thewilkesrecord.com
THE KILLING OF RHONDA HINSON: The Selective Memory Of Mark Turner
Mon, Mar 18, 2024
Editor’s note: This is the continuation of an extensive series detailing the December 23, 1981, shooting murder of Rhonda Hinson who killed on her way home from a Christmas party in Burke County. To date, no one has been charged in connection with her death.
By LARRY J. GRIFFIN
Special Investigative Reporter
The Wilkes Record
Faith [Turner] was so shaken…I could literally see the doubt she had in her mind about Mark. I feel she strongly suspected Mark of the crime, especially when I questioned her about Mark’s mother’s bowl and the presence of the gray sweatjacket in Mark’s car. -- From the Case Notes File of Detective James “Flash” Pruett.
Mark Turner celebrated his 61st birthday on Thursday, January 25, 2024. Though he was actually born on a Friday in January 1963, Turner’s birthday also fell on a Thursday in 1996—the year in which he was initially interviewed, regarding the killing of Rhonda Hinson, by Burke County Sheriff’s Department (BCSD) detective, James “Flash” Pruett. Flash’s meticulous case notes detailing his six-hour interview with “Mark Steven Turner”—three weeks before his 33rd birthday on Thursday January 4, 1996—are just as poignant now as they were when he first recorded them:
Mark said he had never been interviewed on the Rhonda Hinson matter. He was somewhat surprised no one had interviewed him. Mark went to school at East Burke with Rhonda and he also was friends with Greg McDowell. He lived [at the time of Rhonda’s murder] with his parent [Sic] in Indians Hills off the Cape Hickory Road….He owned and drove a 1977 Buick Regal, two-door, gold in color in 1981. He sometimes drove his brother’s blue Thunderbird. He dated Jill Turner during the December 1981 time period.
Turner recounted other details of events which transpired in the six months before the projectile from a high-powered rifle ended the life of 19-year-old Rhonda Hinson. Specifically, Detective Pruett noted that early in the interview, Mark Turner described a Summer 1981 beach trip that he, Jill, Rhonda, and Greg had taken together. They roomed at Mark’s grandfather’s mobile home in the Lakewood Campground at Myrtle Beach, S.C. Turner recalled that Greg drank Budweiser beer ‘heavily’ and his ‘putting cans or labels up on the refrigerator.’ He recollected that Rhonda and Greg ‘did argue quite often;’ however, he did not witness Greg’s ever hitting or pushing Rhonda.
Mark did remember that the couple argued about Rhonda’s refusal to have sex with Greg while on their trip, resulting in McDowell’s trolling the beach in search of girls who would acquiesce to his salacious overtures. A confrontation ensued when Rhonda discovered her boyfriend’s activity, and one or the other of them ‘threatened to walk back home.’
In the Fall of 1981, Mark explained to the BCSD investigator, he attended Elon College and he believed he came home at the conclusion of the Fall Semester 1981 on Thursday, December 17th. Flash recorded in his notes that the then 32-year-old asserted he recalled looking forward to being with his girlfriend, Jill Turner [Mull]. Further, he admitted to putting off Christmas shopping to the last minute, going shopping with Rhonda Hinson at the Valley Hills Mall, and being up on the second floor with her, possibly buying a blue sweater for Jill, while Rhonda purchased a coat for Boyfriend Greg McDowell.
Of greater significance, he recalled that Rhonda left a gray hooded sweat jacket with the initials, HH WTC, in the backseat of his Buick—the same sweat jacket that Rhonda told Mother Judy, on the morning of December 22, 1981, she had left in the backseat of Mark’s Buick when the two of them went shopping to buy Jill Turner [Mull] a Christmas present at Valley Hills Mall in Hickory.
And it was the same sweat jacket that authorities discovered on the sundeck of Rhonda’s 1981 Datsun 210 on the morning of December 23, 1981 and inventoried that same afternoon subsequent to her murder—a sweat jacket that was not in her automobile when she left home on the evening of December 22, 1981 to attend her company’s Christmas party at the American Legion Hut in Hickory.
The obvious question that persists is: How did the sweat jacket, that according to Mark Turner, was present in the backseat of his 1977 Buick Regal, find its way to the sundeck of Rhonda Hinson’s vehicle?
Both Rhonda Hinson and Mark Turner indicated that the sweat jacket was—in fact—left on the backseat of his 1977 automobile the day that they shopped for a Christmas present for Mark’s girlfriend and Rhonda’s best friend Jill Turner [Mull]. As previously reported, there was only one day in which the shopping trip could have occurred—Friday December 18, 1981, five days before the fatal shooting.
Jill Turner [Mull] was scheduled to return to Burke County from Western Carolina in Cullowhee on Friday December 18th and had a hair appointment scheduled for 3:30 that afternoon. According to Jill’s statements, she did not date boyfriend Mark on that evening. Greg McDowell, Rhonda’s boyfriend, did not return home from N.C. State until Saturday the 19th.
It appears, then, that both Turner and Hinson were free to go shopping at Valley Hills Mall on Friday the 18th—likely Mark picked up Rhonda during her Hickory Steel lunch hour. Clearly, the mall trip did not occur subsequent to the end of her workday because she arrived home in Valdese at her usual time, according to Judy Hinson. But whenever Turner returned her to Hickory Steel after gift-buying, Rhonda forgot to retrieve her sweat jacket from the rear seat where she apparently placed it.
At no time did Mark Turner deny that he was in possession of Rhonda Hinson’s sweat jacket, according to Detective James “Flash” Pruett. “He cannot remember how the gray sweat jacket got out of his Buick. He has no memory of what he did with it or how it got out of his car,” Flash recorded in his case file notes.
Logically between the Christmas shopping trip on Friday the 18th and the first hour of Wednesday December 23rd, there were only two points in time that Mark Turner could have found a conduit through which to return the sweat jacket to its owner. The first opportunity presented itself on Tuesday December 22, 1981. The potential conduit? Greg McDowell.
On the morning of Tuesday December 22nd , as she was preparing to go to work at Hickory Steel, Rhonda told her mother that her sweat jacket was in Mark Turner’s car. Much earlier—at 12:55 a.m.—and sixteen miles away from the Hinson home, Mark was released from the Frye Hospital emergency room, after being treated for excruciating pain attributable to a back injury that he purportedly suffered on Sunday afternoon December 20th. He was given pain medication and sent home—medication that he claimed, during his interview, clouded his memory.
Later during the afternoon of December 22nd, Greg McDowell drove to the Turner residence to visit Mark, after having learned of his back injury from mother Barbara Turner, who casually encountered him at K-Mart in Hickory. During her Thursday January 18, 1996 interview with Detective Flash Pruett, Ms. Turner stated that her son, Mark, told her that McDowell came by to visit. Had he had the presence of a mind unclouded, it would have been feasible for Turner to have mentioned that Rhonda’s sweat jacket was lying on the backseat of his vehicle and to have suggested that Greg retrieve it for her.
Previously however, during his Thursday January 4, 1996 interview with Detective Pruett, Mark averred that he could not, “…recall Greg coming to his home on December 22 or going shopping with him, because he likely would have still been in too much pain to go shopping….” If young Turner was in “too much pain” and his memory clouded by medication, it seems unlikely that he would have possessed the presence of mind to apprise McDowell that his girlfriend’s sweat jacket was on the backseat of his 1977 Buick Regal.
Later on Tuesday evening December 22nd, Mark Turner traveled to the Holly Hills development in Valdese to pick up his girlfriend, Jill Turner [Mull], for an evening of dinner and a movie at his parents’ house. Turner told Detective Pruett that he could not recall retrieving his girlfriend but admitted to taking her home.
Jill, however, distinctly remembered the details of her date with Mark Turner on the evening in question. “I remember everything that happened that evening—everything. How could I ever forget the last evening that my best friend in the world was alive?”
Across years and interviews—from her first interview with Detective Pruett in 1995, to a Saturday January 26, 2019 initial interview with this reporter, and most recently a Tuesday August 23, 2022 session with BCSD detectives Isaac Propst and Rodney Norman—Jill’s recounting the sequence of events of the evening and early morning in question has remained consistent:
“Mark had driven to my house in Valdese to pick me up to take me to his house [in Indian Hills]. We had eaten dinner with his family that evening and decided to watch a movie. I don’t recall what we were watching, but apparently it wasn’t very interesting—we both fell asleep. I had a Midnight curfew and when I woke up, it was already a few minutes after 12:00 Midnight. I jumped up, got Mark up as well, and we hurried to his car—I was going to be really late.”
It was about 12:25 a.m., when Turner pulled up in front of Jill’s parents’ residence located on Hazel Street in Holly Hills in Valdese. He did not attempt to pull down into the driveway, fearing that it might have a glaze of ice covering it. Instead, he momentarily parked on the street near a streetlight. While the 1977 gold Buick Regal idled, Jill kissed her boyfriend ‘goodnight,’ and started to exit the passenger’s front seat. It was then that she saw it—Rhonda’s gray-hooded sweat jacket lying on the backseat:
“I asked Mark why Rhonda’s jacket was in the backseat of his car. And he told me that she had left it there when the two of them went shopping for my Christmas gift. I said, ‘Do you want me to take it and give it back to her next time I see her?’ He replied, ‘That’s OK; I will just give it to Greg the next time I see him.’ I didn’t think anything about that—I just said, ‘OK’ and got out of the car. I was focusing on getting inside as soon as I could—I was already past my curfew.”
From where Turner was parked, he could have almost coasted down the hill to the stop sign at the end of Hazel Street. It was approaching 12:30 a.m., when he paused there to look both ways. Timeline evidence suggests that it was at that juncture that a blue Chevy Nova passed in front of him—he recognized the car and the driver—a driver who had been observed earlier that day when he appeared at lunchtime at Hickory Steel to pick up his girlfriend, Rhonda Hinson.
Curiously, the sweat jacket, that Jill Turner [Mull] saw on the backseat of Boyfriend Mark’s automobile, was resting on the sundeck of Rhonda Hinson’s 1981 Datsun 210 when law enforcement arrived on the crime scene the early morning of December 23, 1981.
As previously stated, 32-year-old Mark Turner told Detective James “Flash” Pruett that he could not remember how the gray sweat jacket exited his Buick. He maintained that he had no memory of what he did with it or how it got out of his car. Near the end of his life, the accomplished detective speculated, to this writer, that he had continued to question the extent of Turner’s involvement in the killing of Rhonda Hinson—he was never allowed to seek the answer.
And it seems that law enforcement, across the years since his initial interview with Detective Pruett, appears to have given Mark and his “selectively defective memory” a pass. However, according to a meticulously researched timeline and interviews with principals in the case, there were only two opportunities that Turner had to cede the sweat jacket to someone who could have returned it to Rhonda Hinson—either the afternoon of December 22, 1981 or the early morning of December 23, 1981. There does not appear to be any other way that a transfer could have been transacted—it had to have been either one time or the other.
So, the nagging, persistent question remains: “Mark, which time was it?”