Speaker 1: Tuesday, we dive into current and sometimes cold cases for
Speaker 1: True Crime Tuesday and Today the story is true, sounds true?
Speaker 2: No, it sounds made up. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Garry and Shannon present True Crime Today.
Speaker 1: We bring you the story of Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson.
Speaker 2: And it is not a good story.
Speaker 1: It comes to us from nineteen ninety a beautiful summer night.
Speaker 3: Cheryl and Andy Young. She was twenty two, he was
Speaker 3: twenty one. They meet up at Buy You Mama's nightclub.
Speaker 1: If you want to picture them, picture the quintessential like
Speaker 1: eighties permed blonde.
Speaker 2: Bubbly girl.
Speaker 1: The guy look like out of Fast Times, a Ridgemont
Speaker 1: high blonde, Zach Morris type hair style, green eyes, big smile.
Speaker 2: That's what these two, these two looked like.
Speaker 3: So they meet up at this night club. That was
Speaker 3: really the last time that anybody saw them alive, because
Speaker 3: they drive to an area of known as Lover's Lane.
Speaker 2: Everybody's got one of them.
Speaker 3: This is off of Enclave Parkway near Eldridge Parkway in
Speaker 3: West Houston. The problem is there was somebody there that
Speaker 3: eventually was going to kill them.
Speaker 1: Twenty two year old Chryl did not come home that night.
Speaker 1: And the next morning her family realizes she did not
Speaker 1: come home that night, so they call Houston Police. Security
Speaker 1: guard who is out in the area of Lover's Lane
Speaker 1: was actually the person who came across what appeared to
Speaker 1: be the crime scene.
Speaker 2: It was that security guard.
Speaker 1: He found Andy's car, the white car there and it
Speaker 1: had Cheryl's purse and her shoes inside. When the security
Speaker 1: guard found the car, Cheryl's mom, Barbara, rushed to the area.
Speaker 1: By the time Mom got there, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: there had been a police presence, there had been crime
Speaker 1: scene tape, there had been search dogs, and the search
Speaker 1: dogs found Cheryl's body. When Mom was there, officers had
Speaker 1: to hold Barbara back. They did not want Barbara to
Speaker 1: see the horrific scene that the dogs had come across.
Speaker 1: That they did not want the mom to see the
Speaker 1: horrific way her daughter was killed.
Speaker 3: Now, this quote from Mom, this was just a few
Speaker 3: years ago. Actually, even though the murders took place in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety. Mom said, I know if they had let
Speaker 3: me go to Cheryl, to her body. She said, I
Speaker 3: would have breathed into her and she would be alive,
Speaker 3: and that I don't think I've ever seen a mother's
Speaker 3: love described in a more poignant way than the belief that,
Speaker 3: regardless of what had happened to her daughter, she would
Speaker 3: be able to just through the sheer power of will,
Speaker 3: been able to breathe life back into her daughter.
Speaker 2: Also, just.
Speaker 1: The shock and the disbelief and your mind not being
Speaker 1: able to grasp the fact that your child has been murdered,
Speaker 1: to the point of if I could have gotten there,
Speaker 1: that wouldn't have been the case.
Speaker 3: That was Cheryl's body. Andy's body was found nearby. He
Speaker 3: had been tied to a tree, nearly decapitated, and detectives
Speaker 3: told Andy's father that, in fact, Cheryl was the one
Speaker 3: who was killed first. His d is also a nightmare.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his dad's name is Garland, and he said, this
Speaker 1: means my son was tied to a tree, listen to
Speaker 1: Cheryl's scream, listen to her being murdered, knowing that he
Speaker 1: couldn't do anything about it, and that they were going
Speaker 1: to do the same to him.
Speaker 2: So that's just hard to accept. Still, of course, still
Speaker 2: it's kind of a.
Speaker 3: Tangent to this, or an interesting aspect to the scene itself,
Speaker 3: was that whoever it was that killed Cheryl and Andy
Speaker 3: used Andy's golf balls and golf club out of his
Speaker 3: car to point the way to Cheryl's body, who was
Speaker 3: found hidden under some wooden boards. There was a twenty
Speaker 3: dollars bill lying next nearby, and one of the detectives
Speaker 3: said it was very odd and even in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 3: even twenty seven years after the murders, this detective said,
Speaker 3: I've gotten sick to my stomach stomach thinking of what
Speaker 3: they endured. That was actually Cheryl's sister that said that
Speaker 3: about the what it was that went on.
Speaker 2: When you think.
Speaker 1: About the violence and the crime scene, the fact that
Speaker 1: she was personally attacked and assaulted, and that he was
Speaker 1: tied to a tree and made to listen to all this,
Speaker 1: and the setup with the golf balls and the golf
Speaker 1: club pointing the way, it seems like it was personal.
Speaker 1: Retired detective Billy Belk spent two decades trying to track
Speaker 1: down the killer. He said that even after he retired,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, the case stayed with him because
Speaker 1: he says, it's one of the few cases that I
Speaker 1: never cleared. It's like I left unfinished business when I retired.
Speaker 2: He still had his theories.
Speaker 1: He thinks like maybe the evidence suggests that these two
Speaker 1: were targeted. Coming back, we'll talk about what else retired
Speaker 1: Detective Billy Belk thinks about the case and the fact
Speaker 1: that it's been re opened and where DNA could take us.
Speaker 1: Because DNA was found, and with all of the progress
Speaker 1: that has been made with DNA testing and familial testing,
Speaker 1: maybe it doesn't remain a cold case for much longer.
Speaker 3: We're in the middle of a true crime Tuesday. We're
Speaker 3: telling you the story about Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson.
Speaker 3: Summer nineteen ninety. This young couple out on a date.
Speaker 3: They meet up at a nightclub and then they head
Speaker 3: off to lover's Lane. Their bodies were found a short
Speaker 3: time later, both of them brutalized and just the gruesome
Speaker 3: scene that haunts detectives years later. Now, Belk, Billy Belk
Speaker 3: was one of the Houston PD detectives that did this.
Speaker 3: They covered this case and traveled around the country trying
Speaker 3: to find the suspect. And there were DNA samples found
Speaker 3: at the crime scene, and he compared again this nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety he compared those DNA samples to those of known criminals,
Speaker 3: and he said he came up with about twenty five
Speaker 3: potential suspects DNA that had been compared with what they
Speaker 3: found at the crime scene, but that all of them
Speaker 3: had been ruled out.
Speaker 1: There was a report by FBI profilers that has surfaced.
Speaker 1: KHOU out of Houston eleven News dug this up. Here
Speaker 1: are some of the theories from FBI profilers that took
Speaker 1: a look at the facts of this cold case. Number One,
Speaker 1: the suspect may have been known to Cheryl or Andy
Speaker 1: or both. Number two he was about the age of
Speaker 1: the victims. Three he had above average intelligence but was
Speaker 1: a low achiever. And four police may have interviewed him
Speaker 1: at one time. Now, I don't need to be an
Speaker 1: FBI profiler to tell you that those things. Those four
Speaker 1: things are usually true with most the murders.
Speaker 3: I think you and I, who are not f biprofilers,
Speaker 3: could have written those four points as well.
Speaker 2: Exactly my point.
Speaker 3: In two thousand and one, somebody did send a letter
Speaker 3: to Houston Police Department promising information in that case for
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand dollars in exchange. And they don't know
Speaker 3: if it was written by the killer someone close to
Speaker 3: the killer, if it was a hoax. They simply don't
Speaker 3: know because that never led anywhere. But there was one lead.
Speaker 3: There was one lead that came out about twenty five
Speaker 3: years after the actual murders.
Speaker 1: Yeah, an exotic dancer who was raped about two months
Speaker 1: before the murders provided the first real break in the case,
Speaker 1: but like you mentioned, it wasn't until years later. This
Speaker 1: woman says, back in nineteen ninety, she left her job
Speaker 1: at Gigi's nightclub and went to her boyfriend's house in
Speaker 1: northwest Houston. A man shows up, says he's looking for
Speaker 1: the boyfriend who owed him money, and then attacked her,
Speaker 1: put her hands behind her back, wrapped him in duct tape,
Speaker 1: covered her eyes and mouth, put a bag over her head.
Speaker 1: She said he kept pulling the trigger, taunting her over
Speaker 1: and over. She described him as late twenties to mid thirties,
Speaker 1: about six feet tall, one hundred and eighty pounds, with
Speaker 1: black hair, olive complexion. He had a black fish net
Speaker 1: stalking over his head. He wore black gloves, dark shirt,
Speaker 1: dark pants, possibly a uniform. She said he had a
Speaker 1: very forceful military type stance.
Speaker 3: Now back then again, this would have been nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3: DNA testing was pretty new, was very expensive, and it
Speaker 3: took investigators seventeen years before they would run the DNA
Speaker 3: that they found on the rape victim and actually get
Speaker 3: a match, a match to the DNA that was found
Speaker 3: at the scene of Cheryl and Andy's death from nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: So they track her down to Galveston County seventeen years later,
Speaker 1: interview her again and learned another astonishing link.
Speaker 3: She once worked for Andy's dad. Now they didn't know
Speaker 3: if again his name was Garland. They didn't know if
Speaker 3: the killer might have also worked for Garland Atkinson, or
Speaker 3: if this was just a complete weird coincidence.
Speaker 1: She helped a famous sketch artist, to Lois Gilbson, create
Speaker 1: a sketch of her attacker, which was also aged to
Speaker 1: depict what he may look like in two thousand and eight. Now,
Speaker 1: despite the DNA match, despite the interview with the dancer,
Speaker 1: despite the sketches on all of it, the identity remains
Speaker 1: a mystery.
Speaker 2: He is not in the national DNA database.
Speaker 3: So I mean, we're thirty thirty five years later, no suspects,
Speaker 3: but we do have the DNA, and as we've seen
Speaker 3: multiple times and talked about many times on this segment,
Speaker 3: it is probably a matter of time before they can
Speaker 3: establish that sort of backward ward's family tree that they
Speaker 3: have used multiple times to actually find the culprit in
Speaker 3: this case.
Speaker 1: In recent months, family members have bought full page ads
Speaker 1: and local newspapers calling for any new leads. It's only
Speaker 1: a matter of time, right, How many stories have we
Speaker 1: done where there's always a knock on the door, someone
Speaker 1: thinks they may have gotten away with it, or somebody
Speaker 1: knows that they never will get away with it.
Speaker 3: Interesting, that's why we do our true crime Tuesdays.