By CLAIRE GALOFARO | Police Beat Reporter - Bristol Herald Courier
Published: June 27, 2010
BRISTOL, Va. – First it was his co-worker’s wife, found dead in his family’s abandoned, crumbling house. Eighteen months later, this past March, his embattled ex-girlfriend turned up dead in another patch of woods, 10 miles away.
Oadis William White III – 52, tall, thin and blind in one eye – has been named a suspect in both cases. No charges have been filed against him.
In recent interviews with the Bristol Herald Courier, the registered sex offender admitted knowing both victims, but denies any involvement in their deaths.
White believes Bristol has a serial killer, but, he says, he is not it.
“Somebody’s out here doing it,” he said. “But I didn’t. If I had, then why aren’t my ex-wife dead and my other girlfriends dead?”
White’s late stepfather is the listed property owner of the forsaken house in Washington County, Va., where Meranda Faith Hayden’s body was found in October 2008. Police say White was the last person known to have seen her. White says she was just an acquaintance, his co-worker’s wife.
But White and Angela Statzer, who turned up dead from asphyxiation on a wooded hillside in Bristol, Va., dated and lived together for two years. They were in court, over a crossfire of violated protective orders, exactly one week before her body was discovered, according to court records.
The two deaths are the most recent in a string of unsolved murders in the Bristol area, the victims all young local women found dead in woods and fields spanning three jurisdictions.
In February 2007, the bones of 20-year-old Leah Feltner were discovered in the brush off Blackley Road in Bristol, Tenn. Ten months later and just 100 yards away, a man playing with his grandkids came upon the remains of 21-year-old Jill Cunningham Pope. Feltner and Pope were good friends, police said, and Hayden was linked to them through habits and associates.
Bristol Tennessee Police Lt. Debbie McCauley recently declined comment on whether White is considered a suspect in the deaths of Pope and Feltner.
He says he never knew them.
Months and years passed from the days the first three women disappeared to when their bodies were discovered, leaving them so decomposed that authorities couldn’t determine how they died.
But in March, a dog got away from its owner in a patch of woods across from Aerus Electrolux on East Valley Drive in Bristol, Va. The dog sniffed out Angela Statzer’s body just a day after she died, police estimate.
They called it lucky that she was found so quickly.
Matching DNA
Angela Statzer, 22, listened to a little red MP3 player, her prized possession, as she wandered around town for hours each day. Police searched White’s apartment June 2, specifically looking for the red music player, according to a search warrant. They did not find it, but they swabbed White’s cheeks for DNA and hauled off his journal, handwritten on loose-leaf paper, police said.
White, born and raised in Bristol, keeps a detailed chronicle of his daily comings and goings. “Left for hospital at 9:16,” he read from a recent entry. “Back at 3:20. Undercover police – looking, looking, looking.”
Police refused to comment on the journal’s contents.
White says he has evidence that would exonerate him, but that information must be kept secret until the right time.
“It’ll come out – exactly why I’ve been accused, why they’re putting the finger on me,” he says. “I have proof everything is a lie, and they’ll get it when it’s needed.”
He did not specify when that time would be. A Virginia State Police trooper and Tennessee Highway patrolman are willing to back him up in court, he says, though he declined to name them or describe their testimony.
Police say White has not presented them with any evidence. Still, no arrest has been made, no charges filed. Police refuse to provide specifics about their investigation, now nearing four months old.
Bristol Virginia Police Capt. Darrell Duty said the state forensic lab in Roanoke found DNA in Statzer’s body that matched White’s, based on information in the sex offender registry. They are still, more than three weeks later, waiting for the results of this month’s test.
“There ain’t no way they found my DNA in her,” White said, concluding that he is being set up, his DNA planted in Statzer’s body.
On June 8, White told two Herald Courier reporters that he had sex with Statzer for the last time two days after their final round of emergency protective orders – he took one against Statzer on Oct. 29 and she responded in kind the following day. But in a follow-up interview several days later, he recanted. They hadn’t “slept together” in his bed since then, he explained. But they did have sex in the alley behind his house just three or four days before Statzer’s body turned up. A security camera at the apartment complex adjacent to White’s house caught their coitus, he said. He learned this, he said, when he told Sgt. Steve Crawford about their romp in the alley, and Crawford replied that he saw them on video. White said Crawford “smiled, said ‘I know, I saw you. I saw y’all having sex.’ “
But Crawford said he never saw a video, that it doesn’t exist.
Long rap sheet
White, disabled in a car accident years ago, now spends most of his days on the front porch of his run-down apartment house – brick on its sides and painted blue gray on its front – at an intersection splitting Bristol, Va., public housing.
He sits in a plaid chair, hoisted a foot from the ground by four cinder blocks, greeting familiar passers-by. He wears flashy rings and several studs in his ears, one a golden zipper pull dangling from his left lobe. White admits a fondness for Wild Turkey and once, according to court records, told a probation officer he began his daily alcohol habit at the age of 11.
White has no teeth, a 10th-grade education and a rap sheet that dates back almost 40 years.
At age 15, in 1972, he was convicted of assault and put on probation. Two years later: larceny, making threats and being unruly. In 1976, he was fined $25 for carrying a dangerous weapon. A month later, he was fined another $249.53 for grand larceny.
The next year, White was convicted of forgery and sent to Tennessee’s Turney Center Industrial Prison for a year. Upon release, he absconded probation only to be arrested in Elmore County, Ala., for carrying a concealed weapon, court records show.
In 1981, according to news reports, White and a juvenile picked up a man on State Street, offered him a ride, then showed him a badge and pistol and claimed to be undercover officers. They stole his $80 and beat him unconscious with the butt of the gun. He was convicted of armed robbery in that case, sentenced to 14 years in prison and paroled in 1986. The next year brought a dismissed assault charge and a fine for injuring property.
In 1987, White dated a woman and lived with her son. The son had a 22-year-old girlfriend, who, White claims, he was seeing on the side. She told police a different story, outlined in court records: One night in late December, White stopped by her Pennsylvania Avenue house and asked her to get in the car; he had something to tell her about her boyfriend. He drove to a remote area near South Holston Lake, choked her and yanked her hair, threatening to kill her and her children. He pulled off her blue jeans, sneakers and her yellow underwear, then raped and sodomized her. He also “forced her to perform oral sex on him.”
She promised she wouldn’t tell and White took her home, according to newspaper accounts. She called police immediately.
He pleaded guilty to three counts of aggravated rape – for the three ways he violated her. But he composed a disclaimer, according to court records, claiming she bartered sex for drugs during their secret affair and he pleaded guilty only because, as a black man, he would never have been tried by a jury of his peers: “I would not of had a Fair Trial and I would have been hung Because she is White and I Am Black!”
He later appealed to the judge to reverse his conviction, citing a prejudicial system, newspaper coverage of the crime and an incompetent attorney who he said failed to preclude the state from using his criminal record against him. Had his lawyer told him the victim wavered in testifying against him, he wrote, he would not have pleaded guilty. But the judge dismissed him. So from 1988 to 1999, White lived at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tenn., said Dorinda Carter, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Correction.
To date, White maintains he is innocent of that rape.
“There’s too many females for anybody to have to rape anybody,” he told the Herald Courier. “Prostitutes, homeless women willing to give it up just to have a place to stay.”
White said he does not know why, several times now, he’s been suspected of crimes he denies committing.
“Women scare me, and I let them know,” he says. “Every single one of them.”
Coincidence?
Several hundred feet deep in a field of poison ivy and waist-high weeds off Wyndale Road in Abingdon rots an old white farmhouse. It is invisible from the road, which police say made it a popular party spot before a body turned up inside. Frank M. Broady owns the parcel of land, according to county records. He is the second husband of White’s mother, Hattye B. Broady, who declined to comment.
Meranda Hayden was found in an upstairs bedroom in October 2008, so badly decomposed it took 10 days to identify her.
“That’s what really burns me up,” says her father, Jimmy Wampler. “Somebody leaving a human being like that to rot; ain’t nothing to them.”
Hayden disappeared on the evening of April 5, 2006, when she left her parents’ Abingdon home. Washington County Sheriff’s Capt. Jack Davidson said she and White met somewhere in Bristol, Tenn., although he declined to provide specifics. White was the last person known to be in her company.
White says that Hayden’s ex-husband accused them of having an affair. Mark Hayden, though, reached by phone at the home he shares with his new wife and children, said he never made that accusation.
“I introduced them, and that’s the last I ever heard of it,” said Hayden, who worked with White at HBA Cast Products Co., in Bristol, Va. “I didn’t know if anything else was going on. Outside of work, we never did hang out or anything.”
Meranda Hayden’s parents, Jimmy and Debbie Wampler, are raising the couple’s two boys, who are 9 and 7 years old.
“I’d rather not say much right now,” Jimmy Wampler said the day after police confirmed White’s connection to both their daughter and Statzer. “There’s just some stuff I can’t tell; it might interfere with the investigation, and I don’t want to flub up nothing.”
Wampler believes the person who killed his daughter killed the other young women, too.
“In my heart, that’s just too much coincidence,” he said. “It’s just like an alcoholic. He does it one time and, it might take him a while, but sooner or later he’ll go back and do it again.”
Protective orders
On her MySpace page, a 25-year-old woman named Mary McCready displays White’s mugshot from the Virginia Sex Offender Registry, framed in pink with roses and hearts. The mugshot is captioned, “my daughter’s dad.” Several years ago, McCready had nowhere to go and White offered his bed. He slept on the couch exactly 47 days, he recalls, before proposing that the two become lovers. White fathered his first child, at the age of 49, with then 23-year-old McCready. Their 3-year-old daughter lives with White’s mother.
At some point, McCready moved out. Then, in February 2008, McCready moved out, accused White of stalking her and filed a criminal complaint. In the complaint, she wrote that White drove by shouting profanities and calling her names.
“He said if I ever come around him he would hurt me really bad or he would hit me with a truck or hit me with his fist,” she wrote. “And I’m really scared and I don’t even go around him!”
White says, again, he was innocent. The case was dismissed in court and now McCready, sitting earlier this month on White’s porch, says she lied, that somebody put her up to it.
White admits a penchant for young, indigent, volatile women.
“They don’t have a place to go, except under my roof,” he says. “They just pop up. Sometimes, you have to take what’s presented.”
Angela Statzer happened past White’s porch about two years ago, around the time her foster father said she abruptly left their Abingdon home. At first, the foster father said, she kept in touch. Statzer grew up in foster care after a “rough, tragic” childhood, said her brother, Chad Camper. She was unemployed, quiet, mousy, he said. Everyone called her Angie.
She and White spent a few nights together, then she moved in two weeks later. She was a sweet girl who, according to White, had a violent temper when she didn’t get her way. She threw his stereo over the porch rail, punched holes in his door, beat him and gave him a black eye, he claims.
Their tour through Bristol Virginia Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court began in July 2009, when Statzer filed for an emergency protective order against White.
“I went to the bathroom and came out, as I was going through the hallway, he said ‘hurry, I got to go,’ ” she wrote. “After I didn’t hurry as fast as he wanted, he made me fall on the floor and drug me out the door by my feet and I started bleeding.”
Two weeks later, White filed for an emergency protective order against Statzer. He told police she “punched him very hard with her fist in the back and while he was going out the door, she kicked him.”
The commonwealth’s attorney declined to prosecute both cases, without objection from either victim.
Statzer’s foster father said she cut off contact with them last summer. She skipped the family’s Fourth of July party. “My wife kept telling me, there’s something wrong here,” he said.
Then on Oct. 29, White reported that Statzer punched him in the gut.
The next day, Statzer reciprocated with her own protective order against White. Three days later, police arrested Statzer and accused her of violating the order.
She skipped Thanksgiving and Christmas with her foster family.
On Jan. 17, White contacted police again. He wrote that Statzer arrived in his alley, followed him inside and he “ate a bunch of pills.” He said she watched him down four bottles of them. “I took the pills wanting to avoid her and the love I do have for her and wanted to die,” he wrote, then listed the names of three men who he’d “told why I did try to take my life and it’s because of Angela Statzer.”
Statzer was charged with curse and abuse. She was found not guilty Feb. 24. Exactly one week later, she was found dead in the woods.
White says he learned of Statzer’s death on the noon news. A day or two later, he was on a city bus going to the doctor’s office and two young girls sat in the row behind him. As the bus drove down East Valley Drive, one of the two, “a big-boned girl, maybe 13 or 14 years old,” pointed to the woods and said “that’s where Angie was killed.” That, he said, is how he learned where it happened.
But, according to Transit Manager Danny Hunt, no city bus travels along East Valley Drive. The closest goes straight up Lee Highway.
White isn’t fazed; he says he’s not worried. “The Lord will see to it that the truth comes out,” he said. “I do wrong, we all do wrong. But I’ve paid for my so-called wrongs and they’ll have to pay for putting my name in shame. They’ll get theirs from the man up above.”
cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531
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