone, hit like, subscribe, and tell us in the comments which moment hit hardest.
Frank’s story deserved to be told right. Crimewatch Central will keep telling them. We’ll see you in the next
