Town note
Vinings was first called Crossroads.
about 0:06:09The story
Shortly after four o'clock on the morning of 14 March 1985, people living at the Tahoe-Vining Apartments in Vinings, Georgia, heard a woman screaming. Vinings was then a small census-designated place north-west of Buckhead in the Atlanta area, and the address is now considered part of Atlanta proper. Martin Yabro, an accountant on the second floor, heard a scream and then a loud thud from the third-floor apartment above him, followed by footsteps coming down and then silence. There was no car door, no engine, no sign of how the person had left.
Belinda Wood, who was thirty, lived alone in apartment A on the third floor. She came from Opalica, Alabama, had two children, aged thirteen and seven, who lived with their father, and had worked at a Montgomery Ward store in Columbus, Georgia before moving to Vinings about three years earlier. Neighbours described her as quiet, kind and private. Her cousin remembered that at Christmas Wood had asked for a list of things she wanted to do but could not afford, then rented a hotel suite and a limousine and took her to the Limelight Disco in Atlanta.
At 4.45 a.m. Wood dragged herself from the bedroom to the kitchen telephone and called the operator, who put her through to the Cobb County Police Department. The dispatcher heard long, low moans rather than words, and the tape records the moans drowning out the operator before they stopped. Police went to the third floor and found her on the floor near her bed, in her nightgown, with a six-inch knife lying beside her. She had been stabbed in the back with such force that the blade pierced a lung and broke a rib, and a second wound in her lower left lung left a four-inch gash. A blood trail showed she had crawled to the kitchen and back to the bedroom, where she died. Nothing had been stolen and there was no sexual assault, so detectives looked for someone she knew. Her ex-husband was in Alabama with the children and was quickly ruled out.
He was a respiratory therapist in the neonatal intensive care unit at Piedmont Hospital and came outside when the police arrived, offering medical help. Officers noticed that he smelled of alcohol, that he stayed under Wood's balcony listening to their discussion of the bloody toe prints on her sliding door, and that he kept peering out of his window afterwards. He told them he had been asleep.
Flames came through the roof and it took two ladder trucks and thirty firefighters half an hour to bring it under control. Ten units were damaged and the loss was put at $570,000 in 1985 money, about two and a half million dollars today. He said he had been asleep and woke to find his apartment on fire in three places. He had scratches on his arms, a friction burn on his back and abrasions on his toes, and neighbours said they had seen him climb the outside of the building before. His girlfriend, Virginia Meeker, a nurse who was working overnight, said she had spoken to him three times that night and nothing seemed wrong.
The court ruled a sex book and a set of kitchen knives found in his apartment inadmissible because there was no warrant. The judge granted bond of $500,000 property or $250,000 cash even though the state said it would seek death.
The prosecution said his perverted mind led him to stab her, that the book on his bed was open at a picture of a woman resembling Wood, and that he set the fire to destroy the evidence.