Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson August 1990

[albion]

4. Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson
August 1990

In a case known as the “Lover’s Lane Murders,” 22-year-old Cheryl Henry and 21-year-old Andy Atkinson were found murdered in an undeveloped Houston woodland dubbed “Lover’s Lane” not far from their parked car. Atkinson was found tied to a tree with his throat slashed to the point of decapitation, and the killer used golf clubs lined up one after the other to point police toward Henry’s naked body buried underneath a stack of boards. Four partially deflated balloons were tied to a tree next to her body, and a crisp $20 lay next to her; she’d been raped, and her throat had been also slashed.

[albion]

On August 23, 1990, 22 year old Cheryl Henry and her 21 year old boyfriend Andy Atkinson went out for the night, never to return. The next day, they were found brutally murdered in a desolate, undeveloped wooded area in West Houston that was popularly known as "Lover's Lane" since many couples ventured there for alone time. The couple's car was still at the scene, but their bodies were found in the woods nearby. Cheryl had been raped and then murdered; her throat was slashed and her body was covered up with pieces of wood. Her boyfriend Andy was found tied to a tree with his throat also slashed. Apparently he was nearly decapitated, and the police also found a golf club and three golf balls lined up in a row pointing to Cheryl's body. Four partially deflated balloons were discovered tied to the tree above Cheryl's head, and a $20 bill was on the ground next to her. Cheryl was killed first, which meant Andy had to look on helplessly and hear Cheryl scream in agonizing terror. The Harris County Sheriff's Department linked the murders to another unsolved rape and burglary that was committed a few months before the Lover's Lane murders, but the case still remains unsolved.

[Mr Hood]

''Apparently he was nearly decapitated, and the police also found a golf club and three golf balls lined up in a row pointing to Cheryl's body.''
''In an undeveloped Houston woodland dubbed “Lover’s Lane”''

You do seem to find interesting cases Albion.

[almagata]

Why, aside from the weird positioning, do you thing the golf items are important? I think they are very important if they were brought by the killer. The balloons too? I though golf was created in the British Isles and was as white bread as Wonder.

[Mr Hood]

I admit the leaving of the balloons is really odd and can't at this point think what their meaning is. The association with golf might mean 'common land' If it wasn't obvious who owned the place they were killed then it might be a way somebody wanted to draw attention to the place. I don't think at this point the game of golf was as important as the land. The fact there were 3 golf balls makes one wonder if there were 3 reasons they were killed.

Oddly enough a friend of mine used to go to the US to play golf, there's courses here but football, soccer to the American posters, is the game followed more so over in the UK, that and Cricket with Cucumber sandwiches and tea

[Mr Hood]

Note may hold clues in 'lovers lane' slayings www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Note-may-hold-clues-in-lovers-lane-slayings-1634109.php

''Cheryl Henry, 22, was home for the summer from classes at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. Andy Atkinson, whose 22nd birthday was only days away, had just moved home after finishing college in North Carolina.
The two left on a date the evening of Aug. 21, 1990, along with Henry's younger sister, Shane, and her escort. The sisters said their goodbyes when the couples left the Bayou Mama club near Westheimer and Gessner late that night.
Neither Henry nor Atkinson returned from their date; their families reported them missing early the next day. On the evening of Aug. 22, a Houston patrol officer spotted Atkinson's car parked on Enclave Round, a then-undeveloped area off the 1300 block of Enclave Parkway that young people often used as a "lovers lane."
Blood in the car appeared fresh. When a computer check of the vehicle's license plate showed it belonged to a missing person, a tracking dog was called to search the nearby heavy woods.
The dog led police to Henry's body about 200 yards away. Her clothes, found nearby, had been cut from her body, probably with the same knife used to slash her throat. Her hands were bound behind her with hemp rope. Her killer had tried to cover her body with boards from a rotting cedar fence.
A bunch of deflated balloons hung Dali-like over a tree limb near Henry's body, having no apparent connection with her death but adding to the surreal quality of the grim scene''

Balloons -I wonder if somebody knew Atkinson had a birthday coming up?

I've heard of things being hung from tree branches before, I'll try to remember where it was.

[almagata]

Homicide detective Billy Belk had few regrets when he retired last year after two decades with the Houston Police Department's murder squad.

One case still haunted him, though.

In the summer of 1990, the bodies of Cheryl Henry, 22, and her boyfriend, Garland "Andy" Atkinson, 21, were found in an undeveloped, wooded area of western Harris County where young people often went to park and kiss. Both had been tied up with rope and their throats slashed. Henry had been raped.

"That was one of the few cases over my career that I didn't solve that I really wanted to solve really bad," said Belk, 50. "I've gone all over the country chasing down leads on the case, every one of them ending in a dead end."

Finally, the week after he retired, Belk got the call he'd been waiting 17 years for: DNA evidence from semen found in Henry's body had been matched to DNA collected in the unsolved 1990 rape of a 30-year-old exotic dancer who worked at GiGi's, a topless club on Northwest Freeway.

Henry had worked at a similar club, Rick's Cabaret, on Bering. Atkinson occasionally worked the door at Dreams Street, a club on Winrock managed by his father.

Now, for the first time, investigators are considering the possibility the man who attacked them frequented or worked at local strip clubs.

On Friday, investigators released a composite sketch of the suspect after talking to the rape victim, now a 48-year-old Realtor. It's a major break in the high-profile cold case.

Attachments:

[Mr Hood]

[Mr Hood]

Sept 1, 2016 22:27:12 GMT almagata said:

Homicide detective Billy Belk had few regrets when he retired last year after two decades with the Houston Police Department's murder squad.

One case still haunted him, though.

In the summer of 1990, the bodies of Cheryl Henry, 22, and her boyfriend, Garland "Andy" Atkinson, 21, were found in an undeveloped, wooded area of western Harris County where young people often went to park and kiss. Both had been tied up with rope and their throats slashed. Henry had been raped.

"That was one of the few cases over my career that I didn't solve that I really wanted to solve really bad," said Belk, 50. "I've gone all over the country chasing down leads on the case, every one of them ending in a dead end."

Finally, the week after he retired, Belk got the call he'd been waiting 17 years for: DNA evidence from semen found in Henry's body had been matched to DNA collected in the unsolved 1990 rape of a 30-year-old exotic dancer who worked at GiGi's, a topless club on Northwest Freeway.

Henry had worked at a similar club, Rick's Cabaret, on Bering. Atkinson occasionally worked the door at Dreams Street, a club on Winrock managed by his father.

Now, for the first time, investigators are considering the possibility the man who attacked them frequented or worked at local strip clubs.

On Friday, investigators released a composite sketch of the suspect after talking to the rape victim, now a 48-year-old Realtor. It's a major break in the high-profile cold case.

So, the DNA matched DNA taken from the rape victim and description of the rape victim was late 20's. So the killer could have been born between 1957 to say 1963. Interesting.

www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/DNA-may-help-break-notorious-Lover-s-Lane-1635849.php#photo-1185737
The victim reported she had left her job at GiGi's about 2 a.m. June 20, 1990, and returned to her boyfriend's house at 7826 Terra Cotta. Her boyfriend, a commercial pilot, was traveling, so she ate takeout alone in the living room.

"Then she walked upstairs heading towards the bedroom and a man popped out of her bedroom door," Miller said.

The man wore a fishnet stocking over his face, black gloves, and a dark shirt and pants that matched, possibly a uniform. He held a long-barrelled handgun in his left hand. "Where's Randy?" he asked, referring to her boyfriend by name.

The man taunted her, putting the gun to her head and cocking it. He bound her hands behind her back with gray duct tape before taking cash from her purse. Then he duct-taped her eyes and mouth shut, threw her on the bed and shoved a bag or pillowcase over her head.

"He became very vulgar with her while he was raping her, and he told her she wasn't very observant, that he had a military uniform, which was probably him trying to throw her off the fact that he might've had a security guard uniform on," Miller said.

After he finished, the man ordered the woman to lie on the floor and not move. "I may be in the house for an hour or for five minutes," he said.

The woman later discovered he'd disconnected the phone and put the receiver under the mattress.

When Miller tracked the woman down in Galveston County, she still remembered her attacker's features through the fishnet stocking. On Friday, she described him for Lois Gibson, HPD's forensic artist.

She said he was a white man in his mid-30s, about 6 feet tall and 180 pounds with brown hair, brown eyes, a possible mustache and olive skin.

Miller hopes someone will recognize the sketch. He also wants to hear from other women the man might have raped.

"We know there are other victims," he said. "I still think he's out there, and he is who he is — a rapist and a killer. He still could be doing this today."

[Mr Hood]

www.officialcoldcaseinvestigations.com/showthread.php?3579-At-HPD-a-legendary-case
Budding romance cut short



Henry met Atkinson while she was home for the summer from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.

Henry wasn't the type of girl who got worked up over a boy, but she fell head over heels for Atkinson, her stepsister Cristl Craig said.

Atkinson had recently moved to the Houston area from North Carolina, where he'd completed a semester at Campbell University before deciding to relocate closer to his father's family.

The young man found a job at Gold's Gym on the Gulf Freeway and moved in with his grandmother in Meyerland.

He'd only known Henry for about two weeks when he met her for a date at Bayou Mama's nightclub on Westheimer on Aug. 22, 1990.

Henry's younger sister, Shane Henry Blaine, had a drink with them. "I think I said, 'Get a room' a couple of times that night," Blaine recalled with a smile. "It was sort of during that exciting time of a new relationship."

About 11:30 p.m., Blaine said goodnight to her sister and left.

"We kissed each other goodbye and told each other we loved each other, but that's what we always did," she said. "And that's the last time I saw her."

The next day, a guard patrolling an industrial park in western Harris County came across Atkinson's white Honda Civic parked in an isolated cul-de-sac with the key still in the ignition. The seats were reclined and a cassette tape was in the deck, as if the couple had been listening to music.



A brutal crime scene



It wasn't long before anxious family members converged on the scene, along with patrol cars, helicopters and police on horseback. The night was hot, muggy and crawling with bugs. Cadaver dogs searched the partially wooded area, and officers combed the field with flashlights.

They found Henry's body shortly before midnight. She lay facedown, partially hidden under a pile of cedar fence slats. Her hands were bound behind her back with hemp rope, and there were three ragged gashes across her throat.

The next morning, officers found Atkinson's body tied to a tree about 50 yards away. His hands were also bound behind his back, and his throat had been gashed so deeply that his head was nearly severed. His father, Garland Atkinson, couldn't bring himself to go to the morgue to identify the body.

"We were not only father and son but best friends as well," the 58-year-old Katy resident said. "You see things on TV, you read things in the paper, but you never imagine something that drastic, that horrifying, happening to someone you love."

News that authorities have matched DNA evidence from Henry's rape to another assault left both victims' families in a state of nervous tension.

"It's a good thing, even though it brings up a lot of emotions," Craig said. "It's one step closer."

[e-mail]

[Mr Hood]

It looks like some folk think it's a Zodiac letter. www.zodiackillersite.com/

Attachments:

[Mr Hood]

Those of you who know my favourite posts usually contain history and geography so I'll include a little of both here.

The Atkinson family go back generations to farmers in North and South Carolina. One of the places they lived was Columbia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia,_South_Carolina

The name Columbia was a poetic term used for the United States, originating from the name of Christopher Columbus.

Here's the find a grave for one of the GGG Grandparents Zillie Narcissus Mishoe Atkinson
forums.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GScid=47710&GRid=123671837&df=p&

Typical me, always forgetting something. Edited to add

Garland Andrew Atkinson 'Andy' did indeed play golf, I bet his killers knew that (it's been said it took more than one person to kill the couple)

[albion]

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 dont even know why Im alive, Garland says. Im 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-ass 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 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.

[albion]

Sept 4, 2016 9:06:28 GMT albion said:

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.

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.

There is a Jeffrey McDonald thread over on the earons board. I would recommend reading it if you havent yet. Garlnad Atkinson is Andy's father, and Peter Kearns was his step-grandfather. And the rape victim worked for Garland previous to the rape and the murders. And the rape victim was dating a pilot. And the rapist murderer had a blue uniform type clothing on. There is definitely something more to this case than LE is telling us.

[Mr Hood]

We're getting two crimes to a page now, see attachments.