CHAPTER 32

Once the holidays were past, Rhonda Jackson was able again to devote most of her time to the Headrick case. On January 17, 1997, she took part in a conference call with two FBI agents from the FBI’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, and the FBI agent from the Birmingham, Alabama, field office who had previously offered his advice on the case. The agents suggested that Jackson try to locate Shane Headrick and develop a background on him. They also suggested that Jackson should obtain the current phone records of Randy Headrick and his parents, as well as another subpoena for motel phone and registration records on the motel in Georgia where Jill Shrader and Shane Headrick were staying at the time of the murders. Jackson started the process to obtain the records as suggested, and began working up the information on Shane Headrick into a comprehensive file. Jackson’s record keeping was an amazingly painstaking process; she carefully logged every phone call, every scrap of information and every interview in writing—no matter how irrelevant it might seem—with times, dates and parties present. This careful detailing of events was very important to her, with the Headrick case being her first as lead investigator. She had a lot to prove, both to herself and to her coworkers, and she was determined to do the job and do it well. Her meticulous attention to detail would prove to be invaluable in the coming months of the investigation.

In April, Rhonda Jackson was called back to the residence of John Boggie, the gun-loving taxidermist she had questioned following the murders. Boggie had been involved in a situation a couple of weeks earlier, and was ready to make another statement about what he had heard at that time.

“I was at this guy’s residence just off Highway forty about two or three weeks ago,” he said. “Another guy was there too, and we were all drinking, and two women and another fellow were there too. One of the guys was drinking whiskey; I saw him drink a quart, sitting at the table. He threatened me and one of the women while he was sitting there. He said he had killed other people before and he didn’t care to kill us either.”

The taxidermist said he later took the man to the store at Dutton, a nearby town, and that the man had told him, while they were in the car alone, that he killed the two women at Henagar and had killed two other people.

“I didn’t ask him any questions, and he didn’t go into any detail,” Boggie said. “He mentioned something about Indian artifacts when he said that he killed the women, but I don’t remember exactly what he said. I haven’t seen him anymore since then.”

The investigators checked this story out thoroughly, but it proved to be yet another one of those tales that had flourished in the remote northern areas of DeKalb and Jackson Counties on so many weekends since the murders. After several hours of drinking, quite a number of men had claimed to be the killer in an effort to scare their wives or girlfriends into obedience, or to impress and intimidate their drinking buddies.

In early May, Rhonda Jackson received a tip that Randy Headrick and his current wife, Tonya, no longer lived with Headrick’s relative and had moved back to Chattanooga. Three days later, she received a call from a reserve officer with the Hamilton County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Department in Chattanooga. The officer had heard about the case under investigation and told Rhonda that Randy Headrick had opened a Native American store on Highway 153. When he visited the store, the officer said, Red Crow was cleaning and polishing a bayonet for Headrick, and the officer asked Headrick what he needed with it, or what he was going to use it for.

“Headrick looked at me and said, ‘You never know what you can use something like this for.’ I got an awful feeling when he said that.”

The officer also said that Headrick was going to give him a large bowie knife, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it.

“I told him I didn’t have any use for something like that,” the man said. “I know it’s an insult in the Native American culture to turn down a gift, but I just couldn’t accept it.”

Headrick had told the man that he “didn’t fool with guns; if he needed a weapon, he would use a knife.” He let the man know that he was good with knives; he never mentioned owning any guns, but a twelve-gauge riot shotgun lay on a back counter in the store. When the man saw it and commented on it, Headrick stepped in front of the shotgun to block his view of the weapon.

Headrick never mentioned the murders of his wife and mother-in-law to the reserve officer, but told him that he’d been a U.S. Ranger in Vietnam.

“He tried sucking up to me,” the man said. “He wanted officers in the store because it looked good.”