CHAPTER 6
Mike James began Headrick’s interview by reassuring him that he and Rhonda Jackson weren’t trying to embarrass him or give him a hard time.
“We just need to know what happened yesterday, so some of these questions you may have already been asked by the police, and if so, I apologize,” James said. “We’re not trying to be repetitive, it’s just that I don’t really know what you told the other investigators. And you understand you’re not under arrest, or anything like that.”
Headrick said he understood, and James then asked for a rundown of his activities on the day before, starting with the time he got out of bed. Headrick answered with an outline of his typical morning routine.
“I get up at five o’clock or five minutes till five, whenever the alarm went, go use the bathroom, and brush my hair,” he said. “Then I put on a uniform, go into the living room, put on my boots, get my lunch bag, step on the porch, smoke a cigarette, get in my truck and go to Corner Market in Henagar. I buy usually a Mountain Dew or chocolate milk, and then I go to work.”
James asked what kind of vehicle he drove, and Headrick confirmed that the red pickup he had arrived home in on the previous afternoon was his, and it was what he drove to work. He told James that he arrived at Builders Supply about ten minutes until six o’clock on Friday morning, and started his workday by delivering a load of cardboard to Sola Electric, a Fort Payne manufacturing business. Headrick said he got back to work around 7:30 A.M. and spent the rest of the morning helping load trucks, taking a fifteen-minute break in the maintenance shop, then returning to help the loaders again until lunchtime. Then, he said, he called in an order to a local hamburger stand, which was picked up by another worker, and the two sat in the maintenance shop and ate their hamburgers. Headrick mentioned that another man came along during lunch and talked for a few minutes.
“Then about twelve oh-five, when I left the maintenance shop, I stopped by the woodshop on the way back up, grabbed my tickets and said, ‘I’m gonna pull my load.’ I went out and got in my truck, sat in it for a minute until the air pressure built up, and as I went out the gate, I saw a Milan Express truck pulling out, going to the warehouse. I pulled in behind him because I knew I was going to have to unload the truck.
“So I get over there, unlock the warehouse, let the guy inside and tell him that I’m gonna go get somebody to help unload. I met a supervisor and told him that I needed some help, and he asked how long it would take. I told him thirty-five, forty-five minutes to an hour. Then I went back over and about five minutes later one of our drivers showed up. He helped me unload the truck.”
James asked for the name of the man who helped with the unloading, and Headrick said he couldn’t remember, but described the man as a younger, stocky guy with a mustache.
“He helped me unload the truck and then I told him to stick around and I’d go get us a Coke. I went across the parking lot to the business next door and bought a drink out of their machine, two of them, two Pepsis,” Headrick said. “Then I came back, gave him one, and we talked for about ten minutes. I started pulling my orders, so he stayed and helped me; then he left and I locked the warehouse up, plugged in the forklift, got in my truck and went back to Builders Supply.”
“Okay, what then?” James asked.
“I stood around there by the loading office and talked to the loaders and everything else; then I went in and talked to the president of the company about a guy’s job, how much he’s paid and everything, and—”
“Who were you talking about?” Rhonda Jackson interrupted. “What did you mean about a guy’s job?”
“There’s a guy transferring from one department or taking another guy’s job, and I wanted to find out how much his job paid,” Headrick said.
“To see if you might want it?”
“Yeah.”
James then asked Headrick if at any time during the day had he called home to talk to his wife or mother-in-law, and Headrick said that he had not.
“Do you normally do that?” James asked.
“Sometimes I do,” Headrick answered. “I did on Wednesday or Thursday, I called from work and aggravated Carol. I called from the maintenance shop, bugged her a little bit, then ate my lunch. And sometimes I call her on my way home from work.”
James asked Headrick how he first came to meet his wife, and Headrick launched into a long, detailed account of their courtship and their married life. At the time they first met, he said, he was living with his parents in their house across the road from the Dalton home, and he went over one day to fix a broken showerhead for Mrs. Dalton. He had been told she had a daughter living there with her, but after going over five or six more times to split and carry wood, Headrick had not yet seen her.
“I said, ‘You know, I think you are putting me on, I don’t think you’ve got a daughter,’ and Mrs. Dalton called Carol and she came out and I got introduced to her. A couple of days later, I wasn’t doing nothing, so I called over there and said, ‘Mrs. Dalton, I’ll tell you what, would you ask your daughter if she would like to come out and play in the creek barefooted with me?’ It was winter, you know, and they thought it was funny and then she came out.
“We walked up to the barn and found a lot of the old things that are hanging on the outside of the shed; I took them over and hung them up for her, and she thought it looked pretty. I helped clean out that shed so they could have more storage, and I’d go over and split wood for them.
“We went out a few times for hamburgers and I’d go over there, I’d cook dinner here at my parents’ house and invite them over, she’d come over when I was sick or wasn’t doing good, and she’d stay with me. I’d come home in the morning and she’d come over here and make sure nobody bothered me, and when I’d come home [from working night shift] some mornings, she would bring breakfast or tell me to come over there and eat breakfast before I went to work.”
James asked if Headrick and his wife ever had any kind of problems in their marriage.
“Oh, we had problems,” Headrick answered. “We argued, we fought—you know, no blows—but we argued and fought.”
“What would you argue about most of the time?” Jackson asked.
“You know, it was either something like, you know, maybe something her mother had done or something I had done, or, you know, things that other people had said or done, or just little things. We never got into no really heavy stuff because we always made up.”
“Now you lived with both your wife and mother-in-law,” James said. “Did that cause problems with your mother-in-law?”
“Just for a little while there,” Headrick answered, “and I finally realized that if I didn’t speak to her, but I treated her nice, then everything would be all right.”
“You just didn’t speak?”
“No, I didn’t speak to her for a year, but you know . . . I won a safety award and I told Carol to tell her mother to get dressed and on Saturday I took them out to dinner and took them to Wal-Mart and let them shop, and, you know, I told Carol not to let her mama know it was my idea, and things like that, you know. On Father’s Day, her mom bought me a new pair of sandals and a shirt and . . . ah . . . I remembered her at Christmas and her birthday and things like that, I’d get her cards.”
“Now, is Carol your first wife?” James asked.
“No, Carol is my second,” Headrick said.
James then seized the opportunity to steer the questioning into an area of great interest to the investigators.
“Okay, now of course, we’ve heard forty thousand things, folks have called us and we’ve heard, you know, rumors, and what I’m going to do next is to clear up some of these rumors so I can understand kind of where we stand at. Were you arrested at one time for something involving your first wife?”
“Yes, sir,” Headrick answered.
“Okay, tell me about that, how you were arrested and how that came about—not necessarily the details of the arrest, but, you know, if you were charged and—”
Headrick interrupted, saying, “I was charged and I pled guilty to . . . ah . . . at the court-appointed lawyer’s request, I pled guilty to aiding and abetting.”
“Aiding and abetting what?” James asked.
“Ah . . . possession of an unregistered firearm.”
“Okay, what kind of firearm was that?”
Headrick hesitated, then answered, “It was a pipe bomb.”
“And was the allegation that you were going to have your ex-wife killed, or kill your ex-wife?”
“No,” Headrick quickly said, “the man that went down with me, him and a couple of others, they decided, you know, maybe they could scare her a little bit and stuff, and maybe scare some sense into her and maybe make her come back home. The bad part about it was the guy had asked to use my garage to work on some stuff, and I never thought about it. The night I was arrested, it was the first night I knew about the bombing incident and he told me they had set one off in the middle of the street at a trailer park where my wife was staying with another woman.”
James confirmed that the other man had been charged also and convicted, and asked Headrick how much time had he done in prison for the incident.
“I did four years in jail and two years on probation,” Headrick said, then identified his federal probation officer, whose office was located in Gadsden, Alabama. He told James he had been off probation for four or five years, and said that he didn’t communicate with his fellow pipe bomber.
“If he ever comes near me,” Headrick claimed, “I don’t know what I would do.”
James then moved on to Headrick’s military service.
“Let me ask you, somebody said that you were in the service; what branch of service were you in?”
Headrick said he had been in the U.S. Army, serving primarily as a diesel mechanic. During his time in the military, he said, he had been stationed in Alaska, Missouri, Louisiana and Georgia. When James asked if he ever had any problems while enlisted, Headrick said his wife left him once, taking their two children.
“Did you get an honorable discharge?” James asked.
“Other than honorable,” Headrick said, “because I went AWOL on tour.”
Headrick told James he had gone AWOL because his wife told him she would take him back if he would just come to her. She wanted him out of the military, he said, so she would have more of a chance at a career. She was going to college at the time, but was also in the army in a support company that rebuilt radios. She was currently living in Texas, Headrick said, with their two children.
James asked Headrick if the large amount of Indian artifacts found in the Dalton house were his, and if he was a collector.
“I collected the arrowheads,” Headrick said, “and the rest I made.”
Headrick again confirmed there was one gun in the house, a Ruger .22 stainless semiautomatic.
When the subject of Headrick’s alleged girlfriend came up, he called her an “almost girlfriend” and told James, “See, everybody kept putting pressure . . . people kept putting ideas in Carol’s head, just kept pressure on, and Carol was putting pressure on me, so was everybody else. Carol’s sister was calling the girl and hanging up on her, and her husband was on her case, and all she did was ride to work with me at first. I tried talking to my brother-in-law and explaining that I didn’t have no friends or nothing; she was the only friend I had then. After that, things developed and it just went on and went on and went on. She’d been having an affair with another guy, and when they broke up, I let her talk. I counseled with her and talked, and we became good friends.”
When James began to move the questions toward the subject of the insurance policies and other paperwork Jackson had seized at the house earlier that morning, Headrick grew a bit more restless and began to give lengthier answers.
“Now you can go check,” Headrick told the officers. “They found my will, and they should find where me and Carol sat down and figured what we would do if, you know, her mother didn’t survive and something happened to us, her nieces and nephews would get everything. I made a verbal agreement with my wife that the money would be distributed amongst them for college money with two stipulations, that they go to church and that they never be arrested or have any problems with the police. I wasn’t even supposed to administer the money or nothing, her brother-in-law was, and the house would [go to] her sister. It’s in her mother’s will. The deeds and titles are in Carol’s name, and it’s supposed to go to her sister, Kathy Porter, and I will see to it that she gets the deed, the same way with Dora Ann’s little hidden income money that’s in Carol’s name in the bank.”
Headrick told James that Dora Ann had a savings account in Carol’s name, and said that Kathy was to get it all, including Dora Ann’s truck. He then complained to the officers that he seemed to be under suspicion for the murders of his wife and mother-in-law.
“You know, everybody’s looking at me like I’m gonna gain something here,” he said. “What they were trying to imply last night, they kept bringing up the insurance and I tried to explain to them. I . . . the insurance, you know, I don’t care about the insurance. I’d like to have my wife back. Ah . . . even though we had that large amount, I was not to gain by any of it. I’d promised her already what we would do with it and it would be done.”
Jackson asked Headrick what he had promised his wife would be done with the money in the event of her death. He repeated his earlier account of the equal division between her nieces and nephews, with his brother-in-law supervising the trust accounts.
“He goes to the church and everything, and we figured he’d do a lot better job than anybody else, and he’s honest. He would have got with it, you know, and done it because I would have contacted him and told him.”
James told Headrick he was almost finished with the interview.
“I understand better now how things happened,” he said. “Rhonda, you have any last questions?”
“I’ve heard also that you and Carolyn were planning on building a new house, is that right?” Jackson asked Headrick.
“We were looking at log cabins,” he said. “We had contacted a contractor to build a house and it was too high, so we looked at one of the log cabins. You know, I had the deal all laid out; somewhere up there in the weeds, there’s a basement layout. You know, the stakes are put up for a basement. I did all that, and everything, but we didn’t have the money, we couldn’t do it. So what we done was, we just put it off and thought, you know . . . we rode around and dreamed and the blueprints are over there at the house.”
After asking the locations of savings and checking accounts that Dora Ann and Carolyn had, and whether or not Headrick had a safety-deposit box, the interview was concluded.
“Well, you know, we’re sorry,” James told Headrick, “and I’m sure there are still gonna be other questions we have, and we’re gonna sit down and talk to you again. I’ll tell you again, I’m sorry this happened, and we’re going to do all we can to find out who did this.”
Randy Headrick didn’t realize that one of Carolyn and Dora Ann’s close relatives would be questioned later that afternoon by Rhonda Jackson and Jimmy Phillips. That interview would cover many of the same subjects included in his interview, but from an extremely different angle. It would also bring another person of interest to the attention of the investigators: Shane, Headrick’s younger brother.
The interview took place at Dora Ann’s home, where Sheriff Cecil Reed was preparing to release the crime scene. Phillips began the session by asking if the relative would tell him about what had been going on between Carolyn and Randy during the past two or three weeks.
“Carolyn had gotten real depressed over a money deal between Randy and his sister,” the family member said. “Carolyn had been making some little bead necklace sets and sending them over to a store in Fyffe for Randy’s sister to sell for her. Time had rocked on and Carolyn hadn’t gotten any money. Then one day the sister came over to see Carolyn about getting some cow skulls that she said Randy had sent her to pick up. Carolyn gave them to her, and when Randy came home, he got upset and said his sister had lied. Then a few days later, the sister came over again and talked to Carolyn. Carolyn was really upset with her because Carolyn didn’t have any use for a liar.
“Randy’s sister broke down and told Carolyn, ‘I’m gonna just tell you, me and Randy had this plan. The things that you’ve been making for me to sell, I’ve sold them because Randy owes me money.’”
According to the relative, Randy’s sister then told Carolyn that she had already made over $200 on the bead necklaces and said that Randy told her it would be their secret and they wouldn’t let Carolyn know anything about it.
“She thought a lot of Carolyn, and she told her that she had loaned him the money for a cellular phone, which he denied, but Carolyn began to doubt him and got real depressed.”
The relative also told the investigators that Headrick’s friend and mentor, Red Crow, who was in the process of moving, had been giving Headrick quite a few things, which had begun to pile up in Dora Ann’s yard.
“Dora Ann had just spent money fixing up the house, and she asked Carolyn for them to move the stuff that was lying around in the yard. Carolyn moved all of it, except for three pieces that she couldn’t lift, so she talked to Randy one morning while he was at work and told him that Dora Ann was upset and wanted the stuff moved. He said he would move them when he got there. He said, ‘I’ve been nice to your mother, but no more,’ and he was really upset with Dora Ann about it, but he did move it.”
Phillips then asked the family member, “When Carolyn talked to you about all this happening, did she say anything about any insurance forms or life insurance?”
She had talked about the excessive amounts of insurance Randy had taken out on her life, the relative said, on Wednesday, just two days prior to the murders.
“Carolyn was real depressed and said that they had been really strained for money, and that she just didn’t know anymore; she said they didn’t have the money to pay the insurance premium that he had taken out on her. She told me it was a quarter of a million, a renewable term, and that she had asked Randy several times to drop it because they couldn’t afford the premiums, but he wouldn’t. She said it was coming up, the term was ending, and she said that when it came up, she wasn’t going to sign it again. She was not going to renew it. She also told me that day, ‘I’m tired, I’m just so tired,’ and was just real depressed.”
Phillips asked the relative if Dora Ann had also discussed insurance or spoken about Headrick.
“Yes, Dora Ann called me one day, just tore up because of this particular insurance policy Randy had been pressing Carolyn to borrow against. I don’t know if it was the property here or the policy, but it was through this insurance company, he was wanting her to borrow the money, and Dora Ann just stepped in and begged her not to. He had done this more than once. I called Carolyn and talked to her and she assured me she wasn’t going to do anything like that, it wasn’t her and Randy’s home and she wouldn’t do that.”
The investigators were then told that Randy was constantly suspicious of several of the members of the Dalton family, complaining to Carolyn about them and claiming that when they came to visit, they were after something.
“He tried to tell Carolyn this, that they were after something, and he would tell Carolyn over and over, ‘When you die, I won’t get any of this place.’ In other words, it wouldn’t be his and the family wouldn’t let him have anything. He said, ‘They’ll come and take everything that’s here.’”
Jackson then asked if Carolyn had ever said anything about a mistake that she believed had been made on one of the insurance policies, the one for $250,000.
“She did tell me, yes, that Randy told her that he did not make her the beneficiary, that the insurance company had made a mistake. [She thought] the papers had been filled out to correct the mistake, but it never happened.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Jackson said.
“It’s what Randy told Carolyn,” the relative said, “that the insurance company had made the mistake in the beneficiary.”
“Did Carolyn believe that?” Jackson asked.
“Yes, she believed anything he told her. But then he said he told the insurance agent that Carolyn was the beneficiary and then Dora Ann was next; so that if something happened to him and Carolyn, then Dora Ann would be taken care of. If there was a mistake in the beneficiary, he would have never said that, but Carolyn just wasn’t real sharp about things like that.”
The investigators established that this had been Carolyn’s first marriage, which took place when she was forty-one years old. The couple had been married four years at the time of the murders, and for most of those four years, there had been constant bickering and disagreements among Carolyn, Dora Ann and Headrick.
“When they first got married, things were real good,” the family member said. “He treated Dora Ann and Carolyn real good; then an incident arose with a woman he was carrying back and forth to work. He just couldn’t deal with the mistrust Carolyn had for him then, and it was like the entire marriage turned around. Dora Ann couldn’t say anything or, you know, she was the troublemaker. If him and Carolyn got into it, he claimed Dora Ann was the reason.”
When asked about Randy’s affair with his former girlfriend, the relative said that Carolyn had talked about it a great deal.
“Carolyn didn’t want to believe it was an affair, but she told me everything that she knew about the deal with the girl he was hauling back and forth to work. Carolyn believed that she was just after Randy, and that Randy liked her only as a friend and was giving her rides as a favor, but Randy would spend his off days at the girl’s house. He would get up very early in the morning and leave and go to her house. And things that he had made for Carolyn began to start going missing, and when Carolyn would go to the girl’s house, she would see the missing things and Randy would deny, ‘These aren’t the things I gave you, these are things just like them.’”
Then, one morning, it all blew up, the relative said, when Randy came home from work and told Carolyn that he had opened a closet at work and caught his erstwhile girlfriend and a black man together.
“Randy called her husband and told him about it, and the affair just kind of fell apart then. But Dora Ann and Carolyn were threatened by the girl at that time, she said the hurt and stuff and the damage that they had done in her marriage, she was going to do in Carolyn’s.”
“This may be a hard question for you to answer,” Phillips then said, “but it’s something I think we need to ask you. In your opinion, who do you think killed Carolyn and Dora Ann?”
The answer came promptly. “I believe Randy did.”
“Even though he’s got an alibi, you still feel that he’s the one that actually killed them, or do you feel that he may have had somebody kill them?”
Again the family member answered quickly and with conviction: “If he didn’t actually kill them, then he had to have gone over where everything was located in the house with whoever did kill them.”
“Now, we went over with you and told you a little bit about the brutality of these murders,” Phillips said, “and told you that it seemed to us to be a hate crime, a very brutal type of murder. If Randy didn’t do it, is there anybody else that you might think would be capable of doing something like this?”
Again the answer came without hesitation.
“The only other person that even comes to my mind that I think might be capable of doing it would be Shane, and the only reason that I say that is because of drugs.”
Jackson and Phillips immediately snapped to attention. This was the first time anyone they had interviewed had named a person other than Randy Headrick that they thought could possibly have been involved in the murders.
“Now, Shane is his brother, is that right?” asked Phillips, who had been acquainted with Shane Headrick for some time. “I know Shane, and he has definitely got drug problems.”
Waylon Shane Headrick had just become a person of interest in the deaths of his sister-in-law and her mother, but whether he was actually involved—and, if so, to what degree—would not be determined any time soon.