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