Published April 10, 2022
While the date of April 10 may seem insignificant, five years ago today the world changed for a Fort Worth family.
"The first April 10 and the second April 10 and so on... they were hurdles. Honestly, every 10th of every month for several years were hard," Tracy Matheson said.
April 10, 2017 was the day her 22-year-old daughter Molly Matheson was raped and murdered by Reginald Kimbro, a man who she says had a pattern of behavior that should have been identified by law enforcement long before her death.
"This particular offender was known by multiple law enforcement agencies in the state of Texas for raping and strangling women, and they never did anything," Matheson said. "When I learned that, I was like, 'We cannot keep doing it the way we've been doing it. We have to do better.'"
Just last month, Kimbro took a deal and pleaded guilty to her murder. But Matheson says though justice has been served, the fight is just beginning.
"I am a mama on a mission," she said.
Matheson spent the last five years of her life dedicated to a nonprofit she started called "Project Beloved: The Molly Jane Mission."
The name was inspired by a tattoo she never knew her daughter had and the mission is to advocate for change to help sexual assault victims and survivors.
"Beloved bundles" were the first initiative. In many cases, Matheson found when women go to the hospital to receive a rape exam, their clothes are often taken away as evidence.
"We decided we can create something so that when a victim does go and have an exam… they can walk out of the hospital with dignity," she said.
The beloved bundles are filled with personal hygiene items, clothing and coloring books. They've been sent to rape crisis centers and hospitals across the nation. Since 2018, they've delivered over 10,000 beloved bundles to over 30 states.
A year later they would install their first soft interview room, a space to help victims of sexual violence feel comfortable telling their stories. Now there are 42 of them across the United States.
And then there are social work scholarships for University of Arkansas students. In honor of the school Molly Jane attended and the major she planned to pursue, the scholarships are given out in $2,200 increments in honor of her 22 years on earth.
"We just felt like it would be appropriate to honor that dream of hers," Matheson said.
But there was one more goal to meet.
She says they were just too many gaps in the justice system that allowed her daughter's death. So she helped champion Texas House Bill 3106, now officially known in Texas as Molly Jane's Law.
"It was signed by the governor in September of 2019," she said.
The law requires all state law enforcement to enter information about sex offenses into the federal database called ViCAP, otherwise known as the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program that was designed in the 1980s but wasn't always used.
The nationwide database helps identify serial killers and rapists.
"They have patterns of behavior, and ViCAP will help identify those patterns of behavior because law enforcement doesn't talk to each other, naturally," Matheson said.
It's meant to help connect the dots and save more lives.
"These are all things that our Molly inspired. If she could, she would be right here beside me, fighting this fight with me," she said.
And though Matheson has accomplished a lot in the last five years, she says April 10 is a reminder of just how much more work there's left to do.
"It will forever be a day of significance in our lives, because everything changed April 10," she said. "This is not the end of the story, Molly's story will live on, Molly's story will impact change. That is what our purpose has been since day one… How to bring lightness out of this darkness."