Chilhowie nurse's death remains mystery five years later

The house is simple; it has two stories and a square little lawn. Phil Connell might even think it lovely, had it not in one night housed all of his miseries.

“That’s it. The white one,” he says, pulling onto the narrow shoulder across the street. He just drove 187 miles to see it again.

The house looks the same as it did five years ago, he says, when his 33-year-old daughter was found dead at the foot of the stairs; when his 2-year-old grandson was covered with a blanket and carried out past her body; when whoever killed her cleaned up and locked the door on the way out.

“I think about her always,” he says. “I don’t know how to deal with it, what she might have gone through. If I wasn’t careful, it would consume my whole life.”

His wife, Georgia, leans forward from the back seat.

“She died right in there,” she says. Then, as if correcting herself, “someone killed her right there.”

• • • • •

It was past 9 on a Friday morning in February 2006 and Paige Connell Odom had not arrived at work. Her home phone rang busy; her cell phone was off.

She was a nurse practitioner at the Glade Spring Community Clinic. She had a gift, her boss says. She sometimes spent lunches buying prescriptions for elderly patients who couldn’t afford or couldn’t fetch them. She once went door-to-door selling raffle tickets for a little boy she barely knew who needed a bone marrow transplant.

Her patients loved her, and that Friday morning they were waiting in the lobby.

A co-worker, Kathy Warf, drove eight miles to Odom’s rented house one town over in Chilhowie. The blinds were drawn and her car was in the driveway; its windows still white with ice. The front door was locked. Warf knocked. She shouted. No one answered – not Paige, not the boy.

Warf suspected the worst.

The day before, nothing seemed unusual. They had lunch together. Odom told jokes; she was always funny. She left around 5 p.m. to pick up her son, River, at the Chilhowie Post Office. She and her estranged husband, a retired surgeon old enough to be her father, met only in public places. He was heartbroken and jealous. She had a new boyfriend and – maybe – another admirer.

Warf drove around the corner to the Chilhowie Police Department and found Chief Dwayne Sheffield. He used to live in Paige Odom’s rented house, he told Warf. He shimmied in a side window, then minutes later, opened the front door.

Warf saw the look on his face.

“It was complete silence,” she says.

Paige wasn’t calling out, neither was River. She couldn’t see inside the house.

Sheffield told her to leave, otherwise the police told her nothing. They did not call an ambulance.

Warf drove back to the clinic. They all waited.

A co-worker called Marshall Odom, the estranged husband, and told him something was wrong but they didn’t know what. He drove to the house.

“You should have seen that scene,” Marshall Odom says. “There were cop cars all over the place and so much commotion.”

A deputy he recognized stopped him.

“Doc, you can’t go in there,” Odom recalls the officer saying. “Why not? My wife and child are in there. I want to know something right now.”

The deputy told him that River was fine, but Paige was dead.

“I heard those words and you just don’t believe them at first,” Odom says. “It just can’t be. It’s like a dream.”

He saw his son eating French fries in the front seat of a police car. Paige Odom kept safety stoppers on the boy’s bedroom door to keep him in his room at night. The chief found him there, put a blanket over his head and carried him out, past his mother’s body.

“He didn’t see anything,” Odom says. “He was so little, he didn’t understand. After awhile, I set him down and we talked. I told him that his mom had gone to heaven.”

• • • • •

Paige Odom’s mother, Chris Cantrell, goes to sleep each night watching television. If she doesn’t, the dreams come and in the dreams her daughter is lying twisted at the foot of the staircase.

“When I close my eyes, I see it over and over again,” she says. “I don’t want to, I try not to think about it, but it comes into view.”

At first, everyone – Odom’s family, her friends, her patients, maybe even the police – believed she’d fallen down the stairs. It was an accident; that was the easy thing to think. Her boss, Dr. Douglas Pote, drove by at 2 p.m. and saw officers taking down the yellow police tape, he says. The house she rented was up for sale and Pote’s brother-in-law was the real estate agent. Police told him he could put the sign out front and start showing it that evening, Pote says.

People were in and out of the house that weekend, friends say. Her boyfriend went inside and picked up CDs, her computer. He told her friends he took the things he knew she would want him to have.

Marshall Odom and Debbie Crawford, another of her co-workers, went to her house to get clothes for the funeral.

They chose her favorite pair of blue pants, a matching top and a necklace. Then Marshall Odom looked for his wife’s $8,000 engagement ring – a diamond surrounded by Australian opals. It was missing. It still is.

They went to the funeral home to get her dressed.

“When Marshall saw her body, he was very visibly upset,” Crawford says. “He slumped over; I remember having his weight on me.”

Paige Odom had a knot on her forehead. She was swollen and splotched in green bruises. The funeral director apologized that they couldn’t hide the ones on her hands, Crawford says.

“When I went out of there that day, I went to the clinic and I said ‘that was not an accident, they will never convince me that was an accident,’ ” Crawford says.

Others grew suspicious, too. The more it sank in, the less it made sense.

Two months later, the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner completed the autopsy report. It was, and remains, a point of contention. The cause of death is listed as “undetermined” and yet the medical examiner continued:

“The injuries on the extremities were very atypical for a fall mechanism and much more suggestive of a fight and/or some form of physical restraint. In addition, on the right wrist a circular contusion with linear components was present suggestive an object or ligature was applied. The officers attending the autopsy did indicate that an ornate bracelet with a floral pendant was found in another room on the floor. The hand and finger injuries are consistent with self defense injuries.”

Odom’s friends say the bracelet was her favorite. It was a strap with wooden beads and she wore it nearly every day. Sheffield, the police chief, later showed her friends pictures of the crime scene. In one of them, they say, that bracelet lay broken on the floor in an adjacent room. It was 17 feet from her body.

“The findings are highly suspicious for a violent death,” the autopsy concluded.

For the past five years, Odom’s parents have started and ended each day imagining all of the things a violent death might mean. Over the years, they’ve pieced together an approximation of what they believe happened that night:

Their daughter was attacked in her dining room. She was hit in the head; she fought back, they believe. But she was small. Her hands were soft and tiny, her mother remembers. Eventually, she fell. She was kicked until she was barely alive then something, cellophane maybe, was placed over her mouth until she lay still. Her body was dragged 17 feet to the foot of the stairs, they think, and positioned to look like she’d fallen.

Then her killer cleaned up.

Neighbors told police, who told her parents, that they’d seen the lights on until 4 or 5 in the morning.

“It’s been a nightmare,” Phil Connell says.

• • • • •

Paige Odom grew up in the country outside Spartanburg, S.C. They had cats and dogs, horses and a gerbil.
Her hair was curly and blond, her eyes were blue. She stopped getting taller at exactly 5 feet.

Paige Odom was precocious – she sang, she played the violin and the piano.

“She was so funny,” her mother says. “She could pick up a kazoo and make it sound like something.”

Her parents divorced when she was young and it broke her heart, Chris Cantrell, her mother, says.

Cantrell and Odom’s father are quiet people. They didn’t want to be a nuisance. They called the police occasionally for updates and, before Dwayne Sheffield went to prison, were kept well informed.

Sheffield told them about several suspects.

Paige Odom had three men in her life: her husband, her boyfriend and another man – a doctor who’d visited her at her office, reportedly called her several times the day before she was found and later denied having known her at all.

Marshall Odom, now 63 and raising their son alone, says he was interviewed, but not interrogated. He never felt police suspected him, he says, and he certainly didn’t kill his wife. He loved her. In the few months before her death, her demeanor changed toward him, he says. He was elated; he thought she might leave her boyfriend and come back home.

The boyfriend, a soldier now back home in Washington County, Va., did not reply to a series of messages. He was not home when the Bristol Herald Courier stopped by and he did not respond to a note left on his front door.

The other man did not return messages left at his office.

Marshall and Paige Odom met and married in Boone, N.C. It was his third marriage, her first. They talked about children and a quieter life and Boone started to seem like a crowded place.

The Odoms bought a 100-acre farm in Saltville, Va., and built a house together. River was born March 29, 2003.

By that time, Paige Odom had worked at the Glade Spring Community Clinic for several years. When she died, they lost patients, her boss says. They told him they couldn’t bear the memory of her.

In 2005, readers of the Washington County News voted for their 10 favorite doctors. Doctor Paige, as her patients called her, was the only chosen doctor who was not actually a doctor.

In early 2005, Paige Odom began telling her co-workers that her marriage was falling apart, Pote says.

Marshall Odom says that at first he didn’t know his wife was unhappy. She’d started talking about a patient – a soldier who was leaving for training, Odom says. She arranged care packages and spoke of him often and openly. When he asked her why she cared so much, she said he was an office-wide project.

On a family trip, she disappeared for a half hour, he says. He found her phone, called the last number listed and a man answered at an Army base in Mississippi. He confronted her, he says. She denied it at first then eventually said she needed space. She rented the house in Chilhowie and moved out over Memorial Day weekend 2005.

“I was heartbroken,” Marshall Odom says. “I felt betrayed, lied to.”

In September, she took out an emergency protective order against her husband. The court record lists no reason. She told friends and co-workers she thought he was spying on her emails and breaking into her house.

Marshall Odom says her computer was his, and he’d already had a tracking device installed to keep tabs on it.

He never, he claims, broke into her house.

In 2005, while the boyfriend was in Iraq, Odom met another man – a married doctor, Pote says. He called her frequently at the clinic and once stopped by with a woman’s wig and a fake medical chart and asked her co-workers to help him surprise her in an exam room. They later called the stunt bizarre and unexpected.

Pote does not know if they were dating or just “special friends,” as she described it.

Paige Odom began publicly seeing the other man, the soldier, shortly after he returned from Iraq in late 2005 or early 2006. 

She told friends she’d met her “soul mate.”

Days after she died, the boyfriend arrived at a memorial service looking disheveled, her friends say. He said he’d been talking to police.

“He made this comment that really caught me off guard,” says Odom’s childhood friend, Jennifer Dorris, who, like everybody else, still thought her friend died in an accident. “He was like, ‘they questioned me so much, they have me thinking I done it.’ ”

He came from a troubled family, Paige Odom’s friends say. Both his parents were dead and his girlfriend often loaned him money.

At the service, he told her mother they’d gotten into a fight on his birthday, a few days before she died. Odom cooked him dinner and put chrysanthemums on the table, he told her mother. He hated chrysanthemums; they reminded him of his mother’s funeral. He got mad, went outside to calm down, then came back to apologize.

He blamed “those damn cats” for her tumble down the stairs, her friends say. 

Sheffield later told the Connells that the boyfriend had taken two polygraph tests and “failed both miserably.”
He confessed he’d had a key to her house. But, he told police, the day before she died he was fishing and had a bad feeling. The feeling told him to throw the key in the river.

After she died, Marshall Odom tracked the boyfriend down at a coffee shop in Abingdon. The two men had never met. Odom walked up to him.

“I’m Marshall, Paige’s husband,” he recalls saying. He pointed at him. “I’ve got my eyes on you,” he said, turned around and left.

Odom also was asked to take a polygraph test but, at his attorney’s suggestion, refused. The other man, the doctor, would not speak to police at all. Police caught up with him one day as he was leaving the office, Sheffield told Odom’s friends. He told them he barely knew her.

In July 2006, five months after Odom’s death, Pote asked for a meeting with investigators and Smyth County Commonwealth’s Attorney Roy F. Evans Jr. Pote asked them why they hadn’t gotten her phone records, why they hadn’t interviewed her closest friends.

They told him they were busy, very busy, and asked him to be patient, Pote said.

A few months later, the night before Halloween, the Chilhowie Police Department hosted its now-infamous charity haunted house. Sheffield, his sergeant and a 17-year-old volunteer stayed late to lock up.

Pote arranged two more meetings with investigators, composed an eight-page investigatory memo and gave it to police. Each meeting grew increasingly hostile, he says. He asked why they were keeping the whole thing so quiet. They told him it was a “focused” investigation and nothing could be gained from publicity.

Then the bottom fell out from under the Chilhowie Police Department. On May 22, 2007, an officer was indicted on a charge of distributing a controlled substance. The next day, Sheffield and his sergeant were indicted for raping and sodomizing the 17-year-old haunted house volunteer. Half the department went to jail.

“The police told us time after time after time – we’re so busy, we’re so very busy and that’s why we haven’t done these things – and then we find out what they’re busy doing is selling drugs and fooling around with underage girls,” Pote says. “That leaves a very, very bad taste in your mouth.”

The Smyth County Sheriff’s Office took over the Odom case. According to Evans, they had to “start from scratch.”

“I think all of us would probably say there are some things that should have been done differently,” Evans says.

Pote’s last meeting with authorities was in June 2007, 15 months after Odom’s death and three weeks after Sheffield’s indictment. Pote accused them of shoddy police work.

“They sat up,” he says. “At least we got them to sit up straight. They still hadn’t done their damn job, but at least they were sitting up straight.”

He suspects they will not meet with him again.

Then the police chief in Damascus, one town over from Chilhowie, was arrested on charges of peddling methamphetamine and two unnamed Smyth County Sheriff’s deputies were fired after an investigation into his drug trade.

“This bunch of yahoos botched the investigation from the get-go,” Marshall Odom says. “They didn’t know what they were doing. How does a young woman die and no one can figure out how and who did it?”

Sheffield pleaded no contest to animate object sexual penetration and skirted the four other charges against him. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, most of it suspended. His sergeant took a plea deal, too.

Sheffield declined to comment for this story when reached at the Hayneville Correctional Center. But he had, at least, been cavalier with information, Odom’s family says.

“After that, it got to where we learned less and less,” Cantrell says. “And I don’t know if it’s cause there just wasn’t any more to tell us.”

The new investigators said nothing, Connell and Cantrell say. Sometimes they didn’t call back at all. Her family began losing hope. Paige Odom’s stepmother contacted a famous television psychic.

“At that point, you’ll try just about anything,” she says. She took notes and sent them to police.

“They said they considered it an open case,” Phil Connell says. “But it seemed to me they considered it pretty well shut.”

• • • • •

When Debbie Crawford dreams about Paige Odom, and she often does, they are driving together through a canyon; Grandfather Mountain is off in the distance. They lose control, go up on two wheels and Crawford is scared they’ll flip. But they never do.

They are not nightmares, she says. They’re just reminders.

“It seems like as soon as I put it in the back of my mind, I have a dream about her,” Crawford says. “I’m on a mission. I am going to find out what happened.”

A state away, another woman lives with a similar pledge, and she has the dreams, too. Jennifer Dorris and Paige Odom rode the bus to grade school together, then high school. They threw joint roller skating parties and, years later, were roommates at the University of South Carolina. They were friends for 26 years.

“It consumes me,” says Dorris, who lives in North Carolina. “I have bad dreams that I’m standing in the shower and her killer is behind me. I’ve tried to lay it to rest. But I can’t. I will find out who did this. It may take me til I’m 50 years old, or 80 years old. But I’ll figure it out.”

Dorris met with Sheffield. Crawford accompanied Pote to his meetings with the investigators. Neither can believe that after five years, no one has been arrested in Paige Odom’s death.

On a Thursday in January, the Bristol Herald Courier called Evans and asked for an interview about law enforcement’s “perspective” on the Odom case. He agreed to a meeting the following Tuesday. In his office, a Virginia State Police investigator sat on his left and a Smyth County Sheriff’s deputy sat on his right.

“It’s a suspicious death,” Evans said of the official classification. “It has not been determined to be a homicide, it has not been determined to not be a homicide.”

A task force was formed shortly after her death. It still exists, Evans said, and they still get tips – one as recently as a month before – and they work them as they “have to resources to do so.”

“But if you’re asking if an arrest is imminent,” Evans said, “no.”

Evans and the officers would confirm no facts – not what day of the week Odom’s body was found, not how long after the crime the scene was released. They could not discuss an ongoing investigation, they said. And they hadn’t brought their case files with them.

“You want to tick off a list and you want us to tell you who our suspects are,” Evans said. “I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

He asked who’d been talking to the newspaper and what they said. They wanted to copy the Bristol Herald Courier’s files. Evans asked what the “spin” of the article would be and why it was being written at all.

Odom’s family contacted the newspaper last year. They called it their “last crusade” to find their daughter’s killer. They hoped publicity would jog a memory, incite some interest. Most people, still, think she tripped down the stairs.

“What I’m telling you is I can’t discuss facts of a criminal investigation,” Evans said.

He stood up, went to leave, but came back – albeit briefly.

He was asked why the case hasn’t been solved in five years.

“Why hasn’t any open case been solved in five years?” he said. “I’m done.”

He looked at the officers to both sides. “Anything else?” he asked them.

They didn’t have anything else.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, stood again – this time for good – and excused the Bristol Herald Courier.

Later, Evans described the meeting as an “ambush,” that the Herald Courier asked to talk about his “perspective,” which he did not assume would involve specifics about the case or investigation.

Two weeks later, a letter arrived, dated Jan. 26.

“Needless to say your recent inquiry about the February 2006 death of Paige Odom has generated much discussion among the investigators who took over this case in 2007 and my office,” it reads. “This morning we resolved and I have requested that a special grand jury be empanelled to investigate her death.”

The letter said that the case investigators assure him they’ve followed all leads “to their ends,” but a grand jury will allow for sworn testimony.

“It was apparent from your line of questioning that you have been provided leads that the family or her co-workers claim have not been adequately investigated,” Evans wrote. “Although they have made that claim to us before, we would like to know if there is something new.”

He asked again for the Bristol Herald Courier’s notes and his request was declined.

A special grand jury was seated Friday, Feb. 18, five years and eight days after Odom was found dead.

Phil Connell says he’s “tickled to death” to hear that the investigation is progressing. He just doesn’t understand why it didn’t happen sooner.

His wife wrote: “I am so angry that Paige’s death wasn’t important enough for them to do this on their own without any need for outside help to get things going.”

• • • • •

River Odom looks like his mother. He is 7 now and in the second grade.

“He’s a great kid,” Marshall Odom says. “He’s doing really good in school. He likes to be hugged. He’s a real joy, just really easy to take care of. The only trouble he gives me is what time he goes to bed.”

River plays soccer. He started taking piano lessons and he seems to be a good child. He takes that after his mom, Odom says.

For several years after she died, Odom and River lived at the Saltville farm. They had no family in the area and Odom felt alone in the house he and Paige had built. He’s never told River that his mother might have been murdered.

“I don’t know if I ever will,” he says. “I don’t know what good that would do him.”

Odom’s daughter from a previous marriage lives in North Carolina, so he figured they might as well start over there. They are three hours from Paige Odom’s parents and Marshall Odom often takes River to visit them.

“It would help if we knew for sure that it wasn’t Marshall,” Phil Connell says. “We really don’t want it to be Marshall. And deep down, we really don’t think that it was.”

On a recent visit to the Connell house, River was rocking in a recliner where his mother used to sit.

“I really do miss my mommy,” he told the Connells. “I don’t pray every night, but sometimes I pray that my momma will come back so I can see her just once.”

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com
(276) 645-2531