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“Sketch at link below. DNA links prior rape to two murders.
Published on Sunday, June 15, 2008
New clues in lover's lane murders
By Michael N. Graff
Staff writer
He's probably about 50 now, maybe a little rounder in the midsection, maybe
balding, maybe even with a family of his own.
Or maybe he's still out there raping and killing.
The people who have hated him for nearly two decades can finally picture
him, thanks to a new police sketch.
His eyes are narrow and mean. His chin, strong and cocky. His eyebrows,
perked and uncaring.
Overall, he's handsome and clean-cut.
"Monster," one of his haters says. "Absolute monster."
The sketch, drawn last month after a new round of evidence surfaced, doesn't
account for his aging.
It's time-stamped: 1990.
On Aug. 22 that year, on the west side of Houston, 21-year-old Andy Atkinson
took his new girlfriend down to lover's lane.
Andy, who had moved to Houston from Fayetteville just two months earlier,
had deep dimples and sandy hair. His new girlfriend, 22-year-old Cheryl
Henry, had wavy blond hair and boy-crumbling big eyes.
Good-looking, young and parked in a romantic spot on a steamy late-summer
night - it's no way to die.
From the darkness emerged the man in the sketch. Not so clean-cut. Not so
handsome. Every bit the monster.
Blood splattered in the car. The seats were left down.
He tied Cheryl's hands with hemp rope, took her into the woods, stripped
her, raped her and cut her throat. When he finished, he left her face down
and naked.
About 100 yards away, he left Andy, hands bound behind him with hemp rope,
back leaning against a tree, throat also slashed.
Then the monster left.
For nearly 18 years, from Texas to North Carolina, Atkinson's family members
have had their hopes raised and dashed, and their memories jarred and then
left to fade again. To them, the lover's lane murders are more than just one
of Houston's most notorious crime stories.
It's their nightmare, one they can't escape, one in which the main
characters are their bright-smiled son, his pretty new girlfriend and some
monster.
Now, for the first time, that monster has a face.
He's somewhere today, probably not giving a damn what pain he caused three
people - a father, a mother and a cousin - who knew Andy before he became
the leading role in a Texas murder-mystery.
They knew him for 21 years, almost 22. But like the man in the sketch, the
most recent visuals of Andy are still time-stamped: 1990.
The cousin
The sketch sits beside Tim Godwin's computer at his home in Fayetteville.
"I just hope he's alive," Tim says. "I just hope it's a living person."
Gray shows in Tim's facial hair these days. He'll be 40 in January. Andy
would have been 40 in September.
In the months after Andy's murder, Tim spent several nights curled up near
Andy's headstone at a private family graveyard off U.S. 301 near Hope Mills.
He'd stay there until sunrise or until he was sober, whichever came first.
He'd talk to nobody. He'd drink with nobody. He'd wake up with nobody.
Man, they used to have a good time.
Like when they conned their grandmother into buying them slingshots so they
could flick rocks at the back of the 18-wheelers rolling down Interstate 95.
Like when they helped make the Honeycutt Eagles the best midget football
team in Cumberland County in 1980 - No. 12 and No. 22, an unbeatable pair.
Like when they took that rope swing for ride after ride, splash after
splash, into Permastone Lake.
Like when they worked together at an ice cream shop with a girl they both
liked, a girl named Angela.
Andy was the first to kiss Angela.
Tim wound up marrying her.
Tim and Angela have two children, a boy of 9 and a girl of 5. The boy's name
is Tucker - Tucker Andrew Godwin.
"He was a brother to me," Tim says.
That's not exactly accurate, at least not in the formal family tree. Tim was
Andy's second cousin.
They were raised in separate homes. Tim grew up in a typical family, two
parents and a sister.
Andy lived mostly with his great-grandmother, Shelby, in a yellow-sided
house near a horse farm in Hope Mills. Andy's parents were teenagers when
they had him.
At night, after slingshots were put away, Andy would tell Shelby he wished
his parents would remarry.
"There were times when Shelby would tell me, 'You don't know how lucky you
are,'" Tim remembers.
Though Andy's parents were too young to raise him, they weren't too young to
love him.
The father
Garland Atkinson talks to the sketch.
"Somebody, somewhere, is gonna know you, pal," he'll say. "You just better
hope I don't find you first."
There were times Garland couldn't care anymore.
One night, he remembers lying on his bathroom floor, strung out on cocaine,
when Andy's old dog, Bosley, woke him.
"I didn't care whether I lived or died," Garland said.
Garland was rescued, though. One night on his way to work at a strip bar in
Houston, the police stopped him, found drugs and threw him in jail until
2002.
Garland knows where the man in the sketch should be. He knows it all too
well.
Garland has spent nearly half his life in prison.
"I don't even know why I'm alive," Garland says. "I'm the one that should be
gone. Not Andy."
Andy turned 9 in 1977.
That year, Garland accidentally shot a man in the face during a fight on Hay
Street in Fayetteville after leaving Rick's Lounge. He moved to Houston
after the charges were dropped and had part-time work running drugs all over
the Eastern half of the country. He met some famous friends. Partied with
the guys from Lynyrd Skynyrd before their plane crashed in October. ("They
were just a group of country-
rednecks, just a bunch of delinquents, just
like I had been in Fayetteville," he says). Made a few runs to Connecticut,
selling cocaine by the quarter-ounce to actress Linda Blair, star of "The
Exorcist."
In December, just after his 27th birthday, he took a flight with a friend
from Houston to Jacksonville, Fla. When he stepped off the plane, he was
arrested. He made national magazines for that one. Thirty-two other people,
including Blair and the children of a Florida state senator, were issued
arrest warrants in the sting.
Throughout middle and high school, Andy visited Garland at least once a
month in prison.
Garland was released in 1984 but violated probation a few times with drunken
driving and worthless check arrests.
By 1988, Garland was out and clean, he said.
Andy had graduated from Terry Sanford in 1987 and went to Campbell for a
couple of semesters.
"He was a clean me," Garland says. "He was as popular as I was, but with a
better class of individual."
Finally, early in the summer of 1990, Garland persuaded Andy to move to
Houston.
The mother
The sketch makes Ann Fowler cry. It reminds her of Andy.
Almost everything does.
She works at a doctor's office in Wilmington. When her co-workers talk about
their children or their grandchildren, Ann can't listen.
It took years before she could say the word "murder."
She spent one of her lunch breaks last week crying on the phone, talking of
a son she wishes she could've gotten to know better.
"I think I'd have a life, because now I don't have a life," Fowler said. "He
would've married and had children. I would've had a baby to hold, because my
baby was taken from me."
Ann met Garland outside a teen club in Fayetteville in 1965.
"Prettiest girl in Cumberland County," Garland still says.
In 1968, when Ann got pregnant with Andy at 16, Garland forged her birth
certificate and took her to South Carolina to get married. Ann had to be
home by midnight.
They divorced shortly after Andy was born. Ann moved to Wilmington to go to
college. Andy stayed with his great-grandmother in Fayetteville.
One night when Andy was about 12, Ann saw a report on the news about a young
man in Florida who was taken out into the woods and killed. She worried that
might one day happen to her son.
She pictured a horrific scenario, with her dad calling.
"Something terrible has happened?" her dad said in her vision.
"It's not about Andy, is it?" she would say back.
"Yes, it is. He's dead," her dad would say.
Ann came to Andy's graduation from Terry Sanford. They hugged and he went
off with his friends afterward.
She always wanted him to move to Wilmington.
Garland still apologizes to Ann sometimes for persuading their son to move
to Houston.
Tim Godwin, the cousin, said Andy would have been happy in either place.
"It wasn't that he didn't want to be here in Fayetteville," Tim says. "He
wanted to know his parents."
Ann never had another child. "My bloodline has ended," she said.
She just moved her mother to Wilmington from Fayetteville last year after
her stepfather died.
That stepfather was Peter Kearns, who helped lead the reinvestigation into
the Jeffrey MacDonald case, one of Fayetteville's most notorious murder
cases, one of those crimes you can't mention over a beer unless you want a
bar-full of opinions and theories.
The city
The sketch moved Houston to action.
Police there have been flooded with calls.
"He looks like my neighbor," people will say.
"Well, what kind of person is your neighbor?" the tip line worker will
respond.
"Oh, he's a good guy."
Most cities have at least one crime people can't quit. The lover's lane
crime is one of Houston's.
"They'll never forget about it," said Mike Miller, the new lead investigator
with the Houston Police Department's Homicide Division Cold Case Squad.
Miller took the case from Billy Belk last year after Belk retired.
Belk told The Houston Chronicle several times that every officer has one
case that forever sticks with him. This is his, he said.
Over the years, investigators have chased dozens of leads. In 1994, they
believed they might be able to track down satellite images of the area where
the murders occurred. But the last available image was from 11p.m., an hour
before Andy and Cheryl were slain.
On a message board for ghost-watchers, people tried to tie possible ghost
sightings at a nearby cemetery to the lover's lane murders.
In 2001, police received a hand-written note demanding $100,000 for
information on the murders. The return address on the envelope was "Cheryl
Henry" and "Andy Atkinson."
Nothing has ever turned up.
Then, earlier this year, while re-entering DNA from old crimes into a new
indexing system, investigators discovered a match.
In June 1990, two months before Andy and Cheryl were murdered, an exotic
dancer left work one night and went home.
While she walked through her house, a man jumped out of a doorway "in
nightmare fashion," according to Miller. He pulled a gun, terrorized the
woman and raped her. But he left her alive.
And he left DNA. The same DNA he left on Cheryl two months later.
When they found the match this year, Houston police asked the woman if she
would meet with a sketch artist. She agreed.
Police are chasing several new leads from other exotic dancers who claim to
have been raped by the man in the sketch. They just learned last year that
Cheryl also worked at a strip club in Houston before her death.
Cheryl's family did not return an e-mail from The Fayetteville Observer to
comment for this story.
Miller said investigators are waiting for DNA results to return from a
backed-up state crime lab in Texas, hoping for more matches.
"It's a case that needs to be solved," Miller said.
Then, maybe, they can finally bury the man in the sketch.
The end
On Aug. 23, 1990, word spread like wild fists, punching people from Texas to
North Carolina.
Garland Atkinson, the father, got the first call.
Garland, they've found his car.
"It was like a horse kicked me in the stomach," Garland said.
Garland's sped to the site. His Camaro broke down halfway there, but he
flagged down a guy in a wrecker and rode the rest of the way.
He walked through the woods, looking at the ground, not wanting to find
anything. Then, he saw policemen pointing flashlights at something in the
distance. He ran toward them. Police tried to stop him.
"Bull," he told them. "It's my son that's missing."
Look, that's not your son. It's the girl.
They called off the search until morning because of heat and bugs.
Just after daybreak, they found Andy, tied to a tree Garland had passed
three times.
"Maybe I wasn't supposed to see him like that," he said.
Tim Godwin, the cousin, was a junior at Methodist College.
Tim, you need to come home.
He drove to his parents' house, saw a full driveway and heard people in the
garage.
There, he found his dad and a preacher. His dad talked first.
They found Andy.
"Where?"
Well, he was murdered last night.
Tim drove off five minutes later, not sure where he was going, just hoping
to escape the shock.
He still hasn't outrun it.
Ann Fowler, the mother, heard from her dad.
The conversation went exactly how she envisioned it would go 10 years
earlier.
Ann, something terrible has happened.
"Not with Andy."
Yes, it is. He's dead.
Houston, the city, would read about it on the front page of the paper the
next day.
The headline had all the ingredients to captivate them.
Couple slain in lover's lane mystery
For nearly 18 years, the cousin, the father, the mother and the city have
waited for the end.
But first, they had to see the sketch - the sketch of a man who may be a
little rounder, or balder, or alive, or dead, or still raping and killing.
The sketch of a man they hate, a man who has hung over them for nearly two
decades, a man who is the reason their sandy-haired boy with dimples never
got any older.”
The Fayetteville Observer - Fayetteville, NC
