CHAPTER 10
On Wednesday, Sheriff Cecil Reed announced to the press that the $10,000 reward requested of Alabama governor Fob James had been granted, and it would be given to the person who provided information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders of Carolyn and Dora Ann.
Reed once again told reporters that Randy Headrick “has an ironclad alibi,” since his coworkers had said he was at work when the women died.
“The main question is,” Reed said, “why would anyone use at least three weapons on a victim, when any one of them could prove fatal? Why did the killer overdo this?”
Reed said his officers were investigating “some bits and pieces of information we have received. Some tips need to be checked out, but we definitely need more to go on. Maybe the ten-thousand-dollar reward will help.”
According to Reed, there was no indication that either of the two victims had an enemy anywhere in the world.
“We found no one who spoke a word of harm against these women,” he said. “They all said they were quiet, stay-at-home types. They weren’t employed; they were full-time homemakers.”
Reed told the press about the life insurance policies on Carolyn Headrick, and said the companies would not pay the beneficiary until the case was settled. He said deputies were on their way from Huntsville to the state crime lab in Montgomery to deliver fingerprints from the crime scene, which would be matched with others on file at the Alabama Department of Public Safety.
“They have agreed in Montgomery to move our case ahead of everything else,” he said. “We will know soon if there is a possible match.”
Reed said again that robbery, sex and drugs had been ruled out as motives in the case, and the murder weapon had not been located. No blood had been tracked anywhere in the house, even though the shots were fired at close range, he said.
“I think the victims knew the killer, and the killer knew the victims,” he told reporters.
While Reed conducted his press conference, Investigator Simpson and Investigator Phillips interviewed another woman who had worked with Randy Headrick at the Earthgrains bakery. She, too, admitted that she had had an affair with him, which lasted around one-and-a-half months. She worked at the bakery as a security guard at the time, and told the officers that she broke off the relationship when Headrick began talking to her about having her husband killed. He had a friend who lived on the river at Bridgeport, Alabama, he said, whom he could enlist to kill her husband. The woman said she then became afraid of Headrick and quit seeing him, but before their breakup, he told her that if he ever got in trouble with the law, he wouldn’t be jailed. He would only go to the Veterans Administration Hospital for a short time because of his service record.
When Sheriff Reed returned to his office after meeting with the press, he received another one of those interesting tidbits that were coming in more and more frequently. A woman called him to say that she’d had an anonymous phone call saying that the wrong people had been killed; the victims were supposed to have been the wife and mother of another person in the same area with the last name of Dalton. Reed doubted the accuracy of the information, but like all the other tips he received—no matter how far-fetched—the story of the anonymous call was treated seriously and was thoroughly checked out by the officers working on the case.
Investigators Rhonda Jackson and Mike James traveled to Kennesaw, Georgia, and met with GBI agents Larry Landers and Mike Lewis, who had spoken with Jill Shrader and Shane Headrick in Chamblee, Georgia. The officers went to the Smith Motel, where Shane and Jill had checked in when they left the Lodge on Buford. There, the officers conducted lengthy separate interviews with Shane and Jill.
Shane, who confirmed that he was Randy Headrick’s brother, told James and Landers that on the day of the murders he took Jill to work around 4:30 A.M., then returned to the motel room. Jill called him around 10:00 or 10:30 A.M., he said, then between 12:30 and 1:00 P.M., calling him for the last time around 3:30 P.M. He stayed in the motel room and out by the pool all that day, he claimed.
Shane said he knew that Randy and Carolyn fought over Dora Ann, and told the officers that Randy had a .22 rifle. He said Randy had a $150,000 life insurance policy on himself and on Carolyn while he worked at Earthgrains bakery.
“I later heard he had got a second policy,” he said, “but I don’t know any details.”
Shane then dropped a tidbit of information that immediately got the attention of the officers.
“Jill told me that Randy wanted Jill and her son to ‘fuck up’ Randy’s ex-girlfriend,” he said. “I do not know who killed Randy’s wife and mother-in-law, but in my heart, I think that Randy is responsible for their deaths.”
Shane also told the officers that he had heard Red Crow had a friend who had a red Chevy S10 pickup.
Jill Shrader’s interview, conducted by Rhonda Jackson and Mike Lewis, was more lengthy and more productive than Shane’s. Jill, forty-three, said that she and twenty-two-year-old Shane had been living together for just over a year and had known each other for three or four months before moving in together. The only relationship she had with Randy, she said, was as Shane’s brother.
“I believe you had an occasion to talk to Randy one time about him trying to hire you and your son to do something for him,” Rhonda said. “Can you tell us about that?”
“He was gonna go to Texas with me and my son and get some cranes that we were gonna bring back and sell and make some money off of them, whatever, and in order for him to do that, we had to do something for him. What he wanted us to do was for me to get in contact with his ex-girlfriend and get to where she would go somewhere with me, and my son was to do some dirty stuff to her and carve up her face and break a few bones, not kill her, but do some damage to her.”
When asked who the ex-girlfriend was, Jill said she didn’t know the woman’s name.
“I just know it’s a girlfriend of his. He told me she had a baby by him and that’s caused him a lot of trouble and was still causing him trouble. He would park his truck across the road at his mom’s because he was afraid they would do something to his truck. And he said she caused him to get fired from Earthgrains, the bakery in Fort Payne.”
“Did he tell you what he wanted done to her?” Rhonda asked.
“He just told me a little bit. My son told me a little bit more, he said, ‘Mom, he’s sick,’ he said he wanted no part of this stuff. We’d already decided that when we first started listening to him, but he kept on, you know, for several weeks wanting us to. He offered us all kinds of stuff. He told me I could have charge cards, go on a big shopping spree, he’d get me a card, he’d do this, he’d do that, you know. It was all kinds of stuff we were offered.”
Rhonda asked Jill why she and her son didn’t take Randy up on his generous offers.
“I’m not into anything like that, nothing,” Jill said.
Jill said the attempt to hire her and her son took place in September of the previous year.
“There was several times he came by,” Jill said. “He always waited till Shane wasn’t there and he told me not to talk to Shane about it.”
“Why did he not want you to talk to Shane about it?” Rhonda asked.
“I have no idea,” Jill said, adding that she did tell Shane about it, but only just recently. She said Randy had never asked her to do anything to anyone else.
“Did he ever talk about Carolyn and Dora Ann in your presence?” Rhonda asked.
He had, Jill said, adding that she’d never heard him say anything good at all about either one of them.
“He called them evil bitches and that he’d like to drive something through their evil hearts and would like to figure some way of getting them out of his life. He said stuff like that, on and on, every time he talked about them at all, it was always something like that.”
“Okay, all right.... Did he say what he would like to drive through their hearts?”
“No, I don’t remember anything, but I tended to just steer away from Randy. I thought he was crazy; I thought that from the very start, when he started in with the stuff he wanted us to do to his girlfriend. I really thought he was just talking. And he’d go over stuff about how you could do things and you could not leave any clues and nobody would never know; just me and my son would do such and such, or whatever. He had ways of getting rid of everything.”
“What was he talking about?” Rhonda asked.
“He had some kind of acid he could burn everything up with, that would just dissolve everything, where there would be nothing left. It would even dissolve bones, he said. He just, he said there was ways if you knew how to do them where nobody could ever trace anything back to you.”
Outwardly Rhonda remained totally calm and professional, but her heart was pounding. This interview was becoming far more revealing than she had hoped.
“He was wanting you to do this to his girlfriend. Ah . . . is there some reason why he wanted somebody else to do it, he wouldn’t do it himself?”
“I don’t know, unless he thought they were watching him all the time because he was, like I said, he was real careful about everything. And his excuse to us was that he didn’t trust her or her family,” Jill said, “that there had been something about a safe and a bunch of drugs in a safe, like crack and marijuana and stuff like that, a whole lot. I mean pounds, not little amounts, that he got out of their house or something, and it was hid in the woods and nobody could find it, and he was the only one that knew where it was. But he’d already . . . some stuff had been done to them, as the house had burned and stuff had been stolen from them.”
Rhonda asked Jill if Randy had ever said anything to her about the ex-girlfriend’s house burning.
“You gotta realize Randy is just talk,” Jill said. “You know, and I’m trying to remember exact stuff he’s said, ’cause I try not to listen to him. I know that he said he’d got her some, but he wasn’t through with her, that he wanted some more stuff done to her ’cause of what all she’d done to him.”
Jill said that, to her knowledge, Randy had never solicited anyone else to do anything to the woman.
Rhonda asked if Randy had ever said anything else about Carolyn and Dora Ann, other than his statements about driving something through their hearts.
“Just that they bitched on him all the time—bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch—and stuff about their evil hearts and their tongues and crazy talk.” Jill said Randy had never tried to enlist her and her son to do anything to Carolyn and Dora Ann.
“All right,” Rhonda said, “did he ever tell you anything about the deal in Texas where he was charged with making a pipe bomb to blow up his ex-wife? Did he ever tell you about that?”
“Yeah,” Jill answered, “he said that he was at work and had—I think the reason he told me this was to try to make me believe he was more fierce, because I would kind of laugh him off—he said that he was at work and he had a thing showing that he was at work, that there wasn’t any way they could prove he was anywhere else, but he had his ways of doing stuff. He knows a lot of people, he said.”
“Okay, let’s go to Friday, July seventh,” Rhonda said, “can you tell me your whereabouts on that day?”
Jill said she had gotten to work at a clinic in downtown Atlanta that day at around 5:45 A.M., and Shane had taken her to work and dropped her off. She said that she had gotten off work that evening at 4:15 P.M., when Shane picked her up.
“Do you know Shane’s whereabouts during that time you were at work?” Rhonda asked.
“I know that I talked to him that morning after I talked to his dad, so it had to be somewhere between nine-thirty and ten A.M. And then I didn’t talk to him again until later that afternoon, probably around two-thirty P.M., maybe between two-thirty and three.”
Rhonda asked Jill if she had tried to call the motel room several times during the day.
“Well, I tried a couple of times and he said he was at the pool, ” Jill said.
“But you did talk to him on the phone both times?”
“Yes.”
“All right.... Has Shane said anything to you about these murders? As far as . . . has Randy told Shane anything about these murders?”
“Shane certainly has not,” Jill stated firmly.
“Okay,” Rhonda said. “There was a small red pickup seen in that area where these two ladies were murdered. Do you know anybody that may own a small red pickup?”
“I don’t know the man personally,” Jill said, “but Shane says the Indian friend that Randy has been running around with lately had a small red pickup.”
Jill said that she was aware of Randy’s interest in the Indian artifacts he collected and made, but she didn’t know Randy’s Indian friend or how they met.
“Okay, Jill, let me ask you,” Rhonda said, “do you think Shane is involved in these murders?”
“I would think more toward that line if I knew he wasn’t in Atlanta during the time of the murder,” Jill admitted. “I don’t even know what time the murders took place.”
“Do you think Shane is capable of something like that?” Rhonda asked.
“I think he’s definitely capable of murder,” Jill answered surprisingly. “I don’t like to think he would be capable of doing all the things that were done to them.”
When Rhonda said that Randy appeared to have an airtight alibi, Jill replied, “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
“He was at work that day,” Rhonda told her. “If Randy had planned this, to get somebody to do this job, would you have any idea who he would have gotten to do this?”
“No,” Jill said, “I don’t know of anybody other than what I’ve already talked about. That would be my first guess. I would think that would be the way it was, if it wasn’t for the time difference, the time zone. And I’m still scared.”
“That last statement you just made,” Rhonda said, “are you saying that if it wasn’t for the time difference—”
“That I would be inclined to think it was Shane,” Jill said.
“Yes, right,” Rhonda said. “I think you made the statement before the interview began, that Randy hated his wife and mother-in-law.”
“I don’t know of anybody I’ve ever seen that had that much hate toward somebody they were living with,” Jill said. ”It was just a strong hatred, but when he was with them, it was a different thing. Like when I saw him with Carol, it was honey and everything, and it was okay, and he had that look and action toward her. But when they weren’t together, in front of just us and his family, it was a totally different thing. And if you didn’t know any different, you would have thought that was the way he really felt about them when you saw them together.”
On July 14, an article appeared in Fort Payne’s daily newspaper, the Times-Journal, written by one of the area’s top crime reporters, LaRue Cornelison. After working diligently to get information on the case, she finally had succeeded in getting Randy Headrick to come forward and make his first statements to the press since the murders. Six days after the murders, he talked to Cornelison at length and told her, “I’m ready to stand up and fight. I want the person who did it to get the electric chair. I’m going to keep looking and looking and try to find out for myself who did it. I told the police I’d help them anyway I could.”
Headrick said he and Carolyn shared Indian crafts as a hobby, and said the Native American keepsakes on the walls were some he and Carolyn made, plus some were gifts from friends.
“The police have been questioning Indians on the mountain,” Headrick told Cornelison. “They think this killing was a ritual. But it’s nothing. Me and my wife just enjoyed this as a hobby.”
Headrick claimed he had a list of items taken off the walls, even though police had determined nothing had been removed except the spears and knife that were found in the victims’ bodies.
“And there was a few dollars in my wife’s purse that are missing,” he said.
Headrick also spoke of the issues that he claimed had raised everyone’s suspicions against him: the $250,000 life insurance policy on Carolyn, and his own criminal record. The insurance policy, he said, was intended to be used to employ a full-time nurse for his mother-in-law in the event Carolyn died, because Mrs. Dalton was in poor health.
“I do have a past criminal record,” he told Cornelison. “I came here to start my life over. In the past five years, all I’ve had is a couple of traffic tickets. I’ve lived a good Christian life and helped my neighbors. I did do time in prison—four years, and then two years on probation—for possession of an unregistered weapon, a pipe bomb.” Headrick said he was in a truck with the man who made the bomb, and the bomb was in the back of the truck, when police arrested them.
“I want people to know I’m not trying to hide anything,” he claimed.
In another, related article, which ran directly beneath the first on the Times-Journal’s front page, Cornelison interviewed Headrick’s father, Waylon, owner of the Fyffe Antique Mall, who told her he had retained a lawyer to represent his son. Bob French, one of the best-known and most colorful defense lawyers in the Southeast, said that he would be representing Randy Headrick in all matters concerning the murder investigation. French, who had been known to introduce himself as “the notorious Bob French,” was often deemed by his peers to be “the Gerry Spence of the South.” He had defended Judith Ann Neelley some years earlier at her sensational DeKalb County trial for the brutal murder of Lisa Ann Millican, a young Georgia teenager who Neelley kidnapped and injected with drain cleaner, before shooting her in the back and throwing her body into Little River Canyon.
Neelley was found guilty and received the death sentence, but that outcome was not due to a lack of skilled defense. Bob French, an absolute master at his craft, used every trick in the book to try to exonerate his client despite the overwhelming evidence that convinced the jury of her guilt. French would do no less for Randy Headrick, but even though everything pointed to his new client being implicated in the murders of his wife and mother-in-law, there was still that ironclad alibi for French to work with, and he would use it well. In the meantime, he told the press that he would see to it that his client would be protected from unreasonable questioning by the authorities.
Waylon Headrick told Cornelison that his son had undergone a double trauma on Friday, first learning about the brutal murders and then immediately facing the police and being treated as a suspect. The questioning, he said, had left his son disoriented, and he was unable to work and was under a physician’s care. He was sedated by doctors at the DeKalb Baptist Medical Center’s emergency room on the night of his wife and mother-in-law’s funeral services, and was currently being cared for at his parents’ home.
“We were close to both of them,” Waylon Headrick said of Carolyn and Dora Ann. “I have no idea at all who did this. I can’t imagine them having an enemy who could do anything like that . . . or them even having an enemy.”
Sheriff Cecil Reed told Cornelison that “everybody’s a suspect at this point,” and said that extensive questioning had taken place throughout the community, including family members and friends, particularly within the Native American community. The main one of those who had been questioned, Red Crow, also spoke to Cornelison at length. He told her that Randy and Carolyn Headrick were intensely interested in learning the authentic craft techniques, such as beadwork and making rattles, spears and other items. He explained that this was the reason that Headrick’s home contained so many of the Native American pieces, and he said it was unfortunate the killer chose to use items taken from the wall, the spears and knife, to send what he called “a message for somebody. I believe somebody innocent got in the way. Shooting, stabbing and spearing has nothing to do with Native Americans,” he said, “and for anybody to say Randy had anything to do with it is absurd. They were good people, had nothing to do with drugs or gambling. Most men would love to have a woman and most women would love to have a man to love them the way these two loved each other.”
Red Crow said he and others in the local Native American community had been questioned by the sheriff’s investigators, but he felt that none of those they had talked to had been able to be of much help.
“None of us know anything but what’s been in the papers,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. The Native American community is a network people don’t understand. A true Native American can be recognized not by the regalia he wears. It is his way of life that sets the example.”
Red Crow told Cornelison that he resented a television news report that said skulls were laid out in the Headricks’ front yard to form symbols.
“Where did they get that?” he asked.
It was common practice among Indian craft workers, he said, to get skulls from slaughterhouses and clean them by leaving them outdoors in the weather and exposed to insects, and the bones from animal skeletons were left out to be cleaned in the same manner, then used for making jewelry and other items.
Red Crow said that Headrick did not claim to be Native American, and Carolyn did claim to be part Native American, but their interest in their artwork hobby was sincere.
“I could name four or five other families in the area who do the same thing,” he said.
When Sheriff Reed was told about Red Crow’s theory that the murders might have been some sort of family revenge gone wrong, a killing of innocents, Reed said, “We haven’t decided if we are looking at that as a motive. We have not learned anything to substantiate that.... We are looking at anything that might pop up.”
Reed told the reporter that no feedback had yet been received on the fingerprints lifted at the scene by the forensic team and sent to the state crime lab in Montgomery. Those, he said, could provide a suspect in the case if they happened to match prints that were already on record.
LaRue Cornelison would continue to use her considerable skill as an investigative crime reporter to provide readers of the Times-Journal with riveting coverage on the investigation into the murders, as well as the countless rumors and suspicions that made up the developing feud between the Headricks and the Daltons. She enjoyed an excellent relationship with area law enforcement, who had learned she could be trusted with sensitive information. As a result, LaRue was privy to much that was not disclosed to other members of the media. And her revealing interviews were a source of help to the investigators, who came to think of her more as a colleague than a reporter.