CHAPTER 38

A husky, quiet young man sat in an office at the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Department at 8:34 P.M. on August 20, 1998, waiting to talk to Jimmy Phillips, Rhonda Jackson and Deputy District Attorney Ben Baxley. Terry Durham was a steady, responsible fellow who, earlier that day, had heard his wife and sister-in-law talking about Headrick’s arrest on firearms charges and the murders of Carolyn Headrick and Dora Ann Dalton. When he heard them talking about the details of the murders, Durham realized that he had to tell the authorities what he knew, and had to tell them quickly.

When the investigators and Baxley were ready to begin the interview with Durham, Rhonda Jackson turned on her tape recorder and began asking about Durham’s current address, his marital status, how many children he had and his current place of employment. He worked with Metropolitan Security in Chattanooga, at the Marriott hotel, where he had come in contact with a man named Randy Headrick, who worked in the hotel’s maintenance department on the first shift. Durham said that he worked as a security guard on second shift and often doubled over into third shift, and he and Headrick would sometimes speak to one another in the mornings when their paths crossed during shift changes.

Durham had been stationed at the Marriott for around two months, and Headrick was already working there at the time that Durham started his job. The men had casual conversations, Durham said, and would occasionally go on calls together.

“What kind of calls?” Rhonda asked.

“Well, if something broke down, I’d have to go secure the area and make sure nobody came in it . . . just normal stuff.”

Durham said he had no idea what Headrick’s job description was.

“They have seven different ones that work different jobs. Some work air conditioning, some work plumbing—”

“Okay,” Rhonda said, “during this time that you’ve been working with him or around him, has he told you anything about any homicides in DeKalb County?” Rhonda held her breath, waiting for the answer that she knew was coming.

“He mentioned to me on August first, he asked me if I knew of any murders, especially the ones in the Henagar/Ider area, and I told him that I didn’t, and he started going into details about it, and all this and that.”

“Tell me what kind of details he gave you,” Rhonda said.

“At first, he told me that they never would catch who done it because they didn’t have no proof who it was that done it. And then we just kinda talked around a little bit, and he finally looked at me, and looked at me straight in the face, and said, ‘The reason they won’t never catch who done it is because I’m standing right here; I’m the one who done it and they ain’t caught me yet.’”

Rhonda’s heart was pounding. She had waited, hoped and prayed for three years that this case would finally break, and here sat Terry Durham, telling her that Randy Headrick had not only freely admitted to murdering Carolyn and Dora Ann, but had practically bragged about it. She was almost too excited to continue her questioning, but she composed herself and asked Durham what kind of details Headrick had given him.

“He went into some details about the murder as far as using an authentic, I guess it was an authentic, Native American spear. He said it was six foot long, that’s all, and I didn’t believe him at the time; I mean, who would confess, you know?”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He never really went into details, except for he started mentioning stuff like one woman was eating watermelon, and then I just kinda not paid attention to him for a little bit, and then I caught back up with his talking about burning some clothes in a barn. I have no idea what kind of clothes they were, and he also mentioned wrapping the truck seats in plastic. At least the interior, he said the interior, so I took it as the truck seat . . . car seat . . . I don’t know.”

“And he mentioned, what did you say about burning clothes in a barn?” Rhonda asked.

“That him and his brother burned clothes in a barn,” Durham answered.

Jimmy Phillips broke in, asking, “Did he say where the barn was that they burned.... Anything about it?”

“From what I gathered, it was his father’s.”

“Did he give you any more details?” Rhonda asked.

“Nothing real specific,” said Durham. “Like I said, I didn’t believe him. Why, you know, why would he come out . . .”

Phillips asked if Headrick told Durham what each of the victims was doing at the time of the murders.

“Just that one of them was eating watermelon.”

“And the other one was, what did he tell you what she was doing?”

“I thought he said vacuuming, sweeping, mopping or something, some sort of that nature.”

“All right,” Phillips said, “and then you said he burned some clothes in the barn, how did that come up?”

“We was talking about it and he said, this is where we got into this ‘They won’t catch me because they don’t have fingerprints,’ all this and that, and ‘They don’t have no evidence.’ He said, ‘They don’t have no evidence ’cause we burned the clothes.’”

Phillips asked if Headrick had told Durham that Headrick and his brother had burned the clothes, and Durham said yes, but said that Headrick did not mention his brother by name.

The investigators asked Durham how many times he’d talked to Headrick, and he said at least once a day, sometimes only a casual “Hello, how you doing?” He said Headrick had never mentioned anything even remotely like his admission of murder in any of their conversations before August 1.

“The only thing he ever mentioned was that he had a twenty-two pistol. I have a thirty-eight Special and he had seen it and was looking at it, and I asked him, ‘Do you own one?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a twenty-two pistol,’ and that’s all he ever said. I never saw the pistol, just what he said.”

Durham told the officers that Headrick didn’t say what kind of pistol it was, or whether he had it at home or kept it somewhere else. Headrick, he said, had told him about the pistol around two weeks after Durham started working at the Marriott, because Headrick was trying to get him to buy a pen that held a concealed knife. Headrick told Durham that he owned a store where he sold items of that sort.

The investigators asked Durham several questions to pin down exactly when he first began talking to Headrick at work, and what time the August 1 conversation took place. Durham told them that he and Headrick spoke that day for around an hour, from about 6:00 to 7:00 A.M., Eastern time.

“Did he ever mention why he killed those people?” Phillips asked.

“He just said something about he felt like his wife was cheating on him, and the mother knew it.”

Rhonda Jackson, having come to know the Daltons so well during the course of the investigation, was flabbergasted to hear that statement.

“And the mother what?” she asked.

“Knew that was happening, and that’s why he done it.”

Rhonda shook her head in disgust. The very idea of Carolyn cheating on her husband, or of Dora Ann condoning it, was beyond ludicrous.

Phillips asked Durham if Headrick ever mentioned anything about insurance money.

“Yeah,” Durham said, “he said that he had some odd amount of insurance and that he couldn’t get it all back. I think he said around three hundred thousand, I don’t know.”

Phillips asked if Headrick had said he collected some of the money, but didn’t get it all.

“I don’t believe he told me he collected any of it,” Durham said.

Rhonda asked if Headrick had said anything about living in Tennessee and not being able to come back to Alabama.

“He said he couldn’t come back to Henagar or Ider because of an ongoing investigation with him involved,” Durham answered. “He said that if he come back, that he’d be arrested for homicide, murder, whatever.”

“Was anybody else around when he told you this?” Rhonda asked.

“Not when he told me, but right before I left, we was outside talking and another security employee come to relieve me from my shift. He seen me speaking with Randy.”

Rhonda asked Durham if Headrick had said whether or not he’d ever told anybody else what he had told Durham that morning.

“No, like I said, I didn’t believe him when he told me, so I didn’t really ask him any questions.”

“Well, Terry, what made you come to us today?” asked Rhonda.

“My sister-in-law was talking to me and she mentioned Randy being arrested in Chattanooga or somewhere, and when she said his name, it just made me think, and I said, ‘Yeah, I know him; he used to work engineering at the Marriott, but they told me that he quit because he got into an altercation with an employee.’ One of the second-shift engineers told me that they got in a cuss fight sometime last week.”

“Okay,” Rhonda said, “at what point, did you start believing what Randy Headrick told you?”

“Whenever I started mentioning it to my sister-in-law what I knew, she told me I needed to come talk with Jimmy Phillips.”

Durham said that the conversation between him, his wife and his sister-in-law had taken place earlier that day, around 2:00 P.M.

“And you said that she was saying something about Randy getting arrested on firearms charges in Chattanooga, and then you recognized the name as the man who was working with you and remembered what he told you?” Rhonda asked.

“I said what he had told me.”

Durham told the investigators that he hadn’t told anyone else about what Randy had admitted to him, because he didn’t believe him.

“Not until today, not until all this started going together. I found out today that this was actually true.”

Durham said he wasn’t familiar with the murders and didn’t know about them at all at the time they had happened.

“That’s why I didn’t believe him when he told me, because I didn’t know nothing about this.”

“You didn’t read anything in the paper about any of this murder or anything?” asked Phillips. “I mean, it was well publicized in the paper and on TV, and I just thought you—”

“I never even heard of them,” said Durham.

“So you didn’t know anything about the two women that got killed at Ider?” Phillips asked.

“No, that’s why when he told me, I didn’t believe him, you know, because I didn’t know of anything like that ever happening, ’cause you know how stuff circulates around about that.”

Phillips asked Durham, “When he told you this, you said that he looked at you in a strange way?”

“When he told me that he killed them, he just got that glare, like you can just look through somebody, and just turned his head sort of up in the air, over his shoulder.”

The investigators looked at each other. This was what they had waited and hoped for: an admission of guilt loaded with enough detailed information, from Headrick himself, to lead to an arrest. And likely more than one arrest, since Headrick had also implicated his brother, Shane, as an accomplice. It was almost too good to be true, and they knew they had to proceed carefully to make sure no loopholes were left in their questioning.

Jimmy Phillips wanted to know if Headrick had told Durham anything about his past, and what sort of other claims he had made. As he had previously claimed to so many people, he told Durham that he was a Vietnam veteran. He also told the young man that he had been a branch manager for Pinkerton in Texas.

“This took place over a period of time, just in casual meetings, you know, like he’d come in and ask me how I liked working for Metropolitan, and stuff like that, and he would tell me about Pinkerton and all that. My office is right where they clock out, so he’d clock out and come in and say, ‘I’m going home, see you later,’ you know. And like in the morning when I’d work overtime, he would come in maybe ten or fifteen minutes early.”

Durham told the investigators that Headrick had also told him about working at Builders Supply in Fort Payne.

“He told me there was fifty-five minutes to an hour that y’all couldn’t account for, for where he was for that time.”

“Did he say anything much more about his brother?” asked Rhonda.

“Just that he’s the one, he accused him of doing it, but he never said his name. He just said, ‘I pointed a finger to my brother as the triggerman.’”

Phillips wanted more about the murders, and he asked Durham if Headrick went into any detail about how the two women were killed, other than what he already had stated.

“He never did come out and say he shot them,” Durham said, “but he did say he used the spear. He was telling me how good of a marksman he was with a spear.”

Rhonda asked, “Did he tell you about any weapons other than the spears, and what did you say about them being shot? What was his exact words, if you can remember?”

“I believe most of the stuff that happened, as far as the cutting, was after he killed them or whoever killed them, after they were dead or dying. Basically that they were shot, and he speared them.”

Phillips wanted to know if Headrick ever told Durham how he got away from work, and Durham repeated what Headrick had said about how there was forty-five minutes to an hour during which the investigators couldn’t account for his whereabouts.

“Do you know of anybody else he’s talked to about this, or if he had anybody that he hung around much that works up there, that he was friends with?” Rhonda asked.

“Yeah, there was one of the engineers. I don’t have no idea what his last name was. If he’s still there. You seen them together all the time.” Durham told the investigators the engineer’s first name, and they knew, with that information, that they would be able to locate the man and question him.

Phillips went back to the conversation on August 1, when Headrick had made his seemingly unbelievable admission of guilt.

“When he told you this, you didn’t believe him, right? At the time, you thought he was just more or less running his mouth. Is that what you were thinking?”

“I thought he was just kidding, you know?” Durham told him. “At the time he told me, I didn’t believe him. I mean, why would anybody say that they done it?”

Durham said he had no idea why Headrick had told him he was guilty, especially since he didn’t know him that well.

“I was just there when he said it to me. It was just me and him on the back dock until the other man came to relieve me.”

Durham said Headrick had never mentioned trying to hire somebody to kill the two women.

“So, basically he told you that he was under investigation for murder in Alabama,” Phillips said. “He couldn’t come back to Alabama because he was still under investigation, and if he came back down here, he’d be arrested for murder, and that we would never catch him because we didn’t have enough evidence?”

“You didn’t have no physical evidence was his last words. Nothing that would hold up in court. He mentioned there was no fingerprints found.”

Phillips asked if Headrick had told him the location of the barn where he claimed he and Shane had burned some clothes, and asked him to try and repeat exactly what Headrick had said to him about the incident.

“That him and his brother burnt clothes in there. He never said his brother’s name; I didn’t know his brother’s name until you mentioned it. He just said him and his brother put shit in the barn and burnt it.”

“Did he ever say, like, clothes, other than ‘we put shit in the barn and burned it’?” Phillips asked. “Can you remember distinctly if he said clothes?”

“He said clothes. I don’t know what kind of clothes; he just said clothes.”

The officers spent some time questioning Durham about the exact time he came to work on August 1, and when he spoke with Headrick, and how long. Durham told them he didn’t have any further contact with Headrick after they talked about the murders, and had seen him on a few occasions since their conversation, but they didn’t speak any further about the murders or anything else. Durham didn’t know Headrick had been arrested; he thought he had quit his job at the Marriott because of the altercation he’d had with another employee. He had first learned about the arrest that day, he said, when he heard it from his sister-in-law.