An empty gallon jug of water was discovered three miles from her mummified corpse. Her purse was another five miles away. Interestingly enough, they never did find her vehicle or her car keys.
People grew more nervous now. Particularly when someone in the ME’s office let it leak that Josie Anders also had died from a drug overdose-a fatal injection of the prescription drug Ativan. Seemed sinister somehow. Two sets of girls in two different years. Each last seen in a bar. In both cases the first girl was found dead along a major road. And in both cases, the second girl seemed to suffer a fate that was far, far worse…
The Rabun County Sheriff’s Office called in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The press got excited again. More banner headlines in the front pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. GBI SEEKS POSSIBLE SERIAL KILLER. Rumors flew, articles multiplied and the man clipped each one diligently.
He had a cold feeling growing in his chest now. And he started to tremble each time the phone rang.
The GBI, however, was not nearly so sensational about the case. Investigation ongoing, a spokesperson for the state police declared. And that’s all the GBI would say. Until the summer of 2000 and the very first heat wave.
It started in May. Two pretty, young Augusta State University students headed to Savannah one weekend and never returned home. Last known sighting-a bar. Vehicle-MIA.
This time, the national media descended. Frightened voters hit the streets. The man pawed furiously through stacks of newspapers while the GBI issued meaningless statements such as “We have no reason to suspect a connection at this time.”
The man knew better. People knew better. And so did the letters to the editor. He found it Tuesday, May 30. Exact same words as before: “Clock ticking… planet dying… animals weeping… rivers screaming. Can’t you hear it? Heat kills…”
Celia Smithers’s body was found along U.S. 25 in Waynesboro, just fifteen miles from the cotton-field crime scene where Kasey Cooper had been found six months before. Smithers was fully clothed and clutching her purse. No sign of trauma, no sign of sexual assault. Just one dark bruise on her left thigh, and a smaller, red injection site on her upper left arm. Cause of death-an overdose of the prescription tranquilizer Ativan.
The public went nuts; the police immediately went into high gear. Still missing, Smithers’s best friend, Tamara McDaniels. The police, however, didn’t search the Burke County cotton fields. Instead, they sent volunteers straight to the muddy banks of the Savannah River. Finally, the man thought, they were starting to understand the game.
He should’ve picked up the phone then. Dialed the hastily established hotline. He could’ve been an anonymous tipster. Or maybe the crazy whacko that thinks he knows everything.
He didn’t, though. He just didn’t know what to say.
“We have reason to believe Ms. McDaniels is still alive,” reported GBI Special Agent Michael “Mac” McCormack on the evening news. “We believe our suspect kidnaps the women in pairs, killing the first woman immediately, but abandoning the second in a remote location. In this case, we have reason to believe he has selected a portion of the Savannah River. We are now assembling over five hundred volunteers to search the river. It is our goal to bring Tamara home safe.”
Then Special Agent McCormack made a startling revelation. He had also been reading the letters to the editor. He now made an appeal to speak to the author of the notes. The police were eager to listen. The police were eager to help.
By the eleven o’clock news, search-and-rescue teams had descended upon the Savannah River and the suspect finally had a name. The Eco-Killer, Fox News dubbed him. A crazed lunatic who no doubt thought that killing women really would save the planet. Jack the Ripper, he ain’t.
The man wanted to yell at them. He wanted to scream that they knew nothing. But of course, what could he say? He watched the news. He obsessively clipped articles. He attended a candlelight vigil organized by the frantic parents of poor Tamara McDaniels-last seen in a tight black skirt and platform heels.
No body this time; the Savannah River rarely gives up what she has taken.
But 2000 hadn’t ended yet.
July. Temperatures soared above one hundred degrees in the shade. And two sisters, Mary Lynn and Nora Ray Watts, met up with friends at T.G.I. Friday’s for late-night sundaes to beat the heat. The two girls disappeared somewhere along the dark, winding road leading home.
Mary Lynn was found two days later alongside U.S. 301 near the Savannah River. The temperature that day was 103 degrees. Heat index was 118. Her body contained a faintly striped brown shell crammed down her throat. Bits of grass and mud were streaked across her legs.
The police tried to bury these details, as they’d buried so many others. Once again, an ME’s office insider ratted them out.
For the first time the public learned what the police had known-what the man had suspected-for the past twelve months. Why the first girl was always left, easy to discover, next to a major road. Why her death came so quickly. Why the man needed two girls at all. Because the first girl was merely a prop, a disposable tool necessary for the game. She was the map. Interpret the clues correctly, and maybe you could find the second girl still alive. If you moved quickly enough. If you beat the heat.
The task force descended, the press corps descended, and Special Agent McCormack went on the news to announce that given the presence of sea salt, cord grass, and the marsh periwinkle snail found on Mary Lynn’s body, he was authorizing an all-out search of Georgia ’s 378,000 acres of salt marshes.
But which part, you idiots? the man scribbled in his scrapbook. You should know him better than that by now. Clock is TICKING!
“We have reason to believe that Nora Ray is still alive,” Special Agent McCormack announced, as he had announced once before. “And we’re going to bring her home to her family.”
Don’t make promises you can’t keep, the man wrote. But finally, he was wrong.
The last article in an overstuffed scrapbook: July 27, 2000. Nora Ray Watts is pulled half-naked from the sucking depths of a Georgia salt marsh. The Eco-Killer’s eighth victim, she’s survived fifty-six hours in hundred-degree heat, burning sun, and parching salt, by chewing cord grass and coating herself in protective mud. Now, a newspaper photo shows her exuberantly, vibrantly, triumphantly alive as the Coast Guard chopper lifts her up into the blue, blue sky.
The police have finally learned the game. They have finally won.
Last page of the scrapbook now. No news articles, no photos, no evening news transcripts. In the last page of the scrapbook, the man wrote only four neatly printed words: What if I’m wrong?
Then, he underlined them.
The year 2000 finally ended. Nora Ray Watts lived. And the Eco-Killer never struck again. Summers came, summers went. Heat waves rolled through Georgia and lambasted the good residents with spiking temperatures and prickling fear. And nothing happened.
Three years later, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a retrospective. They interviewed Special Agent McCormack about the seven unsolved homicides, the three summers of crippling fear. He simply said, “Our investigation is ongoing.”
The man didn’t save that article. Instead, he crumpled it up and threw it into the trash. Then he drank long and heavily deep into the night.
It’s over, he thought. It’s over, I’m safe, and it’s as simple as that.