Town note
Late in the 1800s there was a minor gold rush in the area, centred on nearby Coker Creek; it is now a gold-panning tourist attraction.
about 0:08:36The story
Tellico Plains is a small town of 909 people in Monroe County, in the far south-east corner of Tennessee, in the panhandle where the state meets North Carolina, about an hour and a quarter from Knoxville. James calls it backwoods country, a place of hollers and forest, with the motto 'the little town with the big backyard'. The story he tells belongs to the 1970s, when the town and the surrounding hills were a world of teenagers, drugs, cheap cars and very little supervision.
He left school in the third grade, had an IQ in the mid-80s and worked at most part-time as a mechanic. People who knew the family said there were good s and bad s, and Joe was the worst of them. As a boy he threw rocks at neighbouring girls. He was out by 1976.
That year he married Kathy, a girl he had started dating when she was about fourteen and who married him at fifteen. She later described years of beatings, threats with a gun, rape, and being tied up, gagged and carried in the boot of a car from North Carolina to Tennessee. She said he once made her kneel and beg for her life before firing a bullet into the wall. They divorced in Monroe County in 1976, and Joe took both of their sons from her by force that December.
In 1976 a fifteen-year-old girl named Kathy Clowers disappeared from the Tellico Plains area. She had limited academic abilities and was wearing red when she went missing. Joe told Jerry he could not come. Kathy was not reported missing for days, and the story that she had gone to Florida with some boys was enough for the case to go quiet. Nobody looked for her in any serious way.
Two years later, in February 1978, Roxanne Woodson arrived in Monroe County from Indiana. She was fifteen or sixteen, had a seven-month-old daughter called Linda Lou, and had moved to live with her father and stepmother so they could help with the baby while she finished school.
On the night of February 26th, 1978, Joe took Roxanne and three boys, Charles 'Dit' Robards, Harry 'Frankie' Franklin and Wilbur 'Pig', out in his white Camaro. They stopped at the Steel Bridge, then at Tellico Beach diner, and then Joe turned up Old Furnace Road instead of going home. He parked, got into the back seat and wrestled with Roxanne. The boys got out. He produced a pistol and told her that if she did not shut up he would blow her brains out. The younger boys somehow talked her back into the car. Further up the mountain, in a clear-cut area, Joe asked the boys to walk down the road while he calmed her down. They heard a scuffle and Roxanne shout 'you son of a bitch'. When they came back, neither Joe nor Roxanne was there. A minute later Joe ran out of the woods and said she had thrown a comb at him and run off. They searched, asked at the only house on the road, and then Joe took everyone home and told them to keep quiet.
Roxanne's father reported her missing at once. More than a hundred searchers combed the Cherokee National Forest. A bloodhound followed her scent from where the car had been parked to a brush pile about a hundred yards away and then lost the trail. He went into the bedroom to get his coat, muttering loudly about being aggravated by 'these sons of bitches about these damn whores', then came out holding a twelve-gauge shotgun pointed at the officers. Officer Marshall Hendrix pushed the deputy aside, drew his revolver and fired a warning shot over Joe's head. His parents bailed him out.
On March 29th, 1978, police found him curled up under the covers at the foot of a child's bed in his ex-mother-in-law's house in Gastonia, North Carolina. On April 8th his own mother was washing dishes when she noticed the family dogs crowding around some old car seats in the yard. She pushed the seats aside and saw two human hands sticking out of the dirt, one wearing a gold ring. Police dug up the badly decomposed body of Roxanne Woodson. Her jeans were wrapped around her face. Her blouse was unbuttoned, her lower half was bare apart from socks, and her shoes had been placed beside her knees. She was identified through dental records. The autopsy found blows to the head and gave the cause of death as asphyxiation or suffocation, with strangulation and even burial alive left as possibilities.
When told the body had been found in his yard, Joe first said somebody must have put her there to make him look bad. After an interrogation that ran from 3.30 a.m. to 3 p.m., he admitted burying her but denied killing her. He claimed she had agreed to sex, then changed his mind, run off, tripped and hit her head on a rock. He also admitted slapping her two or three times in the car and said he was only playing with her.
On April 17th, 1978, an anonymous caller told police that Joe had killed another girl, Kathy Clowers. Asked about her, Joe said he knew exactly where she was buried and led officers about a hundred yards along a branch off State Highway 68 between Coker Creek and Farner, at the edge of the Cherokee National Forest in Polk County. He stopped and said 'dig here'. They found a skeleton with jeans wrapped around the skull, the same signature as Roxanne. Kathy was identified through dental records. No cause of death could be established.
The other two were caught within days. Joe vanished. In October 1980 a warrant was issued in Illinois for the attempted murder of a policeman, though it was never clear that the gunman was Joe. For years people reported seeing him in Tennessee and as far away as El Paso, Texas. Neighbours described a gentle family man who never drank and fixed their cars for free.
Frankie Franklin and his cousin testified about the night in the car.