CHAPTER 8
On Sunday, Randy Headrick was taken by his family to the emergency room at DeKalb Baptist Medical Center in Fort Payne. On arrival, he was helped to an examining room, where his mother told the emergency room staff that her son was refusing to eat or drink. He was shaking and incoherent, she said, and his “nerves were shot.” While Headrick sat on the examining table, staring straight ahead, the family members explained to the ER staff that his wife and mother-in-law had been murdered on Friday. He had little to say except that he was not hungry and that he had to “go back to Carol.” After being diagnosed as suffering from acute grief reaction, Headrick was prescribed medication for his troubled nerves and then returned to his parents’ home.
Bright and early on Monday morning, tips, rumors and accusations related to the double homicide had begun to flood the county jail’s switchboard. The DeKalb County authorities prepared to deal with a media frenzy that had begun to surround the case. As was his custom, Sheriff Cecil Reed already had spoken to some of his well-known “regulars,” the local reporters who covered county law enforcement on a daily basis, some of whom had come to the crime scene over the weekend. They had been briefed, off the record, by Sheriff Reed. Because of the trust they had earned with Reed and his deputies, those local reporters had an advantage over their colleagues from larger media markets.
On Monday morning, the sheriff found his office crowded with television cameras and reporters from the big area TV stations and newspapers. From Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Huntsville and Birmingham, Alabama, the murders of Dora Ann Dalton and Carolyn Headrick were at the forefront of the news.
“This was one of the worst murder scenes I’ve ever been to,” Reed told reporters. “I’ve been in law enforcement for thirty years and this is the worst I’ve ever seen.”
After providing information on the discovery of the victims by members of their family, and how they appeared to have been killed, Reed addressed questions about all the fast-circulating rumors that Randy Headrick was a suspect in the murders. Reed confirmed that Headrick had taken out what he called a “large” insurance policy on his wife, naming himself as the beneficiary. However, he said, Headrick had a confirmed alibi and appeared to have been at his job in Fort Payne when the murders took place. Reed went on to describe the Native American artifacts that Headrick collected and made, saying that there were many such items around the house, and that the murder weapons were believed to have been taken from among them. Reed said Headrick was “a collector of unusual weapons,” who also fashioned Indian paraphernalia using bone and metal, often selling the items at flea markets in the area.
The sheriff’s department currently had neither a suspect nor a motive, Reed said, and drugs and sexual assault had been ruled out as motives. Early on in the investigation, it was believed that a pocketbook was missing from the residence, he told reporters, but it since had been found. Nothing else appeared to be missing from the house, but the gun used in the murders had not been recovered yet. Based on the preliminary autopsy reports, Reed said, it was believed that the weapon was a .22-caliber pistol and that the victims both had been shot at close range. A gun that was found at the house had been determined not to have been the weapon used to shoot the victims. At the present time, Reed said, investigators were actively searching for the missing murder weapon along the roadsides near the crime scene.
“I don’t believe this was a random killing,” Reed told the press. “I think this was someone who knew them and they probably knew their assailant. There was no sign of forcible entry, but it’s not unusual on Sand Mountain for people to leave their doors unlocked. There has to be some motive here, and eventually the motive will be found.”
Investigators from his department were working practically around the clock, Reed said.
“We have all our investigators assigned to this,” he said, adding that anyone having any information about the murders should call his office.
“We’ll take any lead we can get on this one,” he said. “Everybody is a suspect. We have no prime suspect. We’re asking for help. If anyone has any information, please contact us.”
A reward from the governor’s office had been requested that morning by DA Richard Igou, and Alabama governor Fob James responded quickly by issuing a proclamation later that same day offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.
“I hope an arrest will come soon,” Reed said, “but you never know when you’re dealing with this type of situation. This is not a smoking-gun case. We don’t have any solid leads.
“This is a tough case,” Reed told the people crowded into his office with cameras and microphones. “It’s probably the most gruesome, grisly murder I’ve ever dealt with.”
The residents of the rural mountain towns along Highway 75 had no need to worry, the sheriff said, and repeated that he felt it was not a random killing.
“I feel like whoever committed these crimes had a reason they did it,” he said.
While Sheriff Reed dealt with the press in his office off the lobby of the DeKalb County Jail, Investigator Rhonda Jackson sat in her tiny upstairs office reviewing the notes she had carefully taken over the long weekend she had spent, documenting evidence and conducting interviews. This was Rhonda’s first time to be named lead investigator on a major crime, and all of her fellow investigators and a large number of uniformed officers had been assigned to the case full-time. She felt that her every action would be judged by her peers, and she was determined to supervise the investigation with the utmost professionalism. Rhonda had worked her way up through the ranks in county law enforcement, from desk job to patrol deputy to the county’s first-ever female investigator, and her success or failure in the Headrick case would likely dictate the future of her career. She had been blessed with an extremely supportive husband and family, but there were times when she felt that her striking good looks were a curse. Despite their best intentions, her fellow investigators sometimes tended to treat her more like an attractive woman than a serious law enforcement officer. Because of this, Rhonda Jackson always went out of her way to conduct herself professionally in every aspect of her work. She intended to leave no stone unturned on the Dalton/Headrick murder case. That morning, during the media frenzy downstairs, Rhonda began the first page of what would become a huge file of notes documenting every phone call, every interview and every detail of the work done on the case. Her meticulous notes would prove invaluable to the outcome of the long, complicated investigation for which she was going to be responsible.
The first page she added to the file concerned a phone call Rhonda made that morning to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences when she spoke with Brent Wheeler and Martha Odom, who had worked the crime scene on Friday evening. Their work was far from over, but Wheeler was able to report that the gun used in the murders could have been either a rifle or revolver. The bullet fragments were in bad shape, he said, and he probably would not be able to match them with the gun that killed Dora Ann Dalton and Carolyn Headrick, even if the gun were to be found. Wheeler said the spears and knife used as murder weapons would be checked for fingerprints, and he promised to notify Rhonda immediately if any prints were found.
Later that day, after the turmoil had subsided downstairs and Sheriff Reed had restored order to his department, he received a call from one of Randy Headrick’s female relatives. She asked the sheriff if he would come to her place of business and talk to her, so Reed got in his car and headed there immediately.
The woman had received a collect phone call, she claimed, from a girl who said that she was at a hospital in an adjoining county and wanted the Headrick woman to come there to talk to her. The woman told Sheriff Reed that she went to the Jackson County Hospital in Scottsboro and met, as requested, with the girl, whom she identified by name. She claimed the girl had told her that on the day of the murders, she had been at a house in a remote community called Happy Hollow, an area on the far north end of DeKalb County that had long been notorious for its abundance of drug dealers and bootleggers. The Headrick woman told the sheriff that the girl had said that two men had come to the house with blood on their clothes, saying, “The job was done.” And, the girl said, the men then burned their clothes outside in the yard.
The sheriff immediately passed this information along to the detectives. This was one of the first of countless numbers of calls and tips he would forward to them over the course of the investigation, and the first of many that would lead the authorities down far too many dead-end trails of lies and accusations. When she was located and questioned, the girl denied having been at the Jackson County Hospital, and said she did not place a collect phone call to the Headrick woman. In fact, she did not even know her. She had solid alibis for her whereabouts at the time of the alleged gathering in Happy Hollow, as well as for the supposed meeting at the hospital. Later on, when the Headrick relative’s telephone records were subpoenaed, they showed there had been no collect calls from the Jackson County Hospital placed to the woman’s phone, at home or at her business. Her tip turned out to be one of the many false leads, very likely an intentional one, that bogged down the investigation and wasted countless hours of valuable time in the search for a killer.