The Killing Kind Read online

  She was sitting on top of the knee wall surrounding the carport, her tiny legs dangling, her barefoot heels kicking against the brick, waiting in anticipation for her daddy to come home. She had freckles flanking the bridge of her nose, big, sad brown eyes, and straight, shoulder-length brown hair cut Dutch-boy style. Her rosy smile displayed two missing front teeth, which the Tooth Fairy had scooped up from underneath her pillow one night recently while she slept.

  “Man, she sits there every day waiting for you, doesn’t she?” his boss asked as they pulled into the driveway.

  “Sure does,” Nick said. “That’s my baby. Daddy’s girl.”

  Nick Catterton had never married his daughter Heather Catterton’s mother, Stella (Holland) Funderburk. Stella had a four-year-old boy she brought into the relationship she and Nick had begun in 1983. They lived in South Carolina then, just below the North Carolina border. Stella got pregnant and they had Nicole first, followed by Heather, with her perpetually cheerful outlook on life and lively demeanor.

  Nick worked as a plumber on new construction sites. These were long, hard, dusty, and sweaty days. He’d leave the house at six in the morning and not return until six or seven that same night.

  “We started off in South Carolina and things [were] going great,” Nick later told me. “We were a family.”

  Whenever work dried up, Nick found it elsewhere. During the early 1980s, Nick packed up his family and moved down to St. Augustine, Florida, where they set up home for about five years, living a mile from the coastline. Sunday was the day Nick and Stella took the kids off to the beach for a fun family day.

  “We had to cut back after Heather came along,” Nick said in his slow Southern drawl. “But theys was some really good . . . good times.”

  As Heather grew, Nick noticed how different she was from the other kids. Heather exhibited what seemed to be an inherent love for all kinds of people, especially kids her age—seven, eight, nine, ten. At this young age, Heather was already thinking about worldly issues, like poverty and homelessness and starvation. Sure, other kids cared. But with Heather, it came from somewhere deep inside.

  “She was a real kindhearted person,” Nick said of his daughter. “A real smart girl. She would have graduated high school and went on to bigger and better things.”

  In a school essay, “What I Would Do to Change the World,” which Heather had written when she was eleven, she spoke of a desire to end all war, saying how she really [didn’t] understand why there is a war. In a profound statement for a child her age, Heather tried to reconcile the idea of how it really hurts my heart that people are out there trying to save our lives and killing theirs. She then went on to talk about wanting to meet some of the soldiers fighting for the “freedoms of America,” expressing how she loved them very much. Little Heather claimed she could never be brave enough to go fight for [her] country.

  While in grammar school, after the family moved from Florida to Grover, North Carolina, Heather had such a sophisticated understanding of computers and the skills to back it up that she found herself helping out in class by teaching the other kids how to use the computers.

  Nick and Stella had been having problems for a lot of years and they got worse after the family had moved back to North Carolina. When they finally split, Nick took the girls and moved to Gastonia, and Stella and her son went their own way. Over the years, Nick was the first to admit, drinking became an issue for him. Either from genetics or through the course of drinking what Nick described as “a twelve-pack every day, on the weekends a case in a day” for a period of years, Nick’s heart grew weak and enlarged.

  “I knew the dranking would eventually kill me,” Nick said of his drinking.

  Both of Nick’s parents had died of a heart attack younger than they should have. So Nick knew the physical costs of abusing alcohol, not to mention the emotional toll it had on his family.

  Heather grew tired of authority and quite bitter as she entered the junior-high environment—a rather regimented, daily grind that takes dedication and discipline on the student’s part to be successful. The peer pressure alone, along with the social ladder, was not something Heather took to. Still, she wanted the knowledge. She wanted to learn. She wanted the benefits an education could give a girl from a small Southern town.

  “So she found a family that was homeschooling and she did that,” Nick explained. “And I was paying this lady, who had four or five kids, to homeschool her.”

  As a thirteen-year-old, now uninterested in any type of schooling whatsoever, with her home life in a bit of chaos with Nick’s drinking and Stella gone, Heather became part of the social services system.

  “She kept running away . . . always looking to come back home,” Nick explained.

  Contrary to what some would later speculate, Nick said it wasn’t Stella, Heather’s mother, who turned Heather on to drugs, a path Heather chose as a teenager herself. Heather Catterton was a young, confused human being, enduring the same weaknesses with which many struggle. Albeit misguided, perhaps, she fell into the vicissitudes and ravages of the world around her.

  “It was certain friends she hung around,” Nick said. “And then when she went to . . . foster homes, you know, you run across kids who do certain things and, well, it is what it is.”

  It’s that innocent image of his daughter, young and full of dreams, sitting, waiting for him to come home from work, that Nick Catterton cherishes more than anything these days. Throughout the years, Nick longed for life to be stuck there, in that moment, frozen. But, of course, that’s not how things turned out. People grow and move on. Nick would learn this the hard way.

  During the early part of October 2009, Nick became extremely ill. His heart was failing. It would not allow him to do what he wanted anymore. Whenever Nick had problems, he was placed in Carolinas Rehabilitation.

  “I couldn’t even walk,” Nick said, “that’s how bad I was when I went in [that October].”

  Heather had been in prison, serving a five-month sentence on a probation violation. During the week of October 15, Heather had been released early so she could go see her dad.

  They hugged. They talked. But it wasn’t a father-daughter conversation like Nick would have later wanted as a lasting memory. He was still very ill. He told Heather to stay out of trouble, but that was something Nick had always told his kids. Funny thing, being a parent, you see your child every day, or once a week, and you never believe that it will be the last time you ever lay eyes on her.

  While in rehab, Nick liked to watch the news—it was just something he did as a routine course of his day while he rested and healed.

  On October 28, 2009, there was a story the local news had been working on that bothered Nick. Every time an update came on, a new piece of information unearthed, that ache every father has in his stomach reserved for his children throbbed.

  Nick’s instinct was speaking to him.

  The latest report said a girl had been found in a ditch. Dead. Reporters said she was between thirty and forty years old.

  Nick breathed a bit easier.

  Heather had not been seen by anyone in the family for quite some time. She’d gotten out of prison and had gone to see Nick in the hospital. During that third week of October, she had up and disappeared completely. She’d been gone for quite a while, eleven days at last count by anyone paying attention. This was unlike Heather, to be gone for that long without telling someone. Nick, of course, was in rehab and had not been in the loop back home, so he had no idea that Heather was even missing.

  At seventeen, Heather was a minor. Her sister and mother had reported Heather missing during that last week of October. They figured she’d pop up somewhere and explain that she’d been on a bender with friends. It was sad and painful to hear, but Heather had always been truthful. She was caught up in the game, unable to break free from the terrible grip of addiction and running the streets.

  On October 29, Nick sat down to watch his daily afternoon news show. He was at
home now, just out of rehab. The report started with news of clothing found near the girl in the ditch.

  Nick still wasn’t alarmed. He’d had it in his mind that she was between thirty and forty. There was no need to be concerned.

  Still, something told Nick to pay attention. That parental instinct inside was once again speaking.

  Then the report mentioned that the dead girl in the ditch had been possibly wearing toe socks.

  Nick stared at the television.

  His chest tightened. His face drooped.

  Tears.

  He asked Nicole, Heather’s sister, then Stella: “When was the last time y’all done seen Heather?”

  They said almost two weeks ago now.

  Nick was devastated. Those toe socks. He knew Heather loved to wear them.

  I’m going to wait another day, Nick told himself, and call the York County Sheriff’s Office.

  CHAPTER 4

  On that day the girl’s body was found in the ditch, Detective Randy Clinton alerted forensics about the clothes and belt he had located on the side of the road by the bridge in North Carolina. Forensics had sent in a photographer and that was how the photos wound up on television. While that unfolded, Clinton turned to YCSO captain Jerry Hoffman, who had secured this new scene, and said, “I’m going back up to start searching the road.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Clinton walked up the small embankment and started down Crowders Creek Road, on the left-hand side, that same area where the clothing had been found. He headed north.

  Fifty yards into his search, Clinton found a white tennis shoe. Investigators knew from this evidence, if it was tied to the DB—the dead body—found in the woods by the drainpipes to the south, two scenarios were possible. Either the girl’s killer was heading back into North Carolina, where he had come from, and tossed the items out the window along the way, or he was heading south from the north into the area and tossed the items out before dumping the body. Still, with either scenario, the feeling was that the crime had originated in North Carolina.

  Clinton marked the shoe and had forensics photograph it before having it bagged and tagged. After a detailed search of the entire area, nothing else was found.

  Once she was brought to the medical examiner’s office, it wasn’t hard for the YCSO to identify the victim in the ditch as seventeen-year-old Heather Catterton. Heather had been arrested in the past and her fingerprints were on file. When they removed Heather from the crime scene and took her to the Medical University of South Carolina’s (MUSC) Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine, the first thing the coroner did was fingerprint Heather and put her prints through the system.

  A hit on Heather’s name came immediately.

  An important piece of the puzzle for the YCSO was how Heather had died. That was where Sabrina Gast and her team at MUSC came into play. Gast had been the York County coroner for three years when Heather’s bruised and partially naked body was brought to MUSC. As an interesting aside, Gast had a background in forensic nursing and had worked as a sexual-assault nurse. She knew what to look for in those cases. She had even been certified as a sexual-assault nurse examiner.

  Unaware of Heather’s identity at the time, Gast had been called out to the Robinson Yelton Road crime scene, where Heather had been found. She’d observed Heather’s dead body in situ, which could help now that the actual autopsy had begun.

  Near 9:00 A.M., on October 30, the day after Heather’s body was recovered, under Dr. Gast’s direction and observation, Dr. Cynthia Schandl got to work conducting an autopsy on Heather Marie Catterton. As investigators worked diligently out in the field conducting a victimology, searching Heather’s life for clues to her death by talking to friends and family, Gast and Schandl set out to determine how Heather had died. If they could find out the “how,” the YCSO was going to be able to get closer to the “who.” It had to be determined first if Heather died accidentally, by the hand of a killer, an overdose, or other means. It was one thing to be a cop out in the field and speculate how you thought a victim had breathed her last; it was quite another to allow science to dictate that course.

  Dr. Gast, who wrote the report for Schandl, noted that decomposition had set in on Heather’s body. The body is cool to the touch . . . changes of decomposition complicate interpretation, the coroner wrote.

  As Dr. Schandl got to work scanning Heather’s body and making notes, she pointed out that Heather’s skin had undergone serious changes in the color . . . that would go along with decomposition. It’s known as “marbling”—a pattern that forms on the skin from decomposition very early. A fairly prominent area of what we call skin slippage, where the top layer of the skin, the epithelial layer, like if you get a blister, the part that comes off, that part was slipping off around Heather’s neck.

  As autopsies go, this one was not going to be easy, mainly because the elements and insects had gotten to Heather.

  It appeared from a cursory observation that Heather had been left on the side of the road for some time. The changes Gast noted in Heather’s body as decomposition set in told that story: marbling (left leg and flank), that spotty skin condition; green discoloration, (inguinal, abdominal and back); serpiginous skin slippage of the left side and back, multiple additional foci of skin slippage (face, neck, abdomen, extremities), and mild distention of the abdomen.

  What did all of this mean in terms of Heather’s condition and determining the cause and manner of death?

  Heather’s body was deteriorating rapidly. It was a good thing they found her when they had. Another day or two out in the elements and locating any trace or physical evidence (if any had been left behind) would have been impossible. As it were, Gast noted plenty of insect activity present with fly eggs in the hair, on the abdomen and in the inguinal [groin] region, [along with] maggots in the vaginal and oral cavity.

  The first thing Dr. Schandl did after undressing her was wash Heather’s body. There was dirt and debris all over Heather.

  Clearly, her body had been discarded more than dumped.

  “So having done that, it was apparent that she had a number of bruises and a number of scrapes to the skin,” Schandl said later. “She had what looked like bruising to the right side of her face and the inside corner of the right eye, some scrapes to the left side of her face. She also had bruises to the thighs, to the bottom area. She had scrapes on her right side and a couple of scratches in other places.”

  Heather had gained some prison weight from a recent stay and weighed 161 pounds at the time of her death. She wore it well, but it was above her normal weight. Strangely enough, Heather still wore a metal necklace, loops of silver with tiny silver balls. The photos that forensics snapped of Heather’s neck displayed the necklace, along with yellow and white and purple bruises and what looked to be ligature marks directly underneath the necklace. If she had been strangled, that act of violence did not in the least affect the integrity of the necklace.

  Schandl moved in for a closer look at Heather’s neck and spent a considerable amount of time studying it.

  “I had a concern that perhaps there was a violent element to her death,” Schandl later explained, “and one possibility that I did not want to overlook was that perhaps she had been strangled or smothered or something to that effect. . . .”

  Heather’s pupils and cornea were cloudy and “poorly visualized,” another indication that she had been dead for some time. This observation is the same as one might hear from a chef looking for fish—if the eyes are cloudy, the fish is not fresh. Based on this observation, it was clear that had it been the middle of summer, there might not have been much left to Heather’s body.

  The sclerae and conjunctivae (the white part of Heather’s eyes) showed “evidence of injury.” This type of trauma to the eyes is consistent with strangulation and/or asphyxiation. Forensic pathology 101 says that in manual strangulation, meaning one person using his hands or a ligature, the victim’s face, as in Heather’s case, is left cong
ested and cyanotic (purplish or bluish) because the main source of blood flow to the brain has ceased.

  Schandl was stuck on this. She felt the discoloration around Heather’s neck, coupled with the trauma Heather’s eyes showed, was significant.

  “At this point, when I’m looking just at the outside of the neck,” Schandl clarified, “I try not to make any determinations about, you know, how much trauma is involved, but there [was] definitely discoloration, red discoloration around the neck.”

  Moving on to other parts of Heather’s body, Schandl found there were no outward signs of injury to Heather’s anus or back area. It was hard for the doctor to tell if Heather had been raped because of decomposition and the presence of maggots in Heather’s vagina. It was as equally difficult to tell how many injuries Heather had sustained to her outer body, scratches, bruises, etc., because of the discoloration brought on by decomp. Still, from their experience, both Gast and Schandl were confident that after a thorough examination of Heather’s vagina and rectum, there was “no foci” or “laceration” or “hemorrhage.”

  In her report, however, Gast did make a point to say that “decomposition changes” were apparent in those specific areas.

  Nonetheless, Schandl took oral, rectal, and vaginal swabs, along with a saline swab of an obvious and strange pale discoloration on Heather’s left breast.

  After cutting away the skin on Heather’s neck and peeling it back to examine the inner portion of her muscles, neither doctor found evidence of severe asphyxia.

  Examination of the soft tissues of the neck in a layer by layer dissection, Gast wrote, reveals no abnormalities. She noted that the “hyoid bone” and “larynx” were “intact” and the underlying firm red-brown musculature is devoid of hemorrhage.

  This information would not be consistent with a violent struggle to cut off Heather’s blood flow and oxygen to the brain by strangulation. In many cases, when a person strangles another, he uses more force than is needed. Here, it would almost seem as though Heather had been grabbed around the neck, yet the force was not enough to produce internal injuries.