The Killing Kind (3 page)

O
n that day the girl’s body was found in the ditch, Detective Randy Clinton alerted forensics about the clothes and belt he had located on the side of the road by the bridge in North Carolina. Forensics had sent in a photographer and that was how the photos wound up on television. While that unfolded, Clinton turned to YCSO captain Jerry Hoffman, who had secured this new scene, and said, “I’m going back up to start searching the road.”

“That’s fine.”

Clinton walked up the small embankment and started down Crowders Creek Road, on the left-hand side, that same area where the clothing had been found. He headed north.

Fifty yards into his search, Clinton found a white tennis shoe. Investigators knew from this evidence, if it was tied to the DB—the dead body—found in the woods by the drainpipes to the south, two scenarios were possible. Either the girl’s killer was heading back into North Carolina, where he had come from, and tossed the items out the window along the way, or he was heading south from the north into the area and tossed the items out before dumping the body. Still, with either scenario, the feeling was that the crime had originated in North Carolina.

Clinton marked the shoe and had forensics photograph it before having it bagged and tagged. After a detailed search of the entire area, nothing else was found.

Once she was brought to the medical examiner’s office, it wasn’t hard for the YCSO to identify the victim in the ditch as seventeen-year-old Heather Catterton. Heather had been arrested in the past and her fingerprints were on file. When they removed Heather from the crime scene and took her to the Medical University of South Carolina’s (MUSC) Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine, the first thing the coroner did was fingerprint Heather and put her prints through the system.

A hit on Heather’s name came immediately.

An important piece of the puzzle for the YCSO was how Heather had died. That was where Sabrina Gast and her team at MUSC came into play. Gast had been the York County coroner for three years when Heather’s bruised and partially naked body was brought to MUSC. As an interesting aside, Gast had a background in forensic nursing and had worked as a sexual-assault nurse. She knew what to look for in those cases. She had even been certified as a sexual-assault nurse examiner.

Unaware of Heather’s identity at the time, Gast had been called out to the Robinson Yelton Road crime scene, where Heather had been found. She’d observed Heather’s dead body in situ, which could help now that the actual autopsy had begun.

Near 9:00
A.M.
, on October 30, the day after Heather’s body was recovered, under Dr. Gast’s direction and observation, Dr. Cynthia Schandl got to work conducting an autopsy on Heather Marie Catterton. As investigators worked diligently out in the field conducting a victimology, searching Heather’s life for clues to her death by talking to friends and family, Gast and Schandl set out to determine how Heather had died. If they could find out the “how,” the YCSO was going to be able to get closer to the “who.” It had to be determined first if Heather died accidentally, by the hand of a killer, an overdose, or other means. It was one thing to be a cop out in the field and speculate how you
thought
a victim had breathed her last; it was quite another to allow science to dictate that course.

Dr. Gast, who wrote the report for Schandl, noted that decomposition had set in on Heather’s body.
The body is cool to the touch . . . changes of decomposition complicate interpretation,
the coroner wrote.

As Dr. Schandl got to work scanning Heather’s body and making notes, she pointed out that Heather’s skin had undergone serious
changes in the color . . . that would go along with decomposition.
It’s known as “marbling”—
a pattern that forms on the skin from decomposition very early. A fairly prominent area of what we call skin slippage, where the top layer of the skin, the epithelial layer, like if you get a blister, the part that comes off, that part was slipping off
around Heather’s neck.

As autopsies go, this one was not going to be easy, mainly because the elements and insects had gotten to Heather.

It appeared from a cursory observation that Heather had been left on the side of the road for some time. The changes Gast noted in Heather’s body as decomposition set in told that story:
marbling (left leg and flank),
that spotty skin condition;
green discoloration, (inguinal, abdominal and back); serpiginous skin slippage of the left side and back, multiple additional foci of skin slippage (face, neck, abdomen, extremities), and mild distention of the abdomen.

What did all of this mean in terms of Heather’s condition and determining the cause and manner of death?

Heather’s body was deteriorating rapidly. It was a good thing they found her when they had. Another day or two out in the elements and locating any trace or physical evidence (if any had been left behind) would have been impossible. As it were, Gast noted
plenty of insect activity present with fly eggs in the hair, on the abdomen and in the inguinal [groin] region, [along with] maggots in the vaginal and oral cavity.

The first thing Dr. Schandl did after undressing her was wash Heather’s body. There was dirt and debris all over Heather.

Clearly, her body had been discarded more than dumped.

“So having done that, it was apparent that she had a number of bruises and a number of scrapes to the skin,” Schandl said later. “She had what looked like bruising to the right side of her face and the inside corner of the right eye, some scrapes to the left side of her face. She also had bruises to the thighs, to the bottom area. She had scrapes on her right side and a couple of scratches in other places.”

Heather had gained some prison weight from a recent stay and weighed 161 pounds at the time of her death. She wore it well, but it was above her normal weight. Strangely enough, Heather still wore a metal necklace, loops of silver with tiny silver balls. The photos that forensics snapped of Heather’s neck displayed the necklace, along with yellow and white and purple bruises and what looked to be ligature marks directly underneath the necklace. If she had been strangled, that act of violence did not in the least affect the integrity of the necklace.

Schandl moved in for a closer look at Heather’s neck and spent a considerable amount of time studying it.

“I had a concern that perhaps there was a violent element to her death,” Schandl later explained, “and one possibility that I did not want to overlook was that perhaps she had been strangled or smothered or something to that effect. . . .”

Heather’s pupils and cornea were cloudy and “poorly visualized,” another indication that she had been dead for some time. This observation is the same as one might hear from a chef looking for fish—if the eyes are cloudy, the fish is not fresh. Based on this observation, it was clear that had it been the middle of summer, there might not have been much left to Heather’s body.

The sclerae and conjunctivae (the white part of Heather’s eyes) showed “evidence of injury.” This type of trauma to the eyes is consistent with strangulation and/or asphyxiation. Forensic pathology 101 says that in manual strangulation, meaning one person using his hands or a ligature, the victim’s face, as in Heather’s case, is left congested and cyanotic (purplish or bluish) because the main source of blood flow to the brain has ceased.

Schandl was stuck on this. She felt the discoloration around Heather’s neck, coupled with the trauma Heather’s eyes showed, was significant.

“At this point, when I’m looking just at the outside of the neck,” Schandl clarified, “I try not to make any determinations about, you know, how much trauma is involved, but there [was] definitely discoloration, red discoloration around the neck.”

Moving on to other parts of Heather’s body, Schandl found there were no outward signs of injury to Heather’s anus or back area. It was hard for the doctor to tell if Heather had been raped because of decomposition and the presence of maggots in Heather’s vagina. It was as equally difficult to tell how many injuries Heather had sustained to her outer body, scratches, bruises, etc., because of the discoloration brought on by decomp. Still, from their experience, both Gast and Schandl were confident that after a thorough examination of Heather’s vagina and rectum, there was “no foci” or “laceration” or “hemorrhage.”

In her report, however, Gast did make a point to say that “decomposition changes” were apparent in those specific areas.

Nonetheless, Schandl took oral, rectal, and vaginal swabs, along with a saline swab of an obvious and strange pale discoloration on Heather’s left breast.

After cutting away the skin on Heather’s neck and peeling it back to examine the inner portion of her muscles, neither doctor found evidence of severe asphyxia.

Examination of the soft tissues of the neck in a layer by layer dissection,
Gast wrote,
reveals no abnormalities.
She noted that the “hyoid bone” and “larynx” were “intact” and the
underlying firm red-brown musculature is devoid of hemorrhage.

This information would not be consistent with a violent struggle to cut off Heather’s blood flow and oxygen to the brain by strangulation. In many cases, when a person strangles another, he uses more force than is needed. Here, it would almost seem as though Heather had been grabbed around the neck, yet the force was not enough to produce internal injuries.

Dissection of the throat,
doctors Dominick and Vincent DiMaio wrote in their informative book
Forensic Pathology, usually reveals hemorrhage, often extensive, into the musculature.
The authors went on to note that depending on the victim’s age, the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage, in particular, generally show signs of fracture if strangulation is the cause of death.

But that wasn’t the case here, Gast indicated.

The other possibility—considering the injuries Heather sustained to her throat, neck, and eyes—was asphyxia.

“Suffocation is the exclusion of air from the body,” Schandl later explained. “So we all need air and oxygen . . . to live.... There are a number of different ways you can achieve this, and some of them will leave traces on the body and some of them won’t.”

This was one reason why, Schandl added, when forensic pathologists study a body, they “look very closely, because sometimes the evidence can be very scant.”

If a person was suffocated to death, her body was deprived of the oxygen it required to survive. This might sound simple, but from a pathologist’s point of view in search of a cause and manner of death, it becomes important.

“Every cell in your body needs oxygen,” Schandl explained. “If it doesn’t get it and you can’t exchange the gasses—you’re . . . cells will start to die.”

For a killer using this method, however, this can take a lot of time.

From the injuries on Heather’s upper body, it would appear her killer put something over her head and deprived her body of oxygen while holding the item around her neck just tight enough to cut off her airways, but not tight enough to injure those muscles and vessels underneath the skin.

Schandl filled out a preliminary report, noting that probable cause of death “was pending.” At that moment immediately after the autopsy, the doctor wasn’t prepared to make an assumption of how the girl was murdered.

Pending means, I haven’t been able to determine cause of death definitively . . .
the doctor noted.

The doctor wanted “further law enforcement investigation” before making the determination. Medical examiners do this routinely. Schandl also sent blood and tissue samples to the lab. She wanted those toxicology reports back before she made a determination. There was nothing worse than (and no need for) a rush to judgment.

Regarding manner of death, Schandl also wrote “pending” in her report. She believed the death to be a homicide—just as law enforcement investigating the case did—but until further investigation could yield results, the doctor wasn’t comfortable making a final call. Complicating matters further, early lab tests proved Heather had high amounts of cocaine and amphetamines in her system at the time of her death.

I
t was the call no father wanted to get. His daughter, his baby, was dead. Nobody knew how. Nobody would tell Nick anything. Nick looked out his window and stared at the media trucks parked across the street. He wondered how his life had become a breaking news story he had only seen on CNN or FOX News.

Is this real? Is this my life now?

“My heart was broke,” Nick said through tears as he recalled those harrowing, gut-wrenching days after his daughter had been found in a ditch.

Heather had no reason to be in South Carolina, Nick knew. Moreover, Nick felt that if she had overdosed—which he knew to be a possibility because of the lifestyle she was leading—the police would have already told him.

Which left only a few different possibilities.

The one on Nick’s mind as he considered the days, weeks, and months ahead—and surely on the minds of the reporters camped across the street—was that a vicious murderer was stalking the streets of Gaston County, North Carolina, and quite possibly searching for his next victim.

C
onfirming what they knew already, Heather’s aunt called into the YCSO and said the family had recognized the clothing the YCSO had published in the newspapers and had shown on television.

“She’s been missing for twelve days,” the aunt told police. “She was last seen wearing a Hollister sweatshirt matching the one in the pictures.”

In fact, it was Heather’s sister Nicole’s boyfriend—a forty-seven-year-old local man, Danny Hembree—who had actually encouraged the family to report Heather missing. Family members had feared the worst. When they saw the clothing, all those nightmarish images they’d had became a reality. Heather had never been gone without communicating for that long a period of time.

Heather’s aunt was at Nick’s. He took the phone from her. As the YCSO had suspected since finding the body in its jurisdiction and Heather’s clothing in North Carolina, just over the border, Heather lived in Gastonia, an eleven-mile, twenty-minute ride from Clover, South Carolina, where Heather had been found.

Nick was obviously broken up about his daughter’s death. His phlegm-riddled, scratchy voice told that story. When he collected himself, Nick asked, “How did she die?”

“The cause of death is unknown at this time, Mr. Catterton.”

Later that afternoon, two YCSO investigators caught up to Nicole’s boyfriend, Danny Hembree, at Jacob’s Food Mart out on York Highway. Danny was the type of guy who knew the streets, knew people, and might have some information that could help. He was a career criminal. He was as good as any other resident in town to start with. In addition, Danny knew Heather and the Catterton family quite well. He had offered to be a pallbearer at Heather’s funeral. He said he wanted to help out the family any way he could. He told Nick repeatedly how sorry he was for the loss of his youngest daughter.

Nick appreciated that.

Danny had been dating Nicole for a few months and hung around Nick’s house and even stayed over some nights.

At Heather’s funeral, Danny signed the guest book. When it came time to carry Heather’s casket, however, the idea that initially seemed like a good one scared Danny enough so that he left and blew off the service completely.

“I don’t know why he did that,” Nick remembered. He assumed that Danny, same as everyone else, was broken up over Heather’s death.

Nick wasn’t paying too much attention during those early days to what was going on around him. He was in that fog of grief, struggling with heart issues. By most accounts, his daughter had been murdered and died a lonely, brutal death in a ditch in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was giving him answers.

Danny talked with investigators at the Food Mart and mentioned the last time he saw Heather, saying, “The eighteenth, near two in the morning.” He said something about partying with Heather, a girl named Sommer Heffner, and Sommer’s boyfriend. He didn’t want Nicole to find out. He admitted to having sex with Heather that same night.

“How’d the night begin?” an investigator asked.

“Nicole and me, we got into a fight. She wanted [something]. She wanted me to get it for her. I told her I wouldn’t.”

Investigators asked about the Catterton family in general.

“Look,” Danny said, “I’ve had sex with Heather, Nicole, and their mother, Stella.”

An entire family? Interesting. The guy certainly gets around.

“Had you seen Heather?” The cop meant between the time she disappeared and wound up dead.

“Lots of people been asking me about Heather.... I been asking around, you know.” Danny stubbed out a cigarette on the tar. He spoke with a terribly hard-to-understand Southern brogue, slow, drawling out his words. “I could not find anyone who done seen her.”

“Any ideas?”

Danny thought. “There was this one guy. He been looking for Heather. They call him the Marlboro Man. He drives a red Dodge. I done seen him, oh, near the seventeenth. He was looking for Heather.”

That was good information, considering the YCSO had reports of a truck with that description in the neighborhood where Heather had been found.

One of the investigators asked Danny where he had been that week.

He answered he was working; and that when he got off work, he would go to his mother’s house and eat dinner, then drive over to Nicole’s. According to him, he did this just about every day—facts that had been confirmed by Nicole and Danny’s employer, a report from the conversation with Danny stated.