Another good example of why Cherry was not equipped to watch Timmy was Cherry’s choice in films to watch with him. More than any other type of film, Cherry favored scary movies, the hard-core stuff, such as her all-time favorites, Saw and Hostel. Some other titles she owned and liked to watch, over and over: Dark Floors, Alive or Dead, Séance, Rancid, Panic Room, Guys Gone Wild, Table Dance and so on. There was not one in the bunch that would have been appropriate for a four-year-old. A boy Timmy’s age did not need to see this type of violence and bloodshed, rape and murder, sex and nudity. He could not discern fact from fiction, real from fake. The images would embed themselves into his developing psyche, which at that age was eager to absorb all that was around him. Watching these movies could have a detrimental, negative effect on the boy later in life. Cherry did not realize any of this, and Wheeler would find them on the couch or floor, watching some unsuitable movie together.
Timmy’s stays with Cherry ended in late March, according to Wheeler’s later testimony and notes. Just like that, he stopped coming, and Cherry did not hear from Kim for several weeks. There was an indication that Kim had an episode of some sort with one of her other children—which ultimately led to the court date in which she was fighting for custody—and Cherry might have heard about this from Timmy.
Wheeler showed up one morning in mid-May. Cherry “seemed” happier than usual. The aide asked Cherry what was going on. Why the bouncy mood and the big smile on her face?
“Timmy’s coming over today,” Cherry answered. She had missed him. She was excited.
That one visit sparked a new wave. A week later, Timmy was back—and staying over. Cherry was ironing his clothes, feeding him, bathing him. Kim was disappearing without word of where she had gone, or for how long. She failed to call when she said she would. She didn’t show up on the days or times she had promised.
Little did Cherry know how serious it was. However, there was a second narrative playing out on Kim’s end that Wheeler soon became aware of. At first, Cherry had not shared any of it. But then she broke down one day and explained.
On May 20, 2010, when Kim dropped Timmy off, she told Cherry, “You do not open the door for anyone that knocks, you understand me, Cherry?”
“Yes,” Cherry promised.
“There’s a bad man who lives in this apartment complex,” Kim explained, as though talking to one of her own kids.
Kim said this bad man was out to get Timmy and Cherry. She scared Cherry into submission.
“Yes, Kim,” Cherry said.
“And, most important, Cherry, do not open the door for the police, okay?”
Cherry said she understood.
It was easy, later on, to see that Kim had played off Cherry’s horror film fixation, using the term “bad man,” as if Cherry had somehow gotten mixed up in the plot of one of the movies she liked so much.
Detective James Riggle and Paula Wheeler did not yet know several secrets Kim Cargill was keeping from Cherry and, by mere involvement, Wheeler.
Kim Cargill did not even have custody of Timmy when she had been dropping him off at Cherry’s. DFPS had stepped in back during that period when Kim stopped bringing Timmy to Cherry’s. On May 20, Kim had picked Timmy up at day care, violating a DFPS agreement, and was hiding the boy at Cherry’s—without Cherry having any idea what she was getting herself wrapped up in. Kim knew that she could easily manipulate and use Cherry, and that was what she did. Kim’s reason for not wanting Cherry to testify in the family court matter wasn’t based on Cherry being mentally handicapped and ill-equipped to watch the boy. She knew Cherry’s testimony would focus on all the dates Timmy had stayed over her apartment, proving that Kim had been, in effect, kidnapping her own child.
Additionally, there was a relationship between Kim and Cherry that went deeper than Cherry babysitting Kim’s son. Cherry explained to Wheeler, alluding to that “bad man” comment Kim had made.
On June 3, 2010, two weeks before Cherry went missing, Wheeler arrived to find Timmy watching cartoons, Cherry ironing his clothes. Nothing had changed.
It had to stop, Wheeler knew. As Cherry’s caretaker, she went to her supervisor and reported everything.
Detective Riggle knew after learning all of this that he needed to look deeply into the relationship between Kim Cargill and Cherry Walker. Was there a motive for murder there? Perhaps all that Cherry knew about Kim and could testify to was enough to make Kim capable of murder. But the SCSO was a long way from serving an arrest warrant up with Kim Cargill’s name on it. After all, the medical examiner had not even weighed in yet regarding whether Cherry had been murdered or had died of natural causes. The fact that someone had lit her corpse on fire did not mean she had been murdered. That one fact alone could be an investigatory black hole. If the SCSO fell into it without evidence to support its claims, it could destroy a future case against any suspect they hauled in.
13
DR. MEREDITH LANN WAS IN charge of determining how Cherry Walker died. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Lann completed her graduate work at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences (SWIFS). This was the same facility where she now conducted as many as five to seven autopsies per day with colleagues in Smith County’s crack team of medical examiners. Board certified, Dr. Lann was qualified in clinical pathology and forensic pathology.
Studying Cherry Walker’s charred, burned and blistered body to make a determination of manner and cause of death was going to be a difficult job. Medical examiners such as Dr. Lann, however, were highly trained in this arena. Where manner of death was concerned, Dr. Lann had five choices: natural, suicide, accidental, undetermined and homicide.
“Cause of death,” Lann later explained, “specifically is a physiologic abnormality, something that sets into motion a series of events, which eventually terminates in the death of a person, without any intervening factors.”
Manner and cause of death can be obvious: a gunshot wound to the head, a knife to the heart, a jump from a building. Or it can be a long process of connecting the medical and investigatory dots to draw an educated conclusion backed up by science and interviews with witnesses. Many times medical examiners will rely not only on their findings during autopsy, but on police reports, suspect and witness statements, along with what the overall picture—all of the information collected—showed. SWIFS had its own team of medical examiner investigators that helped with those hard-to-figure-out cases. In some deaths it, indeed, took a village.
In her office, before receiving Cherry’s body inside the morgue, Lann reviewed Cherry’s chart and file, learning everything she could about how Cherry had been found, where, by whom, the conditions and elements, the evidence collected at the scene and so on. It gave her a solid primer for what she would see in the autopsy suite. Well versed, she entered the suite and began her work under the slow hum and heat of the overhead fluorescent lights. As she conducted an initial, cursory inspection of Cherry Walker’s body, a less frequently used phrase came to mind: “Mechanism of death.” This clinical way of explaining the means by which a person had expired became important almost immediately.
“‘Mechanism’ is a little bit more medical,” Lann said. It is a term that “we use as doctors” essentially describing “how a person died.” Fundamentally, “mechanism of death” is a “variable” on cause of death. “For example, ‘exsanguination,’” Lann added, using an uncommon word that means “loss of blood,” much as “asphyxia” means “loss of oxygen to the tissues, the vital organs.”
“There are other mechanisms [that] create a broad picture of how that person died, like a gunshot wound being a cause of death usually leads to exsanguination.”
Unzipping the body bag Cherry Walker had been delivered in, Lann noted a red tag tied to her toe, which meant she had not been “officially” identified as of yet. Lann and her assistant took photos of Cherry’s body as it lay on the table, being sure to document every step along the path to finding out what had happened to
her. This part of the receiving procedure is a good opportunity to look for hairs, trace evidence or other debris, carpet fibers and anything else that might be a candidate for future forensic testing.
With the bag open the intense smell of burned flesh became overpowering.
Lann carefully cut off Cherry’s clothing—or what was left of it from the fire. Her skin was split open in some sections and Lann described those injuries as “thermal burns”—which look a lot like a hot dog on a grill, the skin tightening up and tearing open. As the surface of the skin burns, the skin desiccates (dries out); because of that, it stretches and splits. It was so prevalent on some sections of Cherry’s body, the splitting looked like slash marks, as if someone had cut Cherry open. At this stage of the investigation everything and anything was possible, so Lann had to rule those types of wounds in or out. After all, Cherry’s body had been set afire for a reason—and that reason was to cover up something her killer did not want law enforcement to learn.
Upon further examination Lann could tell that the “slits” were surface wounds and there had been no hemorrhage or bleeding underneath, as would be the case if they were cuts or slashes. Lann’s opinion was that all of the splitting on Cherry’s skin was due to thermal burns.
This was, in a sense, good news. It meant one less avenue investigators needed to consider going down.
Every move on Lann’s part was scripted, a practiced and dignified ceremony of respect for the dead that Lann’s profession took on with deference and integrity whenever a human being arrived in a morgue for autopsy. Lann understood her word was not final, as per the protocol that was important to the overall veracity of the autopsy. Jeffrey Barnard, the chief medical examiner, and Joni McClain, the deputy chief medical examiner, along with every one of SWIFS’s nine additional pathologists, would have to sign off on Lann’s work. Each autopsy was scrutinized to the fullest extent by the entire staff. Doctors at SWIFS took their jobs seriously. A medical examiner needed to come to the right conclusions the first time around. Exhuming bodies—weeks, months, even years later—was not what medical examiners liked to do. It meant they had missed something.
The medical examiner’s “field agents” make phone calls, speak with family members and wage war on the “front lines” of any investigation into a suspicious death, looking to gather all the information they can for the medical examiner and later a prosecution, if there is to be one. Cherry Walker’s death scene and the condition of her body certainly suggested a homicidal death. But there were far too many questions at this point to say that yes, Cherry Walker was murdered.
Another doctor at SWIFS “positively identified” Cherry Walker through dental records, just as Lann was preparing to start her autopsy, allowing her to strip Cherry’s toe of that red tag. At last the victim had an identity. She was Cherry Walker, thirty-nine, not just a DB with a number attached to her toe.
Cherry’s medical records would play an important role in Lann’s autopsy. The doctor received a file from one of Cherry’s physicians that provided all of the pertinent information Lann might need in figuring out manner and cause of death. The most telling fact Lann learned was that Cherry had been, according to her medical records, “mentally retarded.” Also of note was that Cherry had suffered from seizures. Lann learned how one doctor noted that on January 22 and February 4, 2003, Cherry had two seizures. But then on September 1, 2004, the same doctor reported: She’s not had any seizures since I saw her for one, and this was when she was placed on Wellbutrin. (Wellbutrin is an antidepressant—with the common side effect being seizures.) In June 2006, some three years later, another doctor noted that Cherry had not had any seizures since 2003. And in 2007, her doctor reported: I’ve been following her for seizures. She’s not had one in quite a while. Perhaps when she stopped taking Wellbutrin, the seizures went away. By April 2010, a few months before Cherry was found dead, she had reported to her doctors that she had not had any seizures in a long period, but she had been experiencing “tremors.”
Lann considered this information to be vitally important within her final analysis—especially the “tremors,” which Lann later attributed to “shaking of some sort of the body,” a condition Paula Wheeler had noted on several occasions in her reports. What seemed even more relevant to Cherry’s case as Lann studied her history was that on April 24, 2010, the last time Cherry had seen this particular doctor, she had not reported seizures in years and had even denied having “transient paralysis, weakness.” She had not been faint, had no vertigo, no memory problems, no clumsiness: [No] shift in gait, no poor balance, no poor coordination, no trouble walking, no concentration difficulty, confusion or drooling. These were all potential symptoms that could be experienced by mentally retarded patients suffering from seizures and other more serious conditions. Apparently, though, from all reported accounts Lann had at her disposal, Cherry had gotten her condition under control with medication. This was incredibly important: ruling out the idea that Cherry might have died from a seizure.
* * *
One of the first tasks Lann did during the autopsy was to take X-rays of Cherry’s entire body to see if it contained any gunshot wounds or bullets. This, again, was a vital part of the body inspection, based in part on the supposition that Cherry’s body had been set on fire for a specific reason: to cover up a crime.
Lann reported that Cherry’s body was in the “early stages of decomposition,” and had not been out in the elements long, maybe overnight at the most. Equally important to those in law enforcement waiting for the results of this autopsy, Lann confidently concluded that Cherry had died as result of “homicidal violence.” The means by which she had been murdered, however, remained elusive as Lann conducted a more complete autopsy.
After opening Cherry up with a scalpel and studying her organs, tissue and muscle, Dr. Lann encountered a few not-so-specific “findings.” This intrusive but crucial procedure indicated that someone much stronger than Cherry had killed her in a horrific, violent, personal way. One possible means of death was asphyxiation. During Lann’s autopsy, she found: [Cherry Walker] might have had a compression to the neck or some sort of portion of her body, which allowed for . . . small capillaries in her eyelids and eye lining . . . which covered her eyes called the conjunctiva [to have] small hemorrhages in them. It wasn’t a slam dunk for Lann, but she added, When I see those little hemorrhages or bleeds in the membrane, I wonder.
The caveat was that these same type of asphyxialike injuries in the eyes can also occur “in the process of decomposition” or “breakdown of tissue” and “with positioning of the body”—so one had to be careful before jumping to any conclusion that the person had been asphyxiated.
Lann ruled Cherry Walker’s manner of death as homicide and cause of death as homicidal violence through a means that, at the time of autopsy, would have to be considered “unknown.” The coroner walked a thin line here, because Cherry suffered from seizures on occasion, sometimes intense ones. Still, as Lann read through Cherry’s medical history: What etiology or what caused these seizures is unknown. No one could say, in other words, what had caused Cherry to have seizures.
Trumping any of the latent, speculative opinions regarding Cherry and her seizures that would come up later, indicating a potentially new and overlooked cause of death, was the fact that Cherry’s body had been burned. This one fact said a lot about the likeliness of a seizure being responsible for her death. In Dr. Lann’s extensive experience as a medical examiner, she knew that people generally burned bodies to hide identities and other evidence that would point in the direction of a killer. On top of that, Lann took into account that Cherry’s body had been dumped in a field a distance from where she had lived, as well as her being a mentally challenged woman.
Whoever had burned Cherry’s body made sure to pour the accelerant all over Cherry’s neck, making examination of this area almost impossible.
Someone had murdered Cherry—Dr. Lann was certain of it. There was no possible way she
could have had a seizure, fallen into that field and caught on fire by herself. It sounded ridiculous, of course, but Lann and her colleagues knew that once a suspect was identified for this crime, all scenarios would have to be considered and ruled out with evidence—if the case was to go anywhere.
Lann went through several scenarios that could have led to Cherry ending up in that field, set on fire. One included the possibility that Cherry could have had a seizure and died while riding around with someone, and then that person tossed her body in the field and lit it on fire to hide her identity—this might have been someone who was scared and did not know what to do. This seemed possible, if only in theory. Yet, for this medical examiner, based on what she found during the autopsy, it did not seem at all probable or even reasonable.
Why?
The most telling piece of evidence against this scenario was the evidence that Cherry Walker was probably strangled to death. That alone told Lann this was a case of premeditated murder with a potential cover-up.
An additional potential scenario of Cherry going for a walk and having a seizure and falling over and dying in that field off CR 2191 was struck down by common sense. For it to be true, it would have to mean that someone had come along afterward, found Cherry’s body, then set it on fire for no other reason than to watch her burn. That wasn’t likely. On top of that, there were no other footprints around the immediate area of Cherry’s body. Just tire tracks.
Equally important, before arriving at the dirt section of the field—that heavy clay—where Cherry’s body had been found, you would have to pass over a gravel road. If someone had taken Cherry in a car or truck and dumped her, they’d had to travel on the same gravel road. What Lann found interesting as she studied Cherry’s body was that Cherry had “very irregular, haphazard scratches” on her forehead “that were somewhat dried.” At first, this seemed puzzling to Lann. But after further examination, it appeared that the scratches were consistent with a person having lifted Cherry’s body out of a vehicle, perhaps then allowing it to fall under its own weight onto that gravel road before dragging it to the place where it was found. The wounds were subtle, Lann noticed, as if at one point Cherry had something covering her head, or her entire body was wrapped, shroudlike, and that covering had protected her forehead from being completely cut open and gashed by the scraping, leaving only minor wounds.
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