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Jimmy Allan had long insisted his 34-year-old wife Amy Allan hung herself in the family’s Tecumseh, Michigan, basement after an argument in a tragic suicide.
But evidence at the scene suggested that Amy, known to her loved ones as quiet and shy, met a much more sinister end, according to the “What Happened in the Basement?” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered. (This case was previously covered on Dateline: The Last Day.)
Who was Amy Allan?
According to her sister Heather Krug, Amy was “very girly” and loved wearing dresses and playing with makeup as a child.
Her life took a dramatic turn at the age of 13, when the middle-schooler discovered she was pregnant. She gave birth to her son Caleb when she was in the eighth grade. Although it came as a shock to her parents, they quickly rallied around her and helped her raise her son.
“She just did what she could on her time and we did what we could when she couldn’t, just fill the gap,” her dad Jules Winchester told Dateline.
When Amy met Jimmy in high school in Ocala, Florida, he accepted the young mom as she was and a romance soon bloomed. When she was 19, she got pregnant again and the couple got married.
“Jimmy was always a good, hard worker and a good provider for them,” Amy’s mom, Jeanne Winchester, recalled.
Amy stayed home to raise her two children, but Jeanne said that the decision was likely partly due to “Jimmy not wanting her to get out into the working world.”
Who was Jimmy Allan?
Jimmy described himself to police as someone with a Type A personality who liked structure and organization and was “always seeking to improve myself and others around me.”
But those closest to Amy saw his personality as controlling. According to prosecutors’ accounts, he regularly tracked Amy’s location and isolated her from her family.
Amy’s son Caleb told Dateline that the family had “little rules” for everything.
“We couldn’t eat without asking. We basically had to ask to do anything,” Caleb said.
When Caleb would get in trouble as a child, he was forced to sit on his bed and stare at the wall “all day and night,” he said.
Amy confided in her mom that she tried to stick up for her son, but “it would always come back to whatever Jimmy wanted,” Jeanne said. When Caleb turned 17, he couldn’t take it anymore and moved in with his grandparents.
When a heated family argument broke out a few months later, Jimmy instructed Amy to cut off Caleb and the rest of her family, according to her loved ones.
The physical distance between Amy and her family grew even further when, just a year before her death, Jimmy landed a “dream job” in Michigan doing video production for an audio accessories company and the couple relocated with their teenage daughter Ashley.
The night Amy Allan died
On the evening of September 14, 2018, Amy’s life took a tragic — and fatal — turn.
At around 6:30 p.m., the couple dropped their daughter and her friend off at a nearby high school to watch a football game and then they headed to a local bar, where they had a drink.
Jimmy told police that the couple got into an argument after he told Amy he thought they should move again, possibly to North Carolina.
“She said a couple of times, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work,’ and she’s normally positive and was sort of down and negative and she — we started to disagree about it and she’s like, ‘You know, i hope that works out for you,’” Jimmy told investigators.
Amy walked home by herself while Jimmy drove home in the car, arriving there before his wife. According to Jimmy, after Amy got home, she went into the basement. He said he tried to check on her once but she started swearing at him so he went upstairs to watch television.
Jimmy Allan says his wife tried to kill herself
Jimmy said that when he went back downstairs at around 8:40 p.m. that night, he found his wife hanging from an extension cord.
“My wife tried to kill herself. She’s in the (expletive) basement,” Jimmy screamed in a 911 call. “She tried to hang herself. I (expletive) ran down there.”
When Tecumseh Police Officer BJ Horn arrived at the scene a few minutes later, he was surprised to enter a quiet house.
“It wasn’t until I yelled a couple times you know, ‘police, police,’ that I heard somebody,” he said.
Horn found Jimmy downstairs in the basement, giving his wife CPR. When emergency responders arrived to take over, Jimmy became hysterical, loudly moaning and wailing. But Horn noted that he never saw any actual tears.
There was also a strange moment when one of the paramedics ran through the kitchen and told Jimmy that his wife was still “fighting,” making it clear that she was not dead.
““Huh? What?,” Jimmy replied. “Dude, what in the (expletive) hell?”
Amy Allen taken to hospital alive
Amy was rushed to the local hospital. When Jimmy’s father called Amy’s family 14 hours later, he told them their daughter was dead — yet Amy was still alive and on life support.
“We were just told that she was dead. End of story. And that was after 14 hours after everyone else knew about it,” Krug said. “You know, when there’s an emergency, you call.”
Amy’s family rushed to her side and were able to say goodbye before she died at the hospital. Before leaving town, the family went to police to share their suspicions that Amy had not killed herself.
The Michigan State Police would later reach the same conclusion. In addition to Jimmy’s odd behavior that night, authorities learned that the shy and quiet Amy had been carrying on an affair for nearly three years with a man named George that she met online.
“It was a fairly significant amount of communication between them and we also learned that they had met up a couple times,” prosecuting attorney Angie Borders said.
Authorities initially believed it could have been a motive for murder, but Jimmy seemed genuinely shocked to learn about the affair and insisted his wife didn’t have “the capacity to do that.”
Jimmy Allan’s story doesn’t add up
From the beginning, investigators had also been troubled by the very low height of the ceilings in the basement. Jimmy insisted Amy had been hanging from the extension cord when he found her, but the low ceilings put that story in question. To test out their theory, Michigan State Police Detective Larry Rothman reached out to a forensic engineering lab and asked them to test whether it was possible for someone who was Amy’s height and weight to hang themselves in the way Jimmy described using the extension cord.
They found that the cord would have stretched and that Amy’s feet would have touched the ground.
“This was physical evidence, scientific physical evidence that proved that Jimmy’s story just didn’t add up,” Rothman said.
There were also no notable external injuries to Amy’s neck, although the interior of her neck showed injuries consistent with a choke hold.
Caleb would later testify that Jimmy had once held him in a similar hold.
“I think when she got in that house, she raised hell and I think it pushed him to a point where he hadn’t ever been to before and I think he went a little too far and then just kept going,” Caleb told Dateline of a potential motive.
What happened to Jimmy Allan?
Jimmy was arrested in 2020 and returned to Michigan to face trial. Although his defense attorneys continued to argue in court that Amy had taken her own life, a jury wouldn’t agree.
Jimmy was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 to 45 years behind bars.
“It was a relief in one way because I felt like we finally got justice,” Amy’s mom, Jeanne, shared. “Amy finally had a voice, but on the other hand their family’s broken, our family’s broken. There are no winners here.”
