“She . . . she attacked me,” Blake said after calling his dad that night in June.
He was “hysterically upset,” James later said.
“She choked me,” Blake continued. “I think she’s going to kill me. . . .”
Not the words a father wants to hear from his son.
“I’m coming.... I’m coming.... Find somewhere to hide until I get there,” James said.
“Hurry. Please come now. . . .”
Blake “fled from the house” and away from his mother; he was calling while already hiding out. This much he had known to do already.
James was on his way, he said, and hung up. Before he left his house, he phoned the Whitehouse Police Department and explained what was going on.
After the arrival of the police officers, Blake was back at the house. He was safe. The police were there to watch over him while they sorted out what had happened and what steps should be taken.
Kim was huffing and puffing and being “uncooperative with the police”—her usual self. She tried to explain to the police in her heated, rage-filled voice, “He attacked me”—meaning Blake—“and his younger brother. I want to file a police report against my son for assault.”
James was beside himself when he heard this. Kim had abused her child and now wanted to file a report against him? It went against everything a mother should do.
The cops took a look at the young boy, Blake’s brother.
“We don’t see any injuries, ma’am.”
Blake would have to, however, be taken into “protective custody” by the police, Kim was told. They couldn’t allow Blake to continue the visit with his mother. So Blake took a ride with police to the WPD.
James made it to the police station at 7:18 P.M. and picked up his son. What an ordeal. You try to give Kim the benefit of the doubt, and what does she do? Spit in your face. There was no change in the woman. In fact, looking at the way her life unfolded during the past few years, one would have to say that Kim’s behavior was escalating. The question wasn’t if she would hurt her children again, but how severely?
Looking at his boy on the way home, James Cargill could not believe it. Blake had bruises around his neck, as though someone had tried to strangle him. “She put me in a headlock,” Blake explained. “[She] choked me and I thought she was going to kill me.” The child was beyond upset by now. He was scared to death of his mother and what she was capable of doing if his dad and the police had not been there for him.
After several days passed, Blake wanted an Xbox gaming system he had brought with him during the last visit to his mom’s. Within all the confusion and disorder and drama and violence, he had forgotten to grab it when police escorted him away.
“Nope. Not getting it,” Kim said. She wasn’t budging. End of discussion.
* * *
This choking incident was the grand finale in a series of violent and abusive incidents, James explained in his affidavit. The previous month Blake had returned home with his “cell phone literally broken in half.” Kim had tried to take it from him and he refused. A struggle ensued and she “deliberately destroyed it” in front of him.
Two weeks later, Blake called from Kim’s. “I think my foot’s broken, Dad.”
“What?”
Blake had kicked his dresser in his room prior to heading over to his mother’s that weekend. His eruptions of anger were happening more frequently—Kim’s legacy to her child, having shown him by example how to deal with life’s difficulties. The reason why Blake had kicked the dresser was because he did not want to go see his mother. James had been forced to allow her visits under a court order, and Blake had to go. Thus, he kicked his dresser and, apparently, broke his foot.
When James dropped him off at Kim’s that weekend, Blake had not said anything about his foot hurting. Blake had been “silent the entire way,” James later recounted. He could tell his son was less than thrilled by the prospect of another weekend with his mother.
After Blake called to tell his dad he thought his foot was broken, Kim and James spoke.
“You need to take him to PrimaCare,” Kim said, “as soon as he returns to your house.” Kim was annoyed that this “problem” of Blake’s foot had interrupted her weekend and taken up her time.
“Please, Kim, please take him now.” At the time James lived about an hour away from Kim. He could not simply head over and do it himself, or he would have.
“No!” she snapped. “I have more important things to do here at home and two other children to worry about.”
Blake was later treated for a broken toe. He wore a restrictive boot for the next three weeks.
Sometime after this incident, still in 2008, Blake and his dad got into what James later referred to as an “altercation.” Because of Kim’s constant meddling and messing with Blake’s mind, manipulating and feeding him with ideas and thoughts that confused the child, their father-and-son relationship had problems.
“[W]e had another court hearing,” James later described, “and the next morning after that altercation, there was a court hearing in which the court placed [Blake] back at his mother’s house.”
After everything that had happened, everything she had done to the child, much of it documented, the court allowed—perhaps forced—him back into Kim’s custody.
Blake began to run away from his mother’s house, which became an issue for everyone. When the pressure got too much, Blake would turn up missing.
A frequent call to James from Kim included: “He’s run away again. Come help find him.”
One day after Kim had custody of Blake back, she called to let James know his son had taken off again. James rushed the hour drive over to Kim’s house. There had been some indication that Blake had bolted from the house and gone in the direction of the woods in back of where Kim lived at the time. On the opposite end of those same woods was a Home Depot.
James said he’d begin there.
Behind a “big pile of lumber” outside the store, James found his boy. Blake wore nothing more than underwear: no shirt, no pants, no shoes, nothing but his undershorts. James looked at him. Blake was scratched all over from running through the woods. His feet were dirty and bleeding. He was crying, of course. It was as if living on his own, without clothing or shelter, was better than being in that house with his mother.
48
ONE HAZY, HOT AND HUMID Sunday morning in August (2009), Kim Cargill was in the bathroom inside her Whitehouse, Texas, home. She had the door cracked open. It was close to ten o’clock and Kim was fixing her makeup, getting ready for the day, while talking to someone on her cell phone.
“Can I come in and use the mirror to brush my hair?” Blake asked. He stood in front of the door.
Kim looked at her son. She said nothing. Then she slammed the door in his face.
Blake turned red. He became enraged, banged on the door “a couple of times” with his fist.
With no answer Blake stormed off down the hallway to the bedroom he used while staying at Kim’s.
Moments later, Kim came marching—thumping, actually—down the same hallway, walked into Blake’s room and began “wailing on” him with her fists. She was hitting and hitting the boy in one of her ferocious and violent outbursts.
Blake pushed Kim off of him. He was a strong kid, growing bigger every day, nearly the same size as his five-three mother. He was tired of taking abuse from her. Enough. It was time to fight back.
As Kim stumbled backward, but not falling, Blake rushed his mother and “pinned her against the wall” in his room.
Kim mounted a few punches to Blake’s head and then bit him.
Blake recoiled in pain and backed off.
Kim wasn’t done, however. She lunged at her son—who then quickly turned and grabbed a screwdriver on the floor, pointing it at her.
It had been a reaction on Blake’s part. As soon as he recognized what he was doing, Blake “realized it was a mistake and put [the screwdriver] down.”
; Locked inside her own madness, Kim went back at her son with violence in her eyes.
Blake stood his ground and pushed his mother—but this time she fell backward and onto the floor.
Blake walked over. Stared down at her.
“My back . . . it’s broken,” she said (which was certainly not true). “My back is broken, you little shit. You broke my fucking back.”
Little Brian came running into the room to see what his brother and mother were doing. “Call the police.... Call the police,” Kim told her boy. “Right now. Call 911.”
Blake found a spot in the house alone and called his father.
“You run away, find a safe place until I get there . . . ,” James Cargill told his son.
“Okay . . . ,” Blake said.
The police found no injuries to speak of on Kim, so they gave Blake a ticket for the incident and encouraged them to work it out amongst themselves.
49
BY MID-2010, BLAKE WAS UNWILLING to spend any time with his mother. He wanted nothing to do with her. It was over. Kim never, ever showed Blake any love. She never put her arms around him and hugged him. She never said sorry, I love you, let’s work this out. She never expressed an interest in his feelings or showed any care whatsoever.
The less Blake saw of Kim, the better the boy’s behavior became in school and at home with James. The healing had begun.
Over the course of Kim abusing Blake, James had seen things he did not think a mother was capable of doing. Beyond the bite marks, Brian later said in court, one of the worst remnants of Kim’s violence he’d witnessed were these “big belt welts, kind of long bruises with a curved end that, you know, you might see [made] with a . . . I assume to be a belt.”
The walls were closing in on Kim Cargill. Her life was in a constant state of anarchy. She’d lost custody of one boy, Travis, whom she was estranged from entirely. She was losing custody of Blake and would soon be estranged from him, too. Now, as her latest ex-husband, Forrest Garner, removed himself from her madness, he was taking Kim to court to fight for custody of Timmy. And Forrest Garner had one hell of a case against her.
Kim knew, of course, that Cherry Walker’s testimony was going to destroy any chance she had at ever becoming the custodial parent of Timmy once again. Though it was hard for Kim to admit defeat, she knew it was over—that is, unless she intervened in some way.
Kim was a tempest. The slightest matter could throw her into a rage—and yet, even with all that she had done to her kids and anyone that had ever brushed her the wrong way, despite all of the abuse and verbal lashings, her worst, most brutal and bloodiest moment of violence was still in front of her.
PART FOUR
“The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
—Hamlet, in Hamlet by William Shakespeare
50
TO UNDERSTAND THE MIND-SET OF Kim Cargill going into Friday, June 18, 2010, the day Cherry Walker went missing, one has to begin a few days earlier on June 15. On that day Laura Gillispie, clinic manager of the East Texas Medical Center, took several calls from Kim.
Timmy was a patient of a doctor at ETMC. Kim had phoned on the fifteenth and made her usual demands loud and clear, telling office manager Laura Gillispie that she needed information about Timmy and she needed that information right now or there was going to be hell to pay.
Gillispie said no. Not a chance. It was against office policy.
Kim Cargill went ballistic on her and the phone call ended.
Two days later, on Thursday, June 17, Gillispie took several more calls from Kim. During all of these calls Gillispie could not do much more than listen to a virally “angry, screaming” Kim Cargill, Gillispie said later. In fact, Kim was so insulting and obnoxious during all of these calls—a few of which lasted for as long as twenty-nine minutes—that the clinic manager “couldn’t talk over her because she was screaming so loudly.”
It was the same sort of vitriol anybody in Kim’s path had heard during this period. Kim was in the right and everyone else was wrong.
“Are you a mother?” Kim asked Gillispie repeatedly. “How would you feel not knowing about your son?” Apparently, Kim was blowing this particular gasket because ETMC had information about Timmy they were not bothering to share with his mommy. The other part of this—perhaps what really bothered Kim—was that ETMC had scheduled appointments for Timmy (made by Rachel Wilson, Kim’s mom, who had temporary custody at this time), since as far back as June 3—of which Kim had not been aware until now. She was calling to find out the significance of those visits and what was going on with Timmy, but nobody was telling her. All Kim had to do, the clinic suggested, was call her mother.
Into that Friday morning, merely hours before Cherry would disappear, Kim was calling ETMC.
“She was in an angry rage,” Gillispie later recalled.
Gillispie became increasingly upset because from where she sat inside the office, patients walked in for their appointments. Many could hear Kim screaming on the other end of the phone as she exploded into fits of rage about not being told why her son was seeing a doctor.
“Kimberly, I am going to have to end this phone call, which means I am going to have to hang up now,” Gillispie said at one point.
Click.
Kim called back.
Again.
And again.
And again.
As the clinic manager tried to reason with Kim, speaking to her with kindness and resolve, Kim would not have any of it. During one call Kim went on for twelve entire minutes straight, berating the entire staff and Gillispie. The only silver lining was that Kim had not decided to confront the manager inside the office.
Laura Gillispie was very shaken by these calls on June 18. By that afternoon when she got off the phone with Kim, and had decided not to answer any more of her calls, Gillispie told the entire staff to make sure the back door into the facility was kept locked. There was no telling what Kim Cargill was planning to do. She had made it clear that someone would pay for withholding the information from her.
Kim was at a breaking point on Friday, June 18, 2010—and she had just gotten out of bed.
51
CHERRY WAS ALL SMILES AS she walked through the door of Marsha’s Place, a small, hometown beauty salon in Tyler, early on Friday afternoon, June 18, 2010. Sonya Burton greeted Cherry with a cordial “Hello, Cherry, how you doing today?” as Cherry opened the door and the bells rang behind her. Outside, pulling out of the parking lot, Sonya could see the woman she knew as Paula Wheeler, Cherry’s “provider.”
After what turned into a two-hour appointment, in which Cherry was “talking and laughing with everyone, like she always does,” Cherry’s father, Gethry, picked her up and she was on her way back to her Citadel apartment. After spending all that time up close and personal while doing her hair, talking and laughing, Sonya was certain that Cherry did not show any signs of injury. Not on her neck, face, arms. Anywhere. Additionally, Cherry had her trusty coin purse and cell phone with her.
When Cherry left her salon that afternoon, it was the last time Sonya would see Cherry, speak to her or do her hair. Cherry would be dead within four hours.
Earlier that day, at 10:18 A.M., Cherry had received that subpoena to testify at the DFPS hearing regarding Timmy. Kim had been at work in Athens for approximately three and a half hours already, or since 6:45 A.M. While at work, beyond threatening and repeatedly calling and screaming at Laura Gillispie, throughout that morning Kim also called Cherry several times.
After Cherry left the salon, Kim continued to call her: at 2:14 and 3:29 P.M. specifically, along with at least four additional times throughout the afternoon.
At 5:06 P.M., while still at work, Kim called an old friend. It seemed Kim could not stay off the phone on this day.
* * *
It was 2002 when Angela Hardin met Kim at what Angela later called “Nurse Orientation.” It wasn’t that they became BFFs; more
or less, since they’d met, Angela and Kim remained a bit closer than casual acquaintances. They’d call each other from time to time and perhaps hang out once in a while when they were both off. Yet, there would be “long stretches” of time without talking or seeing each other. Angela, for the most part, did not know Kim personally, had never worked with her and saw her only periodically. It’s safe to say that Angela did not have a clue as to the real Kim Cargill—the danger she was to those around her, or how toxic Kim actually was.
Over the past several years Kim had displayed an escalating pattern of violence and abuse and anger that seemed to be escalating as the third week of June 2010 wound down. Maybe because she was desperate for a friend, Kim called Angela out of the blue. Angela had not seen or heard from Kim in months. But here she was, on the phone, complaining about the problems in her life.
“My fucking babysitter,” Kim said. “I’m worried about her being subpoenaed and testifying.”
“Why, Kim?”
“She’s mentally challenged,” Kim said.
“Oh,” Angela responded. She didn’t know what to say. It was the same reaction so many others had to this statement: Why would you ever hire a mentally challenged person to care for your kids? What kind of mother does that?
“It’s going to ruin me,” Kim explained. Her voice revealed great stress and anxiety. She sounded frantic with regard to doing something about this “problem” she now had. As she continued explaining what was happening, Kim grew angrier. Kim felt she was being squeezed, and the one recourse to make things better in the short term was coming into focus for her: get rid of Cherry Walker.
The control that Kim craved had slipped away from her. Cherry—note that Kim did not name her as she spoke to Angela, referring to Cherry only as “the babysitter”—was going to, Kim added, “destroy me. . . .”
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