Dissection of the throat, doctors Dominick and Vincent DiMaio wrote in their informative book Forensic Pathology, usually reveals hemorrhage, often extensive, into the musculature. The authors went on to note that depending on the victim’s age, the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage, in particular, generally show signs of fracture if strangulation is the cause of death.
But that wasn’t the case here, Gast indicated.
The other possibility—considering the injuries Heather sustained to her throat, neck, and eyes—was asphyxia.
“Suffocation is the exclusion of air from the body,” Schandl later explained. “So we all need air and oxygen . . . to live.... There are a number of different ways you can achieve this, and some of them will leave traces on the body and some of them won’t.”
This was one reason why, Schandl added, when forensic pathologists study a body, they “look very closely, because sometimes the evidence can be very scant.”
If a person was suffocated to death, her body was deprived of the oxygen it required to survive. This might sound simple, but from a pathologist’s point of view in search of a cause and manner of death, it becomes important.
“Every cell in your body needs oxygen,” Schandl explained. “If it doesn’t get it and you can’t exchange the gasses—you’re . . . cells will start to die.”
For a killer using this method, however, this can take a lot of time.
From the injuries on Heather’s upper body, it would appear her killer put something over her head and deprived her body of oxygen while holding the item around her neck just tight enough to cut off her airways, but not tight enough to injure those muscles and vessels underneath the skin.
Schandl filled out a preliminary report, noting that probable cause of death “was pending.” At that moment immediately after the autopsy, the doctor wasn’t prepared to make an assumption of how the girl was murdered.
Pending means, I haven’t been able to determine cause of death definitively . . . the doctor noted.
The doctor wanted “further law enforcement investigation” before making the determination. Medical examiners do this routinely. Schandl also sent blood and tissue samples to the lab. She wanted those toxicology reports back before she made a determination. There was nothing worse than (and no need for) a rush to judgment.
Regarding manner of death, Schandl also wrote “pending” in her report. She believed the death to be a homicide—just as law enforcement investigating the case did—but until further investigation could yield results, the doctor wasn’t comfortable making a final call. Complicating matters further, early lab tests proved Heather had high amounts of cocaine and amphetamines in her system at the time of her death.
CHAPTER 5
It was the call no father wanted to get. His daughter, his baby, was dead. Nobody knew how. Nobody would tell Nick anything. Nick looked out his window and stared at the media trucks parked across the street. He wondered how his life had become a breaking news story he had only seen on CNN or FOX News.
Is this real? Is this my life now?
“My heart was broke,” Nick said through tears as he recalled those harrowing, gut-wrenching days after his daughter had been found in a ditch.
Heather had no reason to be in South Carolina, Nick knew. Moreover, Nick felt that if she had overdosed—which he knew to be a possibility because of the lifestyle she was leading—the police would have already told him.
Which left only a few different possibilities.
The one on Nick’s mind as he considered the days, weeks, and months ahead—and surely on the minds of the reporters camped across the street—was that a vicious murderer was stalking the streets of Gaston County, North Carolina, and quite possibly searching for his next victim.
CHAPTER 6
Confirming what they knew already, Heather’s aunt called into the YCSO and said the family had recognized the clothing the YCSO had published in the newspapers and had shown on television.
“She’s been missing for twelve days,” the aunt told police. “She was last seen wearing a Hollister sweatshirt matching the one in the pictures.”
In fact, it was Heather’s sister Nicole’s boyfriend—a forty-seven-year-old local man, Danny Hembree—who had actually encouraged the family to report Heather missing. Family members had feared the worst. When they saw the clothing, all those nightmarish images they’d had became a reality. Heather had never been gone without communicating for that long a period of time.
Heather’s aunt was at Nick’s. He took the phone from her. As the YCSO had suspected since finding the body in its jurisdiction and Heather’s clothing in North Carolina, just over the border, Heather lived in Gastonia, an eleven-mile, twenty-minute ride from Clover, South Carolina, where Heather had been found.
Nick was obviously broken up about his daughter’s death. His phlegm-riddled, scratchy voice told that story. When he collected himself, Nick asked, “How did she die?”
“The cause of death is unknown at this time, Mr. Catterton.”
Later that afternoon, two YCSO investigators caught up to Nicole’s boyfriend, Danny Hembree, at Jacob’s Food Mart out on York Highway. Danny was the type of guy who knew the streets, knew people, and might have some information that could help. He was a career criminal. He was as good as any other resident in town to start with. In addition, Danny knew Heather and the Catterton family quite well. He had offered to be a pallbearer at Heather’s funeral. He said he wanted to help out the family any way he could. He told Nick repeatedly how sorry he was for the loss of his youngest daughter.
Nick appreciated that.
Danny had been dating Nicole for a few months and hung around Nick’s house and even stayed over some nights.
At Heather’s funeral, Danny signed the guest book. When it came time to carry Heather’s casket, however, the idea that initially seemed like a good one scared Danny enough so that he left and blew off the service completely.
“I don’t know why he did that,” Nick remembered. He assumed that Danny, same as everyone else, was broken up over Heather’s death.
Nick wasn’t paying too much attention during those early days to what was going on around him. He was in that fog of grief, struggling with heart issues. By most accounts, his daughter had been murdered and died a lonely, brutal death in a ditch in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was giving him answers.
Danny talked with investigators at the Food Mart and mentioned the last time he saw Heather, saying, “The eighteenth, near two in the morning.” He said something about partying with Heather, a girl named Sommer Heffner, and Sommer’s boyfriend. He didn’t want Nicole to find out. He admitted to having sex with Heather that same night.
“How’d the night begin?” an investigator asked.
“Nicole and me, we got into a fight. She wanted [something]. She wanted me to get it for her. I told her I wouldn’t.”
Investigators asked about the Catterton family in general.
“Look,” Danny said, “I’ve had sex with Heather, Nicole, and their mother, Stella.”
An entire family? Interesting. The guy certainly gets around.
“Had you seen Heather?” The cop meant between the time she disappeared and wound up dead.
“Lots of people been asking me about Heather.... I been asking around, you know.” Danny stubbed out a cigarette on the tar. He spoke with a terribly hard-to-understand Southern brogue, slow, drawling out his words. “I could not find anyone who done seen her.”
“Any ideas?”
Danny thought. “There was this one guy. He been looking for Heather. They call him the Marlboro Man. He drives a red Dodge. I done seen him, oh, near the seventeenth. He was looking for Heather.”
That was good information, considering the YCSO had reports of a truck with that description in the neighborhood where Heather had been found.
One of the investigators asked Danny where he had been that week.
He answered he was working; and that when he got off wo
rk, he would go to his mother’s house and eat dinner, then drive over to Nicole’s. According to him, he did this just about every day—facts that had been confirmed by Nicole and Danny’s employer, a report from the conversation with Danny stated.
CHAPTER 7
Sommer Heffner, Heather’s best friend, walked out her screen door and sat on the porch of her home. It was the morning of November 1, a Sunday. Sommer picked up the newspaper and opened it. She took a sip of her coffee.
To her shock and sorrow, there it was: confirmation. Not Heather’s name, but a story about a young girl found in a ditch. Sommer read what the girl was wearing, along with the clothes cops had recovered not far from her body.
Sommer, who had seen Heather get dressed in those same clothes on the night she disappeared, lost control of her emotions. She started bawling.
Her boyfriend came out.
“What’s going on?”
“That’s Heather,” Sommer said, jabbing her finger into the text of the article. She handed him the story of the girl in the ditch. “That. Is. Heather.”
CHAPTER 8
It’s not every day, week, month, or even year that a body is discovered in your jurisdiction. Law enforcement personnel come under a tremendous amount of pressure to solve a case as the media and downtown brass begin to ask questions about the investigation and what stage it’s at—no matter how early or far into it you are.
“The YCSO was working around the clock on this case,” one law enforcement official told me. “By the end of the first week, with no real leads, they were tired and beat down.”
They didn’t have a clue as to what happened to Heather Catterton.
No one knew it then, but as the second week of the investigation came to a close—and there were still no viable suspects on the radar—the unbelievable happened. It was a scenario that would ratchet up the investigation ten notches and turn it into a multijuris-diction, multiagency search for a potential serial killer. All while a ticking clock worked against law enforcement in what seemed to be a bogeyman on the loose, preying on women in Gaston County.
CHAPTER 9
On the night Heather Catterton’s identity was released publicly for the first time, her photograph was displayed on the nightly news. Randi Saldana, a twenty-nine-year-old (soon to be thirty) local Gastonia woman, sat in the living room of her sister, Shellie Nations, watching television. The two of them, close as sisters could be, talked as if it was just another normal night together, enjoying each other’s company. But as the news came on, Randi was quickly distracted by that image of Heather.
“I know her,” Randi said. It was the face. She had seen Heather somewhere.
“Where?” Shellie asked.
Shellie, called “Shell” by her sister, did not recognize the photo. Heather was, essentially, just a child, and her pudgy, bubbly face indicated as much. Randi and Shellie were much older. Randi hung around different circles. But they had lived in Gastonia, nonetheless, which was where Heather had spent most of her life.
“I got it,” Randi said, snapping her fingers. “Jail.” Randi had done some time just recently for several misdemeanors, drug possession, and fighting.
“You mean it? You talked to her, too?”
“Yeah.” Randi had also seen Heather around town, from time to time, she explained to Shellie. “And you know,” Randi added, “she would not have gone down like that without a fight. She was a tough chick.”
Shellie listened as the newscaster explained what law enforcement chose to release publicly. By now, it was being reported that Heather’s death was considered a “homicide investigation.” She had been dumped on the side of the road in South Carolina; some of her clothing was found just to the north, in North Carolina. They also cleared up a notion that Heather had been officially reported missing, saying there was never a missing persons report filed.
Shellie knew Randi was running around town with some shady characters lately. With the news of Heather’s body dumped on the side of the road Shellie grew worried.
“Listen to me, Randi,” Shellie said, stopping and looking Randi in the eyes, “whatever you’re doing, you need to stop. You have to understand that”—Shellie motioned to the television—“is what we’re scared could happen to you.”
Randi turned pale. She felt the seriousness of Shellie’s concern. Randi was aware of walking that fine line between dabbling in things she could control and others that could turn ugly at any given moment. It seemed to hit her right then that she was living a high-risk lifestyle, same as Heather, and her behavior could ultimately have consequences.
The sisters didn’t say much after that. What else was left? Shellie was the big sister; she was the one who looked out for Randi.
The worrywart.
Randi got up, hugged Shellie, and then turned to leave. She didn’t have to say it, but she did, anyway: “I love you, Shell.”
“Randi, I’m serious. I love you, too.”
“Will you take me to my friend’s house, Shell?” Randi asked. She had been living with a guy since breaking up with the father of her youngest child.
“Yes, Randi.”
As they walked out the door together, they made plans to meet up for Randi’s birthday in a few days.
Shellie pulled up to the house. Randi stared out the car window, almost as if questioning whether to get out of the car.
Before opening the door, she turned to Shellie. “I love you, Shell.”
“I love you, too, Randi.”
Randi was somber. As though Shellie’s words back at the house had impacted her way of thinking.
Randi got out. Walked into the house.
Shellie drove away.
CHAPTER 10
They had met back on October 29 to celebrate Shellie’s birthday. But now it was November 2, just a few days after Heather’s body had been found, and that conversation Randi and Shellie had about Randi’s lifestyle rang in their ears. Randi had always stopped by to see Shellie on her birthday and bring her a little something.
“Let’s go out and eat! My treat,” Randi had said on that October 29 night when she stopped by to wish her big sister a happy birthday. Their birthdays were so close, it was always a celebration.
“No, Randi, you don’t have that kind of money. Let’s just hang out and talk.”
“Nothing big,” Randi said. “Just some tacos. I really want one.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Shellie said, “I’ll bring you some tacos on your birthday.”
Shellie promised she’d drive to where Randi had been living with a guy named Tim, her current boyfriend. Shellie told Randi that in just two days, November 2, she’d arrive with a box full of Randi’s favorite tacos, ready and prepared to celebrate Randi turning thirty. A milestone.
“I like that idea,” Randi had said.
Randi had a glamorous, Vogue-like, supermodel smile that nearly everyone she came into contact with noticed immediately. It juxtaposed seamlessly against her deep, penetrating light blue eyes and porcelain skin. She was one of those women who always took the time to wear the perfect amount of eyeliner and makeup, accentuating her faultless facial features. Randi was not merely beautiful; she was gorgeous, turning heads wherever she went.
As kids, Randi and Shellie, one year and a few days apart, were like twins. Whatever one did, the other was right behind. It had been that way all their lives. They looked out for each other. They knew that men would come and go, even their girlfriends, but they would always be there for each other. No one could take that bond of being sisters away.
“Randi and I both grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina,” Shellie told me. “We had good lives. We were raised for the majority of our lives by our grandmother. We lived a very religious life.”
They attended the local Pentecostal Church of God every Wednesday and Sunday with their grandparents. There were never any drugs or alcohol around the home, Shellie recalled. It was as straight a life as one could lead: prayer, family dinners, more prayer,
cookouts, TV, lemonade, Bible talk, and laughs.
“There was never anything that we could complain about, growing up,” Shellie added. “We had good schooling. Good home.”
It was the kind of life one imagines in the small-town south. Gastonia, the largest small town in Gaston County, has been branded the “All-American City” three times and received the U.S. Conference of Mayors Livability Award. Its slogan spells out the feeling you get, many claim, from walking around town: “Great Place. Great People. Great Promise.” The city’s website says that because of Gastonia’s “strategic location,” just minutes west of Charlotte and midway between Atlanta and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Gastonia has become a bastion for attracting “both industry” and “new residents.”
For Randi and Shellie, Gastonia had always been, and always would be, home.
On November 2, at some point late into the afternoon of Randi’s birthday, Shellie’s phone rang. Looking down at the caller ID, she smiled.
“Hey, Randi . . .”
“Shellie, I need you to come and pick me up.”
“I told you I would bring you some tacos—I’m on my way.”
Shellie pulled up and parked her car in front of where Randi was living. She was excited to see her sister on her birthday.
Because of that strict but formidable lifestyle they had lived as kids growing up with God-fearing grandparents, Shellie and Randi never got into much trouble throughout their youth and into junior high.
“We were very obedient. My grandmother would not have tolerated anything else,” Shellie said.
As Randi grew older, however, she fell into a group of kids at school that dabbled in those temptations just about every kid, at some point, faces. Shellie never went the way of drugs or alcohol; Randi, on the other hand, couldn’t resist.
The Killing Kind Page 3