Akron Beacon Journal (OH)
VANISHING POINT
AFTER HEATHER TEAGUE DISAPPEARED ALONG THE OHIO RIVER IN 1995, POLICE THOUGHT THEY HAD SOLVED HER MURDER. THEN THEY HEARD ABOUT CHRISTOPHER BELOW
Author: Craig Webb and Gina Mace, Beacon Journal writers
Dateline: HENDERSON, KY.
Tim Walthall never met Heather Teague.
Yet their lives intersected on a warm, sunny day in August 1995 in a horrifying moment that passed without significance to anybody in faraway Medina County, Ohio.
It was a perfect day for the blue-eyed, long-haired former beauty queen to find a secluded spot to work on her tan.
She parked her red compact car at Newburgh Beach on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River near Henderson and walked through a stand of willow trees and down a steep bank, plunking her chaise longue along the water's edge.
Alone with the sounds of the river pushing over the nearby dam, the slender 23-year-old removed her cutoff shorts, placed them by her shoes on the sand, and lay down on her stomach, loosening her bikini top.
In Indiana, across the wide expanse of river, Tim Walthall, the owner of a metal fabricating company, had strolled over to a wall of windows in his spacious riverfront home. His wife was busy making hamburgers for lunch.
Walthall had noticed that the thermals -- the visible air waves created by the differences in air and river temperatures -- were nonexistent that day.
So he picked up his binoculars to take advantage of the clear view a mile or so across the river and spotted four ATV riders, making their way over the sand dunes on the distant shore.
Walthall remembered watching them as they cleared a dune not far from the remote spot where a young woman could be seen sunbathing.
As the last of the vehicles turned away from the beach, though, Walthall also caught a glimpse of something peculiar: Somebody's head popped up from a clump of high, dense weeds about 15 feet behind the woman.
Walthall watched -- as did the man in the weeds -- as the ATVs passed from sight.
Puzzled by what he was seeing, Walthall opted to get his more powerful telescope for a better view of the long-haired, bearded man as he inched his way toward the unsuspecting woman. Walthall said the man would take five to six steps then crouch again in the weeds.
"I told my wife, 'Someone's stalking that woman,' " Walthall remembered. "I thought maybe it was her boyfriend trying to scare her."
Still not fully comprehending what was unfolding before his eyes, Walthall said, he saw the man take four or five giant steps, kneel by the woman, and put his arm across her back -- a move that triggered a sudden struggle.
For a moment, Walthall thought perhaps the sunbather knew the man because she stopped resisting briefly when it appeared he was talking to her. But his worst fears came to be when the man grabbed the woman's long brown hair, twisted it around his hand three times, pulled her head back and yanked her off the chair.
Her top fell off, Walthall said, and in her skirmish to retrieve it, he could see that the man had a small silver revolver.
Suddenly, Walthall was stunned not only by the gravity of the moment, but by the frustration of his predicament: Being in Indiana while witnessing a crime taking place across the Ohio River in Kentucky.
He watched helplessly as the woman -- eventually identified as Heather Teague -- was led away from the river and into some underbrush.
As the bushes on the distant shore shook back and forth marking the spot where she struggled, Walthall pleaded with an Indiana State Police dispatcher to give him a phone number so he could alert Kentucky police. Then came his challenge to persuade Kentucky authorities that they had an emergency on their watch.
All told, it was 26 minutes before Kentucky State Police arrived at the beach and by then the woman and her abductor were gone.
Heather Teague was never seen again.
It was Aug. 26, 1995.
In his last 11 years on the Medina police force until his retirement in 2002, Lt. David Shows was a nearly constant presence in the life of Christopher Below, tracking his frequent moves around Northeast Ohio and beyond.
Even though he could never find a trace of Kathern Fetzer, Shows said he knew she was dead and that Below had killed her on that Tuesday before Thanksgiving 1991, and he didn't want him to get away with it.
"I wouldn't let him forget," Shows said.
So, no matter where Below moved, the detective from Medina would appear on his doorstep.
According to the women who were with him, Below found the pressure increasingly unnerving.
Shows even resorted to pretending in 1993 that he was one of Fetzer's relatives, mailing him letters from a Medina post office box, pleading for information on her whereabouts.
But Below never responded and in time Shows said he began to believe Below was a man without a conscience.
"I thought that maybe this wasn't the only time he'd done this," Shows said. "Or that he could do it again."
Shows repeatedly pressed Below to take a polygraph test and Below agreed to do so, but time after time he backed out at the last minute with another fabricated tale of why he couldn't.
``Once he told me he had a learning disability -- he couldn't tell the truth."
In Shows' opinion, that may have been the only time Below didn't lie to him.
When Medina Detective Scott Thomas inherited the Fetzer investigation from the retiring David Shows, Thomas also became convinced that not only had Below killed Fetzer, but that Fetzer was not his only victim.
Thomas consulted with an FBI profiling team, then set out to learn everything he could about Below -- a journey that took him back to Kentucky, where Below had taken refuge in 1994 following his release from an Ohio prison after serving time for stealing money from a Little League team in Holmes County.
Deep in the territory where years earlier Below had come of age, Thomas asked Kentucky and Indiana investigators if they had any unsolved cases of missing women -- like Fetzer -- and he was told of the strange disappearance of Heather Teague.
Teague's body never was found, but her murder was solved, at least to the satisfaction of some, when days after her abduction, Kentucky police zeroed in on the mobile home of their prime suspect, Marvin "Marty" Ray Dill -- a man who resembled the abductor Tim Walthall described.
Investigators discovered Dill's red-and-white Bronco hidden in the woods near his mobile home. It had been freshly scrubbed, but there was a small bloodstain in the back.
It was the same vehicle, with a front vanity license plate, that was caught on tape -- parked near the beach not far from Teague's car -- by an insurance adjuster who was recording crop damage at the time of the abduction.
But as police surrounded the mobile home, Dill brought their inquiry to an abrupt conclusion with a single shot, committing suicide.
To many, Dill's actions solved the case.
Yet the blood found in the back of his SUV was not sufficient to positively link him to Teague.
When investigators took Walthall to the morgue to view his body, Dill had short hair, unlike the long-haired abductor that Walthall said he had seen through his telescope.
At the time, investigators reasoned that the shorn locks could have been the result of a quick haircut by a guilty man.
Members of Dill's family -- including an uncle who sat with him for several hours before Dill shot himself -- have steadfastly refused to cooperate with investigators.
Then came Thomas and his inquiries, eight years after the 1995 abduction.
And here are some of the things he discovered:
+ Below was living in Kentucky in 1995 when Teague was abducted, but not for long.
+ Three days after the abduction -- the same day Dill put the gun to his head -- Below left town.
+ Some of Dill's friends and some of Teague's friends were also acquaintances of Below.
+ A phone call that was placed by Teague on the night before she disappeared was made from a pay phone outside a bar near Henderson -- a bar that Below liked to frequent.
Furthermore, according to Thomas, there is a striking resemblance between Heather Teague and Kathern Fetzer.
In fact, he said when he showed Fetzer's photo to Kentucky State Police Detective Tim Rascoe, Rascoe produced a picture of Teague, "looked at them side by side and said, 'They could be sisters.' "
Beyond all that, though, was a piece of information lost in the significance of Walthall's original description of the bearded, long-haired abductor -- a piece of information that for Thomas was the clincher.
At the time of the 1995 incident, Walthall told investigators there was something peculiar that he noticed about the abductor's hands.
"He remembered everything about the guy, especially how he held his hands -- turned in," Thomas said. "That's Chris Below."
Today, Tim Walthall is left to look at the 1995 composite drawing he helped police create shortly after Heather Teague's abduction -- a composite of a potbellied man with a distinctive chest hair pattern and hands that turned in.
Since picking Below out of two photo arrays that were supplied by Detective Thomas, Walthall now wonders whom he really saw through the telescope that day.
There are still things that make him think it must have been Dill, yet if you ask him if he still believes it was Dill, Walthall hesitates.
"If you asked me five years ago I would have said yes," Walthall says. "Now, I don't know."
In 2000, when Below was back in the vicinity and his half-sister Mellissa Moschner gave him a place to stay for a while at her home across the river in Evansville, Ind., she remembered that her brother had a favorite spot that he liked to visit along the river on the Kentucky side.
"He liked the area of the lock and dam," Moschner said.
It is the same lock and dam that was the background for Heather Teague's abduction.
"He would go off on his own like he was looking for something," she said. "He would get quiet, and seemed to become reclusive whenever he talked about the beach."
Copyright (c) Feb. 2005 Akron Beacon Journal
