Still, Randi was one of those girls in junior high and high school who became a magnet, attracting others who wanted to be around her. She had that glow about her that drew people toward her. You wanted to know Randi. You wanted to be seen with her. You wanted to be her friend. She made you feel alive and loved and important. She made people laugh and allowed them to be comfortable with who they were.
“Her dream,” Shellie recalled, “was to do hair and makeup, to go off to cosmetology school and learn the trade.”
That vocation fit Randi so well.
Randi and Shellie’s grandmother had a large spread of land with a lake, and Shellie recalled how her fondest memories of her sister included going down to the lake, just sitting, staring out at the water, and talking like young girls do.
“We’d always go there swimming with our cousins and cook out right by the lake. We had a lot of family time. It was never many outsiders. It was always family.”
Randi had an inherent goodness in her. Whenever she met people for the first time, she would not judge, as though anyone and everyone were not only equal, but loved by her in a special way.
There was one woman Shellie met years later who shared a story about Randi. The woman was crying. The story had conveyed the type of person Randi was.
“What’s wrong?” Shellie asked.
“Aren’t you Randi’s sister?”
“Yes, I am.”
“If it hadn’t been for Randi, I don’t know where I’d be today.”
The woman explained that when she arrived in Gastonia for the first time, she didn’t know anyone. She met Randi.
“Randi gave me ten dollars and a place to stay,” the woman said.
The woman now had a job, a new home, and was doing better than she could ever recall. All because Randi reached out and showed her love.
“If it had not been for Randi,” the woman concluded, “I do not know where I’d be today.”
“She accepted people for who they were,” Shellie said. “If they were down and had nothing, Randi wanted to help.”
Shellie and Randi spent November 2, Randi’s birthday, together. It was one of those days Shellie remembered later with a gleam: two sisters enjoying each other’s company.
They ate tacos. Talked. Drove around. Laughed.
They didn’t get a chance to see their mother much; but on this day, Shellie drove over to her and Randi’s mother’s house and they all sat and chatted.
At one point, Randi started crying.
“What’s wrong?” Shellie asked.
“I need you to do me a favor, Shell. Will you?”
“Of course, Randi. Yes. What is it?”
Shellie knew Randi was in a tight spot and didn’t like to talk about her life and where it had been lately, not where Randi saw herself headed. Since he had been two years old, Shellie had custody of Randi’s middle child. Randi had signed over that custody. It was the right thing to do for Randi. She realized she couldn’t handle the child at the time and knew that by leaving the child with Shellie, Randi could see him whenever she wanted. For Shellie, family looked out for one another.
When she entered high school, Randi was passionate about hip-hop dancing, along with hanging out with the popular crowd, since she was one of them. As far as boys and dating, Randi was not one of those girls dreaming of one day marrying Prince Charming and riding off into the sunset. Sure, she wanted that white-picket fence, same as most people, but there was something inside Randi that told her not to allow herself to be tied down—at least not at a young age. She was determined that before settling down, the love between her and her partner needed to be genuine. It should not be just the “next thing to do” in life, nor just because she’d had children at such a young age.
For years, Randi considered how people dated. They’d graduate college together. Then they would move into the working world, believing the next “thing” to check off the list was marriage and kids and SUVs and Little League and PTA meetings. It was almost as if their lives had been scripted. And then the bubble burst at some point and they found themselves staring at each other one day across the dinner table, realizing they were following a path set before them by others and not listening to their hearts.
Randi didn’t want that. She yearned for love at its core. If she didn’t feel it, she wasn’t sticking around and wasn’t going to kid herself into believing that just because a man fathered her child, he was “the one.”
“What is it, Randi?” Shellie pressed.
Randi was still crying.
Shellie and her mother looked on, wondering what was going on. It was Randi’s birthday. She was supposed to be celebrating. She should be happy.
But there was a certain darkness hovering over Randi. Shellie could feel it.
“Randi, talk to me. . . .”
CHAPTER 11
Sisters Randi and Shellie hung out with the same group of friends while in high school. Being so close in age, they did just about everything together. High school, however, changes kids—more choices to make, more temptations. Teenagers begin to think as though they’re adults. It’s nature. It’s all part of growing up.
“Randi was never one to get out there and start trouble with people,” Shellie said. “It just wasn’t in her. But, look, if someone brought trouble her way, she was not going to back down. She would stand her ground. Still, Randi was brought up in a godly way. She had more sympathy for people than anger or animosity. She never really wanted to be ugly to anyone.”
While in high school, Randi got pregnant.
“And after she had Brendon (pseudonym), these people, that crowd, started coming around and causing problems for her and her boyfriend, and it wasn’t gonna work out.”
Sometime after giving birth to Brendon, Randi stopped by to see Shellie.
“I want to go to Michigan,” Randi explained. She was looking for approval from Shellie—the okay. They had family up north.
Randi wanted to get away from Gastonia and take some time in another place, a location away from all the drama and bedlam of her life. The last few years of high school had been rough. It started out slowly, but after falling in with a certain group, getting pregnant, and then beginning to dabble in the drug culture, Randi needed a break.
“Do you think it’d be okay if I took Brendon with me?” Randi asked Shellie.
“Of course, honey. He’s your son.”
Randi left.
When she got out there, Randi found out that the father of her child and his family weren’t happy about it. To them, it seemed Randi had run off with the kid. To add to Randi’s problems, she had been in some trouble with the law for fighting. She’d had a court date she skipped out on.
All of that worked against her.
Randi was picked up and the child went to the father’s family. In jail, Randi couldn’t do much about it.
According to Shellie, this was a turning point: “They took him and wouldn’t allow Randi to see her own child.”
As Randi emerged from jail, she’d hit a dark, bottomless pit without any boundaries or safety nets. Randi hadn’t been on any type of hard drugs then. It was only after the father of the child took Randi’s firstborn away that things went south. She fell into a depression that drugs deceivingly lifted her out from under.
“She felt like she had lost everything,” Shellie told me.
The drugs Randi took numbed the pain of losing her child. She could forget about life for a while.
Shellie tried as best she could to rescue Randi, but what can a sibling do for a sister who has basically given up?
In Shellie’s case, only pray.
The family allowed Shellie to pick up the child. When she did, Shellie brought the child to see his mother. Randi, Shellie said, was never high when Shellie brought the boy around. Randi knew better and would never allow her problems to infiltrate the life of her son.
“Losing that child like that, it broke her,” Shellie recalled. “To Randi, she had already lost
her life.”
Randi worked as a power washer for the big rigs, eighteen-wheelers. That’s hard work. It wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t as if Randi had fallen into a deep drug addiction and lived on the street. She was deadening the pain and escaping her problems, holding down a job as best she could.
“You have to understand,” Shellie clarified, “as a family, we never knew that Randi was doing these drugs. She had so much respect for us that she never came over here or came to see any of us when she was on drugs. She never asked us for money.”
They would wonder, of course, but Randi was an adult. She did what she wanted to do, suffered, and dealt with the consequences. Family would help, but Randi had to make the first move.
With Randi hiding her drug use, it made it easy for her family not to see the full grip the drugs had on Randi until later.
Then she had two more kids. One of the fathers, according to Shellie, liked to drink, and Randi found that alcohol served the same purpose for numbing the pain as drugs. Randi fell into drinking.
Life with the new man took an even faster downward spiral for Randi. She knew the relationship wasn’t going to work.
“I don’t love him,” Randi told Shellie one day. She didn’t feel anything for the man. They had drinking and arguing in common, but not much else. “I don’t want to be with him.”
“You don’t have to stay with him, Randi,” Shellie said, comforting her.
“I’m afraid he’ll take the children away from me.”
There was that pain from the past coming back to hold Randi down. Randi felt trapped. If she left, she’d be in a battle for her kids.
Shellie pressed Randi about what was wrong. Why was she so upset? Crying on her birthday?
Randi relented. It was the child Shellie had taken care of since he was two years old. Randi was feeling as though she’d abandoned him and he would never know she was the birth mother.
“Do me a favor,” Randi said through tears.
“Sure, honey, what is it?”
“Make sure he knows I’m his mother one day. Please do that for me?”
Where had this come from? Why was Randi feeling as though she was not going to be around to tell him herself? Confused, Shellie asked Randi why she felt this way. They had always agreed that at the appropriate time, Randi would sit the boy down and explain it herself.
“It was so odd,” Shellie later said. “I just found this statement to be very odd. Because Randi knew that when the time was right, she was going to tell the child herself.”
Staring at her sister, Shellie thought something terrible was going on and she didn’t know about it. Something Randi wasn’t sharing. The way Randi cried and carried on about telling the child who his mother was made Shellie wonder what Randi had gotten herself mixed up in.
“What is it, Randi?” Shellie asked.
“Please, please do me this favor and just make sure he knows I’m his mother.”
“Of course, of course, Randi, when the time is right. But why not tell him yourself?”
“I just want to make sure that he is going to know.”
“Yes, Randi, he is going to know.”
As the night wore on, Randi made a point to tell her mother how much she loved her. The way she sounded, it was as if Randi was saying good-bye.
For good.
They stayed a while longer and Shellie drove Randi home.
“I love you, Shell,” Randi said before getting out of the car. Randi was still feeling that talk back at her mother’s house. She seemed so sad.
“I love you, too, Randi. More than you’ll ever know.”
They said their good-byes and made plans to stay in touch by phone and hook up for dinner soon.
CHAPTER 12
Katherine “Kat” Sturgell spent the morning of November 15 with her sister-in-law, Linda Franks. It had been a fairly mild start to the day, about 62 degrees Fahrenheit, no wind, some bright sun (for that time of year) poking through the opaque clouds. Kat and Linda were riding down Apple Road, inside the limits of Kings Mountain State Park in Blacksburg, just south of the Gaston County, North Carolina, border. This is a massive state park encompassing some twenty-plus miles of hiking trails, along with 115 campsites.
Kat and Linda were trotting down Apple Road on horseback, lost in the beauty of what is fifteen miles of park equestrian trails. Earlier, Kat and Linda had ridden the trails with Kat’s husband and niece, both of whom had gone back home by late morning, early afternoon. Now it was Kat and Linda out on the trails alone.
As they were trekking up Apple Road, Kat saw something that didn’t seem so strange at first glance, especially inside a state park.
“Look,” Kat said as she passed the area before Linda, pulled back, slowed her horse, turned around, and went to check it out more closely.
On the ground between the woods and the road, there was a large burn spot between some leaves and a downed tree. It was easy to see from Kat’s vantage point of being high on her horse: a black patch of what looked to be terribly charred leaves or pine needles by a tree, with something strange-looking inside the ring of ashes.
Kat got down off her horse and approached the area. Something didn’t feel right all of a sudden. One of the worst things for a state park is to have an abandoned fire pit, smoldering. One gust of wind and it could swallow up the whole park within a few days.
Linda was just coming up behind Kat. She stayed on her horse as Linda approached the scene.
“What’s up?” Linda asked.
“I don’t know. It’s a burn spot in the ground. Looks like somebody tried setting the woods on fire,” Kat said, walking closer.
Kat tied off her horse and approached the burn. She stood by what she described as “the foot” of the patch of scorched ground, just a bit larger than the size of a human being. There was something inside the ring of char, faceup, although the face was blackened and perhaps melted completely off. There was also what looked to be a human arm sticking up in the air, stiffened with some type of black soot melted onto it. The entire “thing” was draped over a rotted log. There was some type of blanket or tarp melted onto the thing itself.
Kat thought she was staring at a mannequin. Clearly, she could now make out that the thing was in the shape of a human being, with several sections of what appeared to be unburned skin exposed. The vaginal area was visible and unburned. One breast was exposed. A leg was burned at the foot and thigh. The entire neck and shoulders and head were charred and red, some melted completely. It wasn’t clear if the mannequin’s clothing made the blackened, melted mess all over it, or it was from the mannequin’s plastic flesh, but it had definitely been wrapped in a blanket at some point.
Kat never mentioned seeing this, but the feet of the “mannequin” were bound with some type of copper wire or cord, the plastic outer coat burned away.
“Someone set a mannequin on fire,” Kat yelled up to Linda. “That’s what it looks like.”
To be sure, Kat walked up to the torso section of the mannequin—which was red and burned, but still very much intact. Then she touched it.
“I wanted to make sure. . . .”
She poked at it like rising dough.
And that was when Kat knew right away that it wasn’t a mannequin, after all.
“Call 911!” Kat yelled.
“What?” Linda said.
“It’s a body.”
When she touched it, Kat was certain it was a real woman because, she later said, “it felt like human flesh.”
CHAPTER 13
Captain of the YCSO Detective Division (DD), Jerry Hoffman, along with several officers, raced toward a SWAT call when dispatch radioed to tell Hoffman that the emergency situation had been resolved.
This was a good thing. Anytime cops disengaged from what could be a volatile and potentially violent scene, there is a fleeting moment of celebration.
A moment later, however, dispatch called back, indicating the celebration on this day would be short-lived.<
br />
“Go ahead . . . ,” Hoffman said.
“There’s a body been found out on Apple Road.”
Hoffman hit his lights and headed toward the park, arriving at 12:25 P.M., just over ten minutes after the 911call from Linda and Kat had been made.
There were two patrol officers on scene when Hoffman pulled up. The first thing that struck the investigator as he drove up to the scene was how secluded the area was where the body had been found.
“This is a very rural area,” Hoffman said. “There is only one residence on it that I know of. It runs through the state park, and the area . . . It’s a pretty isolated area. . . .”
In other words, a good place to burn and dispose of a body.
As Hoffman got out of his vehicle and walked up to the body, one of his officers said, “I think it might be a mannequin, Captain.”
“Like somebody pulling a prank or something?”
“Yeah.”
The scene had a surreal vibe to it. The body, if one didn’t know any better, seemed as though it could be a mannequin. Kat had thought so.
Hoffman approached the body, getting himself close enough, he said, “to see, like, a ridge detail on the bottom of the foot.”
Staring at it, Hoffman knew then that “it was, indeed, a person.”
Mannequins don’t have that type of feature.
The captain told his officers to get some crime scene tape up around the area and watch it closely. He didn’t want anyone unassociated with the investigation to enter the scene and possibly contaminate it. Just because a body had been burned, it did not mean there wasn’t trace evidence and possibly DNA left behind.
Hoffman noted that whoever placed the woman here had bound her legs together with some type of wire or cord. To Hoffman, this meant they were looking at the potential cover-up of a violent murder.
When members of the DD realized they had a second body found in a wooded area within a few weeks’ time, alarm bells went off that they might be looking at a serial killer working in the area. Here were two dead females; each was found under similar circumstances, about ten miles apart (depending on which way you drove); both areas were just below the North Carolina border; both victims obviously were murdered in one location and dumped in a second.
The Killing Kind Page 4