For 25 years, Rozesetta Miller has laid down each night, put her hand over her mouth and held her breath – wondering how long it might take her to die that way. She hoped a stroke five years ago might make her forget to wonder what her 8-year-old grandson’s last words might have been; if he suffered; whether he cried for his mamaw.
“That little face – I just can’t forget it,” Miller said. “It’s been hell, pure hell. I remember the day, the time. It was a quarter after 10 when they found him.”
On Aug. 21, 1986, Travis Shane King followed a man with a metal detector from Eastridge Apartments, where he lived with his mother and Miller, as he headed into the woods. The boy’s body was found the next night – strangled and dumped near a rural Sullivan County lake.
The crime shocked the city in a way only a child killing can. Playgrounds emptied at the first threat of sundown. Locals went door-to-door, collecting money for a bounty on the head of his killer, while the city held seminars on coping with the fear of this boogeyman.
“Until last week, it had not happened here,” read an editorial in the Bristol Herald Courier. “It had happened in crowded cities, in faraway places. But it had not happened here. And because it had not happened here, there was always the thought that it would not happen here.”
Now, 25 years later, the death of Travis Shane King remains one of three in the open-homicide file cabinet at the Bristol Virginia Police Department. There is only one suspect: a Bristol-born convicted child killer and serial molester.
“He bounced around his whole life. And wherever he was, kids ended up dead,” said Bristol Virginia Police Sgt. Steve Crawford, part of the third generation of detectives to inherit the case.
Fred Howard Coffey, 66, is in prison six hours away for murdering a 10-year-old North Carolina girl seven years before Shane was killed. Coffey is suspected of killing others – maybe one little girl, maybe more – and reportedly confessed to molesting 100 kids.
He was sentenced to die – twice – in a North Carolina gas chamber. The first was scheduled for 12:01 to 6 a.m. Jan. 11, 1988. But the execution was stayed then overturned on a technicality by the state’s Supreme Court. A second jury sentenced him to death again, scheduled for Aug. 23, 1991. But the sentence was again overturned and a third jury sentenced him to life in prison.
Coffey has been denied parole 15 times since he became eligible in 1995. He will face the parole board again in 2012.
Periodically, for 25 years, the Bristol Virginia Police Department has reopened the four drawers of files from the original investigation – hundreds of interviews, polygraph tests, a timeline of Coffey’s life. In 1986, DNA testing was little more than an academic endeavor. It wasn’t until the next year that the first person – a Florida rapist – was convicted using DNA evidence.
Bristol’s case against Coffey was, and still is, a purely circumstantial one.
“It’s as good as it’s gonna get,” said Capt. Darrell Duty. “What we know is that a known serial killer of children was the last person seen with the child alive.”
Their case is solid, they say. It’s built on the work of detectives long dead or retired, who spent thousands of hours, for years, trying to piece together Shane King’s last moments on earth.
“I think they felt strongly that they had the right man. And we do now,” Duty said.
There are at least half a dozen witnesses who saw Coffey with the boy in the moments before he disappeared. Only one of them has died in the years since the killing. At one point, in the 1990s, the Police Department issued an arrest warrant for Coffey – intending to bring him to Virginia and put him on trial for Shane’s murder. But George Warren, then the city’s commonwealth’s attorney, vacated the warrant. Warren died last year.
“They know who done it,” said Barbara Ferry, the boy’s aunt. “But they won’t bring him back. That’s like saying Shane’s not worth it.”
Jerry Wolfe, the city’s current commonwealth’s attorney, did not return calls requesting comment.
“I think he should be brought back,” said Miller, the boy’s grandmother. “It’s not going to change anything, but it would be on paper – that Fred Coffey killed my boy.”
***
A lanky gray-haired man pulled his Pontiac Sunbird into the Eastridge Apartments parking lot on the afternoon of Thursday, Aug. 21, 1986. A woman leaving for work watched as he got out, opened the trunk and removed a metal detector. She thought it was odd.
About 3 p.m., Shane King was sitting in a recliner watching cartoons at his family’s apartment in the C building. His grandmother needed a part for her car so she and her daughter, Shane’s mother, Terry King, left for the store. It was hot and Shane didn’t want to go with them, Miller said. He’d been sick; his mother made him goulash and they left him alone with the door unlocked. Two hours later, when the women came home, the door was locked but the boy was gone.
“If I had him back, I wouldn’t leave him for a minute – not for a minute,” Miller told the Bristol Herald Courier during the search the next day.
Neighbors reported seeing the boy as late as 4:45 p.m., when someone watched him walking with a man carrying a metal detector. Another saw him sitting on a curb at Springdale Village Apartments, an adjacent complex separated from Eastridge by a narrow patch of dense woods.
The whole town turned out that night. Dozens searched the woods until 4 a.m., then came back again at sunrise. Police joined the search, circulating photos of the boy and knocking on every door in Eastridge and Springdale. A helicopter hovered overhead. Teresa Austin, Shane’s aunt, remembers Fred Coffey standing in the building’s hallway, watching the search party from a window.
She said she commented on the heat. “He never moved; he never even turned around,” she said. “He had no expression, he was just blank.”
Coffey had moved back to Bristol a few months earlier and rented an apartment on the other side of town. He met an Eastridge woman at a laundromat and had been staying with her long enough to make friends with the neighborhood children.
At 8:30 p.m. Aug. 22, 1986, authorities called off the search for the night with plans to resume the next morning. Then, two hours later and 17 miles away, fishermen found the boy’s 80-pound body under DeVault Bridge in rural Sullivan County, Tenn.
“He was swollen, he’d turned black,” his grandmother said. “He’d been bitten by roaches.”
The boy was wearing the same clothes – a tank top, shorts and tennis shoes – that he’d watched cartoons in the day before. The medical examiner determined he was killed within hours of his disappearance, stored on his right side somewhere warm – a car trunk or closet most likely – then dumped early the next morning. There was no indication he’d been sexually assaulted.
“He was such a good boy,” a neighbor told the Herald Courier. “He was the first little boy I knew who washed clothes and folded clothes. An 8-year-old boy that would do something like that.”
By Monday, police had published a composite sketch of the man with the metal detector who was seen talking to the boy just before he disappeared.
Confusion and chaos turned into rage – he’s still out there, neighbors said.
“That man who did it has got friends, and they’re sitting there looking at him, not knowing who he is or what he’s done,” one man told the newspaper.
A Bristol, Tenn., man began the Shane King Reward Fund with a $1,000 contribution, and it quickly grew to 10 times that amount. Businesses contributed thousands and residents went door-to-door, collecting money to add to the bounty.
The local task force swelled to 24 detectives from both sides of the state line. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added another half-dozen agents.
But police got distracted.
In August 1986, cocaine was beginning its first march into Bristol. Shane’s aunts and uncles – his mother’s siblings – were ushering it along. Barbara Ferry, Shane’s aunt, said they drove to Florida to buy the drug, brought it back to Bristol, repackaged and sold it. She was a mule, she said. Her sister, brother and brother-in-law were the brains of the operation, she said.
Their drug trade was well known, and police suspected it might have had a hand in the boy’s disappearance.
“It delayed things,” Capt. Duty said. “Investigators spent time looking at that avenue, and it proved to be a false lead. It sent detectives in the wrong direction.”
Police searched their apartments and their cars – hauling away evidence by the trash bag. Each family member took a lie detector test and passed.
“They tormented me and my brother to death,” said Austin, Shane’s aunt. “They even had me afraid of my own family. We wondered who might have known what the other ones didn’t.”
Shane’s grandmother fainted at his funeral. Others howled and cried and questioned how God could take a quiet, shy boy who played with toy cars and folded the laundry.
Terry King declined to speak to the newspaper. She’s still too angry and too sad, she said. Shane was her only child.
“She’s never been the same,” said her mother. “She’s blamed God for so long. I don’t blame God. This is Satan’s work.”
About a week after the boy was killed, the woman who saw the man take the metal detector from his trunk noticed the same man in the same maroon car. She and her husband followed him, took down his tag number and called police. The car was registered to Fred Howard Coffey.
Another week passed, then a third. On Sept. 14, 1986, dozens of officers searched an apartment on Raytheon Road. Police cordoned off the building with crime scene tape, impounded a red Sunbird and parked it in the fire station.
Investigators found an empty box for a new metal detector among Coffey’s things.
Then-Police Chief Tom Stone announced that the case was centering around one man and investigators were “cautiously optimistic” that an arrest was imminent. Passersby gathered in the street to wait for word. But another day passed with no arrest, then another.
City police contacted investigators in Mecklenburg County, N.C., according to court records. They said they had a suspect in a child’s murder and thought the police department there might be interested in exchanging information. North Carolina detectives arrived the next day.
***
Seven years earlier, in July 1979, a 10-year-old girl named Amanda Ray called her mother at work and asked if she could go fishing with the “nice, gray-haired man” she met at their apartment complex’s pool, just around the corner from the apartment where Coffey lived with his wife and little dog. He’d moved to North Carolina the year before, married, enrolled at Central Piedmont Community College and worked as an emergency medical technician and fire department dispatcher.
Amanda’s mother told her no, she could not go fishing. But about 1:30 p.m., a family at a nearby lake noticed the arrival of a light blue van. A child and a skinny, gray-haired man got out. She sat down and fished; the man remained standing.
Amanda never made it home.
The next day, 19 miles from her apartment, a family picking blackberries found her body in the woods near a lake. She had a black eye, a bruised cheek and authorities determined she died of traumatic asphyxiation – likely from a hand covering her mouth and nose. There was no sign of sexual assault – she was wearing the clothes she’d gone fishing in the day before. Police found eight dog hairs and two blue carpet fibers on her body.
A massive investigation was launched, sending officers through Amanda’s neighborhood. Within days, police released a sketch of the man who took her fishing.
A woman called the police. She recognized the man in the drawing, she told them. Two months earlier, in May 1979, her friend’s husband made her 3-year-old daughter watch him masturbate. She confronted him, he confessed and she asked him to talk to her preacher.
His name was Fred Coffey, she told them.
Coffey was interrogated. He was already a sex offender – in Virginia Beach in 1974, he was convicted of indecent exposure and taking indecent liberties with a child. The following year in Norfolk came a conviction of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
But police suspected another man who delivered papers in Amanda’s neighborhood who’d raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl. Investigators asked that man if he could have killed Amanda and “blacked it out.” Yes, I could have, police reported he replied. But, later, the man – serving a life sentence for the other girl’s murder – told new investigators that he’d said, “yes, I could have. And so could you.” He died in prison in 2002.
The investigation into Amanda’s death went cold.
Eighteen months later, in February 1981, 5-year-old Neely Smith knocked on a neighbor’s door to ask if their kids wanted to play. She was never seen alive again.
Neely lived in an apartment just behind Coffey’s, in a complex adjacent to where Amanda had lived.
Police quickly linked her disappearance to Amanda’s murder and began a joint investigation.
Two months later, Neely’s skull, rib cage, jaw and hair were found in the woods – near a lake – 15 miles from her home. Coffey was interviewed twice; police searched his home and found nothing. The investigation lingered for five years before it was officially deemed inactive, according to court records.
Soon, Coffey got divorced and moved to Lenoir, N.C., where he molested three children and skipped town before police could serve him with a warrant for indecent liberties with a child. He headed to his hometown, Bristol, Va., in January 1986. He got a job as an exterminator, an apartment on Raytheon Road and met a woman at a Laundromat.
***
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 enlisted three times and passed through Connecticut and Georgia and served in Vietnam. He was denied a fourth reenlistment in 1974, when he was charged with molesting a child in Virginia Beach. He moved to Maryland to work for a defense contractor and became 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 murdered 10-year-old Amanda Ray and, maybe, 5-year-old Neely Smith.
On Sept. 17, 1986, nearly a month after Shane’s body was found, Coffey’s picture first appeared in the Bristol Herald Courier under the caption: “Police hold King murder suspect.” He was covering his face as two officers escorted him into the station.
Amanda Ray’s mother wrote Terry King: “For God’s sake, don’t let the police in Bristol let him get away with it this time.”
Meanwhile, detectives in Mecklenburg County contacted Coffey’s ex-wife. Yes, they had a little dog in 1979, she told them. It had since died, but it had liked to sleep on their sofa, which she still had and hadn’t cleaned since 1976. Police picked out eight dog hairs.
Coffey drove a light blue van in 1979, his wife told police. Investigators tracked the van through purchase records and finally found the man who bought it years earlier at a used car lot. He used it mostly for work, he told them. It still had its original blue carpet and he did not recall having cleaned it.
Days after his arrest in Bristol, Coffey waived extradition and was sent to Caldwell County, N.C., on the outstanding indecent liberties charges. He was convicted on nine counts and sentenced to 50 years. Mecklenburg County took him next and set a trial date on murder charges in the death of Amanda Ray.
But, as that trial date neared, the Bristol Virginia Police Department was not convinced Coffey was Shane’s killer.
Several months before Coffey’s trial in North Carolina, Shane’s aunts and uncles were rounded up in a police sting operation and hailed as a “major source” of cocaine in the city.
“I’m not going to tell you that we didn’t get some drug information during the Shane King investigation, but I’m not going to elaborate,” then-police chief Tom Stone told the Bristol Herald Courier. “We have not established as yet a motive for Travis Shane King’s death. We haven’t ruled out that drugs might have had something to do with it.”
Police detectives now say that had Coffey not been taken away so quickly, he would have probably been charged with Shane’s murder.
“Keep in mind,” Crawford said. “We still took a mad man off the streets.”
Mecklenburg County prosecuted and convicted Coffey using the van’s carpet fibers and dog hairs from the couch, matching them to those found on Amanda’s body.
Shane’s family would like to see him hauled back to Bristol and put on trial for the boy’s murder. In Virginia, killing a child is a capital crime.
“I would like to stand face to face with him,” Miller said. “I would like to ask why he did it, why he picked Shane. We live with this every day of our lives. But I don’t believe in capital punishment. I want him to live on and on with this in his heart, til he falls down dead.”
Crawford would like to clear the case, too. It will never be closed – the four filing cabinet drawers labeled “Travis Shane King Task Force” will stay just where they are until someone is arrested.
Crawford visited Coffey at Pender Prison in N.C. He denied killing any kids.
“I saw a meek old man who’s probably going to die in prison,” Crawford said.
Coffey declined to be interviewed for this story.
***
Travis Shane King would be 34 this year. His family thinks he would have gone to college and stayed out of trouble. But, he his stuck in their memories as an 8-year-old boy.
Miller sees him sometimes: sitting at the table, smiling at her; watching television in her living room; helping her fold the laundry.
“I know he’s not there,” she said. “I know it’s just something I imagine. But I don’t know how to let him rest.”
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