The Killing Kind (2 page)

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s the crime scene off Robinson Yelton Road, located just south of the North Carolina/South Carolina state line, filled in with investigators of all types, and yellow crime-scene investigation (CSI) tape was unspooled and wrapped around trees, the on-scene supervisor called in K-9 sergeant Randy Clinton. The theory was that the rest of the girl’s clothing could be somewhere in the woods. But even more shocking: Were there additional bodies out there waiting to be found?

Sergeant Clinton had nearly three decades on the job, the last seventeen dedicated to the YCSO’s K-9 Unit. If you were looking for a cadaver, a trail of a criminal at large, the possibility of drugs inside a house or car, the dogs were the go-to team of law enforcement for the job.

“We work on break-ins, armed robberies, anything that a person left on foot, missing persons . . . ,” Clinton said later.

The dogs have been trained to pick up a scent and follow it.

“I want you to search along the roads to see if you can find any clothes that might have been tossed out of a vehicle,” the captain told Clinton. This seemed like a logical approach. The dead teen was missing some of her clothes. If she had been raped and murdered, as many suspected, her killer might have speedily torn her clothing off and tossed it wherever the attack began. Or taken it with him and tossed it elsewhere. Finding that type of evidence could produce those three magic letters: DNA.

When Clinton met with several other investigators, one suggested walking along the roadside with the dogs. There were three additional officers on scene to assist Clinton. Together, they could cover a lot of ground.

Respectfully, Clinton didn’t like that idea. His thought was to have two cars drive along the roadside and conduct a cursory search first, in order to see if they spotted anything out in the open. The incident had likely occurred at night. Out here in these parts of the south, the night sky is a shade under “cave dark.” Out in the woods and along the dirt roads, the moon is your only light. There could be evidence left behind in plain sight, which the killer had not seen.

Those in charge agreed with Clinton.

Clinton and a colleague hopped in one vehicle and two other officers in another. Each went their separate ways along Robinson Yelton Road, north toward the state line between North and South Carolina. The small town of Clover is directly south of Gastonia, North Carolina, a mere thirty-minute, twenty-mile ride up Highway 321. These cops see lots of crimes generated by people from nearby Charlotte and other North Carolina towns across the border. Not that there aren’t the same types of crooks, dopers, and criminals in South Carolina, but this region of the state is prone to people coming down from the north and bringing their trash and trouble with them.

Clinton and his colleague took off south down Robinson toward Lloyd White Road, the 148. Both cars inched slowly along the side of the road. Officers peered out the windows, looking into the brush and gravel off on the side of the road to see if anything popped out. The thought was: Conduct a passing search by eye first and see what came of it. If they didn’t spot anything, they could double back with the dogs on foot and go deeper into the brush and woods along the roadside.

Not long after they started, Clinton and his partner came to a stop sign at Crowders Creek Road, right on the North/South Carolina border.

“Take a right,” Clinton suggested. His eyes were focused on the side of the road.

They drove for a mile and a half; Clinton thought he saw something.

“Stop.”

They were just beyond a small concrete bridge, now in Gaston County, North Carolina. Something red, with smudges of mud, was half on the edge of the roadway and half in the brush, almost in front of a striped orange-and-black road sign indicating a bridge.

Clinton got out.

“A red shirt!” the cop yelled.

Deputy Mark Whitesides, Clinton’s colleague, called it in.

Standing up at the bridge, looking down into the woods, Clinton spotted what appeared to be something sparkling in the sunshine like a disco ball. As they trekked down the hill and searched the immediate area in the woods, a short five- to six-foot embankment from where the shirt was located, Clinton saw a pair of “blue jeans with a diamond-studded belt.” The jeans and belt were farther down near the actual creek that the road had been named after.

Upon an even closer examination, the officers discovered that stuffed inside the jeans were a red bra and a pair of black panties with red stripes. The jeans had that diamond-studded black belt inserted around the loops.

When law enforcement looked at the area where the clothing was recovered—the shirt at the top of the ridge near the bridge, the jeans and bra and panties down by the creek—it appeared someone had tossed the items out of a car window while pulled over, or hurriedly flung the clothing out of a moving vehicle.

Or maybe this was where the attack occurred?

Clinton’s gut told him the person was fleeing toward North Carolina.

The items matched with the size of the woman found not too far away. They had to be related.

Neither officer touched the clothing. Instead, Clinton had forensics come out and photograph everything before they could look inside the pockets and see if there was identification.

After a meeting and several conversations regarding how they could identify the dead woman, it was decided that the most productive task the YCSO could do was issue a press release and involve the public. If the girl had been missing, and family and friends were out looking for her, they would be watching the news. Additionally, the YCSO had several pieces of clothing, along with some jewelry, that could help with that process.

On Friday, October 30, 2009, as the young woman’s body went off to the medical examiner’s office for autopsy, the YCSO issued a press release explaining how the body of a young girl found on Robinson Yelton Road was that of an
18 to 28 year old white female approximately 5’ 6” tall, weighing 150 to 160 pounds, brown hair . . . and dark eyes.
They published photographs of the clothing on the victim and the clothing located down the road, along with a necklace she was wearing. The YCSO held back the identity of several personal belongings, however, which had been found inside the pockets of the clothing. This might become important to the investigation later on.

“We haven’t determined if she was killed where the body was found,” a YCSO spokesperson said in a statement released to news outlets. “Part of the reason we need to speak to anyone who has any information is to piece together [answers to] these questions.”

An additional motive for going public and hopefully identifying the girl was to try and reach “anyone who can tell us” who she was and where she had been during the final days of her life.

“We want any information about her, period,” the YCSO spokesperson said.

Two suspicious vehicles had been spotted on the road during the time her body could have been dumped, the YCSO had learned during early interviews. One was a Ford F-150 red pickup, the sheriff’s office reported, almost pleading for someone to come forward. This vehicle had tinted windows and a flatbed liner cover. It had been seen in the area of Robinson Yelton Road between noon and one o’clock on October 27. The second vehicle was a two-tone Chevy S-10 pickup with a blue top and tan bottom, possibly a 1987 to 1990 model. That vehicle had been seen in the area on October 25 and 26, between 9:00 and 10:00
P.M.
The YCSO believed, without coming out and stating as much, that the girl’s killer was driving one of the vehicles.

S
he was sitting on top of the knee wall surrounding the carport, her tiny legs dangling, her barefoot heels kicking against the brick, waiting in anticipation for her daddy to come home. She had freckles flanking the bridge of her nose, big, sad brown eyes, and straight, shoulder-length brown hair cut Dutch-boy style. Her rosy smile displayed two missing front teeth, which the Tooth Fairy had scooped up from underneath her pillow one night recently while she slept.

“Man, she sits there every day waiting for you, doesn’t she?” his boss asked as they pulled into the driveway.

“Sure does,” Nick said. “That’s my baby. Daddy’s girl.”

Nick Catterton had never married his daughter Heather Catterton’s mother, Stella (Holland) Funderburk. Stella had a four-year-old boy she brought into the relationship she and Nick had begun in 1983. They lived in South Carolina then, just below the North Carolina border. Stella got pregnant and they had Nicole first, followed by Heather, with her perpetually cheerful outlook on life and lively demeanor.

Nick worked as a plumber on new construction sites. These were long, hard, dusty, and sweaty days. He’d leave the house at six in the morning and not return until six or seven that same night.

“We started off in South Carolina and things [were] going great,” Nick later told me. “We were a family.”

Whenever work dried up, Nick found it elsewhere. During the early 1980s, Nick packed up his family and moved down to St. Augustine, Florida, where they set up home for about five years, living a mile from the coastline. Sunday was the day Nick and Stella took the kids off to the beach for a fun family day.

“We had to cut back after Heather came along,” Nick said in his slow Southern drawl. “But theys was some really good . . .
good
times.”

As Heather grew, Nick noticed how different she was from the other kids. Heather exhibited what seemed to be an inherent love for all kinds of people, especially kids her age—seven, eight, nine, ten. At this young age, Heather was already thinking about worldly issues, like poverty and homelessness and starvation. Sure, other kids cared. But with Heather, it came from somewhere deep inside.

“She was a real kindhearted person,” Nick said of his daughter. “A real smart girl. She would have graduated high school and went on to bigger and better things.”

In a school essay, “What I Would Do to Change the World,” which Heather had written when she was eleven, she spoke of a desire to end all war, saying how she
really [didn’t] understand why there is a war.
In a profound statement for a child her age, Heather tried to reconcile the idea of how it
really hurts my heart that people are out there trying to save our lives and killing theirs.
She then went on to talk about wanting to meet some of the soldiers fighting for the “freedoms of America,” expressing how she loved them very much. Little Heather claimed she
could never be brave enough to go fight for [her] country.

While in grammar school, after the family moved from Florida to Grover, North Carolina, Heather had such a sophisticated understanding of computers and the skills to back it up that she found herself helping out in class by teaching the other kids how to use the computers.

Nick and Stella had been having problems for a lot of years and they got worse after the family had moved back to North Carolina. When they finally split, Nick took the girls and moved to Gastonia, and Stella and her son went their own way. Over the years, Nick was the first to admit, drinking became an issue for him. Either from genetics or through the course of drinking what Nick described as “a twelve-pack every day, on the weekends a case in a day” for a period of years, Nick’s heart grew weak and enlarged.

“I knew the dranking would eventually kill me,” Nick said of his drinking.

Both of Nick’s parents had died of a heart attack younger than they should have. So Nick knew the physical costs of abusing alcohol, not to mention the emotional toll it had on his family.

Heather grew tired of authority and quite bitter as she entered the junior-high environment—a rather regimented, daily grind that takes dedication and discipline on the student’s part to be successful. The peer pressure alone, along with the social ladder, was not something Heather took to. Still, she wanted the knowledge. She wanted to learn. She wanted the benefits an education could give a girl from a small Southern town.

“So she found a family that was homeschooling and she did that,” Nick explained. “And I was paying this lady, who had four or five kids, to homeschool her.”

As a thirteen-year-old, now uninterested in any type of schooling whatsoever, with her home life in a bit of chaos with Nick’s drinking and Stella gone, Heather became part of the social services system.

“She kept running away . . . always looking to come back home,” Nick explained.

Contrary to what some would later speculate, Nick said it wasn’t Stella, Heather’s mother, who turned Heather on to drugs, a path Heather chose as a teenager herself. Heather Catterton was a young, confused human being, enduring the same weaknesses with which many struggle. Albeit misguided, perhaps, she fell into the vicissitudes and ravages of the world around her.

“It was certain friends she hung around,” Nick said. “And then when she went to . . . foster homes, you know, you run across kids who do certain things and, well, it is what it is.”

It’s that innocent image of his daughter, young and full of dreams, sitting, waiting for him to come home from work, that Nick Catterton cherishes more than anything these days. Throughout the years, Nick longed for life to be stuck there, in that moment, frozen. But, of course, that’s not how things turned out. People grow and move on. Nick would learn this the hard way.

During the early part of October 2009, Nick became extremely ill. His heart was failing. It would not allow him to do what he wanted anymore. Whenever Nick had problems, he was placed in Carolinas Rehabilitation.

“I couldn’t even walk,” Nick said, “that’s how bad I was when I went in [that October].”

Heather had been in prison, serving a five-month sentence on a probation violation. During the week of October 15, Heather had been released early so she could go see her dad.

They hugged. They talked. But it wasn’t a father-daughter conversation like Nick would have later wanted as a lasting memory. He was still very ill. He told Heather to stay out of trouble, but that was something Nick had always told his kids. Funny thing, being a parent, you see your child every day, or once a week, and you never believe that it will be the last time you ever lay eyes on her.

While in rehab, Nick liked to watch the news—it was just something he did as a routine course of his day while he rested and healed.

On October 28, 2009, there was a story the local news had been working on that bothered Nick. Every time an update came on, a new piece of information unearthed, that ache every father has in his stomach reserved for his children throbbed.

Nick’s instinct was speaking to him.

The latest report said a girl had been found in a ditch. Dead. Reporters said she was between thirty and forty years old.

Nick breathed a bit easier.

Heather had not been seen by anyone in the family for quite some time. She’d gotten out of prison and had gone to see Nick in the hospital. During that third week of October, she had up and disappeared completely. She’d been gone for quite a while, eleven days at last count by anyone paying attention. This was unlike Heather, to be gone for that long without telling someone. Nick, of course, was in rehab and had not been in the loop back home, so he had no idea that Heather was even missing.

At seventeen, Heather was a minor. Her sister and mother had reported Heather missing during that last week of October. They figured she’d pop up somewhere and explain that she’d been on a bender with friends. It was sad and painful to hear, but Heather had always been truthful. She was caught up in the game, unable to break free from the terrible grip of addiction and running the streets.

On October 29, Nick sat down to watch his daily afternoon news show. He was at home now, just out of rehab. The report started with news of clothing found near the girl in the ditch.

Nick still wasn’t alarmed. He’d had it in his mind that she was between thirty and forty. There was no need to be concerned.

Still, something told Nick to pay attention. That parental instinct inside was once again speaking.

Then the report mentioned that the dead girl in the ditch had been possibly wearing toe socks.

Nick stared at the television.

His chest tightened. His face drooped.

Tears.

He asked Nicole, Heather’s sister, then Stella: “When was the last time y’all done seen Heather?”

They said almost two weeks ago now.

Nick was devastated. Those toe socks. He knew Heather loved to wear them.

I’m going to wait another day,
Nick told himself,
and call the York County Sheriff’s Office.