Death Trap (3 page)

3

During the early-morning hours of February 16, 2002, somewhere near 3:30
A.M
., four friends traveled down Old Mill Road in Rutledge, Georgia. They were on their way to South Carolina to attend what one of them described as a “chicken show.” In fact, inside the Toyota minivan they were traveling in were cages of chickens to bring to that show.

It was dark as motor oil out there that time of night. The men had just woken up. They were all a bit groggy still, the ruts in the dirt road bouncing them along, when one of them noticed a light. It was no common light. It had a red and orange glow to it. It came from off in the distance.

“Over there,” one of the men shouted.

The others looked.

“I know someone who owns that land, y’all. Turn around and head over there.”

There was a concern that the woods were on fire. A friend might lose acreage. Maybe even a barn. Animals. People. The closer they got, pulling onto Hawkins Academy Road, where the dark smoke and flames were centered, the more it became clear that this was not a small brush fire, but some kind of inferno. Something was burning out of control.

Pulling up to what they realized was a car engulfed in flames, the men got out of the van. As soon as they hit the outside air, they could feel the heat from the blaze push them back.

One of them was already on his cell phone calling the sheriff.

Morgan County, Georgia, deputy sheriff John Eugene Williams took the call. The man on the other end of the line reported that there was a car on fire in the woods near Hawkins Academy Road. Someone needed to get the fire department out there immediately, before the woods burned out of control. There were trees on fire already. The ground was charred and flaming. Rutledge is a suburb of Madison. It is a deeply settled region of Morgan County. Lots of trees and dirt roads and farmland.

Bucolic nothingness.

“It’s rural,” Deputy Williams later explained.

“There’s a car on fire,” the man said into his cell phone, “out here at Hawkins Academy Road. . . .”

Damn kids probably messing around again. After all, it was still Friday night, unofficially speaking. Bunch of punks probably tied a good one on and, after funneling beers half the night, got a little rowdy and decided to torch an old rusted-out junk vehicle sitting in some farmer’s pasture. Deputy Williams needed to get the local fire department out there as soon as he could and get those flames extinguished before that common car fire turned into an uncontrollable forest fire.

Then he’d have big problems on his hands. A headache the deputy surely didn’t need. Or wanted to deal with.

“Thanks,” Williams said. He was on it.

Deep in the Georgia woods, standing there humbly among the flagpole-straight American beech trees, rotting leaves from the previous fall underneath your feet, you look up in the middle of the night and realize you are a witness to the immaculate grace of God’s country: a blanket of diamonds sparkling against a perfectly black shawl of a sky that gazes back down at you. Off in the distance are the subtle, darkened silhouette outlines of mountains in the shape of a camel’s back. Rutledge, Georgia, as Deputy Williams seemed to imply, is just a blip on a GPS screen, with a population of seven hundred. The town is located approximately halfway between Atlanta and Augusta. It is a forgotten place, essentially, there to serve its people. Rutledge and Madison are quiet and nondescript wooded areas off Interstate 20 that interlopers might assume are nothing more than lost, vast wilderness. Out here, good old folks live quietly. They bother no one. Their focus is on working the same land their forefathers have had for generations past.

Yet, during the late 1990s and early into the new millennium, for some bizarre reason few could ever discern, this same area of the state became a dumping ground for the dead, especially those who had been brutally murdered. There was an elderly woman, abducted and beaten with a tree branch, left there to be found by the animals; two teenage runaways who kidnapped a newspaper girl and left her mutilated body just off the interstate; and three teens who tortured and eventually killed a runaway.

Strange happenings, indeed.

Dead bodies popping up every now and then was no reason for alarm, locals knew. And law enforcement would say the same thing when asked why this area of the state had become such a refuge for murder victims: because it was between two major American cities, and the woods were easily accessible on and off the interstate.

It was either that, or Morgan County had the ghastly luck of being a quasi-burial ground for the murdered souls of the region.

 

 

Deputy Williams rustled up his jacket. Headed quickly out the door. Hopped into his Crown Victoria. Took off.

The Morgan County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) is located on Athens Highway. That’s about twenty minutes from the fire scene. Hawkins Academy Road is in Madison, actually, a mere rock toss east of Social Circle, just north of Rutledge. Looking at the road on a map, you can easily see why one might drop off Interstate 20 and onto Route 11 (Covington Street), follow the train tracks toward Rutledge, then take that turn onto Knox Chapel Road and head toward Hard Labor Creek State Park, stopping off somewhere along the way to set fire to a vehicle. From a bird’s-eye view you can see how one might be drawn to this area; that is, of course, if burning a car or dumping a body is in your immediate plans. The area is remote and yet effortlessly reachable, both in and out. The terrain is dense and thickly wooded and settled. If you wanted to cause mischief and not be seen, this would be an ideal place to get it done and get the hell out without anyone seeing you.

“There’s very few houses on it,” Williams said later, referring to Hawkins Academy Road. “It’s fairly isolated.”

As Williams drove, dispatch confirmed the call.

From the main road, Williams turned onto Hawkins Academy, a gravel road, heading toward a vast farming area. It was about 3:50
A.M
.

When he arrived, Williams was pleased to see that the Rutledge Fire Department (RFD) was already on scene. Not only that, but to the deputy’s great relief, they had extinguished most of the fire. It was under control. The ground smoking and hot. Trees blackened and bare. The car hissing, casting off an unhealthy smell of burned plastic and chemicals.

Chief Jerry Couch greeted the deputy as he pulled up and got out of his vehicle.

“Anybody in that vehicle?” Williams asked.

It was hard to tell by looking at it all burned up like that, but the car was a 2001 red Pontiac Grand Am. It had turned white, this after every last bit of paint had bubbled like blisters and melted from the vehicle due to the excessive heat and flames. Parked nose-first toward what looked to be a gate to let cows or horses into the acreage, a solid thirty years of the forested carpet in a circle around the charred vehicle was burned apocalyptic-like to the ground. Everything in that same area around the vehicle had turned to nothing but ash and black soil. Those skeletonized trees were just standing there, naked and charred like kindle wood.

As Williams walked toward the scene, he could see it was now nothing more than a smoldering mess of melted plastic and metal. Most of the rubber and plastic from the vehicle was gone. Liquefied. Cars didn’t just catch fire like this and burn themselves unrecognizable. Williams was no rookie cop. He knew better. An accelerant had to be involved. Hell, you could smell some sort of fuel. A car fire will generally burn itself out without much help. But this: the entire inside and outside of the vehicle was completely destroyed, blackened and charred. Smoldering. There were no seats left. Inside and out, the vehicle was nothing more than a carcass, same as a frame at the beginning of an automaker’s line in Detroit.

Having the fire under control, and more or less settled, was one less problem Williams had to contend with on what had turned into a frosty, excessively windy February night in the South.

Williams asked again: “Anybody inside?” There was the outside chance someone had torched the vehicle and a person along with it. Everyone had seen at least one episode of
The Sopranos
or a Martin Scorsese film. Burning bodies was a common way to get rid of evidence.

“No,” the chief said. “Ain’t nobody in there, but it . . .”

“Good . . . ,” Williams started to say. Again, one less problem to contend with in the middle of the night.

“. . . but it looks like somebody just slaughtered some beef or had some deer meat or something in the trunk,” the fire chief finished spitting out.

“Well,” Williams said, “let’s have a look.”

Poachers? Out here? What the hell? Someone trying to steal a darn cow in the trunk of a Pontiac Grand Am? The sheriff had seen people try to get away with more stupid things throughout his career. But this would be a first.

Williams could smell burning flesh himself as he approached the back area of the Grand Am. Waves of it wafted with the wind. Overtook his senses.

Indeed. Cooked meat had a very distinctive odor. Very potent. Very gamey.

To the sheriff, there was no mistaking what it was.

He walked over to the trunk. The plastic light housings on the rear end of the vehicle were gone, melted like candle wax, sponged into the black soil below his feet. The trunk was propped open with a halogen tool, a fireman’s crowbar. The car’s license plate had fallen off, but was on the ground, still intact, upside down. That was good to see. Identifying whose vehicle it was would be easy enough.

The sheriff went in for a closer look.

The backseat of the car had burned into ash, spring coils popping up. This gave the sheriff a clear view from the inside of the trunk into the hub of the vehicle’s backseat. There was definitely something bulky and large, all burned up, inside the trunk. There looked to be a blanket, or comforter of some type, underneath.

Williams leaned in for an even closer look. He knew right away what he was dealing with now. It was not going to be an uncomplicated night, after all.

The fire chief was off—but not too far.

“These are human beings,” Williams said to the fire chief, “not an animal.”

Both men stared at the mound of charred remains before them. It was hard to make out, but the cop was right. If you focused on the bulky entanglement of what looked to be two large animals coiled up together, you could clearly see the outline of two dead human beings, and what was left of the arm of one person. Williams believed, he said later, he was looking at a male and a female, or a man and a child. He didn’t know which.

“I knew one was a male,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t tell if the other one was a female or a child. [It was] much smaller.”

Either way, Williams was looking at the remnants of a heinous crime. A double murder. The vehicle was, obviously, the cover-up.

The crime scene.

Williams needed to clear the area. With help from several fire officials, he ran yellow crime-scene tape in a circular pattern extending to about thirty-five feet in diameter around the vehicle. He warned that nothing was to be moved or removed from the scene. Nobody should touch anything. Williams said he needed to get the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) out to start investigating. They needed to sift through what were the charred remains of two badly burned bodies and find out what had happened. It appeared a double homicide had been committed.

Williams went back to his car and got on the radio.

4

Philip and Joan Bates did not find much sleep throughout the night of February 15, 2002. Alan’s parents spent long periods staring at the ceiling. Wondering. Waiting. Counting sheep. Their stomachs in knots. When was the phone going to ring? When was that news coming? Joan knew it wasn’t going to be good.

A mother’s instinct.

“I had done all I knew how to do,” Philip said later, recalling that hectic night, “and went to bed for a few hours.”

That morning Philip made coffee. The clock on the wall in the kitchen said 6:00
A.M
. They had not heard from Alan since Friday afternoon. Not a word from anyone, for that matter. Philip called his son’s cell phone again, same with Terra’s. But he got the same voice message.

He put the phone down, he said later, and thought about it:
Darn
.
Those kids are in trouble.

It was time to file a missing persons report, Philip knew. It was the only way to get law enforcement out and about, looking for Alan, Terra and the kids.

Sipping his coffee, Philip knew the first question law enforcement would ask was a question he did not have the answer to. He needed to get some information first. Be prepared. Have what they need. Don’t sound desperate. Appear organized. An engineer thinks through every contingency, every possible problem
before
it happens.

The worried father took out a pad. Sat down and called rental car agencies inside the Birmingham Airport terminal to see which company had rented Alan and Terra a car. Philip knew Alan always used one of the agencies from the airport. He just didn’t know which one.

So he started with Avis.

“I told them who I was, what I was trying to do, and my concern,” Philip said later.

The agent was helpful. Said he understood Philip’s dilemma. Maybe he could help. Heck, he
wanted
to help.

Philip asked, “Have you rented a car to my son, Alan Bates . . . and if so, could you give me the color, make, model, maybe a description of it, so I could file a missing persons report?”

Philip knew he was probably going to have to repeat this same line to several different companies until he found the one Alan had used. But what he heard on that first call, he certainly did not expect.

“Um . . . hold on a minute, sir,” the agent said. He sounded concerned. Worried. There was urgency in his young voice. “I need to get my supervisor.”

Philip was shocked by this comment. Was there a red flag in the computer system on Alan’s bill?

A manager came on the line. Philip told the same story. Then the manager made a suggestion that spiked the hair on the back of Philip’s neck. “Sir, I was told to give this number out to anyone calling here regarding that rental.”

The number was for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Philip’s heart fluttered; his stomach twisted.

“What?”

Here it was, Saturday morning, February 16, and Alan, Terra and the girls were a no-show. Philip had even called Terra’s father, Tom Klugh, a man who knew just about every move his thirty-year-old daughter made. (Terra was set to turn thirty-one in about six weeks, on March 30.) Tom had not heard from them, either. And now here was some car rental agent manager telling Philip to phone the GBI.

“That’s when I knew,” Philip said. “That was it.”