Chapter 14

“Her face was red, like she’d been crying.”

On Friday evening and Saturday morning, Patricia Booher made several phone calls to family and friends to tell them her good news. She wanted everyone close to her to know that she had been to the clinic the day before and found out that she was pregnant. Patty left messages for several other friends who were not at home, and they reported the phone messages did not sound as though she was upset or that the call was urgent; none of them felt there was any problem when they listened to her message.

Patricia’s pastor, Reverend Paul Lamb, told investigators he wasn’t aware of any trip she was planning, and said she most likely would have told him if she was going out of town. He, too, had a phone message from Patricia on Saturday morning but was unavailable to contact her, and said he had heard she was pregnant and suspected she wanted to talk with him about the pregnancy.

To those people Patricia spoke with on the phone, she sounded very happy and excited about her positive pregnancy test, but she mentioned to none of the people she talked to on Friday night or the following morning that she might be about to leave for Florida to visit Hayward Bissell’s parents.

“No one knew she was leaving town,” her cousin said. “Usually she tells someone, either her sister or us. She would have been easy to take advantage of.”

The trip was quite obviously unplanned on Patricia’s part, for when her apartment was searched by Norwalk police on Sunday night, all of her personal items were there. It is highly unlikely she would have left her apartment planning to go on vacation without taking any extra clothing or even her toothbrush.

Patricia had told several people she did not want to make the trip to Florida with Bissell because she was trying to end the relationship. She would not be comfortable going on vacation with him under the circumstances, she said.

“When she tried to break it off with him, I just think he thought, ‘If I can’t have you, no one can,’” her cousin said.

Regardless of her intentions, Patricia left the Firelands Village apartments with Hayward Bissell on Saturday morning, shortly after making a last phone call to two of her friends. She took only her purse and coat, and Bissell also left Norwalk with no extra clothes or personal items. He carried nothing but the contents of his pockets . . . and two very long, sharp knives hidden in the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car.

Bissell told investigators that he and Patricia had gotten as far south as Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Saturday, and said they spent Saturday night in the parking lot of a motel near there. A frigid rain was falling and ice was beginning to form on the streets, and it must have been a cold, miserable night during which they got very little sleep. They had only a few dollars in cash, and Bissell knew they would have to get more money in order to keep going.

The next morning, as the weather grew increasingly nastier, Bissell again headed south in the predawn darkness on the interstate. As he crossed the state line from Tennessee into Northwest Georgia, he knew he wouldn’t get much further without money for fuel and food. He began to look for an exit where he claimed he wanted to try to find an automated teller or a Western Union, and eventually he left the interstate heading in the direction of the small towns of Summerville and Trion, Georgia.

That Sunday morning, residents of Summerville woke up to find trees and power lines downed by the night’s accumulation of ice. Streets and roads were slippery in spots and many were blocked by fallen timber, but some were still passable, and a few gas stations and convenience stores were able to be open early.

Amy Gilliland and her husband, Kevin, live in one of the most pleasant residential sections of Summerville. The streets leading to their house on White Oak Road are narrow and winding and lined with trees and shrubbery that fill in the areas between the comfortable, attractive homes.

On Sunday, January 23, 2000, Amy woke to find her neighborhood had been turned into a fairyland of glittering ice and snow. Unfortunately, there was a downside to the picture-postcard beauty left by the winter storms. Many sections of town, and the neighboring towns of Trion and Lyerly, were without electricity that morning.

Around 8:00 A.M., Amy called to check in with her father-in-law, Bobby Gilliland, who told her he had already been out riding around to see which parts of town still had power, and he told her he had gone to the Golden Gallon store on the Lyerly Highway. It was open and he had gotten some coffee there.

Amy then called Barbara Deering, her grandmother, to see if she had power. The electricity was out at Deering’s house, and after Amy hung up, it occurred to her that she could go to the Golden Gallon store and get her grandmother some hot coffee. Amy left home in her 1996 Nissan Maxima and drove to the store, got the coffee, then went to her grandmother’s house.

After a short visit, Amy left Barbara Deering’s house and drove to Highway 27, which runs through downtown Summerville. She continued through town and made a couple of turns that took her back to White Oak Road. It was then that she first noticed she was being followed.

The car was an older Lincoln, pale blue or silver colored, with a dark blue top. It was a big car, a long four-door model, and it was following her so closely that she could read the Ohio license plate. Amy could see the driver, a big man, and he was coming dangerously close to Amy’s car, especially considering the treacherous icy roads. She sped up, trying to move away from him, but he stayed on her bumper, keeping up with Amy as she drove faster along the twists and turns of the road toward her house.

The Gilliland house is only one house away from the dead end of White Oak Road. When Amy turned into her driveway, the driver of the Lincoln pulled in right behind her without any hesitation. Amy parked her car, then sat there for a few seconds, keeping a close eye on the driver in her rearview mirror. She decided she would be safer to get into the house as quickly as possible, so she got out of the car, walked around behind it, and went straight to the doorway leading to the house. The entire time, the stranger in the car watched her every move, and at the same time she was keeping a very close eye on him. He had turned off the motor of his car and was sitting there, staring at her, expressionless.

Amy hurried inside the house and began calling to her husband, Kevin, telling him to get up and come to check on the man who had followed her all the way home and was now parked behind her car in the driveway.

While Kevin was getting dressed, Amy peeped out the blinds looking at the car and the big man behind the wheel. For the first time, she noticed that there was either a small person or a child sitting in the passenger’s seat and wearing a seat belt. The person was so small Amy could only see them from the nose up. Maybe this was a man and his child who needed help for some reason; maybe that was why they had followed her all the way home. She really ought to check and see if they were having car trouble or something.

Amy opened the door, staying safely inside the house, and shouted, “Can I help you?”

There was no response from the car.

Amy called out again, “Can I help you?”

The driver opened his door and stepped halfway out, with one foot on the ground, and leaned out and said without any expression, “We’re lost.”

Amy was able to get a good look at the man, who was only about twenty feet away from the doorway where she stood. He appeared to be in his late thirties to early forties with short, dark hair, a receding hairline and no mustache or beard. He was a very big man, and his face was very red and looked flushed. For some reason, Amy got the impression that he wasn’t telling her the truth about being lost. The man got back in the car and shut the door without any further comment.

Amy’s cat chose that inopportune moment to dart between her feet and run out the door, stopping by Kevin’s truck, about halfway to the Lincoln. Amy dashed out, snatched up the cat and retreated back to the house as quickly as she could. Her unwelcome visitor then started his car and backed out of the driveway, and Kevin got to the window just in time to see the big Lincoln’s Ohio license plates as it pulled away and headed back down the road.

Sometime later that morning on Orchard Hill Road, in a neighborhood on the opposite side of Summerville, a man and his daughter left home on a walking tour of the neighborhood to look at the ice and broken trees. They had not gotten far from their home when Jeff “Coach” Bennett and his daughter, Beth, noticed a large grayish silver car stopped in the northbound lane of one of the streets they passed.

When the Bennetts headed back toward their home, the big car had moved on past their house and stopped again. As they walked closer to the car, Beth could see it had Ohio license plates. Through the front windshield, she saw a small woman or child sitting in the passenger’s seat and a very large man behind the wheel. As they walked nearer, Coach thought to himself that it was unusual for a car with Ohio tags to be in his neighborhood, and even more unusual for it to be stopped in the middle of the road on a Sunday morning during an ice storm. He said, “Hi, how are you?” to the driver, but the man didn’t respond. The Bennetts walked on past their house to the end of the road, and when they turned around and came back to their home, the car was gone.

Moments later, around 10:30 A.M., two women who lived farther down Orchard Hill Road decided to walk up the road and look at the storm damage. As Connie McCurdy and Rebecca Mickley topped Orchard Hill, they saw the Lincoln stopped in the road with its emergency flashers on.

“Ask those people if they need some help,” Connie told Rebecca as they neared the car.

At first, the man and woman inside the Lincoln didn’t answer when Rebecca spoke. Then the driver rolled down the window and told her he didn’t need any help; he was letting the transmission cool down, he said.

The driver was a very large man with dark hair, and Rebecca could also see the small woman sitting in the passenger’s seat. She had dark hair and glasses and was wearing a blue coat, and Rebecca later told investigators, “Her face was red, like she had been crying.” Connie was standing by the passenger’s-side window and she, too, noticed the woman appeared to have been crying and looked as if she were very upset.

As Connie and Rebecca began walking back toward their home, the Lincoln pulled into a driveway and both women noticed and commented on its Ohio license plates. They, like Coach Bennett, found it highly unusual for a car from Ohio to be cruising their neighborhood on a Sunday morning, especially when the streets and roads were gradually becoming impassable due to an ever-increasing coat of ice.