Town note
Originally known as Mount Zion when the first post office was established.
about 0:06:14The story
Section is a small community in Jackson County in the north-eastern corner of Alabama, high on Sand Mountain where the southern tip of the Appalachians runs into the state. It began as Mount Zion, took its name from the sixteenth section, a square mile of land set aside to support public schools, and by the 1990s it had a population of 743.
Their son Ethan was born on 20 January 1996, and the family lived in the community of Dutton. Michelle was remembered as bubbly and upbeat, a homemaker who loved Mariah Carey's Vision of Love.
On 7 December 1997 Michelle left their home in a 1990 Toyota Camry, wearing a pink sweatshirt, pink trousers and sandals, to fetch breakfast at Hardee's in Scottsboro. She never came back. He had left a note at home: 'hi, sweetheart, we got worried you broke down, so we went out looking for you. P.S. we left at 11.03.' An investigator thought the precise time looked like someone trying to establish a timeline.
A week before she vanished a friend, Rebecca White, had seen Michelle at home and the carpet was intact. On the Friday before she disappeared Michelle told Rebecca she had something really important to tell her but left because Rebecca was ill. No one alleged that he had abused her. When police looked round the house they found a large square cut out of the carpet in the master bedroom, with a little blood nearby, and the room had been repainted.
About a week after she went missing her car was found abandoned at the edge of a wooded area on property owned by the Byrom family. Her purse was still inside with her driving licence, cash, a jacket, keys and a gun, so robbery did not look like the motive. A wallet on the ground nearby belonged to Shane Byrom, who said he was always losing things; he and his father had been out of town when Michelle disappeared, and nothing in his home connected him to the case. The only useful fingerprint in the car turned out to be the sheriff's own, lifted from the seat belt because he had not worn gloves.
Six weeks of searching, with dogs, helicopters and dragged rivers, found nothing. On 20 January 1998, Ethan's birthday, Michelle's body was found near Powell on a private hillside off a trail. She had been put in a hole about five to six feet deep, covered with rocks, and cotton-like material was caught on the shrubs along the path. Small truck tyre tracks led to the spot. She had been bludgeoned about the head, possibly with the butt of a shotgun, her throat had been cut, her face slashed and she had been stabbed in the chest.
The physical evidence never matched. Fibres, duct tape, soil and blood all failed to tie the house to the grave, and the blood in the bedroom yielded no DNA. They married within four to six months.
On Friday 22 June 2007 Kim picked up papers at the nursing home, phoned a friend on the way home and vanished. Her truck was found by the unfinished log cabin on their homestead, down a dirt road off a Jackson County highway. When she failed to appear at work she was reported missing. There was no banking activity to support the story and the family had no connection with Montana. A hundred state, federal and local officers searched the forty acres, draining a pond and using cadaver dogs, and the FBI joined in. Blood was found in a truck and on a small hatchet, too degraded to match. Ethan, then eleven, was taken into the custody of the Alabama Department of Human Resources and held for months in the hope that he would talk, before being allowed to live with relatives.
He also threatened judges, prosecutors, local officials and his mother-in-law.
Two defence witnesses, Clara Townsend and her husband, said they saw Michelle driving in her car around ten on the morning she disappeared; the prosecution said they had confused the day.
Kimberly and Haley have never been found. Ethan, by 2020, was nineteen and serving in the Air Force.