He Watched Her Get Dragged Off a Beach Through a Telescope | Heather Teague 

Most people wouldn’t think twice about  spending a Saturday afternoon alone at   the beach. There were hundreds of people  nearby. The sun was out. And 22-year-old   Heather Teague was simply lying back in her  chair, waiting for her boyfriend to arrive. Nothing about the moment seemed dangerous. But Heather had unknowingly chosen a secluded  spot beside a dense stretch of woods.

 And   across the river, someone looking through a  telescope suddenly noticed that she was no   longer alone. A man had emerged from the trees.  He was carrying a weapon. And within moments,   Heather was dragged away from  the beach—never to be seen again. [intro] Heather Danyelle Teague was the oldest of  four children and had grown up in Kentucky.  

In high school, she seemed to thrive. She  was intelligent, enjoyed writing poetry,   and stayed busy with sports like basketball  and track. At Webster County High School,   she was also a cheerleader, was crowned homecoming  queen, and earned the title of Junior Miss. Those who knew Heather saw a young  woman with a lot of possibilities   ahead of her.

 She had considered studying  psychology at Western Kentucky University,   but after graduation, she decided to step away  from school for a while. During that period,   Heather began dating a man roughly  twenty years older than she was. And somewhere along the way, her life  began to change. Heather became involved   with some unsavory people, doing things  that were largely unlike her.

 In fact,   just two weeks before today’s case began,  her parents had even reported her missing.   She was eventually found safe, but when  her family asked where she had been,   Heather offered only a vague explanation. She said she had been “just running around.” Whatever was happening in Heather’s life, she  was still only 22 years old.

 She loved the beach,   still talked about studying psychology, and  still had time to find her way back toward the   future she had once imagined. But on August 26th,  1995, Heather went to the beach for what should   have been an ordinary Saturday afternoon.  And this time, she would not come home. HEATHER GOES MISSING August 26th, 1995, was a Saturday, and it  started with Heather having plans with her   boyfriend to go camping.

 She went to his house  early in the morning—a little after 4 am—but   the house was empty. His car was gone, and she  was understandably irritated. So, she decided   to have a little beach day to herself at Newburgh  Beach in Spottsville, Henderson County, Kentucky. Eventually, her boyfriend did call  her. The two talked back and forth   about meeting for breakfast and whatnot, and  it was ultimately decided that he would join   her at noon. Heather agreed; the two ended  their call, and she went back to sunbathing.

Now, this beachfront is located on the Ohio  River and is actually a border between the   states of Kentucky and Indiana, which is  where Heather was headed. It is important   to mention that she was on the Kentucky side  of the river and that the beach was packed,   but she decided to set up at a rather  secluded spot, more or less by herself.

But while Heather was sunbathing and  enjoying her me-time at the beach,   waiting for her boyfriend to meet up with her,  a man named Tim Walthall was waiting for food   on the opposite side of the river. While he  was waiting, he pulled out his telescope and   was watching people playing on the beach  on the other side, and scoping out birds.

This was apparently just an ordinary day  for Tim… but this day was about to become   unordinary very quickly. Because what Tim  was about to see through his telescope was   going to spark a crime investigation  that spanned nearly three decades. As Tim peered through the glass, he  saw a young woman with long dark hair   wearing a red plaid bathing suit,  round John Lennon style sunglasses,   sitting on her lounge chair—  sunbathing. This was Heather Teague.

But a few moments later, Tim saw a man emerge from  the woods behind her. But this man wasn’t coming   out of the woods to set up his own sunbathing  chair… no… he was armed. Tim sat there watching,   stunned and in complete disbelief. The  then approached Heather from behind,   threatened her with his weapon, grabbed her by  the hair and dragged her away into the woods.

At first, Tim thought that it was a  boyfriend pranking his girlfriend—but   after 25 minutes passed and he saw no sign  of the couple emerging from the wooded area,   he got very anxious. He also told  his wife about this weird incident,   who was in the back preparing food, and the two  were extremely confused.

 What had he just seen? Well, when his worry got the better of him,  he called the Kentucky State Police as well   as the Indiana State Police. In the call,  Tim described the whole scene to the officer,   and he even managed to describe  the assailant in great detail. According to Tim, the man stood at 6 ft or a  little taller than that, weighing 200 to 230   pounds with a large belly.

 He had brown hair  that appeared to be a wig from a distance,   a bushy beard, and was wearing what looked like  a mosquito net and a pair of jeans. At the site,   Heather’s belongings and chair remained untouched,  and Tim could still see them from his telescope. Now, the distance between Tim’s house and  where Heather was lounging at the beach   was almost 300 feet—close to the length of  a football field – not too far at all.

 So   even though Tim claimed that he had a very  powerful magnification on his telescope,   it is just so bizarre that there is  only one witness in this entire case,   and that is Tim, who was practically across  the river, 300 feet away from the site. If you remember, the beach was packed with people,   and even though Heather was sitting quite a  distance away from all the other beachgoers,   it is puzzling to see that no one in the  vicinity saw this incident going down.

According to FBI reports, there were about  500 to 600 people on that beach, and Heather   was seated 500 feet or so away from the main  crowd. This is a pretty good distance away,   but still, with so many people, you’d imagine  someone had to have seen something… but no. So after the call, the police arrived  at the scene as instructed by Tim,   and when they got there, they  knew something was terribly wrong.

Heather’s lounging chair, her clothes, and  other belongings were still there. There   were also footprints leading from the chair  into the wooded area, and as they got deeper,   the cops recovered a discarded towel  as well as a bathing suit bottom. It was a red plaid bathing suit. The  same one Heather had been wearing.  

But there was no sign of heather,  nor the man who took her. THE SEARCH When police first arrived,   they still didn’t know the identity of the  woman who had been taken from the beach.  That changed when they found a red Nissan  parked nearby. Information inside the   vehicle led them to 22-year-old Heather  Teague, and what had begun as a report   of a possible abduction now had a  name and a family attached to it. 

Authorities immediately launched a large-scale  search of the area. Volunteers combed the woods,   divers searched the water, aircraft scanned  from above, and tracking dogs followed   Heather’s scent away from the beach. But the trail eventually stopped.  Investigators began to suspect that Heather had  been moved from the area in a vehicle.

 Aside   from a partial footprint believed to have  come from a size 10 Lacrosse Predator boot,   there was little physical evidence pointing  them toward the person responsible.  For Heather’s family, the silence  was especially frightening.  She had disappeared briefly before, but this was  different.

 Her belongings had been abandoned,   a witness had reported seeing her forced into  the woods, and days passed without a single   call to her parents, friends, or boyfriend. Police questioned people close to Heather,   including both current and former  boyfriends, but none of those interviews   produced a meaningful lead.

 Ten days after she vanished,   authorities released a composite sketch  of the man seen on the beach. By then,   Heather had seemingly disappeared without a trace.  Then investigators learned that a camera near the   beach may have captured something important. The surrounding area contained several farms,   and because vandalism had become a recurring  problem, some landowners had installed cameras   to watch over their property.

 One of those cameras  recorded a red-and-white Ford Bronco parked beside   Heather’s Nissan on the day she disappeared. The  vehicle alone did not prove anything. But it was   the first solid object detectives could trace. And within days, they found the man who   was driving it. THE BRONCO DRIVER See, sometime after Heather’s disappearance,  the police were doing a routine traffic stop,   and one of the cars that they checked  was a red and white Ford Bronco,   and the driver was a man by the name of Marvin  Ray Dill, who went by his nickname Marty.

As soon as the police saw this guy, they were  stunned. Because Marty bore a striking resemblance   to the composite sketch in Heather’s case.  He matched the height and build descriptions,   and when the cops searched his  car, they recovered several items. Inside the car, they found several  restraints, firearms, rubber gloves,   and weapons of various sorts. This  immediately put the cops on high alert.  

The disappearance was still fresh at the  time, and now they had found the guy whose   car was found parked close to Heather’s on  the day of her disappearance, and everything   else matched pretty consistently – from the  make of the car to the actual man himself. But here’s the problem. They couldn’t  arrest Marty right away.

 Just because   he looked suspicious doesn’t  mean that he was automatically   guilty without any evidence. This was  exactly what the police needed to find. So, within a week of Heather’s  disappearance, on August 31st,   1995, search warrants for Marty’s house and car  were granted, and the investigators got to work.  

They swabbed and swept every inch of the car,  and they did find a couple of alarming things. They found strands of hair that matched  the color hair of the missing woman,   but DNA tests had to be conducted to know for  sure. They also obtained some fingerprints   from the interior of the car, as well as some  areas that contained DNA.

 But it’s unclear if   they tested these samples to find out if  they really belonged to Heather or not,   because this was in the ’90s, and  DNA testing was not what it is now. But authorities believed it warranted further  investigation regardless, and very quickly,   on September 1st, Marty’s home was  swarmed by the police and the FBI.  

But this visit wouldn’t go according to  plan, because as soon as Marty got wind   of being surrounded by the police and the FBI, he  barricaded himself in his home… and he was armed. This was a very tense situation. You have a  potentially unpredictable person who is barricaded   in a small space and can make an unpredictable  and irreversible decision any minute, and on   the other side, you have the police and the FBI  trying to calm him down and get him to surrender.

They tried to assure him that he was not  getting arrested and that they were only   here to execute the search warrant, but things  were escalating pretty quickly. The problem was,   Marty was threatening himself, claiming  that if the police didn’t leave,   he was going to do exactly what they  had feared.

 And if Marty took himself   out of the picture… Well, any hope of  finding Heather alive would be gone. The police did everything they could to  get Marty to surrender… but he refused.   Just moments later, a loud pop echoed through  the neighborhood. Marty had taken his own life,   and taken with him the truth of what had  happened to Heather on that sunny afternoon,   at least in theory.

 Because even though  police felt confident that Marty was   involved in this – and this recent turn of events  certainly seemed like the actions of someone with   a guilty conscience, they still couldn’t  prove much. They had means, opportunity,   and he matched the guy in the sketch…  but that still didn’t mean he was guilty. This was a devastating end to this lead,  because investigators really thought that   they were onto something with this progress.  Sadly though, one action changed everything.

Even though Marty was now out of the picture,  the trailer was still deeply searched following   this really unnerving incident, and nothing  in connection to Heather was found anywhere.   They also recovered a note inside the  trailer, written by Marty, but again,   there was not even a single mention of Heather  or anything remotely close to her incident.

But people did look into some strange things   Marty was doing and saying in the  days leading up to September 1st. First of all, and this information came  from Marty’s dad, and uncle—the latter   being a former police officer  himself—Marty was acting really   erratically when he found out that he  matched the description of the composite   sketch. He had threatened to harm himself  multiple times following this situation.

Someone had also called him and claimed that Marty  matched the sketch perfectly, and after that,   he noticed a very significant change in his  behavior. He claimed that Marty vowed to do   something reckless if the police ever showed up to  his trailer. And Marty made good on that promise. But soon enough, an anonymous caller  came forward to the police.

 He was   told by a woman who lived in a home  close to Marty that he had told her   something along the lines of “the  less you know, the better it is”. Apparently, he didn’t want her involved  in something, but the context of this   conversation is unclear, which is why  we don’t know for sure if it is about   Heather or not.

 But I’m unsure why the  woman would have called in about this   if she didn’t truly believe that this remark  was in reference to Heather’s investigation. But the woman also confirmed Marty’s uncle’s  statement, and she admitted that Marty told   her as well as, if police ever showed up to his  home, he was going to do something irreversible. But here’s where things get even more strange.  See, Marty was a married man.

 And according to   his own wife, she also grew incredibly suspicious  of him in relation to Heather’s disappearance.   That’s because, after she found out that he  perfectly matched the sketch of the perpetrator,   she confronted him about it. She flat out asked  him if he was at the beach the day that Heather   disappeared. Marty then flew into a fit of rage  and ordered his wife, Tracy, to leave the home.

Now, all of this might be coincidental, because  who wants to be pinned for a crime just because   they’re suspicious? But it didn’t seem that  way to the police. Why was he so adamant   about doing something reckless if the police  showed up at his place? If he had nothing to   hide and he knew that he had no hand in Heather’s  disappearance, then why would he act this way?   Why did he want fewer people involved?  And what did he not want people to   know? All of this information is really  confusing, and it just runs in circles.

The investigators, or anyone for that  matter, feared they wouldn’t get any   answers because the death of the one who knew  everything basically locked this case down for   good… at least, that’s how it seemed.  But detectives pressed on regardless. Investigators then believed their next best  option was to press Tracy, Marty’s wife,   for any information he may have let slip.

 They  brought her in for questioning, they spoke with   her extensively, and they even tried to get  her to testify in a trial against Marty… but   she refused. In fact, not only that, but she  refused to answer any of their questions at   all and invoked her fifth amendment right  to silence. She refused to say a word. There is just a lot of uncertainty here.  

But one thing is for sure. Heather’s  case was right back at square one. With no leads. With no progress. With no  answers. And no sign of the young woman herself. …YEARS LATER So, after the whole Marty Dill scenario, the  police were still looking into suspects; but, most   of them still believed that he was the one who was  involved in Heather’s disappearance.

 But here’s   another problem that led to a huge number of  issues between the Teague family and the police. Heather’s mom, Sarah, didn’t believe that  Marty remained a primary suspect in her   daughter’s incident. If you remember,  Marty matched the description and the   general composite sketch made public by the  police. But here is where the kicker comes in.

At the time of her disappearance, Marty  was supposedly clean-shaven and bald. He had been compared to the  sketch with his older pictures. Tim had clearly seen a guy wearing a shaggy  wig and a beard, and the most recent pictures   of Marty—in which he was clean-shaven and  bald—didn’t match the sketch anymore.

 This   was a huge error on the police’s part.  Sarah believes that police were going   after him based on tunnel vision and not basing  their actions on the general facts of the case. Now, you might agree with this, but I’m sure  there’s still a question in the back of your mind:   Well, if Marty is innocent, then why  was he so scared of the police coming   after him? Why was his wife so adamant  that she wasn’t going to say anything? Well, this behavior was also  explained when you look at his   previous charges. See, Marty was no model citizen.

He had actually been arrested for  growing controlled substances,   and he was looking at a 5-year prison  sentence. But he took a plea deal,   which led him to spend only 40 days  in prison before he was released on   probation.

 He had a couple of other charges  against him, like disorderly conduct as well   as substance-related felonies, but he was  not deemed a threat to society or himself. Even though it is just a theory—mere  speculation—it is believed that Marty   didn’t want to go back to prison for breaking  parole and for growing illegal substances,   and he was nervous because he didn’t  want to be on the police’s radar.

With this… the leads on the case  had completely run out. Police were   trapped at another dead end. And with this…  another ten years would pass without answer. DECADES PASS Ten years later, in 2005, the FBI  released a report on Heather’s case,   detailing DNA samples being sent for  testing, but what really stood out to   everyone was that the bureau claimed  to have another person of interest   in this case. His name was Christopher J.  Below. He also lived in Henderson County.

Eerily enough, he had pleaded guilty to  the charges of involuntary manslaughter   of a woman named Kathern Fetzer in 1991. She was  actually someone he was having an affair with. Christopher was ultimately sentenced to  11 to 18 years in prison for the crime. He was also suspected to be involved  in other missing women cases,   like those of Mary Kushto, who went  missing in May 1995; Kristina Porco,   who was last seen leaving her parents’ apartment  on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, in 1986;  

and Shaylene Farrell, who missed a  work shift in August 1994 in Ohio. Christopher also matched the composite sketch  if you count the shaggy hair and beard,   and after combing through the available evidence  and clues like the farm video footage from 1995,   investigators alleged he and  Marty… may have acted together.

See, when the car footage was enhanced by the  FBI and reviewed over and over, they concluded   that a bald man was sitting in the driver’s seat  of the Bronco—and investigators believed this may   have been Marty—and another man with longer, messy  hair is ransacking Heather’s car in the distance. Again, even the enhanced footage is extremely  grainy, and you have to have a really sharp   eye to be able to make these details  out; but regardless, it was noteworthy.

It was also revealed that Christopher was in the   general area where Heather was last  seen at the time of the incident,   and she also matched the description of the  other women whose cases he’d become suspected of. Interestingly enough, Christopher also left  the area shortly after her disappearance,   and can you guess the exact day when he  left? The day when Marty took his own life.

It is very suspicious and it leads you  to wonder whether it was a coincidence,   or was there more to it. To  add to that, Sarah was also   notified that Marty and Christopher were  classmates back when they were younger. As of present, though, he was released from  prison, and he wasn’t charged in any of the   other missing women’s cases or in Heather’s, even  though he was picked out in a police lineup three   times by none other than the telescope guy, Tim  Walthall – the only witness in this entire case.

As for Christopher, he has maintained  his innocence throughout and has denied   having anything to do with her disappearance. To this day, Heather has still  not been found. Her mom, Sarah,   legally declared her deceased in 2007.  Since then, her mother has repeatedly   plead with the police for more transparency  in her daughters investigation, but she claims   that police are not willing to work with her, and  aren’t even keeping her updated on case details.

Police actually exhumed the body of  Marty Dill so that they could extract   a clear DNA profile from him. This was  done so that they could compare this   DNA with samples that were taken from  the bottom half of Heather’s swimsuit. This whole situation makes no sense – and  Heather’s mother feels that the Kentucky   State Police have developed tunnel vision, and  are dead-set on pinning Marty for this crime,   neglecting to follow any other leads or suspects.

Still, she has fought tirelessly and alone  in this journey of getting answers for her   daughter’s incident and what happened to  her. Her work has led to some progress,   but it is still not anywhere near the finish  line – and she is currently tied up in a   lawsuit against the investigators to try to  get to the bottom of what’s going on here.

At the end of the day… Heather’s life was stolen  from her far too soon. And for what reason?   She was a lone woman just sunbathing on a  beach, enjoying the afternoon while waiting   to meet up with her boyfriend for breakfast. She  didn’t provoke anyone. She wasn’t in a sketchy   place. She wasn’t out asking for trouble.

  She was just a woman trying to enjoy some   alone time… when a bushy haired man emerged  from the woods and took advantage of that.