A Bend in the River
A cheerleader lies dead in dark waters, and life in the small towns along the Red River will never be the same. A tale of restless youth in a lonely land.
BeeJay says: I agree with callie to a certain extint. Violent henious crimes happen for a reason. So that reason has to be researched. Why can you be charged with the actual crime if you didn’t pull the trigger? Hand of one hand of all, thats how and its a . I agree Texas takes things beyond the extreme - for instance you don’t send a mentally ill 15 to prison for the rest of his life because he made a mistake. You give young people a chance to correct thier mistakes. How is it a 31 year old man can rape a two year old until she’s four and only gets 3 years but a rapist of an adult woman who can fight back you’ll give out a life sentence for. If anyone ever touches my children the police won’t be called but you might read about it in the paper. Theres no stability in Texas. They look for convictions and not the truth. (November 9th, 2009 at 1:55pm)
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Randy resented Heather’s flirtations with other boys. His own teenage uncertainty was heightened by his hard-luck background. His family was one of the poorest in town; he had never known his father, and his mother had a history of drug use. He had started smoking pot in the third grade after stealing it from his mother, and he often had the glassy-eyed look of a kid in a world of his own. Still, as a Waurika Eagles running back, he had earned the respect of his team, and around town, people liked the soft-spoken, well-mannered teenager who was making the best of the bad hand life had dealt him. His family’s poverty was evident from their run-down frame house, where broken windows were covered up with old quilts and cardboard, but Randy tried to present himself well, wearing oxford shirts and khakis and holding his head up when he walked the mile to school. Randy was just a "big, dumb kid" back then, people say, "a little slow" but adored around town. "Heather befriended the underdogs—that’s why she liked Randy," says Gail. "She felt sorry for him. She took him to church. She felt like Randy had never been given a chance." His five-month relationship with Heather was intimate but not one of great passion; they would never sleep together. The relationship was so low-key that many people, including the Riches, mistook them for friends. Heather and Randy liked to sit and talk for hours on end—but even after so much time together, Heather could seem like a stranger. "I knew her but not like I wanted to," Randy says, "not like I should have."
Heather was also growing more distant from her parents, who were consumed by a family crisis. Duane, an electrician, had nearly been killed on the job when a transformer blew up, burning him over 65 percent of his body. His injuries changed him from an involved father and husband into a helpless patient: Skin grafts and physical therapy would follow, and he had to learn to walk again. Heather fed him and dressed his wounds, and when her mother began working long hours to make ends meet, the cooking and cleaning duties fell largely to her. "Our lives were in chaos," says Gail. "I didn’t give Heather the time she needed. I should’ve checked up on her friends instead of taking her word. She’d say, ’But, Momma, there’s good in everybody’ and look at me with those big blue eyes." Mother and daughter were close, though Gail didn’t know the extent of her daughter’s self-destruction: Heather had begun to cut herself now and then, running a razor blade across her legs until she drew blood.
A few weeks after school started, Randy broke up with Heather after hearing a rumor that she had gone skinny-dipping at a co-ed pool party. Within a week, an acquaintance of theirs named Dennis Wayne Goss, a twenty-year-old from the nearby town of Terral, fatally shot himself in the head. Deeply rattled by the breakup and perhaps Goss’ suicide, Heather’s behavior grew more erratic. "She had a brightness, a glitteryness, about her eyes," says Gail. She would later learn that Heather had started experimenting with meth not long after Randy stopped seeing her.
Toward the end of September, six days before she disappeared, she was drunk on the sidelines at a football game. She was suspended from school for three days while administrators decided whether to kick her off the cheerleading squad. The Riches became so concerned about Heather that they made an appointment with a therapist for the following Thursday, October 3, 1996. "We wanted to get her help and figure out why she wanted to hurt herself," says Gail.
On October 2 Gail came home to find a $300 long-distance phone bill that Heather had racked up calling friends from church camp—a bill the family could not pay. Angry and exhausted from the strain of working sixteen-hour days, Gail lost her temper. "All you ever do is cost me money," she snapped. Wounded, Heather retreated to her room. She came to her parents’ bedroom later that evening and wished Duane good-night, telling him she loved him. She ignored her mother, walking past her without meeting her glance. Gail never saw her daughter again.
THE NEXT MORNING, THE RICHES WENT to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department to report Heather missing. Sheriff’s deputies refused to take the disappearance seriously, assuring Gail that Heather had probably just run away for a few hours to give her a scare and advising her to return home. "When your daughter’s missing, you can sit at home," Gail said angrily. She knew her daughter hadn’t run away; Heather’s makeup bag, which she never left behind, was still in her bedroom. None of her clothes were missing, and her diary lay open on her bed. As Gail made frantic inquiries around town that morning—"I was beating on people’s doors," she says. "I was working on pure adrenaline and anger"—a friend at Waurika High School slipped her the day’s absentee list, which included Randy Wood. Gail reached him by phone and asked if he had seen Heather. Randy said he hadn’t, then added, "I was with Josh Bagwell all night, till six this morning." His voice sounded tired and flat. When Gail pressed him, he repeated that he hadn’t seen Heather; he was with Josh Bagwell all night. "Randy, if you knew anything that could help us find Heather, you would tell us, right?" Gail asked him. "Yes, ma’am," he replied. When she hung up, she added Josh Bagwell to her list of people to question.
Randy and Josh were good friends, though they made a curious pair. Josh was a snob, say some who knew him—a clean-cut, pampered seventeen-year-old who lived with his wealthy grandparents, Toad and Hattie Dale Anderson. "The Andersons were always a little bit better than everybody else," says one local. "They’re showy with their money. They have a big house, the newest cars. For Waurika, they’re high rollers." Josh’s mother was divorced and lived out of town; at sixteen, he moved in with his maternal grandparents, who liked to indulge him. With little discipline at home, he bristled at authority. When he was arrested once for drunk driving, he scuffled with police officers, yelling, "I want my f—ing attorney," and was charged with resisting arrest. His white Dodge Stealth was the fanciest car that any teenager had in town, and Randy was awed by his easy wealth. "Josh told me it was his sixth brand-new car," says Randy. "He said he’d wrecked some of the others." Heather was taken with Josh’s life of privilege too. Her ongoing flirtation with him had paid off that September, when Josh promised she could ride on the back of his car in the homecoming parade.
The day of Heather’s disappearance, Josh was also absent from school. He had been suspended for three days for cutting class; earlier that week, he had attended his friend Dennis Wayne Goss’s funeral. When members of the Rich family questioned Josh, as they did dozens of teenagers around town that day, he shrugged and said he hadn’t seen Heather in a week.
As days went by with no sign of their daughter, the Riches’ desperation led them to hire a private detective and to use a friend’s bloodhounds to sniff around wooded areas near town. Many tips that came in about Heather’s whereabouts circled back to something Gail had not previously known existed: Waurika’s drug culture. "We discovered that there were several meth labs in town and houses where people dealt drugs on nearly every block," Gail says. "Duane and I had raised four kids in Waurika, and we had no idea this was going on. Our kids, everyone’s kids, knew about it. After the sun went down, our town was full of dope."
On the eighth day of the Riches’ search, a rancher reported finding a body. The victim’s identity was soon confirmed. "Duane walked in the door and I took one look at him and I knew she was dead," Gail says. "I said, ’Just tell me. Say it real fast and get it over with.’ He told me that someone had shot her and thrown her in the water and that she was never coming home. I remember screaming and beating on him for an hour, saying, ’No, no, no.’" Word filtered through Waurika the next day. "There was shock and total disbelief," remembers Mayor Biff Eck. "No one could understand how something like this could happen to someone from our town." Randy was at school, standing at a water fountain, when he heard the news that Heather’s body had been found. "It was like time stopped," he says. That night he was crowned Waurika High School’s homecoming king. During the halftime ceremony, he looked haunted under the glare of the stadium lights.
A TEAM OF TWENTY INVESTIGATORS interviewed more than one hundred people in the days to come, with little luck. "Nobody wanted to talk," says Montague County sheriff Chris Hamilton, one of the Texas investigators working the case. "There was a party culture up there, and kids didn’t want to snitch. There was a code of honor, an us-against-the-police kind of attitude." Even the Waurika newspaper, the News-Democrat, observed that local teenagers were adhering "to a code of silence that would make the Mafia proud."
The Riches often stopped by the investigation’s makeshift command post—the old redbrick train depot, newly wired with laptops and phone lines—to offer home cooking and words of thanks. But as days, and then a week, passed with no progress, a sense of unease settled in. One of the few credible leads was that Heather had sneaked out to go to a party at Josh Bagwell’s house the night she vanished. Randy Wood had told Gail earlier that he had been there until six in the morning. They hadn’t seen Heather, Josh said. Only two people had stopped by his house that night: Randy and Curtis Gambill, Josh’s drinking buddy.
Curtis Gambill lived with his grandmother Reda Robbins, in Terral, twenty miles downriver from Waurika. At 64, Reda had spent her whole life on the river, and she knew it well: At dusk, she could stare up at the sky and then out at the river and tell whether its water would run red the next day or gin-clear. She knew where the imprints of wagon wheels were still worn deep in the sandstone lining its banks and where, among the wild lilac and blackthorn and yucca, gold was rumored to be buried. Reda has both Cherokee and Choctaw blood in her; her high cheekbones are set against jet-black hair and wide, expressive blue eyes that catch the sunlight, and she is eccentric in the way that all people deeply connected to this river are. She has had a series of husbands, and for years she sang in a local country and western band, crooning lonesome love songs. As a girl living on the river’s Texas side, she spent countless afternoons fishing on Belknap Creek. Back then, she used to walk the five miles from her house, down a dead-end dirt road, and sit on the Belknap Creek bridge, baiting hooks with earthworms and lowering them down below. Years later, she liked to take Curtis fishing there too.
Reda was disturbed by the news of Heather’s death, not only because it happened in her most beloved, and secret, corner of the river bottom, but also because she intimately knew the anguish of murder. Her mother was one of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas’ first victims; in 1982 he stabbed her in the heart and shoved her in a wood-burning stove in Ringgold, only a few miles from Belknap Creek. In the years that followed, Reda had worried about her grandson, Curtis. He had taken an unloaded gun to school and was sent to a juvenile facility as a result; after that, he got mixed up in drugs. "Curtis had a mean streak," says one local. "He was always raising Cain, and everyone knew to steer clear of him." A river rat, Curtis was tan and straw-haired, with green eyes that assessed whatever stood in his way with a cold, hard stare. He liked to camp and fish and roam the bottomland, and Reda spent a great deal of her time worrying about him. She knew he had been brooding ever since his best friend, Dennis Wayne Goss, had committed suicide. Curtis had made some strange remarks to her about his late friend: Dennis Wayne hadn’t killed himself; he had been murdered, and Curtis intended to find out who did it.
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