Town note
Named for Congressman William Dickson, a Nashville physician who served in Congress in the early 1800s and was a close friend of President Andrew Jackson.
about 0:09:12The story
In late September 1995 Virginia Jackson, known to everyone as Jenny, disappeared from Dickson, Tennessee. Jenny was 43, divorced, with a twenty-year-old daughter and a sixteen-year-old son. She came from one of the town's wealthiest families. Her father, Dr William M. Jackson, was one of three physician brothers who founded Goodlark Hospital in 1958; the hospital became a regional medical centre and was sold earlier in 1995 for 103 million dollars. Her mother was Margaret Phillips Jackson, her brother Andy was a judge in the county's juvenile and probate court, and several relatives worked at the hospital, later renamed Horizon Medical Center. Jenny had been to cosmetology school but did not work at it for long. She drank too much, and everyone who knew her described her as very pretty, very lovable and outgoing, a woman who never met a stranger. Her family saw her at a wedding on 23 September. Two days later she was gone. Her car was found parked behind a gas station near her house, where she habitually left it before taking a cab home from the bars; the door of her house was unlocked, and the back tyres of her truck had been slashed.
He lived with his mother, Aileen, in Dickson and worked as a janitor at St Thomas Hospital in Nashville, in the department where surgical instruments were cleaned. His record went back a long way. In December 1969 he sexually assaulted an underage girl. He offered them a lift, then pulled a gun as they neared the Hutton family farm in Cumberland City, drove them into the woods and marched them at gunpoint to an abandoned barn. He tied them with baling rope and raped the girl in the dark while Hutton struggled helplessly. He then left with her, telling Hutton he would be back. Hutton tore his wrists open getting free and ran through the woods all night until he found a house with a light on. Investigators searching his room during that case found detailed maps of two women's houses, one in Nashville and one in Memphis, with notes on when a husband left and where a woman lived alone.
On the night of 25 September 1995 Jenny arrived by taxi at Bronco's bar in Dickson at about half past eight, with her Irish setter, a purse and a pillow, wearing her multi-coloured hair clips. The bartender, Carol Owens, would not let the dog inside. Jenny had two beers over three hours. Marianne Wheat was there for part of the evening. By half past eleven Jenny wanted to go home and both cab companies were closed, so she said she would walk. The two left together in his red pickup.
The next day Jenny's brother-in-law noticed a pile of clothes on the farm road leading to her house but assumed it was dumped rubbish. On 1 October the family reported her missing. On 18 October he mentioned the clothes to the police, and officers searching the area found hair clips matching hers, a cell phone, panties, a pillow, a sweatshirt and a sock. A neighbour, Melinda Jones, remembered a small red truck she did not recognise passing her house on Old Yellow Creek Road between 4 and 6 October, with something white slipping onto the driver's shoulder. On 8 October he telephoned his mother, said he was in Knoxville avoiding creditors, and came by for money, clothes and the camper top. He watched the detective's car leave, waited ten minutes, and never came back. On 12 October he sat in the Lake View Tavern in Cumberland City, trousers and shoes covered in red dirt, and stared at the bartender, Darla Harvey, for about an hour and a quarter without speaking.
On 19 October two hunters, Bill Pierce and Walter Weinick, were riding three-wheelers in a wooded area off an old logging road on the Houston and Dickson County line when they saw buzzards and found a shallow grave about two feet deep. A left arm was exposed but there was no left hand, and there was no head. The torso had been cut cleanly from neck to navel. The grave was a few miles from Jenny's house. Her brother and three sisters went to the site; the family identified her by her jewellery, a recently broken toe, her feet and her manicure. The forensic anthropologist Dr Murray Marks concluded she had been there about a month, face down, that animals had worked on the left forearm and back, and that the head had been removed after death with a sharp instrument. The autopsy found alcohol and Prozac in her liver, could not establish a cause of death, and put death at 24 to 48 hours after she was last seen.
About 2,500 feet across the road from the grave, investigators found a campsite. The truck itself had a chain and padlock mark on the passenger seat, a section of the seat cut out, and bloodstains from which Jenny could not be excluded. He had a .25 automatic pistol, brass knuckles with a knife blade and handcuffs; the truck held a shotgun and a sawn-off shotgun, shells, a shovel, a tent, sleeping bags, a stove, coolers and cigarettes.
Asked hypothetically where she might be, he said someone might have chained her to a tree, and added that her head and hands might have been removed so she could not be identified. The prosecutor told a newspaper there was enough evidence to send him to the electric chair. Charles Hutton testified. The defence called Dr Frank Joseph Paretti, a forensic pathologist from the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory, who said the cause of death could not be determined, that the head might have been taken by an animal, and that Jenny's history of overdoses and drinking could explain her death.
The state said the deal brought finality, since many witnesses had died. Jenny's daughter, by then a nurse in Chicago, told the court she still wanted to know why he chose her mother, why he cut off her head, where he put it, whether she suffered and whether she died quickly. When he looked away she stopped and said she was still talking to him. He remains in the Tennessee Department of Corrections.