Unsolved Murder of Debbie Wolfe, NC

Name: Deborah Ann Wolfe
Case: Unsolved Murder
Location: Fayetteville, North Carolina
Date: 1985

Suspects: None

Debbie Wolfe

CASE DETAILS

On Wednesday, December 25, 1985, after completing her shift at the hospital, Debbie Wolfe of Fayetteville, North Carolina, left work, presumably heading home. According to Debbie’s mother, Jenny Edwards:

“The next morning, Debbie should have been at work. She had to be at work at eight. Debbie did not go to work. Debbie did not answer her telephone. It wasn’t like Debbie at all. She never missed work.”

Debbie’s parents and a family friend named Kevin Gorton hurried over to her house, an isolated cabin, four miles outside Fayetteville. Knowing that Debbie took good care of her home and her pets, Debbie's mother was surprised by what they found:

“We looked around and we saw beer cans laying in the yard. Her dogs had not been fed. There was a uniform laying on the floor, in the kitchen, and other things thrown on the floor, like maybe she took them off.”

Was the man on the machine the killer?

Debbie’s purse was not in its usual place. Kevin found it shoved under her bed. There was also an odd message on Debbie’s answering machine recorded earlier that day. A man from the hospital was calling to see how Debbie was doing. He mentioned that she had missed many days of work. This made no sense to Debbie’s mother:

“What concerned me about his message was that he said that she had missed a lot of days at work, and she hadn’t. In fact, she had only missed a few hours at work at the time that he put the message on the answering machine.”

The search continued outside the cabin and around a nearby pond. There were no signs of Debbie. Debbie’s mother called the Sheriff’s office and was told they would investigate only after Debbie had been missing for three days. But five days passed before authorities began a full-scale search:

“They searched the cabin. Later that afternoon they brought the bloodhounds out and they could find nothing at all. They then walked around the edge of the pond. I was there for that.”

Captain Jack Watts of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department:

“I think it was mentioned that they had already looked in the pond…there was no use for us to look in the pond, so I don’t think we did a dive of the pond or a complete search of the pond on that day. No, we did not.”
Jenny Edwards decided to hire her own divers. On January 1, 1986, Kevin Gorton and another friend, Gordon Childress, returned to the pond. Both men were familiar with rescue work. Childress dragged the pond looking for evidence. According to Kevin Gorton:

“He was in the water approximately two minutes when he called out to me and told me that he had found what looked like a set of footprints and a drag mark.”

In fact, according to Gordon Childress, he found two sets of footprints pressed into the thick mud, along with the drag marks. Once he went under the murky water, it wasn’t long before Childress came across a body:

“It was inside of what looked like a burn barrel. That’s a rusty, 55-gallon oil drum type thing with holes in it.”

The police were called to the scene. The dead woman was identified as Debbie Wolfe.
The coroner concluded that she had drowned. An autopsy revealed no trace of drugs, no alcohol in her system, and no signs of foul play. Kevin Gorton does not believe Debbie’s death was as a result of drowning:

“A typical coroner drowning would be eyes open, mouth open, hands and arms in a very clawed state, you know, just a fight for life. Which was quite on the contrary to what Debbie was. The eyes were closed, the mouth was closed, arms were in a relaxed state, just her whole body was relaxed. She looked like she was asleep.”

Capt. Jack Watts proposed a theory:

“Her dogs were running loose when the family members and the Sheriff’s Department first met over there. Possibly, she was playing with the dogs and fell in.”

As the investigation continued, Debbie’s mother said, police began to deny that Debbie’s body had been found inside of a barrel:

“I asked one of our friends who was there, I said, ‘What happened? Do they have the barrel?” And they said, ‘No, they decided to leave it there. They’ll get it in the morning.’ The next day, they went back to get the barrel, and they said that the barrel was gone. All of a sudden it didn’t exist. The same barrel that had been there the night before.”

Capt. Jack Watts denies there ever was a barrel:

“In my opinion, and the opinions of some of the investigators, what appeared to be a barrel to some of the divers could have been Debbie’s jacket which may have ballooned out as she was laying at that angle in the bottom of the pond.”

Gordon Childress is certain of what he saw:

“There was no doubt in my mind, I’m a hundred percent positive that it was an old burn barrel or something of that nature. You know, metal, rusted, 55-gallon type drum, that the body was in.”

Jenny Edwards then recalled a barrel she had seen near Debbie’s cabin:

“I went over to the spot where the barrel was and the barrel was gone. The indentation of the barrel was still there, on the ground, but the barrel was no longer there.”

A few months later, Jenny discovered another inconsistency:

“When I got a chance to examine the clothes that were on Debbie’s body, I looked at them very carefully and realized that those were not Debbie’s clothes. The pants were very, very much too long for Debbie. The bra cup-size was three sizes too large for her and around-size, it would be two sizes too large for her. The shoes, Debbie wore a ladies size seven, and these were a men’s size six, which winds up being about three sizes larger.”

Debbie’s family became convinced that she had been murdered. One of Debbie’s responsibilities at work was coordinating the hospital’s volunteers. According to Jenny Edwards:

“There was a volunteer at the hospital that wanted to become romantically involved with Debbie. Debbie discussed this with everyone, including him, and told him that she would be his friend but nothing else.”

Jenny is convinced that this was the man who called Debbie the day after she disappeared, expressing concern that she’d been missing from work. Capt. Watts says the man was investigated:

“Anyone that the family requested that we talk to or interview, we tried to interview. Of course, through the information we received through these interviews, there was nothing there that we could use in any criminal prosecution, or there was nothing there that would indicate to us that this was a homicide.”

Jenny Edwards said the volunteer had since left the area:

“He was investigated by the Sheriff’s department the night that the body was brought to the surface. However, he provided an alibi and refused to take a polygraph. So he wasn’t questioned any longer. He left several days after that to go out of state.”

What really happened to Debbie Wolfe? Her mother believes she was taken hostage and then murdered. She believes that, later, someone returned to the pond to remove the barrel, so that the death would seem accidental:

“There are people out there who know what happened to Debbie. And I’m hoping that they will come forward and finally say something. She was loved by very, very many people. And I think that she has a right to be put to rest, finally. And I’d like to do that.”

Taken from the Unsolved Mysteries Story - see story link here scroll to right until you find the Wolfe segment

Friday, January 1, 1988
Fayetteville Times

By PAT REESE Staff Writer

It's been two years since the body of a Cumberland County woman was recovered from a small pond on the Brock farm near Fort Bragg, and investigators may never be able prove if her death was an accident, suicide or murder.

The victim, Deborah Ann Wolfe, a 28-year-old nurse at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, lived alone in a cabin by the shallow pond, not far from Johnson Farm Road in northeastern Cumberland County.

Investigators haven't been able to find anyone who saw Wolfe after she left the hospital at 4 p.m. on Dec. 26.

Unanswered questions, contradictions, and the victim's mother's adamant refusal to accept theories voiced by law enforcement authorities, have shrouded the death in mystery.

The death certificate, filed on Feb. 24, 1986, lists the cause of death as "pending" and the determination of the death as a murder, suicide, undetermined or natural causes also "pending."

A supplemental report filed the same date lists the cause of death as "drowning." "Undetermined" is typed in the blank where the medical examiner is required to state whether the death was due to accident, suicide or homicide.

Detectives with the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department homicide squad, assisted in their investigation by the Bureau of Identification, on Jan. 3 announced death was by drowning.

Maj. Charles Smith, then chief of detectives, advanced the theory that Wolfe was either walking her dogs in the woods or searching for firewood and fell into the water.

The body was found 30 feet from shore, and Smith said at the time Wolfe must have lost her sense of direction in the water and moved away from the bank.

Wolfe's mother, Jenny Edwards, refuses to accept that theory.

Photographs of the cabin taken the day after the body was found show a large stack of wood next to a chimney. Another photograph shows kindling and wood in a container inside the house.

And Wolfe's two German shepherds, Mason and Morgan, were released from their chains every afternoon and remained free through the night until Wolfe left for work in the morning.

Smith said it was possible one of the dogs fell into the pond and Wolfe drowned trying to help him.

"She never took those dogs for a walk like they said, and both were excellent swimmers," Edwards argues.

The late Sheriff Ottis Jones called on the State Bureau of Investigation to conduct an inquiry. Marshall Evans, then stationed in Clinton, was given the assignment. Evans, now assistant supervisor of the Fayetteville SBI district office, came to Fayetteville and talked to county detectives, family members and others. He visited the scene several times.

Dr. William Oliver, a pathologist at N.C. Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, conducted an autopsy and, after a lengthy delay, reported the body had undergone changes characteristic of "cold-water drowning" or "immersion syndrome," in which death is believed to occur from cardiac arrest. He said he found no evidence of beating, stabbing, shooting or strangulation.

Although the case still is not "closed" in the SBI files, Evans told The Fayetteville Observer he does not believe the death was murder.

Wolfe's body was found in 5 1/2 feet of water about 30 feet from the bank. The water at the edge of the pond is only about an inch or two deep. The bottom gently slopes, and the pond is only knee-deep five feet from the edge.

The question Edwards continues to ask is how Wolfe, who was a good swimmer, ended up 30 feet from the bank. If she happened into the pond accidentally, Edwards insists, she would have immediately turned and walked out.

If she fell, she would have been in only inches of water.

County detectives offered the theory that Wolfe became frightened and disoriented in the water, moving toward the deeper water where she became a victim of immersion syndrome.

Edwards said that if her daughter had been able to move to where her body was found, she would have been gasping for air and there would have been water in her lungs.

The autopsy found only about a half teaspoon of water in Wolfe's upper bronchial area.

There are many questions for which law enforcement officers admit they do not have answers.

Wolfe was wearing Nike white leather shoes, ankle socks and red knee socks, blue isulated underwear, a black T-shirt, a brown checkered shirt, brown corduroy pants, underwear and a new regulation Army field jacket.

The corduroy pants were unzipped.

One of the unanswered questions involves the Army jacket. Wolfe had an old Army field jacket that had been given to her by her brother, and she usually wore it when she was outside during cold weather.

Her boyfriend, former Army Criminal Investigation Division agent Steve McDonald, said he did not give the new jacket to Wolfe and had never seen it before.

McDonald, who is now stationed in California, said he is positive he would know if anyone had given the jacket to Wolfe.

There was no nametag on the garment and no way to trace its original owner.

Another unanswered question involves a white, short-sleeved nurse's uniform found on the kitchen floor when her stepfather went to the cabin on Dec. 27. It was not the uniform Wolfe had worn to work on Dec. 26.

Investigators had surmised that she dropped the uniform on the floor after arriving home from work and changed into warmer clothes.

Edwards later sent the uniform found in the kitchen to a laboratory in Dade County, Fla., and experts wrote her saying the uniform had not been worn since it was last washed.

Roger Rushing, a worker at the VA hospial, says he was with Wolfe during lunch in the hospital cafeteria on Dec. 26 and that he accidentally spilled coffee on the sleeve of her uniform. He said he is positive she was wearing a uniform with long sleeves.

"We never found that uniform she was wearing on Dec. 26," Edwards said.

Still another question involves a wool stocking cap Wolfe usually wore outside in inclement weather. It was found mashed in mud by Franz Shoaf, a family friend, at the opposite end of the pond from the point where officers said Wolfe is believed to have entered the water. Shoaf had gone to the house to feed the dogs after Wolfe's body was discovered.

There was a thin layer of ice on the pond on Dec. 26 so the cap could not have floated to the other end.

The Nike tennis shoes Wolfe was found wearing were at least two sizes larger than what she normally wore, Edwards said. They were men's shoes, size 6.

There was no mud or residue on the shoes when they were returned to Edwards by the SBI. "They told me they had not washed the shoes, that they were the same as they were when they were removed from her body," Edwards said.

Invesigators said there was soft mud around the edge of the pond.

Edwards still has the clothing her daughter was wearing when she was pulled from the pond.

The bra returned by the SBI is a size 38-C. Wolfe wore a size 34-B, Edwards said.

The pathologists' report stated Wolfe was 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. Her mother said she was 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed less than 120 pounds.

When the body was recovered, she was wearing was a black T-shirt with the words "Pittsburgh Steelers" across the front.

Edwards and her husband, retired Army Sgt. John Edwards, said they never saw the shirt before. Wolfe's friends do not remember her wearing the shirt.

The cordurory pants she had had a 30-inch waist and 30-inch lenth. Wolfe wore 28-28 slacks.

The Observer traced the events surrounding the drowning from the day Wolfe was last seen alive until her body was found.

* Thursday, Dec. 26. Wolfe called her mother from the hospital at 3:30 p.m., asking for suggestions on what she could buy her sister-in-law for a birthday present. A member of the volunteer services said she saw Wolfe leave work at 4 p.m. No one else has come forward to say they saw the victim alive after she left the VA hospital. She probably arrived home 15 or 20 minutes after getting off work.

* Friday, Dec. 27. Wolfe did not show up for work. Her mother called the hospital sometime between noon and 1 p.m. and learned she had not reported for duty. Her stepfather loaded kindling into his car and, accompanied by a friend, Kevin Gorton, drove to the cabin. They found the kitchen door locked and the living room door unlocked. A nurses's uniform and shoes were on the kitchen floor. The electric heater was turned up. The 1975 Pontiac that had been loaned Wolfe by her mother was parked in the yard with all doors locked. Several Christmas presents could be seen on the seats of the car. The dog's feeding dishes were nearly empty and it was evident they had not been fed since the previous day. The men placed dog food in the feeding dishes. They remember seeing a stack of wood by the fireplace. Thinking Debbie had gone off with someone, they turned down the heat and left.

* Saturday, Dec. 28. Wolfe's stepfather and a tenant from one of his apartments, Dave Thomasson, drove to Wolfe's cabin and discovered once again the dogs had not been fed since the previous day. Edwards said everything appeared the same as the day before. He and Thomasson walked into the wooded area and around the pond but found nothing.

* Sunday, Dec. 29. At 11 a.m., Edwards, Thomasson and another tenant, Kevin Gorton, drove back to cabin. They fed the dogs and looked over the house again. Edwards said he got down on his knees and found Wolfe's purse under one corner of the bed. They looked around the cabin area, found nothing suspicious and left.

* Monday, Dec. 30. At 8:30 a.m., Mrs. Edwards called the hospital and learned Wolfe had not returned to work. She called the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department, and a deputy arrived later to fill out a missing person's report and obtain a photograph of Wolfe. A number of friends joined the Edwards in walking through the woods and around the pond. At 4:30 p.m., detective Lt. William Nichols arrived at the Edwards' mobile home park on Murchison Road. He told Mrs. Edwards he had gotten lost trying to find the cabin and promised searchers would be at the cabin site the next morning. Nichols has since resigned from the department and is believed to be working out of state.

* Tuesday, Dec. 31. Edwards and Thomasson drove to Wolfe's cabin where several deputies were searching with the assistance of a bloodhound. The deputies told Edwards the they could see the bottom of the pond and there was no indication that a body was in the water. Officers searched the cabin and told the Edwards' they could clean up the cabin.

* Wednesday, Jan. 1. Edwards, Thomasson and Gorton returned to the cabin at 9 a.m. and continued their search. At 12:30 p.m., Sgt. Gordy Childress, an Army trooper who is a scuba diver, volunteered to conduct a search of the pond bottom. He entered the water at 3 p.m. At 3:20 p.m., he surfaced and called to say he had found a body face down in an oil drum with the feet sticking out. They went to the cabin and reported their discovery to Wolfe's mother, who called the sheriff's department.

According to their statements, the first officer did not arrive until about 40-45 minutes after the call. Childress pointed to the area about 30-35 feet from the bank where he said he had found the body. Deputies delayed entering the water because they had to wait for an air gauge. Gorton drove to his house to get a gauge he loaned the deputy. Deputy Don Smith, a member of the sheriff's department's E Platoon, went into the water with Chidress and surfaced minutes later. Smith, Childress and other officers recovered the body and brought it to the bank. Smith told reporters he also had seen the barrel.

Smith was filmed by a television cameraman as saying to Maj. Smith of the barrel, "Major, I saw that sucker right out there." He pointed to the spot where the body was found.

Investigators drained most of the pond and reported there was no barrel in the water a week later.

They insisted that the Army jacket Wolfe was wearing may have ballooned out over her head and appeared to be a barrel.

Wolfe was buried in Louisana on Tuesday after her body was found.

Mrs. Edwards, after learning of the autopsy, decided to have the body exhumed and a second autopsy done by Forensic Pathologists Inc. in Bossier City, La.

No real conclusions can be drawn from the differences in the two autopsies. There were some bruises on Wolfe's body, along with small cuts on her right knee and hands. The second autopsy stated there was severe intercostal hemorrage along the thoratic spine.

Both autopsies stated some of the bruises probably were postmortem discolorations not uncommon in drowning victims.

"Two years have gone by, and the pain has not lessened," Mrs. Edwards, who owns The Pub in Eutaw Village, said this week. "There are so many questions and not even one answer.

She said she believes the investigators "have decided it will be much easier to keep it under the proverbial rug." She said concrete leads given to investigators "were ignored."

She is bitter and said she will never give up her efforts to prove that her daughter was murdered.

View Original Video of the Unsolved Mysteries Story on the Debbie Wolfe Case

The volume is low on the video, so you may have to enhance the volume to hear the video

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