CHAPTER 33

On Monday, May 19, 1997, Sheriff Cecil Reed received a phone call that sent his department into frenzied action. A funeral director from Kerby Funeral Home in Henagar, the funeral home that had conducted the services for Carolyn Headrick and Dora Ann Dalton, called the sheriff and told him that Randy Headrick had called the funeral home that morning and said that he wanted them to exhume Carolyn Headrick’s body and have it cremated on Wednesday, May 21. The sheriff immediately contacted newly-elected DA Mike O’Dell, who took office after Richard Igou’s retirement. A court order was issued to stop the exhumation temporarily. O’Dell then received a memo from the state medical examiner that enabled the exhumation to be prevented entirely:

The memo stated that the medical examiner had been informed that there was an impending exhumation and cremation request on Carolyn Jean Headrick. The medical examiner said that while he foresaw no missed features in regard to the original autopsy at that time, the case was a homicide with an ongoing investigation. He strongly recommended that a request for cremation be denied in the event that exhumation might be required and further examinations of the body would be necessary.

The medical examiner went on to say that in his many years as an examiner for the states of Alabama, Florida and New Mexico, he had never seen an exhumation/ cremation order granted on an unsolved homicide.

“I feel that this would be a dangerous precedent to establish,” he stated.

Whatever Randy Headrick’s intent had been by wanting to have his deceased wife’s body exhumed and cremated, his plan had been effectively foiled by the quick action of the authorities and the funeral home.

On June 5, Rhonda Jackson received a call from Jill Shrader, who told her that a couple of Shane and Randy’s relatives had gone to Texas, to the home of another Headrick relative, about four or five weeks previously.

“They told the woman that if anyone came to her asking her anything about a truck driver, not to tell them anything, ” Jill said. “She asked them why they didn’t just call her about it, and they told her they thought all their phones were tapped. She said they only stayed about thirty minutes, then left. It was about a fourteen-hour drive from Alabama to where she lives in Texas.”

Jill also said Shane had gotten upset with her for calling Rhonda the previous week.

“I told him, ‘Well, you told me I could call her.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re not the one going to prison.’ He got real mad and said if the investigators pull up out there, he’s not talking and he’ll ask for a lawyer.”

Shane must have felt the noose tightening, and was evidently becoming very nervous at the amount of attention he was getting from the investigators. His nervousness was beginning to look justified; five days after Jill’s phone call, Jackson and Phillips spoke again with the man who had earlier told Phillips that he had tried repeatedly to call Shane at the motel on the day of the murders and had gotten no answer.

“On July 7, 1995, Shane Headrick’s father called me about six-thirty or seven A.M. and said he was trying to get in touch with Jill and Shane. He wanted to know if I had talked to them, and I told him I hadn’t. He told me he had talked to Jill earlier at work and she told him Shane was at the motel, and he had called and didn’t get an answer. He wanted me to call and see if I could get in touch with him.”

The man said Headrick’s father gave him the phone number of the motel.

“I called and couldn’t get an answer, and called Mr. Headrick back and told him that I didn’t get an answer either. He didn’t say what he wanted, but he said that he just needed to talk to Shane. I tried four or five times to call again before lunch and didn’t get an answer. Jimmy Phillips called me after three P.M. and told me Mrs. Dalton and Mrs. Headrick had been killed, and he wanted to know if I knew where Jill and Shane were. I told him I had been calling all day to try to get in touch with Shane for his dad, and couldn’t get an answer.”

The man said he called again, and that time, he contacted Jill at the motel.

“I told her the law was hunting them, that they needed to talk to Shane,” he said. “I didn’t tell her what had happened. I told her I had been trying to call all day. She told me Shane was supposed to be at the motel, that she had been trying to call him too and hadn’t got an answer.”

On July 3, 1997, Rhonda Jackson took a copy of a list of questions for a voice analysis–structured interview that she hoped Randy Headrick would agree to answer. They were delivered to attorney Bob French’s office, and on July 8, Jimmy Phillips told Rhonda that Bob French had told him that Randy wasn’t going to answer the questions and that he had helped the investigators all he was going to. This came as no surprise; the officers had felt it was doubtful that Headrick and French would agree to the voice analysis, but they thought it was worth a try. After two years of tirelessly working the case, they weren’t about to pass up any chances, no matter how slim.