Текст книги "Death Trap"

Автор книги: M. William Phelps

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

3

During the early-morning hours of February 16, 2002, somewhere near 3:30 A.M., four friends traveled down Old Mill Road in Rutledge, Georgia. They were on their way to South Carolina to attend what one of them described as a “chicken show.” In fact, inside the Toyota minivan they were traveling in were cages of chickens to bring to that show.

It was dark as motor oil out there that time of night. The men had just woken up. They were all a bit groggy still, the ruts in the dirt road bouncing them along, when one of them noticed a light. It was no common light. It had a red and orange glow to it. It came from off in the distance.

“Over there,” one of the men shouted.

The others looked.

“I know someone who owns that land, y’all. Turn around and head over there.”

There was a concern that the woods were on fire. A friend might lose acreage. Maybe even a barn. Animals. People. The closer they got, pulling onto Hawkins Academy Road, where the dark smoke and flames were centered, the more it became clear that this was not a small brush fire, but some kind of inferno. Something was burning out of control.

Pulling up to what they realized was a car engulfed in flames, the men got out of the van. As soon as they hit the outside air, they could feel the heat from the blaze push them back.

One of them was already on his cell phone calling the sheriff.

Morgan County, Georgia, deputy sheriff John Eugene Williams took the call. The man on the other end of the line reported that there was a car on fire in the woods near Hawkins Academy Road. Someone needed to get the fire department out there immediately, before the woods burned out of control. There were trees on fire already. The ground was charred and flaming. Rutledge is a suburb of Madison. It is a deeply settled region of Morgan County. Lots of trees and dirt roads and farmland.

Bucolic nothingness.

“It’s rural,” Deputy Williams later explained.

“There’s a car on fire,” the man said into his cell phone, “out here at Hawkins Academy Road. . . .”

Damn kids probably messing around again. After all, it was still Friday night, unofficially speaking. Bunch of punks probably tied a good one on and, after funneling beers half the night, got a little rowdy and decided to torch an old rusted-out junk vehicle sitting in some farmer’s pasture. Deputy Williams needed to get the local fire department out there as soon as he could and get those flames extinguished before that common car fire turned into an uncontrollable forest fire.

Then he’d have big problems on his hands. A headache the deputy surely didn’t need. Or wanted to deal with.

“Thanks,” Williams said. He was on it.

Deep in the Georgia woods, standing there humbly among the flagpole-straight American beech trees, rotting leaves from the previous fall underneath your feet, you look up in the middle of the night and realize you are a witness to the immaculate grace of God’s country: a blanket of diamonds sparkling against a perfectly black shawl of a sky that gazes back down at you. Off in the distance are the subtle, darkened silhouette outlines of mountains in the shape of a camel’s back. Rutledge, Georgia, as Deputy Williams seemed to imply, is just a blip on a GPS screen, with a population of seven hundred. The town is located approximately halfway between Atlanta and Augusta. It is a forgotten place, essentially, there to serve its people. Rutledge and Madison are quiet and nondescript wooded areas off Interstate 20 that interlopers might assume are nothing more than lost, vast wilderness. Out here, good old folks live quietly. They bother no one. Their focus is on working the same land their forefathers have had for generations past.

Yet, during the late 1990s and early into the new millennium, for some bizarre reason few could ever discern, this same area of the state became a dumping ground for the dead, especially those who had been brutally murdered. There was an elderly woman, abducted and beaten with a tree branch, left there to be found by the animals; two teenage runaways who kidnapped a newspaper girl and left her mutilated body just off the interstate; and three teens who tortured and eventually killed a runaway.

Strange happenings, indeed.

Dead bodies popping up every now and then was no reason for alarm, locals knew. And law enforcement would say the same thing when asked why this area of the state had become such a refuge for murder victims: because it was between two major American cities, and the woods were easily accessible on and off the interstate.

It was either that, or Morgan County had the ghastly luck of being a quasi-burial ground for the murdered souls of the region.

Deputy Williams rustled up his jacket. Headed quickly out the door. Hopped into his Crown Victoria. Took off.

The Morgan County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) is located on Athens Highway. That’s about twenty minutes from the fire scene. Hawkins Academy Road is in Madison, actually, a mere rock toss east of Social Circle, just north of Rutledge. Looking at the road on a map, you can easily see why one might drop off Interstate 20 and onto Route 11 (Covington Street), follow the train tracks toward Rutledge, then take that turn onto Knox Chapel Road and head toward Hard Labor Creek State Park, stopping off somewhere along the way to set fire to a vehicle. From a bird’s-eye view you can see how one might be drawn to this area; that is, of course, if burning a car or dumping a body is in your immediate plans. The area is remote and yet effortlessly reachable, both in and out. The terrain is dense and thickly wooded and settled. If you wanted to cause mischief and not be seen, this would be an ideal place to get it done and get the hell out without anyone seeing you.

“There’s very few houses on it,” Williams said later, referring to Hawkins Academy Road. “It’s fairly isolated.”

As Williams drove, dispatch confirmed the call.

A 10-code. 1070. Vehicle fire.

From the main road, Williams turned onto Hawkins Academy, a gravel road, heading toward a vast farming area. It was about 3:50 A.M.

When he arrived, Williams was pleased to see that the Rutledge Fire Department (RFD) was already on scene. Not only that, but to the deputy’s great relief, they had extinguished most of the fire. It was under control. The ground smoking and hot. Trees blackened and bare. The car hissing, casting off an unhealthy smell of burned plastic and chemicals.

Chief Jerry Couch greeted the deputy as he pulled up and got out of his vehicle.

“Anybody in that vehicle?” Williams asked.

It was hard to tell by looking at it all burned up like that, but the car was a 2001 red Pontiac Grand Am. It had turned white, this after every last bit of paint had bubbled like blisters and melted from the vehicle due to the excessive heat and flames. Parked nose-first toward what looked to be a gate to let cows or horses into the acreage, a solid thirty years of the forested carpet in a circle around the charred vehicle was burned apocalyptic-like to the ground. Everything in that same area around the vehicle had turned to nothing but ash and black soil. Those skeletonized trees were just standing there, naked and charred like kindle wood.

As Williams walked toward the scene, he could see it was now nothing more than a smoldering mess of melted plastic and metal. Most of the rubber and plastic from the vehicle was gone. Liquefied. Cars didn’t just catch fire like this and burn themselves unrecognizable. Williams was no rookie cop. He knew better. An accelerant had to be involved. Hell, you could smell some sort of fuel. A car fire will generally burn itself out without much help. But this: the entire inside and outside of the vehicle was completely destroyed, blackened and charred. Smoldering. There were no seats left. Inside and out, the vehicle was nothing more than a carcass, same as a frame at the beginning of an automaker’s line in Detroit.

Having the fire under control, and more or less settled, was one less problem Williams had to contend with on what had turned into a frosty, excessively windy February night in the South.

Williams asked again: “Anybody inside?” There was the outside chance someone had torched the vehicle and a person along with it. Everyone had seen at least one episode of The Sopranos or a Martin Scorsese film. Burning bodies was a common way to get rid of evidence.

“No,” the chief said. “Ain’t nobody in there, but it . . .”

“Good . . . ,” Williams started to say. Again, one less problem to contend with in the middle of the night.

“. . . but it looks like somebody just slaughtered some beef or had some deer meat or something in the trunk,” the fire chief finished spitting out.

“Well,” Williams said, “let’s have a look.”

Poachers? Out here? What the hell? Someone trying to steal a darn cow in the trunk of a Pontiac Grand Am? The sheriff had seen people try to get away with more stupid things throughout his career. But this would be a first.

Williams could smell burning flesh himself as he approached the back area of the Grand Am. Waves of it wafted with the wind. Overtook his senses.

Indeed. Cooked meat had a very distinctive odor. Very potent. Very gamey.

To the sheriff, there was no mistaking what it was.

He walked over to the trunk. The plastic light housings on the rear end of the vehicle were gone, melted like candle wax, sponged into the black soil below his feet. The trunk was propped open with a halogen tool, a fireman’s crowbar. The car’s license plate had fallen off, but was on the ground, still intact, upside down. That was good to see. Identifying whose vehicle it was would be easy enough.

The sheriff went in for a closer look.

The backseat of the car had burned into ash, spring coils popping up. This gave the sheriff a clear view from the inside of the trunk into the hub of the vehicle’s backseat. There was definitely something bulky and large, all burned up, inside the trunk. There looked to be a blanket, or comforter of some type, underneath.

Williams leaned in for an even closer look. He knew right away what he was dealing with now. It was not going to be an uncomplicated night, after all.

The fire chief was off—but not too far.

“These are human beings,” Williams said to the fire chief, “not an animal.”

Both men stared at the mound of charred remains before them. It was hard to make out, but the cop was right. If you focused on the bulky entanglement of what looked to be two large animals coiled up together, you could clearly see the outline of two dead human beings, and what was left of the arm of one person. Williams believed, he said later, he was looking at a male and a female, or a man and a child. He didn’t know which.

“I knew one was a male,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t tell if the other one was a female or a child. [It was] much smaller.”

Either way, Williams was looking at the remnants of a heinous crime. A double murder. The vehicle was, obviously, the cover-up.

The crime scene.

Williams needed to clear the area. With help from several fire officials, he ran yellow crime-scene tape in a circular pattern extending to about thirty-five feet in diameter around the vehicle. He warned that nothing was to be moved or removed from the scene. Nobody should touch anything. Williams said he needed to get the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) out to start investigating. They needed to sift through what were the charred remains of two badly burned bodies and find out what had happened. It appeared a double homicide had been committed.

Williams went back to his car and got on the radio.

4

Philip and Joan Bates did not find much sleep throughout the night of February 15, 2002. Alan’s parents spent long periods staring at the ceiling. Wondering. Waiting. Counting sheep. Their stomachs in knots. When was the phone going to ring? When was that news coming? Joan knew it wasn’t going to be good.

A mother’s instinct.

“I had done all I knew how to do,” Philip said later, recalling that hectic night, “and went to bed for a few hours.”

That morning Philip made coffee. The clock on the wall in the kitchen said 6:00 A.M. They had not heard from Alan since Friday afternoon. Not a word from anyone, for that matter. Philip called his son’s cell phone again, same with Terra’s. But he got the same voice message.

He put the phone down, he said later, and thought about it: Darn. Those kids are in trouble.

It was time to file a missing persons report, Philip knew. It was the only way to get law enforcement out and about, looking for Alan, Terra and the kids.

Sipping his coffee, Philip knew the first question law enforcement would ask was a question he did not have the answer to. He needed to get some information first. Be prepared. Have what they need. Don’t sound desperate. Appear organized. An engineer thinks through every contingency, every possible problem before it happens.

The worried father took out a pad. Sat down and called rental car agencies inside the Birmingham Airport terminal to see which company had rented Alan and Terra a car. Philip knew Alan always used one of the agencies from the airport. He just didn’t know which one.

So he started with Avis.

“I told them who I was, what I was trying to do, and my concern,” Philip said later.

The agent was helpful. Said he understood Philip’s dilemma. Maybe he could help. Heck, he wanted to help.

Philip asked, “Have you rented a car to my son, Alan Bates . . . and if so, could you give me the color, make, model, maybe a description of it, so I could file a missing persons report?”

Philip knew he was probably going to have to repeat this same line to several different companies until he found the one Alan had used. But what he heard on that first call, he certainly did not expect.

“Um . . . hold on a minute, sir,” the agent said. He sounded concerned. Worried. There was urgency in his young voice. “I need to get my supervisor.”

Philip was shocked by this comment. Was there a red flag in the computer system on Alan’s bill?

A manager came on the line. Philip told the same story. Then the manager made a suggestion that spiked the hair on the back of Philip’s neck. “Sir, I was told to give this number out to anyone calling here regarding that rental.”

The number was for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Philip’s heart fluttered; his stomach twisted.

“What?”

Here it was, Saturday morning, February 16, and Alan, Terra and the girls were a no-show. Philip had even called Terra’s father, Tom Klugh, a man who knew just about every move his thirty-year-old daughter made. (Terra was set to turn thirty-one in about six weeks, on March 30.) Tom had not heard from them, either. And now here was some car rental agent manager telling Philip to phone the GBI.

“That’s when I knew,” Philip said. “That was it.”

5

GBI crime scene specialist Todd Crosby was one of the first to arrive at the Hawkins Academy Road scene that morning. Crosby worked out of the GBI’s Milledgeville, Georgia, office, a sixty-minute drive south of Rutledge. He had received a call at four forty-five that morning from the GBI Communications Center and hit the road in his crime scene van shortly after.

The GBI works on a “request only” basis, supporting all law enforcement agencies in the state of Georgia. According to its mission statement: [The] GBI is an independent, statewide agency that provides assistance to the state’s criminal justice system in the areas of criminal investigations, forensic laboratory services and computerized criminal justice information.

The Bureau, as it’s sometimes called, is split up into three divisions: investigative, forensic sciences and crime information. Each works to serve the other—and the corresponding law enforcement agencies calling on the GBI for help. It is an agency that has been operating in the state of Georgia in some form or fashion since 1937.

With two severely burned bodies in the trunk of a car, there was a good chance someone was trying to cover up a set of murders. The mob did this sort of thing—although, they were generally a lot cleaner about it. If you know what you’re doing, a fire is a great way to destroy evidence. The only problem is, you had better make sure you finish the job; because with the technology available today, a forensic team is certain to uncover bags of trace evidence in support of its case if the fire doesn’t do the trick. Arson investigation is not as difficult as it may seem. Fire can sometimes preserve evidence and leave clues otherwise unavailable.

This was, of course, one of the main reasons why Todd Crosby was summoned to the scene. His job is to collect biological and fingerprint evidence. If someone left his or her DNA at the scene, or fingerprints somewhere on this vehicle, Crosby would find it with any one of his many forensic tools.

Crosby was briefed as to what was going on. The GBI Communications Center paged him and explained what it could. By 6:40 A.M., Crosby parked his van near the scene. Getting out of his vehicle, he was now among the commotion of flashing red and blue lights lined up along the road. Soon the sun would be up. Then the real work could begin.

Crosby first noticed that the original crime-scene tape was in an area too constricted and confined. It was awfully windy out, more so than it normally was on an average day. The scene needed to be expanded in case pieces of trace had drifted away with the wind. So Crosby ordered “approximately two hundred yards on either side of the vehicle” to be “roped” off. This area would be the “new crime scene.” The idea was to begin a gridlike search of the ground for anything: cigarette butts, chewing gum, footprints, a fingernail, a piece of paper. Whatever jumped out. Killers are not generally prone to pick up after themselves and leave no evidence. Sure, the murderer generally thinks he or she is smarter than the rest of the world (especially law enforcement), but the reality is that all killers leave evidence behind. Crosby’s job was to find what this killer had haphazardly left in his or her wake. That one clue. That one piece of the puzzle that might just make sense—and tie things together—in the coming days.

The wind picked up as Crosby began his duties. You get only one or maybe two shots at a crime scene before it becomes too overtaken and infested by people. “Contaminated” is the word they use. After a day, an outside scene like this wasn’t going to be worth a damn.

Around the car, as the sun rose and illuminated the immediate area, pine trees were scattered, stuck perfectly in the ground like immense green arrows pointing toward the sky. There was not a house in sight anyone could see. As Crosby conducted his search, he photographed things. The initial area the technician focused on, which Crosby knew to be the most important, was the inside of the trunk, where both bodies had been uncovered. From the inside of the vehicle, looking toward the backseat, he noted it was an area of the vehicle that had been burned completely. So much so, Crosby could see into the trunk from inside the car.

As he glanced into the vehicle, a set of knees stared eerily back at him.

“Her legs,” Crosby said later, “were bent back around, behind her. . . .”

It was a woman. She was small. Very petite. Moreover, it was easy to tell—and this would become an important factor as the case progressed—that the victim closest to the backseat of the car had been placed in the trunk first.

Were they dead before being placed inside the trunk? Chances were the victims had been murdered by some other means—the fire had not killed them—at a second location. Which meant there were likely two crime scenes involved.

In front of the female victim, closest to the back end of the vehicle, Crosby photographed and studied the second victim’s feet and legs. Both were somewhat visible if you stood over the trunk and looked directly down. This victim was a man. They could tell by the size of his left arm, which had been burned entirely away from his fingertips, up to about his elbow. His bone, near the bicep area, was visible.

Crosby took scores of photos. Flashes of light—pop, pop, pop—paparazzi-like, one after the other. Crosby studied how the bodies were placed and how they might have been put inside the trunk.

“His legs,” Crosby noted, talking about the second victim, “come up and then bend back around the thigh area . . . the right side of the body.”

Crosby noticed that both of the victims’ arms and legs were discernible if you looked closely. The same was true with regard to other parts of their bodies. The back of the male’s calves were, in the same way as the female’s, bent flush against the back side of his thighs. These people were definitely, Crosby was now certain, crunched up together and then placed into the trunk—another indication that they were killed beforehand at a second location.

As Crosby searched the trunk, another GBI technician combing the scene noticed something. There was a comforter underneath the bodies that hadn’t been completely consumed by the fire.

They definitely needed that.

Hairs. Fibers. DNA.

Slowly, with the help of several additional investigators, including Susan Simmons, the deputy coroner of Morgan County, Crosby removed the body of the male and carefully placed him in a waiting body bag.

On the male victim’s left hand was a wedding band. Crosby photographed it before the body was zipped away in the bag. As he did this, Crosby noticed what appeared to be a bullet wound on the man’s wrist.

Interesting.

The male victim had possibly held up his hands to block an oncoming bullet, perhaps instinctively protecting himself. Maybe there was a bullet fragment somewhere?

Looking at the female victim next, Crosby noticed what he called “defects in the body,” eventually finding out that they were also “bullet holes.” The female victim had a wound in her lower back.

The comforter was now clearly visible.

When both bodies were placed in body bags, they were taken to the GBI Crime Lab for further study and autopsy.

Not too far away from the vehicle, one of the many crime scene specialists who had shown up at the scene found something else. It was a sheet of paper towel with the imprint pattern of a little boy and little girl. The corner of the paper towel was burned, but a majority of it was still intact.

A GBI agent bagged it.

Upon further investigation, GBI investigators found what looked to be an engagement ring inside the trunk, but the diamond was gone. It was underneath where the female victim’s body was placed. There were all sorts of debris in the trunk. Then two duffel bags were located: one contained partially burned clothes; the other—on a quick glance—was full of what looked to be court documents.

The theory was that the murderers had probably hoped these duffel bags would be incinerated with the rest of the evidence.

No such luck.

There was a particular reason these two people were murdered. That was clear from the evidence at this early stage. Any cop worth his yearly salary knew that finding that reason would lead to a suspect.

Connect the dots. Despite what Law & Order and CSI portrayed on television, some investigators still viewed police work in that same simple, gumshoe manner. One piece of evidence leads to the next.

Baby steps.

As Crosby finished his work at the scene, investigators from the GBI and the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office walked the scene looking for additional trace. At one point Crosby located and photographed a .44 Magnum Remington shell casing someone uncovered about ten to fifteen feet from the rear of the vehicle.

It was an odd find. A .44 would have blown the male victim’s wrist off, not put a hole in it. Two weapons? Two different guns used in the same crime?

Another anomaly.

When he finished, Crosby was whisked up in the air by helicopter. This gave him the opportunity to take scores of aerial photographs before heading back to the GBI Crime Lab.

As investigators continued searching the scene, someone found a spent projectile that was mushroomed over on the top inside the trunk.

An important piece of the puzzle.

Not long after that, someone located a cigarette butt, a Marlboro Light.

Things were coming together rather expeditiously.