CHAPTER 42

The investigators on the Headrick case were surprised to hear from Terry Durham again, on September 9, 1998, when he called the sheriff’s department and told them he needed to speak to them again because he had left some information out of his previous statement. This struck the officers as not only odd, but potentially disastrous; so, they wasted no time arranging a meeting in Chattanooga, convenient to Durham’s work site. Durham arrived at the TBI office that day at 2:30 P.M., and once again sat down at the table across from Rhonda Jackson and Jimmy Phillips. It had been a month since he had given them his first statement, and the stress of that month showed plainly on the young man.

“Okay, you have told us that you want to talk to us a little bit more about this case,” Phillips said. “Is that true?”

Durham said it was true.

“Okay, if you would tell us what you forgot to tell us, we need to know everything that Headrick told you that morning.”

Unsettled and uneasy, Durham gave the only answer he felt he could give and still be totally honest with the officers.

“I didn’t forget to tell you anything,” he said.

“You said you didn’t forget to tell us anything, but you didn’t tell us all of it,” Jackson said. “Can you tell us why you didn’t tell us all of it the first time?”

“Because I realized, when I told y’all the first time, how much I knew that I shouldn’t know, and I didn’t like being in that situation,” Durham answered.

“Do you feel bad about leaving this out?”

Durham, dejected and humbled, said that he did. The officers then asked him to go back over his entire conversation with Headrick, starting from the very beginning on the day it happened.

“It was a Saturday morning when I got off work,” Durham said. “He came in an hour early because he’d been sitting at his store all night. Someone had tried to break into the store and he said he just decided to come on in to work. We carried on a conversation for a little bit, just small talk, and I got a call to escort a vagrant off of the sixteenth floor at the hotel. He went on the call with me to help me escort the man off the floor, and we came back down to the back dock and were standing outside talking. Then he got to talking about this murder case in Alabama.

“He asked me if I ever heard about the murders in Ider, and I said no, because I didn’t know what he was talking about. He went on into a little bit of details about what had happened, and then he looked at me and he told me, ‘They’ll never catch who done it,’ and I said why, and he said, ‘Because he’s standing in front of you now.’”

Phillips asked Durham to tell him exactly what kind of details Headrick went into as he talked about the murders.

“About the spears being stabbed in them and a woman being pinned to the floor or the wall, and one of them was eating watermelon, and the other one was in the bedroom, house cleaning, you know, maybe vacuuming and fixing the bed or something.”

Durham said Headrick told him that the woman who was sitting eating watermelon had her back turned to the door where a person would come into the house, or into that room, and that she had been shot and speared, and the other woman was shot and speared and stabbed.

“Did he tell you who killed them?” Phillips asked.

“He told me his brother, Shane,” said Durham. Headrick had told him that Shane killed Carolyn, Durham said, and that he, Headrick, had killed his mother-in-law.

“Did he tell you anything about how he got there to the house?” Phillips asked.

“He told me that he was on a run and he worked at Builders Supply, so the run, I figured, was like a delivery. But he never went there or never came back from there or something.”

“Now, I don’t understand what you mean,” Jackson said. “He said he was supposed to be on a run or a delivery?”

“That’s what they thought he was on, was a run, a delivery. He didn’t have one.”

Phillips asked if Headrick had told Durham where he hooked up with Shane.

“I can’t remember if his brother was already at the house or if he picked his brother up; I don’t really think he ever said that.”

“But he never told you that he went and picked Shane up and they went there together?” asked Phillips.

“No,” Durham said, “I know they left together.”

Phillips asked what kind of vehicle they left in, and Durham said he thought, when Headrick told him that he had worked for Builders Supply, that he meant a ton truck or delivery truck.

“That’s what I thought he was talking about, was a truck, because you can’t haul stuff in the back of a car.”

Durham said Headrick didn’t tell him an exact time as to how long he and Shane had stayed at the house, but told him that the murders took place around 12:30 P.M.

“He told you that?” Phillips asked.

“Around twelve-thirty,” Durham repeated.

Phillips asked if Headrick had mentioned anything about why he thought there was no evidence that could link him to the murders.

“He burnt all the clothes that they had on and he had plastic in the seat and all that,” Durham said.

“Did he tell you one of the things that we couldn’t prove is that he was at work all day?” asked Phillips.

“He said he had an hour, one hour, that y’all couldn’t account for where he was at,” Durham said, “but the rest of that he said he had an alibi for.”

Durham told the officers that Headrick had told him that the time he couldn’t be accounted for was from about 11:55 A.M. until 12:55 P.M.

“Did he say there was anybody else involved?” Jackson asked.

“Him and his brother, and that his dad is the one that told them to burn the stuff. To burn the clothes in a barn.”

“And that’s Randy’s dad, right?” asked Phillips.

“As far as I know,” Durham answered. “I mean, he said ‘Dad.’ Yeah.”

The officers asked Durham if he was certain that he never saw anything about the murders at the time they happened, on television or in the newspapers.

“The reason I asked you that is because I need to know if you’ve read anything or seen anything on TV. This was a highly publicized case—it was in the paper; it was on TV; it was an everyday thing there for a while.”

Durham said he couldn’t remember seeing or hearing about the case.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said, “at the time y’all said this happened in ’95, I had just got married; I wasn’t reading no newspaper, you know?”