The Killing Kind (5 page)

S
isters Randi and Shellie hung out with the same group of friends while in high school. Being so close in age, they did just about everything together. High school, however, changes kids—more choices to make, more temptations. Teenagers begin to think as though they’re adults. It’s nature. It’s all part of growing up.

“Randi was never one to get out there and start trouble with people,” Shellie said. “It just wasn’t in her. But, look, if someone brought trouble her way, she was not going to back down. She would stand her ground. Still, Randi was brought up in a godly way. She had more sympathy for people than anger or animosity. She never really wanted to be ugly to anyone.”

While in high school, Randi got pregnant.

“And after she had Brendon (pseudonym), these people, that crowd, started coming around and causing problems for her and her boyfriend, and it wasn’t gonna work out.”

Sometime after giving birth to Brendon, Randi stopped by to see Shellie.

“I want to go to Michigan,” Randi explained. She was looking for approval from Shellie—the okay. They had family up north.

Randi wanted to get away from Gastonia and take some time in another place, a location away from all the drama and bedlam of her life. The last few years of high school had been rough. It started out slowly, but after falling in with a certain group, getting pregnant, and then beginning to dabble in the drug culture, Randi needed a break.

“Do you think it’d be okay if I took Brendon with me?” Randi asked Shellie.

“Of course, honey. He’s your son.”

Randi left.

When she got out there, Randi found out that the father of her child and his family weren’t happy about it. To them, it seemed Randi had run off with the kid. To add to Randi’s problems, she had been in some trouble with the law for fighting. She’d had a court date she skipped out on.

All of that worked against her.

Randi was picked up and the child went to the father’s family. In jail, Randi couldn’t do much about it.

According to Shellie, this was a turning point: “They took him and wouldn’t allow Randi to see her own child.”

As Randi emerged from jail, she’d hit a dark, bottomless pit without any boundaries or safety nets. Randi hadn’t been on any type of hard drugs then. It was only after the father of the child took Randi’s firstborn away that things went south. She fell into a depression that drugs deceivingly lifted her out from under.

“She felt like she had lost
everything,
” Shellie told me.

The drugs Randi took numbed the pain of losing her child. She could forget about life for a while.

Shellie tried as best she could to rescue Randi, but what can a sibling do for a sister who has basically given up?

In Shellie’s case, only pray.

The family allowed Shellie to pick up the child. When she did, Shellie brought the child to see his mother. Randi, Shellie said, was never high when Shellie brought the boy around. Randi knew better and would never allow her problems to infiltrate the life of her son.

“Losing that child like that, it broke her,” Shellie recalled. “To Randi, she had already lost her life.”

Randi worked as a power washer for the big rigs, eighteen-wheelers. That’s hard work. It wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t as if Randi had fallen into a deep drug addiction and lived on the street. She was deadening the pain and escaping her problems, holding down a job as best she could.

“You have to understand,” Shellie clarified, “as a family, we never knew that Randi was doing these drugs. She had so much respect for us that she never came over here or came to see any of us when she was on drugs. She never asked us for money.”

They would wonder, of course, but Randi was an adult. She did what she wanted to do, suffered, and dealt with the consequences. Family would help, but Randi had to make the first move.

With Randi hiding her drug use, it made it easy for her family not to see the full grip the drugs had on Randi until later.

Then she had two more kids. One of the fathers, according to Shellie, liked to drink, and Randi found that alcohol served the same purpose for numbing the pain as drugs. Randi fell into drinking.

Life with the new man took an even faster downward spiral for Randi. She knew the relationship wasn’t going to work.

“I don’t love him,” Randi told Shellie one day. She didn’t feel anything for the man. They had drinking and arguing in common, but not much else. “I don’t want to be with him.”

“You don’t have to stay with him, Randi,” Shellie said, comforting her.

“I’m afraid he’ll take the children away from me.”

There was that pain from the past coming back to hold Randi down. Randi felt trapped. If she left, she’d be in a battle for her kids.

Shellie pressed Randi about what was wrong. Why was she so upset? Crying on her birthday?

Randi relented. It was the child Shellie had taken care of since he was two years old. Randi was feeling as though she’d abandoned him and he would never know she was the birth mother.

“Do me a favor,” Randi said through tears.

“Sure, honey, what is it?”

“Make sure he knows I’m his mother one day. Please do that for me?”

Where had this come from? Why was Randi feeling as though she was not going to be around to tell him herself? Confused, Shellie asked Randi why she felt this way. They had always agreed that at the appropriate time, Randi would sit the boy down and explain it herself.

“It was so odd,” Shellie later said. “I just found this statement to be very odd. Because Randi knew that when the time was right, she was going to tell the child herself.”

Staring at her sister, Shellie thought something terrible was going on and she didn’t know about it. Something Randi wasn’t sharing. The way Randi cried and carried on about telling the child who his mother was made Shellie wonder what Randi had gotten herself mixed up in.

“What is it, Randi?” Shellie asked.

“Please, please do me this favor and just make sure he knows I’m his mother.”

“Of course, of course, Randi, when the time is right. But why not tell him yourself?”

“I just want to make sure that he is going to know.”

“Yes, Randi, he is going to know.”

As the night wore on, Randi made a point to tell her mother how much she loved her. The way she sounded, it was as if Randi was saying good-bye.

For good.

They stayed a while longer and Shellie drove Randi home.

“I love you, Shell,” Randi said before getting out of the car. Randi was still feeling that talk back at her mother’s house. She seemed so sad.

“I love you, too, Randi. More than you’ll
ever
know.”

They said their good-byes and made plans to stay in touch by phone and hook up for dinner soon.

K
atherine “Kat” Sturgell spent the morning of November 15 with her sister-in-law, Linda Franks. It had been a fairly mild start to the day, about 62 degrees Fahrenheit, no wind, some bright sun (for that time of year) poking through the opaque clouds. Kat and Linda were riding down Apple Road, inside the limits of Kings Mountain State Park in Blacksburg, just south of the Gaston County, North Carolina, border. This is a massive state park encompassing some twenty-plus miles of hiking trails, along with 115 campsites.

Kat and Linda were trotting down Apple Road on horseback, lost in the beauty of what is fifteen miles of park equestrian trails. Earlier, Kat and Linda had ridden the trails with Kat’s husband and niece, both of whom had gone back home by late morning, early afternoon. Now it was Kat and Linda out on the trails alone.

As they were trekking up Apple Road, Kat saw something that didn’t seem so strange at first glance, especially inside a state park.

“Look,” Kat said as she passed the area before Linda, pulled back, slowed her horse, turned around, and went to check it out more closely.

On the ground between the woods and the road, there was a large burn spot between some leaves and a downed tree. It was easy to see from Kat’s vantage point of being high on her horse: a black patch of what looked to be terribly charred leaves or pine needles by a tree, with something strange-looking inside the ring of ashes.

Kat got down off her horse and approached the area. Something didn’t feel right all of a sudden. One of the worst things for a state park is to have an abandoned fire pit, smoldering. One gust of wind and it could swallow up the whole park within a few days.

Linda was just coming up behind Kat. She stayed on her horse as Linda approached the scene.

“What’s up?” Linda asked.

“I don’t know. It’s a burn spot in the ground. Looks like somebody tried setting the woods on fire,” Kat said, walking closer.

Kat tied off her horse and approached the burn. She stood by what she described as “the foot” of the patch of scorched ground, just a bit larger than the size of a human being. There was something inside the ring of char, faceup, although the face was blackened and perhaps melted completely off. There was also what looked to be a human arm sticking up in the air, stiffened with some type of black soot melted onto it. The entire “thing” was draped over a rotted log. There was some type of blanket or tarp melted onto the thing itself.

Kat thought she was staring at a mannequin. Clearly, she could now make out that the
thing
was in the shape of a human being, with several sections of what appeared to be unburned skin exposed. The vaginal area was visible and unburned. One breast was exposed. A leg was burned at the foot and thigh. The entire neck and shoulders and head were charred and red, some melted completely. It wasn’t clear if the mannequin’s clothing made the blackened, melted mess all over it, or it was from the mannequin’s plastic flesh, but it had definitely been wrapped in a blanket at some point.

Kat never mentioned seeing this, but the feet of the “mannequin” were bound with some type of copper wire or cord, the plastic outer coat burned away.

“Someone set a mannequin on fire,” Kat yelled up to Linda. “That’s what it looks like.”

To be sure, Kat walked up to the torso section of the mannequin—which was red and burned, but still very much intact. Then she touched it.

“I wanted to make sure. . . .”

She poked at it like rising dough.

And that was when Kat knew right away that it wasn’t a mannequin, after all.

“Call 911!” Kat yelled.

“What?” Linda said.

“It’s a body.”

When she touched it, Kat was certain it was a real woman because, she later said, “it felt like human flesh.”

C
aptain of the YCSO Detective Division (DD), Jerry Hoffman, along with several officers, raced toward a SWAT call when dispatch radioed to tell Hoffman that the emergency situation had been resolved.

This was a good thing. Anytime cops disengaged from what could be a volatile and potentially violent scene, there is a fleeting moment of celebration.

A moment later, however, dispatch called back, indicating the celebration on this day would be short-lived.

“Go ahead . . . ,” Hoffman said.

“There’s a body been found out on Apple Road.”

Hoffman hit his lights and headed toward the park, arriving at 12:25
P.M.
, just over ten minutes after the 911call from Linda and Kat had been made.

There were two patrol officers on scene when Hoffman pulled up. The first thing that struck the investigator as he drove up to the scene was how secluded the area was where the body had been found.

“This is a very rural area,” Hoffman said. “There is only one residence on it that I know of. It runs through the state park, and the area . . . It’s a pretty isolated area. . . .”

In other words, a good place to burn and dispose of a body.

As Hoffman got out of his vehicle and walked up to the body, one of his officers said, “I think it might be a mannequin, Captain.”

“Like somebody pulling a prank or something?”

“Yeah.”

The scene had a surreal vibe to it. The body, if one didn’t know any better, seemed as though it could be a mannequin. Kat had thought so.

Hoffman approached the body, getting himself close enough, he said, “to see, like, a ridge detail on the bottom of the foot.”

Staring at it, Hoffman knew then that “it was, indeed, a person.”

Mannequins don’t have that type of feature.

The captain told his officers to get some crime scene tape up around the area and watch it closely. He didn’t want anyone unassociated with the investigation to enter the scene and possibly contaminate it. Just because a body had been burned, it did not mean there wasn’t trace evidence and possibly DNA left behind.

Hoffman noted that whoever placed the woman here had bound her legs together with some type of wire or cord. To Hoffman, this meant they were looking at the potential cover-up of a violent murder.

When members of the DD realized they had a second body found in a wooded area within a few weeks’ time, alarm bells went off that they might be looking at a serial killer working in the area. Here were two dead females; each was found under similar circumstances, about ten miles apart (depending on which way you drove); both areas were just below the North Carolina border; both victims obviously were murdered in one location and dumped in a second.

Not to mention, with a second female having been burned the way she had, did this indicate that perhaps her killer, after realizing his first body had been found so easily in that culvert, had now figured out that he might want to try and get rid of his victims from this point on?

O
n Monday, November 16, Shellie Nations was at home, keeping herself busy doing what housewives and mothers do. She had been thinking about the last time she saw Randi on Randi’s birthday and how sad Randi had seemed. Some weeks had gone by. They’d spoken on the phone a few times and made plans to see each other, but life had gotten in the way and priorities kept them apart. What Shellie didn’t know—and how could she?—was that Randi’s life had been on a fast-moving, downward trajectory over the course of the past few months.

Randi had been living with a boyfriend, Tim Gause, in a house they had emptied out because it was being foreclosed on. She had been running with some of the same people Heather Catterton had. The sting of drug addiction for Randi had become infected. She had been doing things that, had it not been for the drugs, she would not have ever thought of attempting. Randi essentially had become the type of person she had once helped out. Tragically, she managed to keep it all hidden from those in her life who could have helped her.

What was she thinking?
Shellie thought as an item on the nightly news caught her attention. Shellie had just sat down, happy to be off her feet for the first time that day, when the newscaster reported another body had been found in York County, South Carolina, just below the North Carolina border.

When Shellie heard of possible ties to Gastonia, she paid attention.

The YCSO had released a photograph of a tattoo found on the woman’s body—one of only a few sections that had not been burned or charred beyond the recognizable beauty and ceramic-like texture of the woman’s skin. What greatly worried investigators was how the woman’s killer had wrapped her in a blanket and bound her legs with what they now knew to be a piece of cut electrical cord. This was not some sort of overdose or accidental death being covered up by a group of dopers, a gallon of gas and a stupid idea. That deduction was clear from the evidence thus far.

“York County was greatly concerned,” said one North Carolina law enforcement official, “that they had a serial killer on their hands and he would soon strike again. And when they discovered that both victims lived in Gastonia, that was when they called on the Gaston County Police [Department] for help.”

Shellie was listening to every word spoken by the newscaster, who was reporting from as close to the Kings Mountain State Park crime scene as cops would allow. In the background, as the reporter told a familiar tale, you could see the yellow crime-scene tape flapping in the wind, marking off the area. A black char mark on the ground was visible in the distance.

Then the news showed a photograph of the tattoo. Investigators were hoping the victim’s family would recognize it and call in.

That tattoo looks very familiar,
Shellie thought, staring at the television. The YCSO had released a partial photo, actually: just the green leaf section of what had been a red flower.

Shellie called out for her husband.

“Yeah?” he responded, walking into the living room.

“I really want you to watch the news. This tattoo they’re showing really looks familiar to me.”

It was 5:30
P.M.
As each moment passed, Shellie was beginning to worry more.

“We need to go find Randi
right
now,” she told her husband. Shellie wanted Randi in front of her, so she could see her and hug her and know—without a doubt—that this was all just a terrible coincidence. She wanted to convince herself that the way she felt was how several other people watching might be feeling, staring at the same tattoo.

“Sure, Shell. Let’s go.”

Shellie and her husband searched all the places she knew Randi either hung out or had spent time at. Randi had been so mobile over the past few months that it was hard to track her down to any one spot.

“We could not find her,” Shellie recalled.

Shellie and her husband returned home near midnight. As the time passed, Shellie went through a roller coaster of emotions.

“My mind was telling me she was all right,” Shellie said. “But my heart was telling me something different.”

Shellie’s and Randi’s mother had severe heart problems. She’d been struggling with those issues for many years. Shellie didn’t want to concern her mother, but she did want to tell her what was going on.

It was the tattoo. Shellie kept seeing it in her mind.

That . . .
coincidence.

“Listen, Mom,” Shellie told her mother that night, “they found a girl over at the [park], and I cannot find Randi.” Shellie’s voice told her mother how concerned she was that her sister was not around and she hadn’t heard from her.

“Oh, Shellie, she’s all right,” her mother said. “You worry too much.”

Shellie stood with the phone in her hand. She felt a “pit,” as she described it later, in the middle of her stomach. “And I knew,” Shellie said later, “that it was
not
all right.”