Town note
In the late 1700s Dragging Canoe, a Cherokee leader, lived at Running Water, which was what Whiteside used to be called, at a Chickamauga Cherokee town.
about 0:07:14The story
In November 1986 Tara Michelle Stow was fourteen years old, an eighth-grader who lived with her grandmother in Tiftonia, Tennessee, near Chattanooga. She had been born on 27 December 1971 and would turn fifteen that December. Her grandmother had gone to Dallas for several days, so Tara was staying with her aunt, Betty Davis, in a mobile home in Tiftonia.
On the evening of 29 November 1986 Betty Davis left the mobile home at about eight o'clock to collect Tara's grandmother in Chattanooga. Tara and Betty's other daughter, Kerry, were left there with friends, among them three of the Dagnon boys, John, David and Tony.
His mother had died when he was fourteen and he had never met his father; he lived with his grandmother in a trailer and had left school in the ninth grade. Tara's boyfriend was James Dagnon, a cousin of John Dagnon senior, who was said to be living in a tent in the woods because John senior had taken out a warrant accusing him of whipping his son David.
They were told she had gone to Egypt Holler with the Dagnons, so they drove back and found her sitting on the steps of the church in the hollow, waiting for James. Sexton drove away. The last he saw of them, they were turning up into the hollow, and no one saw Tara alive again.
On the following Wednesday he threatened Dagnon for searching the woods and asked him whether he thought he had hurt Tara. Tara's family reported her missing on 4 December 1986, and Detective Bill Schroeder of the Marion County Sheriff's Department began investigating.
When he was told he would be held on other warrants he lost his temper and shouted that Schroeder would never find or prove anything on him. He went on to talk about ways of disposing of a body, suggesting that he would feed one to pigs or dig up a grave and put the body on top of the coffin. He also named places in the mountains where the police might look. None of them was anywhere near where Tara lay.
At 11 a.m. he gave a written statement. He made further statements on 6, 15 and 18 December, none of which said where Tara was.
On 27 December 1986, Tara's fifteenth birthday, two hunters found her badly decomposed body in a ravine beside a creek, about 65 feet from the guard rail on Murphy Hollow Road. It lay 248 feet from Egypt Hollow Road and 3,500 feet from the point where Sexton had last seen her alive. Her slacks and underpants were found six to eight feet away, and jewellery and a hair clip were scattered around. Dr Frank King, the Marion County medical examiner, found trauma to the neck consistent with strangulation, and a serologist found human sperm in her underpants.
When he was told that the body had been found and photographed he leaned back and said, 'good, give me some for my scrapbook'. He asked how strong the case was and said he had an ace in the hole and that no one else was in it with him. Pandora Edwards, in the next cell, said he told her he had raped, beaten, cut and buried a fourteen-year-old. Eddie May Tate Wilkerson, her cellmate, said he told her he killed the girl because she was his girlfriend and was seeing another man. Charlie Algood heard him say he would walk because there were no witnesses. James Graham heard him say that if the missing girl turned up dead he would be blamed. Stephen Morgan and George Caldwell heard him say, while watching news of the search, that they were a long way from finding the body and that it was about 300 feet from the road.
The most damaging account came from Ernest Morrison, a capital murder defendant from Georgia who shared a cell with him. He said he grabbed her by the hair, told her it was her time, walked her to the creek, made her kneel, pushed her head into the water and drowned her, then strangled her for good measure. He took her ring, dragged her up the hill, laid her in the brush and put some rubbish on top of her. He said he did not care whether she was buried.
They also called Jan Gifford, a friend of James Dagnon's mother, who said James had been at her house in Trenton, Georgia from 7 p.m. on 29 November until 2 p.m. the next day. James himself did not testify because he was in a burn ward in Augusta, Georgia at the time.
He said he had been with James Dagnon at Paraly's, a local hangout, and that James had taken the ring from Tara during an argument and given it to him to hold. He said the last he saw of Tara and James, they were arguing as they walked back towards the hollow, and that he then walked away in the direction of the interstate and went home.
The court held that he had waived his rights, that no adversarial proceedings had begun and that there was no proof the inmates were directed by the police. It also rejected his complaints about the serologist's evidence, the refusal of a DNA test and the evidence about the condition of the body.