Witness Testifies Suspect Beat, Raped and Abducted Her

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. – The first day of Heather Moore’s January 2008 ordeal began like any Friday: She left early from her job as an administrative assistant at Regions Bank, went to a car wash, and then picked up some groceries on way the home, she testified Tuesday at her ex-husband’s trial.

When asked to describe what happened next – in her kitchen, her arms full of groceries as she turned around – Moore’s matter-of-fact testimony gave way to heaving sobs.

For nearly an hour and a half Tuesday, Moore told jurors how Doug Young, the man she was divorcing after 10 years of marriage, beat her, raped her and abducted her at gunpoint – all the while threatening her life in blatant disregard of a court order mandating he refrain from contacting her.

Sullivan County prosecutors have charged Young, 48, with four counts of aggravated rape, aggravated burglary, aggravated assault and especially aggravated kidnapping. On Tuesday they finished presenting evidence.

Today, defense attorneys will present their side of the case.

The strength of the prosecution's case, while supported by physical, forensic and medical evidence, lies with Moore’s account of the week of Jan. 4 through Jan. 11, as local, state and federal authorities desperately searched for the pair.

She told jurors Tuesday that the afternoon of Jan. 4, 2008, unfolded like nightmarish déjà-vu: Just a month earlier, she said, after the two ate breakfast at Moore’s Bristol, Tenn., home, Young attacked and sexually assaulted her. That incident, on Dec. 1, 2007, injected new urgency into their long-pending divorce, resulted in a court order prohibiting Young from contacting Moore, and concluded in August 2008 with Young’s conviction for aggravated rape. In October, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

He has appealed the conviction.

In the Dec. 3, 2007, order of protection, Moore wrote of Young, “He possesses many firearms and has threatened to shoot me and I am in fear for my life.”

Moore’s father, Fred Moore, began staying with her after Dec. 1, he testified Tuesday. He also said Tuesday that he gave his daughter a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, and a shotgun to keep in her closet.

None of this deterred an increasingly desperate Young, who had taken to spying on his wife at her home and workplace with the help of a friend, that friend, Clarence Derek Smith, testified Monday.

On Jan. 4th, as Moore loaded groceries into her refrigerator, she turned to see Young enter the room, carrying her father’s revolver. He punched her in the face, she testified, and her mouth filled with blood.

“I spit as much blood as possible,” she said under questioning from Barry Staubus, the lead Sullivan County prosecutor. When asked why, Moore said, “So if I didn’t make it, they would know what happened to me.”

Moore reached for the phone, managing to punch “hold” so that the line would ring busy, and, she hoped, alert her family that something was amiss. But Young continued to hit her, pushing her into the same guest bedroom where he’d forced her to perform a sex act on him the previous month. He raped her again, she testified.

Young had set the gun down while he was on top of her, and Moore snatched it.

“You’re not doing this to me again, you bastard,” she testified, her voice shaking.

She tried to pull the trigger. He bent her finger back and wrested the gun away, she said.

At one point, she tried to escape – naked – through the French doors in the master bedroom. Young hauled her back, she testified. It was the last time she would try to run.

But she did try to leave clues.

Though Young ordered her to clean up the blood from the floors, walls and bedspread, she tried to leave as much as she could, she testified. She had lost one earring during the scuffle, and she placed the remaining one on the dresser – knowing that her family would find that unusual.

Then Young forced Moore to leave with him at gunpoint, she testified.

“If you try to run, I’ll shoot you,” she recalled him saying.

Young also employed a threat that became a kind of refrain at key moments – before Moore went into a bank or other public place with him – “If you do anything, the first four bullets are for you,” she recalled in her testimony.

The two traveled in Moore’s vehicle to Asheville, N.C., where they spent the night at a rest stop; to Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where they circled the scenic loop over and over again; and to Cherokee, N.C., where they holed up at the Drama Inn for most of the next week, according to testimony presented Monday and Tuesday.

From Cherokee, Young and Moore took shopping and dining excursions to Spartanburg, S.C., and Clayton, Ga. From Jan. 4 to Jan. 11, Moore testified, Young kept a gun trained on her at almost all times, and forced her to have sex with him on at least seven separate occasions. Prosecutors are focusing only on the incidents that occurred in Sullivan County.

Everywhere they went, Moore testified, Young kept the pistol in his right-hand pants pocket. One day, while drinking vodka and driving, Young menaced her with the gun, running it up and down her head, saying, “I could kill you right now,” she recalled.

Moore did not try to run after Jan. 4. Brad Sproles, Young’s defense attorney, argues that this – given Moore’s many chances to flee in public – is evidence that she was not held against her will. In his cross examination of Moore, Sproles pointed out that she had resisted him before – by picking up his gun, by attempting to leave traces of blood, and by trying to escape through the French doors.

After eliciting from Moore that she could have tried to escape in public, Sproles asked, “With these opportunities, the whole reason you didn’t try to make the situation known was fear?”

“Yes,” she said.

After the attacks and his violation of the court order, “he had nothing to lose,” Moore testified, claiming Young himself uttered those words as he ruminated about suicide.

Instead of attempting to flee, Moore resorted to subtle tactics, trying to get Young to use his credit card so authorities could find him, and looking into the lens of every surveillance camera she saw. She placated Young by participating in “normal-type activities,” such as playing card games, which seemed to calm him, she testified.

With a credit card purchase of gas in Clayton, Ga., on Jan. 11, local authorities found the two at a restaurant and apprehended Young. Moore had two black eyes, a broken nose and pneumonia, law enforcement and medical witnesses testified Tuesday.

The state wrapped up its case Tuesday by presenting forensic evidence linking Young and Moore by her blood and his semen, and cataloguing the contents of Young’s vehicle, including two guns and a long sheath knife.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558