Burdens of proof

Timeline:

• July 11, 2004: Ashli Shea Ayers, 19, last seen at a Johnson City homeless shelter
• July 17, 2004: Oadis White reports finding Ayers dead in his basement
• December 2005: Leah Feltner, 20, disappears
• April 2006: Meranda Faith Hayden, 25, disappears
• February 2007: Leah Feltner’s remains found in a Bristol, Tenn., creek
• April 2007: Jill Cunningham Pope, 21, disappears
• December 2007: Jill Pope found in the same Bristol, Tenn., creek, just behind a rental house White maintained
• October 2008: Meranda Hayden’s remains found in an abandoned house in Abingdon, Va., on property owned by White’s late-stepfather
• March 2, 2010: White kills Angela Statzer
• March 3, 2010: Angela Statzer’s body is found on a densely wooded hill off East Valley Drive in Bristol, Va.
• August 2010: Oadis White indicted in Statzer’s death; police from at least two other jurisdictions question him in the unsolved homicides of several other young women
• May 2011: White convicted of first-degree murder in Statzer’s death.
• July 7, 2011: White sentenced to life in prison for Statzer’s murder

BY CLAIRE GALOFARO
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER

When Meranda Faith Hayden disappeared in April 2006, her father began searching the sprawling Bristol, Va., public housing projects where his daughter spent her time. For six months, day and night, he walked its sidewalks and streets, asking each person he passed if they’d seen her. He came across a man named Oadis William White III, who looked him straight in the eye and said he’d never heard of her.

Hayden’s father, Jimmy Wampler, later learned that White was the last person known to have seen his daughter alive. White worked with her husband; they might have been having an affair.

Wampler didn’t know it then, but White already was a suspect in the unsolved deaths of three other young women.

***

In July 2004, three days after moving into a house in Johnson City, White called police and reported that he found a 19-year-old girl dead in his basement.

Three years later in Bristol, Tenn., the remains of two other young women were found 10 months and a half-mile apart in the same creek off Weaver Pike. White knew them both and was the caretaker for an abandoned house nearby.

Then, in October 2008, more than two years after she disappeared, Hayden was found in an old, vacant farmhouse several hundred yards deep in a Washington County, Va., field owned by White’s late stepfather. She was so badly decomposed it took 10 days and dental records to identify her body.

White quickly became a “person of interest” in her death, too, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office confirmed.

“There are just too many coincidences that tie Oadis to all these people,” Bristol Tennessee Police Capt. Charlie Thomas said. “He’s told different stories; he’s denied knowing people we know he knew. There’s no doubt that Oadis knew all of them.”

In May, White was convicted of killing his embattled ex-girlfriend, who was found smothered to death in the woods off East Valley Drive in Bristol, Va. Detectives called it “lucky” that a man walking his dog happened upon her body the day after she died, before the weather and bugs reduced her to bones like the other young women.

White, 53, was sentenced Thursday to life in prison.

But Hayden’s father, Jimmy Wampler, is not satisfied that White will likely die in prison. He wants him put on trial for his daughter’s death.

“I believe it with all my heart that they got the right one,” Wampler said. “But if they can’t prove it, you never really know for sure. It’s like you’re stuck half-way in between.”

Washington County Commonwealth’s Attorney Dennis Godfrey did not return a series of messages requesting an update on the county’s case in Hayden’s death.

But the cases of the two women found in Bristol, Tenn., will not be prosecuted, Sullivan County District Attorney General Barry Staubus said.

“We just don’t have enough evidence to go further,” he said. “As far as anything we can do, it is closed. We simply did not have enough evidence to connect him, forensically or otherwise.”

For the police, the case remains open until an arrest or prosecution, Thomas said. Even if one never comes.

“Obviously, I can’t say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did it. If I could, we would have charged him,” Thomas said. “But he is a very strong person of interest.”

***

The city of Bristol – with its nearly nonexistent rate of violent, random crime – has born two suspected serial killers.

“For a small town, that’s pretty much unheard of,” said Mike Aamodt, a psychology professor at Radford University who started the Serial Killer Information Center.

A serial killer, defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is anyone who kills two or more people with a cooling-off period in between. The majority of them – 70 percent – have two things in common: abuse as a child and brain damage, either by injury or birth defect.

The two Bristol men were born a decade apart. One went to college; the other is a 10th-grade dropout. One is white, one black. One was brutally abused, both sexually and physically, as a child. The other described his upbringing as pleasant.

But they have certain things in common: They’ve each been convicted of one murder and, if police suspicions prove true, they both left a trail of decomposing bodies and unfinished homicide investigations.

Bristol-born child-killer Fred Howard Coffey strangled a 10-year-old North Carolina girl in 1979. He also is a suspect in the deaths and disappearances of several other children, including Travis Shane King, an 8-year-old Bristol, Va., boy who was kidnapped and strangled in 1986.

Coffey was born in Bristol, Va., in 1945. His father raped and beat both Coffey and his sister, his mother testified at his murder trial in North Carolina. When his mother found out, she took the kids and left. But he kidnapped them occasionally, took them to motels and made each watch as he raped the other.

Coffey graduated from Virginia High School and joined the Navy in 1962.

“He bounced around his whole life. And wherever he was, kids ended up dead,” Bristol Virginia Police Sgt. Steve Crawford said.

He was convicted of molesting children in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, then moved to Maryland, where his is a suspect in the death of one bludgeoned teenage girl and the disappearance of two young sisters. He moved on to North Carolina, where he masturbated in front of a toddler, murdered a 10-year-old neighbor and, maybe, killed a 5-year-old two years later. He moved again, molested three children in Lenoir, N.C., before returning to his hometown of Bristol, Va.

Travis Shane King was murdered eight months later.

[Insert box near here teasing to Monday’s story on TSK.]

Oadis White has lived in Bristol all of his life – the parts, at least, when he wasn’t in prison.

His rap sheet begins nearly 40 years ago, at the age of 15. For 10 years, he was in and out of local courts: assault, larceny, forgery, making threats. In 1981, he and a friend beat a man unconscious with the butt of a pistol and stole his $80. He was convicted of armed robbery and sent to prison. He got out in 1986. The next year, he dated a woman who had a son with a 22-year-old girlfriend. He stopped by the young woman’s house in December 1987 and told her he knew something about her boyfriend. She got in the car. White drove to a remote area near South Holston Lake, choked her and pulled her hair, threatening to kill her and her children. He pulled off her jeans and her underwear, then raped and sodomized her.

He went to prison for 11 years.

White was married in the early 2000s. During one marital incident in 2003, he tried to take an entire bottle of pills in front of a police officer, shoved the cop and ran. He spent some time under house arrest. In January 2004, he told his probation officer that he and his wife would likely separate and “he didn’t know where he would go – either to the Salvation Army or to jail.”

But in July of that year, he and another man moved into a house on East Fairview Avenue in Johnson City. Three days later, about noon July 17, they started smelling something rotting in the basement, they told police. White opened the basement door “and saw a foot,” according to the police report. They called police at 6:20 p.m.

The body of Ashli Shea Ayers, a 19-year-old blonde, had likely been lying on the basement’s dirt floor for several days, police determined. She was from Missouri and had moved to Kingsport with a friend several months earlier, according to archives from WJHL Channel 11.

She went to visit family in Scott County, Va., police said. She took a bus to Johnson City and stopped to eat at a homeless shelter about a week before she was found dead. That’s where her paper trail ends. Police told Ayer’s hometown newspaper, the Southeast Missourian, that they didn’t know what brought her to Johnson City or where she was staying.

The Johnson City Police Department did not return a series of messages left with detectives and Chief John Lowry requesting information on the investigation.

A year later, in 2005, White was a known drug dealer in Bristol, Tenn., who bought his supply from a group of Jamaicans at a house at the end of Beechwood Drive, Thomas said. The Police Department received two anonymous tips. One person told them that a woman, who they named, had been shot during a drug deal at the Beechwood house. The second caller named the same woman and the same house, though said she’d died of a drug overdose. Police searched and searched, and eventually found the woman named by the anonymous callers. She was alive and well.

Around the same time, in December 2005, 20-year-old Leah Feltner’s grandmother reported her missing. Fifteen months later, in February 2007, city workers installing a drainage pipe behind a house off Blackley Road uncovered her remains. Her bones were in a creek just across the railroad tracks from the Beechwood house where White bought drugs, Thomas said.

In retrospect, he said, the anonymous callers might have just gotten the name wrong. They might have been talking about Feltner, who had been seen with White and rumored to be dating him.

Two months later, in April 2007, 21-year-old Jill Cunningham Pope disappeared. Feltner and Pope were friends, police said. They ran in the same crowd of hard-partiers and druggies.

Pope had just gotten off track and was trying to clean herself up, her family said. She was the youngest of six sisters. She had a young son living with his grandparents. Shortly before she died, she told her sister that she “wanted out” of the drug scene.

“She was typical little hell-raiser,” said her sister, Linda Orfield. “If you look at it, so are all the girls linked to this monster – they all had something going on in their life: family problems, drugs, drinking, some of them are high school dropouts. But none of them deserved to die like this.”

At first, police assumed Pope ran away.

But in December 2007, kids playing in a creek off Weaver Pike came upon a human skull. Police dragged the length of the creek and found a few ribs and a foot bone a quarter-mile upstream, where the creek runs behind a vacant rental house that sits down an embankment, hidden from the street. The bones belonged to Jill Pope.

“We only ever found half of her,” Orfield said of her sister’s remains. “We buried all we had of my sister in a baby casket. The rest of her is floating in a lake somewhere.”

Oadis White had worked for the man who owned that rental house off Weaver Pike. He’d mowed the lawn and collected the rent. But the tenants had moved out and the house sat empty. Pope’s sister said it smelled like death.

Pope’s bones were in the same creek a few hundred yards downstream from where Feltner’s body was discovered 10 months earlier.

“He just threw them out like they were trash,” said Penny Cunningham, another of Pope’s sisters. “But they were somebody – they were somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister.”

In early 2008, the Bristol Tennessee Police Department started poking around in a computer system they share with other police departments in the Tri-Cities. Bristol, Kingsport, Johnson City and the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office can search each others reports.

They found White’s name on a 4-year-old report – the 2004 unsolved suspicious death of Ashli Ayers in Johnson City.

It was then that Oadis White became suspect No. 1.

“It’s kind of like a puzzle, the more pieces you get – the more ties from person to person to person – you can start eliminating some people, and firm up others as suspects,” Thomas said.

Still, they didn’t have enough. There was very little of any of them left – no cause of death could be determined; no evidence collected.

“The most frustrating part to us in a case like this is not being able to give closure to their families,” Capt. Thomas said. “I’ve got kids of my own. I can’t imagine not knowing how they spent the last few minutes of their lives.”

***

Orfield imagines her sister putting up a fight, scared to death and running for her life. She has nightmares, she said. Her sister is running, screaming for her.

“I want to know, no matter how painful it will be, how my sister died,” she said. “I want to know why he killed her. And how. Did he make her suffer? Did he make her beg?”

The not knowing, she said, is the worst part.

Her father is slowly grieving himself to death, she said. He sold his house because he couldn’t stand to live in the last place he saw her alive. He won’t eat; he can’t sleep because the dreams come to him, too.

“I couldn’t find her when I promised my daddy I would,” Orfield said. “Try to live with that.”

A few months after Pope’s bones were found, Meranda Faith Hayden turned up in White’s stepfather’s forsaken house, deep in a poison ivy field off Wyndale Road in Abingdon. She was found in October 2008, more than two years after she disappeared.

Within weeks, police linked Hayden to Feltner and Pope – she ran in the same crowd; she knew all the same people, including Oadis White. Her husband had worked in a factory with him.

Hayden left her parents’ house on the evening of April 5, 2006, according to Washington County Sheriff’s Capt. Jack Davidson. She was on her way to meet White somewhere in Bristol, Tenn., and was never seen alive again.

“The day they got him, I was tickled to death,” Wampler said. “At least he can’t hurt nobody else. But if he killed more than one person, I think he ought to answer for all of them. For fairness – for justice.”

***

On March 3, 2010, a dog got away from its owner and ran up a steep, wooded hill off East Valley Drive. The dog, followed by its owner, found a young woman lying dead on her back.

Police recognized her immediately – she was Angela Statzer, Oadis White’s girlfriend.

For two years, police were regulars at the apartment they shared on the corner where Moore Street runs into Lee Highway. Their relationship was violent and volatile; they were in and out of family court on a series of exchanged warrants and protective orders.

“He made me fall on the floor and drug me out the door by my feet and I started bleeding,” read one.

“She punched him very hard with her fist in the back and while he was going out the door, she kicked him,” said another.

Statzer was unemployed, quiet, sweet, a little slow, her family said. Before she took up with White, she’d been living with her brothers in the Lee Garden apartment complex on Euclid Avenue. She’d grown up in foster care – her mother went to prison in 2000, convicted of child endangerment for allowing men to rape her 12-year-old daughter while she was passed out drunk.

In January 2010, White called the police. She wouldn’t leave him alone, he told them. So he “ate a bunch of pills” to “avoid her and the love I do have for her.” He wanted to die, he said.

Statzer was charged with curse and abuse. She was found not guilty Feb. 24, 2010. Exactly one week later, on her 22^nd birthday, she was found dead in the woods.

She’d been smothered the day before, police said.

White was indicted in August and tried in May. His DNA was inside her, experts testified. And he couldn’t keep his stories straight.

A jury convicted White of first-degree murder.

Meranda Hayden’s father still has hope that Washington County also will prosecute White – he hasn’t heard from them otherwise.

But Jill Pope’s family has run out of hope. There will be no prosecution, no charges, no answers.

“I want just two minutes with him,” Cunningham said. “I would tell him that he took her from us and he took her from her child. There’s not another day we can spend with her. Not another minute, not another second. And I would tell him that he doesn’t deserve to be sitting down there in the Bristol Virginia Jail still breathing. He should pay for what he did.”

Will Marling, executive director for the National Organization for Victim Assistance, said families of murder victims, particularly those who go unpunished, often feel let down by the criminal justice system.

In mystery novels and television shows, the system is fair and kind – it saves the good guys and punishes the bad ones.

“You’re expectation is that they will help you in a certain way. And they don’t,” Marling said. “That in and of itself causes greater pain. It’s like a betrayal.”

He describes the experience as a second trauma sometimes more incomprehensible than the crime itself.

“The main thing that victims experience is a loss of control – you’re tossed into this whole process against your will, suddenly and chaotically,” he said. “People are trying to gain a sense of control and they want to believe that the system is going to help them with that.”

But, quite often, it doesn’t.

White is probably going to prison for life, but that’s not the point, Pope’s sister said. The point is that he hasn’t answered for her sister’s death. Or Leah Feltner’s or Meranda Hayden’s or Ashli Ayers’s.

“What does justice look like?” Marling asked. “That is always the question.”

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com
(276) 645-2558