The Cold Case of the Pierced Woman

"Slick Nick", as he was known on the street, was also known to a pretty rough character. He just wasn't really very slick when it came to avoiding arrest. His arrest record went back to the age of eighteen and included robbery, car jacking, and drug dealing, all felonies according to Tennessee law. When the officers searched his trailer, they found two shotguns and four pistols. They arrested him for premeditated murder and six counts of possession of a firearm by a felon.

I had him dead to rights because the bullet the coroner pulled from the college kid's chest matched one of the pistols

I had Slick down cold as far as the weapon used and how the murder had gone down. The DA always likes to show the jury a motive too, so I questioned Slick about what happened and why he'd done it. The public defender said he wouldn't let Slick answer unless I offered something other than the death penalty.

I said if he told me why and if both I and the DA believed the story, the DA might ask for life in prison with no possibility of parole. The public defender whispered something to Slick and after Slick whispered something back, the public defender said he wanted life with the possibility of parole.

Life with parole sure as hell wasn't justice for the kid's mom and dad. Slick was twenty-three, so he'd probably do about twenty years before his parole hearing. If he kept his nose clean, he'd probably be paroled. The only good thing about it was that he'd be at least in his forties by the time he was paroled and most guys that old don't go back to their gang. He might continue to commit crimes though. Many ex-cons do, but they usually get caught and multiple offenses mean longer sentences.

I said if Slick would confess, write everything down, and sign the confession, I'd see what the DA had to say. If the DA said no, I'd tear up the confession and let Slick take his chances with a trial. I reminded Slick then that with his record, a judge might not sentence him to death, but probably wouldn't make parole part of the sentence.

Slick wrote out his confession and I had him taken to Holding to await arraignment. Then, I charged the driver with negligent homicide and had him taken to Holding as well.

When I got home, Rochelle had a bunch of pictures spread out on the dining room table and was bent over looking at them. It was pretty neat that her top had fallen open and I was looking at her breasts sitting in her pink bra, but I figured she was too busy to think about anything other than the pictures.

I asked her if she'd found a match yet and she frowned.

"I didn't in any of the forty-six I found before, but then I started wondering if maybe she was a runaway. That would kind of fit with the piercings she had since they're sometimes about being an individual rather than part of a group. I wondered if maybe she disappeared before, like when she was seventeen or eighteen, so I went back to the DOE Project and looked for girls who disappeared between 1975 and 1979. I may have found three. None of the three have blonde hair, but maybe she bleached it at some point. Come see what you think."

Rochelle had three pictures of young women laid out on the table beside three of the pictures Christy had made for me. I saw the resemblance in two, not so much in the third. Of the two, one did look a lot like the picture Christy made. The woman had light brown hair, about shoulder length, and she was smiling. I pointed to that one and said I could see a resemblance in that one.

Rochelle nodded.

"That's my pick too. It's obviously a high school picture so she was probably only seventeen or eighteen when it was taken, but the nose looks pretty close and so does her chin. The description of her disappearance fit's part of my theory too.

"Her name is Theresa Cheryl Madison, and she was nineteen when she left her parents home. She was last seen when she was arrested for prostitution in Johnson City. She was released with a trial date, but never showed up for her trial.

"I called the detective in Johnson City who has her case file and explained what we'd done so far and why I called him. He said he couldn't tell me any more because I wasn't part of law enforcement. When I told him you were a detective in Knoxville, he said he could give you as much information as he has. He said it's not much, but it might help. He also asked me to send him the pictures the TBI made. I sent them via Fedex at about four, so he should have them by tomorrow at noon. He said he'd show them to Theresa's sister and see if she recognized her."

I didn't need to wait to find out information about Theresa. I opened my laptop and when the NCIC database loaded, I typed Theresa's full name into the search box. What I got back was the report about her arrest for prostitution.

Theresa had been arrested for soliciting a plain-clothes officer one night in Johnson City in 1979 when she was nineteen. She didn't resist and was booked and released since it was her first offense. When her trial date came up and she didn't show, the judge issued a warrant for her arrest, but she was never found.

That was all that was in NCIC other than her physical description, but I could put together a theory of what happened to her. I figured she'd just left Johnson City for Knoxville, changed the name she went by from Theresa to Cheryl, and continued being a prostitute. While doing that, she'd met up with somebody who had killed her. A lot of prostitutes are also drug users, so it might have just been heroin or cocaine that was cut a little less than she realized. I'd investigated cases like that before. It looked like murder, but what it really was, was a self-administered overdose, either accidental or with the intention of suicide.

Why somebody would have buried her instead of calling the police made me lean more toward murder than an accident or suicide. Of course, I still had no proof that Theresa and my victim were one and the same.

Talking with the detective in Johnson City who had the case file filled in a lot of details about Theresa, but didn't help me much.

Apparently, Theresa and her parents didn't get along very well. They were pretty religious and wouldn't let her dress like she wanted or go out with boys until she was seventeen. Even after that, they had to meet the guy before they'd let her go out with him.

Theresa left home right after she graduated because of that, or so the parents said. The detective thought there was more to the story than that, but by the time he got the case, both parents were dead so he couldn't talk to them. He did find out from Theresa's sister that their father was pretty domineering at home. She also told him that Theresa told her that when she was eighteen, her father had started touching her breasts and hips. The mother knew this was going on, but was too timid to say anything to anybody.

That fit what I'd seen before as a patrol officer. She was abused at home by a domineering father and ran away from that. With not much education, she wouldn't have been able to find much of a job, so she turned to prostitution. It's a story I'd seen too often before.

The detective in Johnson City had gotten the pictures Rochelle had sent him, and had shown them to Theresa's sister. The sister said the pictures looked a lot like Theresa, especially the picture with long, light brown hair.

That interested the detective so he asked the sister if she still had anything from Theresa. Specifically, he was looking for hair samples because he'd read that now it was possible to get DNA from the hair shaft and not just from the hair follicle. When he asked about hair, the sister said she remembered a lock of Theresa's hair in a baby book her mother had kept and that she now had.

The sister found the baby book after looking for an hour, and gave the detective a few strands that he bagged and then sent to the TBI for analysis. He said it would probably be at least a couple weeks before he learned anything.

I'd read about the new DNA technique too but I hadn't had a reason to use it. That afternoon, I pulled the blonde hair samples from evidence and had the Crime Lab send half of them to the TBI for the same analysis. If the DNA from the baby hair matched the DNA from Theresa, I had a name and that was a start. I also asked the TBI to compare the DNA from Theresa's hair and other samples and the DNA from the blonde hair found at the burial site.

Rochelle was happy when I got home that night. She'd taken the picture of Theresa and driven over to see Archie, the tattoo and piercing artist she'd talked to before. He'd looked at the picture for almost a minute and then said it had been a long time, but he hadn't pierced many women's labia back then and thought she was the woman he remembered as Sherry. I didn't notice it until Rochelle pointed it out, but he said her ears weren't pierced and he couldn't figure out why she'd want her nipples and labia pierced when her ears weren't.

That further made me think that Theresa was our unidentified body. It seems like most women have pierced ears anymore, but there weren't any earrings found at the burial site.

Rochelle smiled then.

"It sounds like we've found a name to go with our victim even though Archie said her name was Sherry. There's not a lot of difference between Cheryl and Sherry, so maybe he just didn't hear her right or remember it right. She might have started going by Cheryl after she was arrested."

"Well, I admit it does sound promising, but don't let yourself get ahead of the facts. Let's wait and see if the TBI can get a match between Theresa's hair and the blonde hair from the burial site. If they're a match, we'll have the proof and we can go from there."

That wait only took a week, and it wasn't what I was expecting to see. I was expecting the DNA from Theresa's hair to either match the blonde hair from the burial site or for there to be no match to either. What I got was a match between Theresa's hair sample and the bone samples the coroner had sent at the time of the autopsy, but no match to the blonde hairs found at the burial site. My skeletal remains were Theresa, but there was someone else involved. That someone else was probably the killer.

There was a match to the blonde hairs found at the burial site though. TBI had also sent the sequenced DNA from the blonde hairs to CODIS and had found a match. The blonde hairs were from a woman who, along with her husband, had been arrested for felony assault in 2004. Her name was Rachael Luttrell and she was fifty at the time of her arrest.

I pulled the case file and read the reports of the doctor and the detective.

According to what I read on her arrest report, in July of 2004 a young man had walked into a hospital in Knoxville with multiple severe cuts on his back and buttocks. The doctor who examined him thought the cuts looked like the man had been beaten with a whip so he called the Knoxville police.

When questioned by the detective assigned to the case, the man admitted to having been whipped, and said it had happened in the barn next to a farmhouse out in the countryside around Knoxville. He gave them two names, Andrew and Rachael Luttrell.

The detective then went to the Luttrell home with two officers to talk with them. Neither denied they'd beaten the man. They said it was consensual and that the young man had wanted to experience the fringes of BDSM and they'd only agreed to do it. The detective didn't believe them, so he arrested them both and took them back to Knoxville for booking. That's when he took DNA samples from both.

The case stopped when the detective questioned the young man again. During that round of questioning, he described being blindfolded and trussed up in the barn and then beaten with a whip with a thin, leather lash attached to the end. When the detective asked him if Mr. or Mrs. Luttrell forced him into the experience, he thought for a while and then shook his head. He said he found being humiliated to be sexually arousing, and when he read about what he called "edging", had decided he wanted to experience it.

He described "edging" as being significantly more painful and potentially dangerous than what most of his friends in the BDSM community in Nashville felt comfortable with. He'd found Mr. and Mrs. Luttrell through talking with others in the community and had contacted them.

That made the beating consensual, and while there were and are laws against such things in the Tennessee code, that same code exempted any act between adults that was consensual. The exemption had been made after the US Supreme Court had basically invalidated all sodomy laws in 2003. That decision was interpreted by most state legislatures to mean that whatever happens between consenting adults in private is protected by the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, and they changed their laws to reflect that.

The detective released Mr. and Mrs. Luttrell with the advice that another person might not be so sure it was consensual, and if it wasn't, they'd be charged with felony assault.

NCIC had no other information relative to Mr. or Mrs. Luttrell after that single incident, but since I had DNA proof she'd either been at the burial site or had at least left some of her hair there, she was obviously involved somehow. I wanted to know what that involvement was.

At the time, my theory was that she and Mr. Luttrell hadn't just had the one experience in extreme BDSM activities. The pictures in the file showed the man's back and ass were basically slashed to ribbons. I couldn't imagine any human being doing that to another without working up to it over some period of time with other victims.

I thought it was likely they'd done a similar thing to Theresa except they'd gone too far and she'd died. That would explain why the coroner hadn't been able to determine a cause of death. That evidence had just decomposed with the rest of the woman's body.

When they realized Theresa was dead, they'd taken her out to where her body had been found and buried her there. Either when they wrapped her in the shower curtain or when they buried her, Mrs. Luttrell had left some hairs behind.

I needed to talk with Mr. and Mrs. Luttrell about Theresa, but before I did that, I wanted to find out as much about them as I could. Sometimes it's the little details of someone's life that leads to either a confession or enough evidence for a conviction.

I already had the NCIC file on both so I went to the Knox County recorders office and asked for all records for Andrew or Rachael Luttrell. While I was waiting, I accessed the Tennessee DMV database for both. Among other things, the DMV database would tell me if they still lived in the same farmhouse.

The DMV records had the farmhouse listed as the last address for both Mr. and Mrs. Luttrell, but Mr. Luttrell's license expired in 2005 and he hadn't renewed it. There could be a lot of reasons for that, the foremost being that according to his date of birth, he'd be seventy-five now. Many people give up their license when they don't feel safe driving any more. Some have problems seeing well or have other conditions that make driving at least uncomfortable. Mrs. Luttrell was sixty-nine and had renewed her license in 2020 so she was probably doing all the driving.

I did get some other interesting facts about both that I wasn't sure were relevant. Mr. Luttrell was only five feet one inch tall and weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. His hair color was black and he had brown eyes. Mrs. Luttrell was five feet six and weighed a hundred and eighty, but the face on her license made me think she was probably at least twenty pounds heavier than that. Her hair color was blonde and her eyes were blue.

I got the information from Knox County two days later and it was pretty helpful.

Andrew Luttrell and Rachael Forsythe were married on June 5, 1976 when he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-one. Neither was born in Knox County so I didn't have birth certificates. I did have birth certificates for their two children, Rosemary and Sharon, born in 1985 and 1987 respectively.

When I searched for Rosemary and Sharon Luttrell in the Tennessee DMV records, I found Rosemary was living in Nashville and Sharon was living in Sevierville. Apparently neither was married because their last names were still Luttrell.

Rochelle had started her facts board as soon as we had a match for Theresa's and Mrs. Luttrell's hair. I took my information home the night I got it and she put it in her timeline, then stepped back and studied it for a few minutes.

"So, they got married, killed Theresa five years later, and then did nothing until both girls were out of the house? Doesn't sound to me like they were very deep into BDSM. From what I've read, it becomes a lifestyle, not just a hobby."

I shrugged.

"A lot of couples give up a lot of what they like to do when they have kids. Maybe that's what they did. Besides, we don't know they gave it up. All we know is they just didn't get caught doing anything extreme while their kids were growing up. If everything was consensual, they probably wouldn't have been caught because there would have been no complaints. It's also possible what they did during that time wasn't as extreme as what they did to the guy they whipped and whatever they did to Theresa.

"Maybe they sent the kids to a grandparent's house on the weekends. I don't know where that might be because neither of them was born in Tennessee, but it's a possibility."

Rochelle shook her head.

"If we had kids, would you give up sex except for a weekend when we sent the kids to visit grandma? From what I've read about BDSM, it's an integral part of sex for people in the lifestyle. I don't think they'd have given it up except for the weekends. I sure wouldn't give up sex just because we had a couple kids running around. We'd have to be careful, but I wouldn't stop doing it."

I wasn't sure Rochelle was right, but she had given me an idea. The guy they whipped said they'd done it in the barn on the property. Harry didn't search the barn because once the guy said it was consensual, he didn't have a case to investigate. I figured I had probable cause with the DNA match with Mrs. Luttrell and the hairs from the burial sight, and I wanted to see just what was in that barn.

I was planning on doing that as soon as I had both in custody when Rochelle asked me another question.

"What do you suppose brought them together? They were eight years apart in age when they got married. That's probably not rare, but it is unusual. Five years or less is usual. If she was as heavy then as her face looks in the driver's license picture, she wouldn't have been every guy's dream of a good wife. Most women put on weight as they age, but really big girls like her usually start out being pretty big in their teens."

"Well, there are some men who think big women are sexy, but there could be another reason too. He was working in a factory and was getting old enough that most women his age would already be married or at least living with a partner, and in his driver's license picture, he doesn't look like he'd attract many good looking women. He might have figured she was as good as he was going to get."

Rochelle frowned.

"I suppose that's possible, but even if she wasn't heavy back then, what on earth would have attracted her to him? He was short and skinny. She was relatively tall. Maybe she was heavy back then and figured he was the best she'd find. I've known women who thought that way. Most would have picked a man at least as tall as they were though. Even if she was wearing flats, she'd have been a lot taller, and if she was wearing heels, they'd have looked like Mutt and Jeff."

I chuckled.

"So, you picked me because I'm taller than you are?"