The one thing Todd couldn’t seem to do was forget about the case. One harrowing incident captured what lack of closure can do to you.
It was 1995. Todd lived with twenty-four-year-old Lori in a single-wide trailer adjacent to his parents’ home.
As he did every day, he yanked black curtains over the trailer’s tiny bedroom window to help himself sleep, but white-hot sunlight still crept in around the edges. He pulled the bedspread over his eyes, trying to pretend that the world outside was dark and still. It was only Wednesday—two more all-night shifts at the Hutchinson plant before the weekend.
For eight years, he’d been chasing the ice-cold trail of a girl dead almost three decades. He never imagined himself as a private detective, let alone an amateur one. As a kid, he’d spent so much time in hospitals for a congenital heart condition that he figured he might have picked up enough medicalese to become a doctor. With a bum heart, he couldn’t quarry limestone like his grandfather, and he didn’t have his father’s knack for fixing machines and driving trucks. But, married at eighteen and a father at twenty-two, Todd had a family to support.
After bagging groceries at Brown’s Galaxy Market his junior year in high school and working as a bundle boy in a garment factory, Todd now commuted less than a mile to Hutchinson Worldwide, a global conglomerate that owns manufacturing facilities in Livingston. Inside a large, windowless rectangular building he plucked pieces of stainless steel off an assembly line and inserted them in a machine called a bender. The metal was curved into a cylinder, then he and high school buddy Wayne Sells fitted O-rings onto it, capped it, labeled it, and packed it on its way to automobile factories for use in air-conditioning and engine cooling systems.
Sells invited Todd to hear his bluegrass band, but Todd was always tracking down some lead on a dead girl. Sells had never heard of such a thing. For one, it seemed impossible. And it didn’t seem like fun.
Todd’s night-owl schedule meant he was often alone with time on his hands to think about Tent Girl and how she had most likely been murdered and that her murderer was still at large, maybe even in Tennessee. Loneliness spilled over into depression. He feared he was losing his grip on reality. Looking back, he wouldn’t say he went crazy, exactly, but he knew he wasn’t pursuing healthy patterns. He never got enough sleep. Dark seemed darker, he knew, when your mind isn’t the way it should be.
One morning, he was startled to see a half-empty glass of juice on the kitchen counter that hadn’t been there when he had gone to bed. He didn’t recall waking, walking to the kitchen, pouring and drinking the juice. Another time he’d awoken and found himself standing completely upright, propped against a cabinet in the bathroom with a book in his hand. These incidents set him on edge for days. Was he capable of lighting an oil lamp while he slept and setting the entire trailer on fire?
If you asked him if he believed in ghosts, he might say that ghosts were crazy talk. Other times, the God’s honest truth was he wasn’t sure. Todd once spent a night in a city park in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, hoping to catch a glimpse of a ghost. The story goes that a young woman arrived at the now-defunct Graham Springs Hotel in the mid-1800s and signed the register with a fictitious name. The woman danced madly the entire night and finally collapsed, dead, on the ballroom floor. She was buried in an anonymous grave on grounds that became a park. Todd didn’t cross paths that night with the Lady Who Danced Herself to Death, but if trying to see her meant he was crazy, so be it; he wasn’t ashamed. Maybe, he said a tad defensively, there’s a separate, unseen world out there that we only catch glimpses of.
In the state between wakefulness and sleep, the outside world felt removed, unreal. Todd had to shut down his morbidly swirling thoughts if he was going to get to sleep. He was, as usual, exhausted. The doctor had given him a prescription for the sleeping pill Ambien. He thought of the vial in the medicine cabinet but later swore he did not take any that day. He had just succumbed to a blissful blankness when he heard a sound. This was not unusual. Some days he was awakened by scratching, banging, rattling—sounds difficult to ignore.
Members of Todd’s family had had ghostly encounters before. His mother once heard a cooking pan clatter to the floor in the middle of the night. The pan rolled on its rim before finally settling with a clank of metal on wood. She got up to pick it up only to find it safely on its hook. Even Lori once insisted that an entire second-floor landing had crashed in—but nothing turned out to be out of place. Right before Todd’s grandmother died, she accused Papa Vaughn of playing tricks on her when she discerned guitar music coming from the next room. But even though Tom Vaughn was known for the occasional practical joke, that wasn’t one of them.
Todd heard a thump. Like a driver in a slow-motion car wreck, he felt himself propelled through space. He threw off the sheets and stumbled from the bedroom into the adjacent combined kitchen and living room.
She was there in the kitchen. He was not at all surprised to see her. The trailer’s small windows were covered in a vain attempt to simulate night, but he made out the shape of a head and shoulders. Awkwardly confined by the grayish green canvas bag, she nevertheless seemed able to move about the cramped room.
He imagined himself, like her, closed up in a tarp, struggling to breathe. It was almost as if he were inside her head. He could feel her fear.
The first thing he asked her was what he most wanted to know: Who are you? He sensed her reproach. He should know who she was, if he truly wanted to help her. Well, then she would have to reveal herself. The next thing he knew, the bag was lying on the couch and he was leaning over it, a butcher knife in his hand. He heard a blade sawing through fabric, the way Riddle’s must have when he cut open her shroud. Todd struggled to penetrate the tough fabric, finally carving a slit, an opening that he hoped would free whatever was inside from the horror in which it was trapped.
As soon as the opening was big enough, something flew out toward him. What was left of her face, streaked black and brown with decay, burst through the hole. Her short reddish hair was mussed and plastered to her scalp. The eyes were gone; the right side of her face eaten away, exposing her white, straight teeth to the roots. Her lipless mouth looked huge, the teeth bared in a horrific grin.
A few years later, in 1998, a newspaper reporter would come to interview Todd. They stood together in the brand-new double-wide that had replaced the single-wide trailer. The reporter shuffled through a sheaf of paper, pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph, and offered it to Todd. Todd looked down at the photo in his hand.
It was just as horrific as the dozens of times it had replayed in his mind. The rotted flesh, the skin leathered over, the hair in disarray. The only difference was that the reporter’s photograph was black-and-white. The image burned into Todd’s memory was in full color.
The reporter was amused by the look on Todd’s face. The photo was taken at Tent Girl’s autopsy hours after Wilbur Riddle found her. The gruesome image had never been published, never made available to anyone outside of police investigators working on the case. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen that before,” the reporter chortled.
* * *
Immediately after Tent Girl popped through the opening Todd had cut in her shroud, he sat bolt upright in bed, shaken and recoiling from her ruined face.
After a time, he disentangled the sweat-soaked sheets and padded into the living room. The room was quiet and empty. He turned to return to the bedroom and a glint caught his eye. He spun around and scanned the room: chairs, lamps, tables, all where they should be. Then he spotted it. On the couch was an enormous butcher knife with a razor-sharp blade.
* * *
When Todd and Lori’s son Dillan was born, Todd turned his mental image of Tent Girl into a young mother and the white cloth on her shoulder into a diaper. He wrote to the Scott County sheriff, the governor, and the coroner, urging them to exhume her remains and reexamine her pelvis for signs that she had borne a c
hild.
Maybe the young woman had been pregnant and someone killed her to hush it up? Looking at Dillan toddling about, Todd wondered if Tent Girl had had a child who had been kidnapped, or killed and dumped elsewhere. Or—(and here he guessed the truth)—if she had a young child, now motherless, who had no way of knowing her mother was buried in Kentucky.
At that point, Todd even started suspecting Wilbur Riddle. He’d heard about Riddle’s romantic conquests outside of his three marriages, rumors about illegitimate children. Todd decided he wouldn’t put it past Riddle to “dispose” of an inconvenient lover. He was ashamed afterward of his evil thoughts, but there was no love lost between father-in-law and son-in-law. Over the years, Todd and Riddle’s shared interest in Tent Girl had evolved into more of a rivalry.
Sometimes Todd’s information-gathering forays dovetailed with trips to see Lori’s family in Indiana. Early on, Lori waited patiently in the car while Todd rummaged through microfiche in libraries and picked up old copies of newspapers from archives. Other times Lori railed at him. “You don’t think about anybody but yourself!” she yelled. “What about our son? He needs you more than some dead girl.” Their fights got more heated, more physical.
There was the matter of money. Todd’s friend and former coworker Wayne Sells recalled that they made no more than eighteen thousand dollars a year. They both worked overtime, but it was hard to support a family on that salary. More often than not, Todd, Lori, and Dillan ate dinner with Billy and Brenda Matthews in their house next door, so close they could practically shout to one another—too close, in Lori’s opinion. And Todd often got so wrapped up in Tent Girl, he forgot he had a family, Lori said years later.
Billy was satisfied that the young couple was meeting payments on the trailer but he didn’t know that, besides the money Todd spent pursuing Tent Girl, the couple was living beyond their means, taking cash advances against their credit cards. They told one another they’d work more overtime to pay it back.
Todd was soon bankrupt. He couldn’t bring himself to tell his dad. Lori, tired of Todd spending money they didn’t have on detective work, moved out of the trailer and rented her own place in town. Todd, always on the computer searching for Tent Girl clues, seemed to have no time for her or their son. “I left because the Tent Girl was his life, not us,” she said simply. At the plant, Todd still couldn’t get the hang of working the third shift. He was physically and mentally exhausted by whatever was compelling him to seek out the name of a stranger who had died before he was born. He had to concede his family and friends were right. It was time to give up this crazy attachment to Tent Girl.
He decided to ask one last person and abide by her word.
Todd climbed the steps of a dilapidated house in Livingston, Tennessee. There was no name or shingle out front. Everyone knew where to find the lady who saw visions.
Todd’s decision to call on Miz Cole was partly a whim, like the times he dropped everything to drive to a library on the off chance that they would have a stash of two-decade-old newspapers, and partly desperation. Tent Girl appearing bloody and reproachful in his kitchen, Lori moving out, filing for bankruptcy: the events of the past few months had left him shaken.
Yet, the thought of abandoning Tent Girl made Todd feel as guilty as failing to see his grandfather the night he died. Todd’s fondest childhood memories were tromping through the woods with Papa Vaughn, searching out unnervingly human-shaped ginseng roots. Papa had recently moved out of his daughter and son-in-law’s house next door to the trailer. Todd didn’t visit as often as he planned; he wasn’t there the night his grandfather died of heart failure. Since the old man’s death, the words played in Todd’s mind: You should have gone. You had the opportunity to go. Why didn’t you go?
Some extolled the potency of Miz Cole’s psychic powers. Others called her a phony. Then there were those who declared Miz Cole pure evil, a practitioner of witchcraft.
Inside the shabby house, a plain, tired-looking woman answered the door. Furniture covered most of the floor, whatnots such as Avon perfume bottles shaped like the Eiffel Tower crowded every surface, putting Todd, as he recalled the scene years later, in mind of an episode of Hoarders. Miz Cole seated Todd at the kitchen table. Todd heard children somewhere in the house or yard. Apparently accustomed to visits from their grandmother’s clients, they kept out of sight.
Miz Cole opened notebooks filled with cryptic writing, scribbled verses from the Bible referring to gifts. People in the Bible saw visions, she told him. Her powers, she claimed, were a gift she was obligated to share. She listened attentively as Todd described his indecision, his anguish, over a dead girl who had nothing to do with him, the exasperation of his family, his nightmares. She talked about sprinkling holy water over his door to ward off evil energy. He rejected that idea. She finally said, “The answer lies within yourself.”
If Todd hadn’t sounded so serious as he related this, I would have burst out laughing. I’d often thought Todd should have lived in Victorian times, when everyone believed in witches, ghosts, and fairies. On the other hand, I’d heard Todd scorn psychics who purported to know where the remains of the missing could be found. “ ‘Oh, they’re buried near the water,’” he mocked. “Okay, well, how many lakes are around here? Specifically north, south, east, or west? What county? They can’t tell you that; they just know that the spirit is near the water. Good tip. We’ll dig up the entire coastline of the United States.”
But just then Miz Cole’s hackneyed phrase was exactly what Todd needed to hear. He didn’t know it, but the psychic’s advice would help define his adult life. It gave him permission to do what he was determined to do all along: give Tent Girl a name.
At the time, all Todd knew was that he felt better than he had in weeks. After the reading, although Miz Cole didn’t ask him for money, he handed her a five on his way out.
He still didn’t know what to make of his terrifyingly realistic nightmare. But he was convinced he was on a quest some force in the universe didn’t want him to quit just yet.
9
HOW TO MAKE A JOHN DOE
I was in Guilford County, in north-central North Carolina, on the trail of a John Doe who was frustrating the hell out of Betty Brown and a local detective. On her day off, Betty, dwarfed behind the wheel of her husband Joe’s Dodge Ram—tricked out with a skull-and-bones-motif rearview mirror and ox-size chrome testicles hanging from the trailer hitch—drove me to the site where the remains were found.
Detective R. Allen Cheek hadn’t divulged too many specifics to me on the phone. Some things only the murderer would know, he said. He didn’t want to blow his case—should he ever have one.
Trailing Cheek’s unmarked cruiser south on US 421, one of many interlacing highways and secondary roads between Raleigh and Greensboro, we passed a sign for Climax Creek, invisible through the dense foliage. “A lot of people get dumped out there dead.” Betty pointed through the truck’s window. “In a back area of road with no houses, you can easily pull over and drag a body out and throw it out and no one actually sees you. They found three women there in the last year and a half—one decapitated, one beaten to death, one shot—all dumped on that road, all within a five-mile distance.”
We looped onto a ramp for 421 and had pulled over next to a wooded area dividing the highway’s northbound and southbound lanes. Betty chain-smoked in the truck while Cheek and I picked our way into the football field–size island between the two roadways.
It was a gray, misty day. The detective elbowed his way past brambles, stepped over a Dunkin’ Donuts cup, and skirted an old tire in a puddle. He drew aside a swath of vegetation as if it were a velvet curtain and he was inviting me backstage. “You’re going to get your shoes dirty,” he warned.
One February day in 2008, a motorist pulled over at this spot to stretch his legs. Wandering into the woods to take a leak, he spotted a rolled-up tarp. Animals had ripped and sh
redded it to gain access to something inside. “He started looking at it and he realized he was looking at a human rib cage,” Cheek told me. “So he backed out and called us.”
“Us” was the Guilford County sheriff’s office in Greensboro. Many web sleuths make themselves known to local law enforcement to gain trust and information. Betty Brown is no exception. “If you give me a lead, I’ll work with anyone,” Cheek said, though he admitted he was initially wary of Brown and her questions. I sympathized. Betty could be a tad scary.
Sometimes when cops wouldn’t return her calls, Betty told me out of Cheek’s hearing, she’d be forced to “harass” the police department until they entered their missing and unidentified cases into NamUs. She wouldn’t let them back down. One sheriff, resisting Betty’s efforts to collect a family reference sample for a missing person, told her, “I don’t know about that DNA. They’re kind of backwoods hick people. I don’t think they understand what DNA is.”
“Well, give it a whirl,” Betty told him drily. “They might watch CSI.”
Shannon Vita, the fellow Doe Network and NamUs volunteer from Arizona who talks to Betty almost daily, agrees that Betty can be aggressive. “That’s how she gets her stuff done. If there is something concerning a family’s missing person or unidentified case she feels strongly about, she will not take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Today Betty couldn’t say no to yet another attempt to ID the John Doe found near US 421.
Betty had told me on the phone from North Carolina that it seemed the John Doe’s assailant or assailants thought they knew something about forensics. In an apparent attempt to mask the victim’s identity, they left him clad in nothing but a T-shirt and pair of boxer shorts. And they took his false teeth.
The Skeleton Crew Page 15
