Latest / Gone Cold - Texas True Crime / The Murder of Cheryl Callaway Part 2: Grasping at Straws

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The Murder of Cheryl Callaway Part 2: Grasping at Straws · Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

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Hi, it's me Alice. I want to personally thank you for supporting me
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with dear cookie purchases last week. I also wanted to let you know that
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throughout cookie season, Girl Scouts except cookie donations for our Cookies for Heroes program.
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Each year, our troop hand delivers cookies to our local fire and police
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departments to thank them for their service. Donations have been a little slow this
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year, and if you would like to donate, please consider clicking the link
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in this episode's show notes. Oh and there's still a few weeks to buy
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yourself some cookies as well. Thank you for supporting me, My troop and
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the Girl Scouts have a wonderful day. The Gone Call podcasts may contain violent
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or graphics subject matter. Listener discretion is advised. Police and Arlington put every
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resource they had available toward investigating the January thirtieth, nineteen seventy four murder of
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Cheryl Anne Callaway in the parking lot of the Forum three h three Mall.
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Due to the severity of the injuries Cheryl sustained and the brutality with which the
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forty six blows of the ice pick were inflicted, detectives Mike Leyman and Sergeant
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Mike Adair were under the immediate impression that the terrible crime was Personal interviews with
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Cheryl's friends and family, including her fiancee Clint Harris, offered absolutely no insight
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as far as a potential motive. They could think of no one who held
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a grudge against Cheryl, and police ascertained through these interviews that the eighteen year
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old wasn't involved in a single activity that might make her a likely target.
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Detectives didn't fare much better when they questioned Cheryl's coworkers. The motive almost certainly
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wasn't robbery, as the brazen killer had taken nothing, not even the victim's
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purse, which was found at the scene and contained twenty five dollars in cash.
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It was possible Cheryl was killed as the result of a botched abduction.
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The perpetrator perhaps had the intent to sexually assault her. This particular theory would
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suggest the overkill occurred because Cheryl fought the attempted kidnapping and the killer became angry.
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The theory couldn't be easily dismissed, and fifty years later, it still
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isn't. Less than three weeks after Cheryl Anne Callaway was viciously murdered, and
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about thirty miles to the west, seventeen year old Carla Walker was abducted,
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raped, slain, and dumped in a concrete cattle crossing culvert in a rural
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area of Tarrant County near Benbrook Lake. While it couldn't be more unlikely that
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Carla and Cheryl's cases connected in any way whatsoever, the few similarities might offer
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at least some insight. For decades, Carla Walker's killer was unknown, as
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her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, was forced to navigate life followed overhead by an
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unrelenting black cloud of suspicion. To their credit, it should be said,
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detectives conducting the initial investigation ruled out Rodney quickly and remained steadfast and adamant that
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he wasn't the guy. Carla's case didn't go unsolved for over four decades anyway,
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because the cops gave up. They never did. Rather, the murderer
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was able to roam the streets of Fort Worth and lay his head down at
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night less than two miles from the family home of his victim. Because he
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had no connection to her. The crime was random and Glenn Samuel McCurley struck
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because he was a predator and the opportunity simply arose. His name did show
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up in the initial investigation into the murder of Carla Walker, which is something
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of a miracle, though one aided by mccurley's own sloppy stupidity. But back
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in seventy four, before DNA identification was a thing in police investigations, they
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had nothing on the guy, and his name sunk further and further into the
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voluminous police file with every cold case detective that worked it. Point is the
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further initial investigators on Sheryl Anne Callaway's case dug in, the further away they
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got from identifying her killer as someone she was close to. It's far more
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difficult to nail a murderer who struck at random, with seemingly no other motive
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than his own depraved urges. And as the investigation continued, as it grew
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colder, that possibility overshadowed possibility that Cheryl's killer was someone she knew. Two
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folks, a husband and wife, witnessed the murder of eighteen year old Cheryl
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Anne Callaway. They described the perpetrator as a black male, tall with a
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strong build. He was clean cut and dressed neat with a medium length Afro
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style haircut. He was perhaps in his twenties or early thirties. The killer
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was wearing a light colored, ruffle cut shirt with flower print and dark colored
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trousers, the witnesses said. Sergeant Mike Adair of the Arlington Police Departments Crimes
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against Persons Unit, found the witnesses to be highly credible. Our witnesses on
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that I think were solid with what they did see. In other words,
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I don't think it could have been a white guy with a frow or something
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like that. You know, I had a lot of faith in our two
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witnesses as far as their description. Sergeant Adair kept an open mind, however,
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as did his partner on the case, Detective Mike Lahman. I know
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we were not one hundred percent convinced that it was or was not a black
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guy. Early on, we did because it was good fresh information. But
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as you go through the investigation, and I don't recall anything specific, but
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you know, you started thinking, well, are we totally convinced? And
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we just weren't. That makes sense. There were two young men close to
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Cheryl who demanded immediate investigation, especially considering the passion with which the crime seemed
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to have been carried out, one who fit the witness descriptions and another who
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did not. Ryl Callaway had been meticulously planning her upcoming wedding to a twenty
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one year old man named Clint Harris, who was also her manager where she
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worked at a Dairy Queen fast food restaurant not far from where the crime was
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committed, at the corner of West Pioneer Parkway and South Cooper Street. Clint
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didn't fit the description. He was white, but his closeness to Cheryl couldn't
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be ignored. A detective Layman noted behavior that might be taken as strange and
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remorseful. As he and Sergeant Adair investigated, they had a relationship and at
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the time that was very serious. As the investigation continued, what I recall
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most is he started acting a little again. I don't know if it's strange
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but unusual ever, worry when he was carrying a Bible and he was in
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very much when more about the loss, and you know that's there can be
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a terpretal lot of ways. At the Dairy Queen where he and Cheryl worked
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on the Marquis letter sign positioned below the store's logo sign. Clint spelled out
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something like I love you Cheryl or I will always love you Cheryl. Detective
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Layman scrutinized Clint Harris hard. If the grieving fiance was responsible or involved in
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Cheryl's brutal murder, it's a near certainty that Mike Layman would have found something
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on him, no matter how small. But he didn't. Turns out,
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Clint Harris just mourned in what was perhaps a socially unconventional way. Clint was
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impacted by Cheryl's death immeasurably, and it was impossible for the young man to
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keep his grief to himself. His world had been shattered. Detective Layman said,
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he was as eliminated as a suspect can get. We did have him
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do a PolyGram, and I believe he passed it, and we had no
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indication or evidence that there were any connection between him and the actual homicide.
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But looking into Clint was an unfortunate necessity, just one of the ripples that
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would continue to affect Cheryl's loved ones for the next fifty years. The police
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hit this dead end early, and it was hardly the last Clint Harris was
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divorced in October of nineteen seventy three after a short marriage that began in February
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of the previous year. Neither Clint's X nor her next husband, who she
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married the month following Cheryl's murder match the description of the killer by any stretch
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of the imagination, but there was someone connected to Cheryl who did match the
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witness description. With the help of a Dallas police chopper, Arlington patrol cruisers
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had stopped and questioned countless vehicles matching the description of the one. Cheryl's killer
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drove a late model black over white luxury vehicle, perhaps, the witnesses said,
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an Oldsmobile cutlass. Though patrolman took the information of those who seemed even
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slightly suspicious for further inquiry, none of them produced anything resembling a solid lead.
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On February fourth, nineteen seventy four, the Arlington Chamber of Commerce,
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Law and Justice Task Force established a reward fund. During the announcement, Police
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Captain Bob Parson said his department was hard at work to find Sheryl Callaway's killer,
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and insisted that those providing information could remain completely anonymous and still collect the
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reward. He added poignantly, I hope we haven't become too calloused because of
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an overexposure to day to day murder, shootings and robberies, that we fail
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to exercise compassion for one another. I hope fear doesn't become a substitute for
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reasoning and courage. The reward grew to a remarkable five thousand dollars in a
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matter of two days, or over thirty thousand dollars in today's equivalent. The
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reward led to many anonymous tips, but those all led nowhere. The establishment
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of the reward fund and Arlington resident's desperate attempts to make sense of what had
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happened wasn't due to a lack of diligence on the part of law enforcement.
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They were fighting tooth and nail to uncover leads. The department employed several experienced
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investigators, but this case presented problems most didn't. As leads crept in,
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police, particularly detectives Mike Layman and Sergeant Mike Adair, continued chasing them down.
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The department was willing to explore any avenue and possible links to robbery murders
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in Dallas were being looked at for similarities. Similar stabbings in Houston and Pasadena
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were also combed over. It seemed undeniable that Cheryl's murder was overkilled. On
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the surface, it suggested to detectives working the initial investigation that her killer either
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loved her or hated her and passionately. This led to detectives investigating the possibility
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that Cheryl had been involved in illegal activity such as drugs, but there wasn't
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a shred of evidence to suggest she was, or that she was into anything
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else that might put her at a higher risk than most. Cheryl Anne Callaway
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was as clean a victim as they'd ever seen. Arlington Police Captain Bobby Wiggins
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believed that because the attack on Cheryl happened in a well lit area, virtually
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in the middle of a parking lot that was relatively crowded with parked vehicles,
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there were more witnesses. According to Detective Mike Lehman, there were other witnesses
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and there was two people in a car that just saw a commotion. They
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ran into the mall and they reported it to All duty on into policeman who
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was working there part time, and he called in to the department that someone
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was going on out there. This is perhaps the reason for Captain Wiggins's public
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plea for others to come forward with what they saw. It's unclear if those
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particular witnesses did, but it was tips, and not necessarily witnesses, that
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continued to pour into Arlington Police headquarters. Everyone who sees a black man driving
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in a black and white car calls us. A police desk officer told a
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reporter for the Fort Worth Star Telegram, It'll take us a year to track
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down every lead, every lead that we came up with. If we looked
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at we were able to drop it in the bucket in no time at all.
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Upon interviewing Cheryl Ann Calloway's friends and family, detectives discovered something a friend,
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schoolmate and football player at Sam Houston High who'd shown interest in dating her.
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This young man fit the description of Cheryl's murderer provided by witnesses at for
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a mall to a tee. He was tall, with an athletic build,
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fashionable clothes, and sported a medium length apro Arlington Crimes against Persons Unit Sergeant
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Mike Adair said, we reeled him out pretty quick, and you know,
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well, I think we pretty well reeled out any kind domestic type situation,
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boyfriend ex boyfriend, that type of time. Apparently, this individual took a
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polygraph exam and was cleared as the result, along with other factors of which
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we are unaware. We'll talk about him more next episode. The details that,
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for good reasons put him on the police radar, and perhaps some they
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didn't uncover. As every one of those leads fizzled, That's when Sergeant Mike
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Adair said the investigation entered the straw grasping period in their search for a vehicle
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matching the one their suspect drove. The cops went to every length imaginable,
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even those that seemed slightly far fetched. After they'd failed to locate such a
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car on the streets of Arlington and the surrounding areas, police extended the search
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to include any dark overlight color combinations. The parking lot of the Forum three
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zero three mall was well lit, but the light cast down by the bright
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humming mercury vapor lights gave everything a blue tent, which Detective Mike Lehman thought
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might have given the witnesses the wrong impression. We had a color, but
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it could have been distorted because it was under the street lights of the parking
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lot. They put off a kind of a blue light, and if it
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hit a white vehicle, that vehicle could look blue. So we're not we
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were not ever totally sure beyond I think it was a light color. We
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weren't totally confident that the color was accurate. This led detectives and assisting officers
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down a tedious and mundane rabbit hole that eventually resulted in the scrutiny of thousands
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of cars. During the mid nineteen seventies, the General Motors plant in Arlington,
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Texas manufactured several different vehicles, the Chevrolet Chevelle, the Sprint, which
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was the GMC equivalent of the Chevy El Camino, which the plant also produced.
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As far as the vehicles that might pertain to the investigation of the murder
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of Sheryl Anne Callaway, the plant also produced the Oldsmobile Cutlass and Chevy Monte
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Carlo. We checked GM pretty heavy too, for the fact that it was
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a GM product for one thing, and then it was close, you know,
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it was close out there, but never really developed. Anybody that was
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felt good about. We managed to get all the v in numbers of all
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the vehicles coming off the line that did the description, and we narrowed those
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down by zip code, you know, on sales where they were sold and
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anyway. It was a long, involved, extensive process, but we never
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really came up with anything solid to go on with the vehicle description. They
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all came up dry. After months with no leads, the Arlington police attempted
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hypnotizing the wife and husband who saw what happened to Cheryl. Though they failed
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at their goal of getting the license plate number of the suspect's car, the
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session was helpful for the fact that the witnesses repeated almost exactly what they'd originally
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said. We didn't develop any more information, but we did verify that did
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they saw what it sold. The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that during the
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hypnosis, the witnesses were called an insignia that best matched a Chevy Monte Carlo.
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On March seventeenth and eighteenth, nineteen seventy four, almost two months after
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the Slang family, friends and Arlington residents, walked the city's neighborhoods to collect
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funds for the Sheryl Anne Callaway Memorial Reward Fund. Going door to door,
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ten thousand dollars was raised, which would be more than sixty thousand dollars.
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In twenty twenty four, more calls came in and all led nowhere. Now
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more desperate for a lead than ever, the Arlington Police grasped at perhaps a
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straw that offered the least likely hope. We were so desperate to try to
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find anything that we were grasped in astrials. I think our boss, our
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deputy chief is in charge of our detective division even sent us out to talk
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to a psyche that said that she had envisioned something and we met her out
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at ground Bell Park and sent and listened to who are talking generalities for a
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customers? You know, it should have happened by the water or whatever,
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you know, that type of thing. It just just nothing came from for
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the detectives and officers working Cheryl's case. More frustration was to come in a
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time before the advanced DNA technology investigators currently use Denton County Sheriff's Lieutenant Ron Douglas
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total reporter. The law of averages said that if there are no substantial leads
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within seventy two hours, you might as well hang it up. But detectives
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Layman and Adair refused to stop, even months after Cheryl's murder. Arlington Police
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Captain Bobby Wiggins total report orders. He was optimistic for a resolution to the
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case. He had the inside advantage of knowing how hard his boys were working.
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Meanwhile, Cheryl's family was forming their own theories. The victim's mother,
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Rose Callaway, feared her daughter's case, maybe like all those other murders that
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go unsolved. After all, police had no suspects and couldn't come up with
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a motive. It wasn't a dig on the cops. She just knew in
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her bones and through her correspondence with detectives Layman and Adare, that there was
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a good chance Cheryl's killer was a stranger an opportunist. Rose could only come
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up with a single theory as far as that goes, that an attempt was
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being made by her daughter's killer to break into her car, Cheryl surprised at
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them, and the man killed her. But it still didn't make sense.
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The perpetrator likely would have grabbed Cheryl's purse, something that would have been easy.
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He'd already spent so much time at the scene as it was. Still,
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she couldn't fathom the motive being revenge at the hands of a scorned friend
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or secret lover, and there was no reason for her to think that it
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may have been killing for the fun of killing. The slain young woman's mother
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said, we don't believe that it had anything to do with anyone she knew.
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Neither did the authorities or other professionals. Months after Cheryl's murder, in
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May of nineteen seventy four, psychologist at the University of Texas Arlington, doctor
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Robert Gatchel, shared his diagnoses of the killer with a reporter for the four
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or Star Telegram. The brutality of the crime suggested that the perpetrator had a
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psychopathological disorder, the doctor said, and such disorders don't go away overnight.
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He's out there walking the streets, doctor Gatchell said, and his emotional instability
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makes it likely he'll strike again. He said that though in a series of
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murders committed by the same person, the same or similar weapon is most often
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used, the ice pick might have been the only instrument available to Cheryl's killer
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when the opportunity to kill a rose. It was something he was suggesting that
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might throw off the police by the change in modus operandi. Arlington Deputy Police
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Chief Marion Reddick in the same article said that the department had what he called
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a real good lead. They were currently attempting to validate statements and build evidence
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around information they obtained from what the deputy police chief called an underworld source.
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Investigators had also made progress search for possible witnesses at Forum three h three,
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mal reddig said, and the fort Worth Star Telegram read the department's secrecy about
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the new leads and the Deputy chief's insistence that if they are successful with this
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particular lead, they'd most definitely have a suspect as an indication that an arrest
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was eminent. It was not. In fact, this lead came with a
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bang and left without so much as a peep. More than a year went
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by, and although Cheryl's case slowed to a crawl in the media, it
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hadn't left the desks of detective's laymen and Sergeant Adair. When a Fort Worth
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man confessed to seven of the most heinous murders that city had ever seen,
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Arlington investigators charged with solving Cheryl Callaway's case thought they might have their man.
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On February tenth, nineteen seventy five, papercutter machinist Kenneth Granville walked into Fort
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Worth Police headquarters alongside his reverend and spilled his guts. He didn't want to
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kill any more innocent people, he told them, like the three women he'd
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raped and murdered in the Riverside Village apartments in October of nineteen seventy four.
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Granville had also killed two of the women's toddlers, two year old. The
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day Granville turned himself in, he'd committed other senseless acts of sexual violence and
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homicide as well. Along with other monstrous acts. Granville began being looked at
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for several other Tarrant County crimes, including multiple unsolved rapes, the nineteen sixty
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seven sexual assault and murder of Mildred May, and Cheryl's slang. The twenty
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four year old man was similar in description to the suspect witnesses described in Cheryl's
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case. He dressed fashion and was well built and tall. His crimes,
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like in the case of the murder of Cheryl Anne Callaway, were incomparably debraved
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and performed with what could only be described as callous indifference and perhaps even hellish
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glee. Kenneth Gramble couldn't be connected to Cheryl's murder, however, and though
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the brutality of the crime was a good match, many other details didn't seem
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to match at all. Because of that and other reasons never publicly released,
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police decided Granville wasn't their man. In an article about the city's crime rate
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published on June fifteenth, nineteen seventy five, Deputy Chief reddig called Cheryl's murder
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the most vicious in Arlington history, and it was one of the three from
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the previous year that remained unsolved. In the article, police attempted to ensure
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the city's public that crime rates were on the decline, and most of the
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previous two years nine murders anyway, were negligent homicides. Eventually, Cheryl's case
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would be the only from nineteen seventy four that remained unsolved, though police were
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stumped leads, tips, and arrests of murderers in the subsequent years after Cheryl
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Calloway's brutal slang had detectives continually looking back at the case in the hope they
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could find something, even when they knew in their gut it was going to
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be a dead end, no matter how out there a lead was or how
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little faith they had in it. The disappointment always hit hard. Then the
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leads completely dried up and the case went cold, though never inactive, at
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least not for many years. Adare and Layman continued to look for Cheryl Calloway's
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killer for a few more years, investigating it between the others and their workload
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or when a lead came in. You know, I felt, uh,
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felt so bad for the parents. Her dad was a wreck. You know.
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Oh, we didn't ever really discount anything. But you know, you
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always have the and you've you've seen it in the cases. I'm sure that
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you've looked at that. You're always worried that you missed uh something or missed
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a chance to to clear it. And you know, I wracked my brain.
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I think I feel pretty good about the fact that we covered every angle
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we could, but there may be one we didn't, you know, and
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maybe somebody we missed. I don't know. I always felt bad that you
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don't solve it. I know the mother was just heartbroken. She was crushed
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that I remember, uh, and that really sticks with you. I mean,
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you want to solve it for you, which you really want to solve
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it for the family because they go their whole life wondering, Okay, what
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brought this on? What happened? How did this happened? You know why?
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Where you know a wrestle with all that, and you try to solve
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it more for them, even more than through yourself. I do remember her
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mother was just really just heartbroken, and I mean that sticks with you.
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A Dare went to work as an investigator for the County District Attorney's office,
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and Layman became the chief of police in Mansfield, to the south of Arlington.
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Detectives who followed, building on a. Dare and Layman's work and coming
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across new information of their own didn't fare any better. Other investigators taking a
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crack at Cheryl's case in the coming decades pursued suspects who didn't necessarily fit the
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description the witnesses at the scene gave. Were under the assumption that whoever brutally
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killed her was a stranger who struck at random. While it's important to keep
30:07
open to such a theory, of course, could Cheryl's killer have slipped through
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the cracks as it gained prevalence. Next time on Gone Cold, we'll discuss
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that very thing. And here from Clint Harris's brother Steve. If you have
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any information about the nineteen seventy four murder of eighteen year old Cheryl Anne Callaway,
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please contact the Arlington Police Department's Homicide Unit at eight one seven four five
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nine five seven seven to two. We'd like to thank former Arlington policeman Mike
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Lehman and Mike Adair for their contributions to this episode, and we'd also like
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to thank Kathleen Barnett for making that happen. If you like Gone Cold's mission
30:56
to raise awareness for unsolved homicides, missing persons cases, and other mysteries across
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