The Land

When two sisters vanish after walking to a neighborhood convenience store their family is immediately alarmed. The urgency of the case ratchets up when their skeletonized remains are found weeks later in the heart of a federal recreation area. The unsolved murders of 16-year-old Vickie Stout and 14-year-old Carla Atkins need your attention.

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  Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today takes place near land between the Lakes National Recreation Area, close to the Tennessee-Kentucky border. This region is more commonly known as LBL, and it's a destination with a reputation for having lots of recreational activities. It spans 170,000 acres of wetlands, open lands, and undeveloped forests, which, I don't know about you, sounds like a dream to me. Annually, around 1.5 million visitors come here to fish, camp, picnic, birdwatch, go boating, and hike. There are more than 500 miles of trails which are open all year long, weather permitting.

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  If you drive about forty-five to fifty minutes southeast of the Park Central Visitor Center, you'll end up in the city of Dover, which is located in Stewart County, Tennessee. And it's there, in the fall of 1980, that a baffling crime happened that would change a number of people's lives forever. Two half-sisters, playing hooky from school, vanish without a trace. Weeks later, their bodies would be found miles from home in the LBL. But to this day, the truth about what really happened to them and who came across their path remains unsolved. But that could be changing. Because, you see, I'm not the only journalist who's become obsessed with this case.

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  There's an entire investigative series podcast about this story called Murder at Land Between the Lakes, which is hosted by Amelia Courtney and Laney Sullivan. If you want to go even deeper into this case, check out their podcast because it's super in-depth. Amelia is very close with the victim's surviving family members, and she was immensely helpful in bringing me up to speed so that I could complete my own coverage of this case. And let me tell you, even though there's limits to what you can find out about this crime on the internet, I'm told there are plenty of people in Tennessee and Kentucky who are still talking about it. And maybe, just maybe, you, the listener, might hold that one detail or tidbit of information

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  that law enforcement needs to take this story from being a cold case to a solved case. This is Park Predators.

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  On Wednesday evening, September 17, 1980, 22-year-old Trish Gordon was at work in Henry County, Tennessee, when she got a call from her 17-year-old brother Roger, asking if she'd spoken with or seen their teenage sisters, Vickie Stout and Carla Atkins. Trish replied that she hadn't seen the girls that day and asked her brother to explain what was going on. Roger told her that a few hours earlier, around 3:15 PM, Vicky and Carla had walked to a convenience store right up the street from their house in Dover, Tennessee. They'd gone to buy cigarettes but hadn't come home. He wanted to know if maybe they were at Trish's house or with friends where the family used

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  to live in Paris, which was only about a half hour away. At the time, Trish was married and living in Paris, but Roger and the girls still lived at home with their mom in a trailer off of Route 2, along with their older brother Randy, who was in his early twenties, and younger brothers Brian and Joel, who were children. The family was a bit of a blended one, with lots of kids who were different ages. Trish, Randy, Roger, 16-year-old Vickie, and another one of their siblings named Deborah, all shared the same dad and mom. But after their father died when Trish was about six years old, their mom Margie had remarried a guy named William, with whom she'd had 14-year-old Carla and the younger boys Joel and Brian.

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  So in relation to Trish, Vicky was her biological sister, and Carla was her half-sister. In September 1980, Trish and Deborah were both married and living with their spouses in neighboring Henry County. But sometimes Carla and Vicky would visit Trish or their friends where they'd all previously lived in Paris, but on that particular afternoon, the girls seemingly hadn't left over. By nightfall, they were still not home, so Margie dialed the Stewart County Sheriff's Office to report them missing.

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  Trish told me during our interview that deputies from that agency didn't immediately take a missing persons report for the girls or dispatch units to look for them. It was only after their mom called back the next morning that the sheriff's office finally got on the ball and sent the sheriff and a youth services officer out to Vicky and Carla's house around 10 a.m. or so. The youth services officer had interacted with the girls on prior occasions, most notably for reports of them skipping school. You see, Carla and Vicky had developed a habit of playing hooky from class, and in fact, on the day they vanished, they'd arranged to skip out on school once again. Their sister Trish and Amelia Courtney, one of the hosts for Murder at Land Between the

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  Lakes podcast, told me that in June or July of 1980, so a few months prior to the girls going missing, Randy, their older brother, and Vicky's boyfriend at the time, a guy named Randall, had gotten in trouble for a cannabis-related offense. On September 17th, the boys were due back in court for that charge and planned to turn themselves over to authorities, which they did. I'm told they served about two weeks in jail in relation to that offense. And so, the girls had decided that day they'd wanted to spend as much time as they could with the guys before Randall and Randy headed to jail. According to what Amelia told me, Vicky in particular was super upset to see them go because she suspected she might have been pregnant with Randall's child.

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  That turned out not to be the case, but Randall, who was about five or six years older than Vicky, later told Amelia that when he last saw Vicky and Carla before walking into court, he was under the impression he was gonna have a kid with Vicky because that's what she'd told him when they'd parted ways that Wednesday. Anyway, I don't know if the girls hanging out with Randall and Randy was information law enforcement knew about or took into account in terms of their overall timeline for that day. But from speaking with the girls' mother and siblings, investigators learned that they'd left their home around 3:15 p.m., headed in the direction of a convenience store called The Furnace. They planned to buy cigarettes and presumably come right back.

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  Now, The Furnace was more than just your average mini-mart. According to Trish, it was a place where a lot of young people and teenagers in Stewart County would hang out. You could buy snacks, cigarettes, play pool, and just be with other kids around the same age. Vicky and Carla had both been to this spot numerous times in the past, so making the trip there on that Wednesday afternoon wasn't out of the ordinary for them. The girls were super close and were pretty much together all the time. They were sandwiched between brothers of varying ages and didn't have their older sisters Deborah and Trish at home to gravitate towards. So to me, I can totally see why they stuck together all the time. Anyway, when the youth services officer went to The Furnace and interviewed the owner,

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  he claimed that the girls had left the store around 3:30 PM, walking down Highway 79 in the direction of where they lived. When authorities spoke with a woman whose house was close to the store, she said that she'd seen Vicky and Carla speaking with someone in or possibly getting into an older model blue pickup truck. She said that truck had a rifle rack on the back and claimed that the vehicle was being driven by a young white man, which wasn't the most detailed description, but it was at least a start. Authorities brought in a sketch artist to create a composite sketch based on the witness's description, but it wasn't very helpful. The description of the driver was that he was white with brown hair and possibly a tan complexion.

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  He was 25 to 30 years old and weighed between 165 and 170 pounds. The description was, like I said, kind of vague because it favored a number of young men residing in Dover at that time. According to Trish, the way in which authorities distributed the sketch and information to the public was also unhelpful. She told me that her family wasn't even made aware that a sketch was done, and when they did find out about it later in the investigation, they learned it had only been circulated in Henry County, not Stewart County. Which was puzzling because where Vicky and Carla lived and disappeared from was in Stewart County. Amelia Courtney told me during our interview that a tip she and her co-host

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  received while producing their podcast resulted in them being directed to a local district attorney, who pulled a never-before-seen case file from a local judge's home, which contained a law enforcement report about a second witness sighting of the mystery man in the blue truck. She said that according to that document, a man who'd been driving behind the blue pickup said he'd seen Carla and Vicky get into that vehicle, and because he'd been in closer proximity to the mystery man, he was able to provide authorities with a much better description of the driver. That information, though, was never reflected in news coverage or flyers distributed back in 1980. But the fact that the girls had a history of skipping school and had seemingly jumped into a stranger's truck made authorities

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  begin to wonder if maybe they'd just run off with a friend. Amelia Courtney told me that based on her work, she assumed that the sheriff's office's theory early on was that the girls were in fact runaways. And that was a theory news coverage about this case also reported. So the sense of urgency to find the pair wasn't all that high for law enforcement right after they vanished. But to their immediate family, Vicky and Carla's absence was extremely concerning. Trish told me she and her siblings questioned everyone they knew to figure out if anyone had seen the girls or heard if they were planning to run away, and of course, no one had.

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  What exactly law enforcement did in the first few days of the investigation is unclear. News coverage from September 1980 is limited, but according to one article I read, by the end of September, nearly 10 days after Carla and Vicky were reported missing, deputies were reportedly actively looking for them. However, from their sister Trish's perspective, it didn't seem like deputies were really doing all that much. She told me that initially her family assumed authorities had organized a formal search party after the girls were reported missing, but she was later informed that wasn't the case. To her knowledge, Stewart County deputies didn't put up any roadblocks or dispatch deputies to check areas surrounding

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  the furnace. In the years since, Trish has not been able to find a single person who can confirm they were ever part of a formal search party for Vicky and Carla in those critical first few days, which makes her think that an organized effort by the sheriff's office never actually happened. The only thing we know for sure, or that was at least documented, was that at some point the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was called in to help Stewart County. The special agent put in charge of the investigation was a local man named Jack Charlton. Trish told me she definitely remembers Jack because he visited her family in person at least one time after the girls disappeared, and he remained a key figure in the case for several years.

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  But even with additional resources coming in, there were some unique challenges facing investigators. For one thing, people would often get the girls confused. Even though Carla was younger by about two years, she was taller and bigger bone than Vicky. Trish told me that Vicky's father was a small-framed man, and Vicky took after him, so when people saw her next to Carla, they often assumed Carla was 16 and Vicky was 14, but it was actually the opposite. When they'd last been seen, Vicky was described as weighing about 90 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes. She was wearing a blouse, flip-flops with dark jeans, a yellowish-gold chain necklace, and stood about 5 feet 2 inches tall.

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  Carla was said to be about 5 feet 5 inches tall, 130 pounds, and had brown hair and blue eyes. She'd last been seen wearing a red check shirt, blue jeans, and blue track shoes. For 18 long days, their whereabouts were unknown. No one in their family saw them, and their names faded from newspaper headlines. But then, on the afternoon of October 5, 1980, everything changed.

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• 15:03Speaker 04

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

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  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

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  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived. Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

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  That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

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  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 15:51Speaker 04

  I'm Eva Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

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  On Sunday evening, October 5th, Trish got a phone call from one of her aunts with an update about Vicky and Carla. And the news was grim. Her aunt informed her that shortly before 4:00 PM, a husband and wife who'd been hiking in Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, just northwest of Dover, had come across the decomposed bodies of her teenage sisters after noticing a bad smell. When Trish heard this news, she got ahold of her other sister, Deborah, and together they drove to the scene to meet up with their 17-year-old brother, Roger. You see, not long after the hikers had called authorities, Stewart County Sheriff and TBI Agent Jack Charlton had visited the family's house in Dover and summoned Roger to come

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  with them to confirm Vicky and Carla's identities. Because their remains were so decomposed, Roger had only been able to tentatively ID his sisters from the clothing that had been found with them. Where the girls were discovered was in an area known as Lost Creek, which was where a lot of people would go to party. Trish described it to me as kind of off the beaten path and a spot that folks would frequently visit to drink, smoke cannabis, and swim. Roger told Trish that when he'd arrived with the sheriff and TBI agent Jack Charlton, Carla was the first one they'd come across. She'd been left near the edge of the roadway and appeared to have been shot in the face at close range with a shotgun. About seventy-five feet away from her, down a nearby hill, was Vicky.

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  Her remains indicated she'd been shot in the back of her head with a shotgun and fallen face down. Both girls' skeletonized bodies were situated between logs and appeared to have been covered with leaves. Roger said that along with the girls' remains, Jack Charlton and the sheriff collected several shotgun shells, as well as a shotgun ammo wad, a soft drink bottle, a cigarette pack, and cigarette butts. There was also a light blue stain on a tree that investigators determined was at the right height where it might have come from a vehicle. Roger told Trish that all the evidence was bagged up and placed into the back of the TBI agent's car. He and the investigators also saw tire track marks near the bodies, but according to Trish,

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  Roger said the sheriff and Jack Charlton had driven their vehicles through those tracks in order to navigate the rugged terrain. So that evidence, if it was related to what happened to the girls, was obliterated almost immediately. By the following day, the girls' remains were removed from the scene and transported to Memphis for autopsies. Based on the deteriorated state of their bodies, dental records were used to formally identify them, and the ME estimated that they'd likely been killed the same day they vanished. Their autopsy reports state that they'd both died from shotgun wounds to the head, and their manners of death were homicide. The pathologist who examined their bodies recovered several shotgun pellets from their

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  hair and skulls, but further analysis of that evidence would likely be limited because shotgun ammunition is notoriously difficult to do ballistics testing on. The clothing and items found with Carla's remains included a blue tennis shoe, blue jean-like pants, a pair of underwear, a sock, a pink comb, a belt, a bra, and a red check shirt. The clothing and personal items found with Vicky included a blouse, underwear, blue jean type pants, and a golden mint green necklace that was still around her neck. Additional notes in the autopsy report indicate some hair fragments were found scattered around Carla, and those were sent to the lab for testing, but what the results were is unclear.

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  The autopsy reports were difficult to interpret, but based on what I saw, it seems that testing might have been done on both girls underwear to determine the presence of semen. However, the word "negative" and the phrase "no work performed" is typed next to some of the samples for both girls, so I'm not 100% sure what if any actual testing was done. But Amelia Courtney, co-host of the Murder at Land Between the Lakes podcast, told me that she later learned some semen was found on the back of Carla's bra and the back of her shirt. But who the semen belonged to, when it got there, or when that information was discovered, is not something I can corroborate with the source material I could find.

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  So whether either victim was sexually assaulted or not, remains a bit of a question mark in this case. Interestingly, towards the end of Carla's autopsy report, there's a short handwritten note that states "TBI Agent Jack Charlton told the ME that Carla's boyfriend had given her a silver necklace recently, and that she hadn't taken it off her neck since he gave it to her." Now, when Trish and Amelia first read that note years after the murders, they were completely baffled, for a couple of different reasons. One, no one in Trish's family knew about this silver necklace, so they couldn't understand how Jack Charlton did. And two, at the time of the girls' abduction and murders, Carla reportedly wasn't dating

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  anyone. Now, I guess it's possible the necklace may have come from a prior boyfriend, but as far as Carla and Vicky's family was aware, she wasn't in a relationship at the time of her death. In fact, it was kind of the opposite. Amelia Courtney interviewed her best friend from back in the day, a woman named Ivana, and she said that Carla didn't have a boyfriend in September 1980. So, seems to me that kind of contradicts what official records say, or at least what Jack Charlton provided the ME. But regardless of Carla's relationship status at the time, what troubled Amelia and Trish so much about this necklace detail was that the official paperwork denotes Jack Charlton as providing the info about the necklace being

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  missing to the Emmy, which seems to indicate he knew it was missing from Carla's body. But the question Amelia and Trish kept asking themselves was, how would he know that? Had he seen it himself? That didn't seem likely because Trish told me that Jack didn't even know their family. He was an older man and didn't regularly interact with Margie and the kids. So the only alternative was that maybe he'd spoken with someone who told him about the necklace. And that opened up a whole new set of questions for Trish and Amelia. Because, you see, they've learned in recent years that Jack Charlton wasn't just the lead TBI agent over the case.

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  He was also associated with a young man who'd previously harassed Carla and Vicky.

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  The girl's mom, Margie, told Commercial Appeal reporter Charles Crouch that prior to moving to Dover, the family had lived about 40 minutes away in Paris, Tennessee, in a neighborhood that was kind of rough and not a desirable place to raise kids. So in an effort to get out of that situation, Margie had uprooted and moved everyone to Dover. However, about six weeks before moving into the trailer that Vicky and Carla lived in at the time of their disappearance, Margie and her kids had lived in another trailer behind a local drive-in restaurant in Dover called The Dairy Dip. That establishment was a place that people would gather to party on a regular basis, and oftentimes, those activities would spill over into the family's front yard.

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  Randy, the girl's older brother, was a bit of a partier himself and seemingly a regular at The Dairy Dip. And so sometimes he'd invite people over and keep the good times rolling. Well, one night, not too long before the girls disappeared, Vicky and Carla were home when a young man in his early twenties, who I'll call Dean, showed up outside their trailer, hollering and cussing at them to come outside. The situation was so alarming that law enforcement was called and showed up to speak with Dean. Instead of arresting him, though, the responding officer just wrote Dean a complaint card and then left. But not long after that, when Margie moved the family to the trailer the girls lived in at the time of their disappearance, Dean did the same thing.

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  He showed up randomly and yelled at the girls. Trish told me she never got a clear story about why Dean was so mad or what his deal was, but she heard two different rumors that he might have either dated Carla at one point, or was possibly tied up with some drug stuff the girl's older brother Randy was associated with. She doesn't know for sure, but what she and Amelia did confirm is that at the time of the second incident, the police officer who responded and dealt with Dean later told Trish and Amelia in an interview that he wrote Dean another complaint card for his actions. However, that officer regrets not arresting him at that point because of what would later happen to Carla and Vicky. And you want to know something else, Wild?

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  The complaint cards about Dean's two incidents with the girls are not in any of the case files as far as Trish and Amelia are aware. They just, poof, vanished with time. What's even wilder is that according to Trish, her family later learned that all the physical evidence that was found with the girls' remains, you know, the shotgun shells, wadding, cigarette packs, cigarette butts, and so forth, well, allegedly, all that stuff mysteriously vanished from TBI agent Jack Charlton's car before it ever made it to the TBI's crime lab. Trish said that Jack later claimed the items had been stolen, and to this day, no one knows for sure what really happened to the stuff.

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  For years, Trish's family had no idea what was going on with Vicky and Carla's case. Tennessee's governor in 1980 announced the creation of a $2,500 reward for information, but no one came forward to claim that money, and the case languished. Trish told me she remembers Stuart County Sheriff and the youth services officer who first worked the murders came by once just to tell her they were still investigating, but after that, it was pretty much radio silence. In 1993, the sheriff's office announced it was looking into a convicted felon from Benton County, Tennessee, who was part of a known family of criminals as a possible suspect because he was suspected in several murders during the 80s, but he wasn't formally charged in the girls' case.

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  However, that guy reportedly drove a blue pickup truck in 1980 and lived near Paris when Carla and Vicky were killed. Trish told me that the man's name stayed on a list of possible suspects for a number of years, but investigators later seemingly lost interest or eliminated him entirely.

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  A former Stewart County deputy named John Vincent, who became the sheriff in 1996, told Tennessean reporter Paul Oldham that Stewart County had handed over its entire case file to the TBI by then. His personal theory about what happened to the girls was that maybe Carla or Vicky were shot in some sort of accident gone wrong. Vincent surmised that the suspect had likely shot the first victim unintentionally, but her death caused the other teen to panic and so she ran, prompting the killer to then take her out so she couldn't alert authorities. Vincent explained his theory like this: "The girls were picked up by someone they knew, one man, as they walked back toward home that fateful day.

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  Whoever they met enticed them to ride with him to the secluded spot. Maybe they were enticed with a promise of drugs, money, cigarettes, tapes, or something that interested one or both of the girls. Once he had the girls at the secluded spot, for some reason the murderer had a shotgun, and for some reason had the gun trained on one of the girls."

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  It was also possible two people might have been involved in the crime, and if that were the case, then the shooter's accomplice would be the key to solving the murders. Regarding this theory, Vincent remarked: "If only one person is involved without a witness, it will be hard to ever solve. If more than one person was involved, one of them may eventually tell on the other."

• 28:08Speaker 03

  And according to what Trish, Amelia Courtney, and her co-host Laney have dug up, Vincent's prediction seemingly came true.

• 28:21Speaker 00

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  Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.

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• 28:46Speaker 02

  Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene: a dining area converted into classrooms, with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory. A baby factory.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived. Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

• 29:31Speaker 06

  That's the one time that we called the cops, because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 29:35Speaker 07

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 29:41Speaker 04

  I'm Ava Kaufman. "The Journey" is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Over the years, Trish Gordon had called the Stewart County Sheriff's Office to check for updates about her sister's murders. And her husband even went by in person once. But the agency refused to share any records with them. In 2011, a newly-elected sheriff announced he'd reopened the case and was willing to explore new testing of old evidence. But by October 2013, that still hadn't happened. An investigator told newspaper reporter Bonnie Lil that the cost of doing DNA analysis was too much money for the sheriff's office, so they were having to explore working with television programs that might be willing to pay for the testing on the agency's behalf. Around that same time, so fall of 2013, public interest in the case made a resurgence

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  after an anonymous user posted a very specific tip on an online forum.

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  The post claimed that the guy who'd allegedly harassed Carla and Vicky at their house on two separate occasions was responsible for the crime. This user claimed, albeit without hard evidence to back up their story, that a resident of Stewart County who'd been a lifelong friend of Dean's told them that he'd been with Dean when the girls were abducted and murdered. Dean's friend allegedly made this confession just weeks before dying by suicide. The tipster then accused Jack Charlton of allegedly covering up what Dean had done and intentionally hiding evidence to steer the investigation away from him as a suspect. Now, Amelia Courtney has dug so much further into this tip than I could, but one version

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  of events she said multiple sources told her, which mirrors a lot of what this online poster claimed, is that Vicky and Carla's murders did involve two people, and the whole thing was possibly, at least initially, unintended. Amelia told me during our interview that people who were present for Dean's friend's confession stated that he told people he was present for the crime, and that Carla had been shot inside the truck that he and his friend were riding in, possibly as she was trying to leave. The witness claimed he and Dean were high on LSD and they'd picked up the sisters. At one point, this witness, Dean, and the girls pulled over so he could go pee, and while he was relieving himself, he heard a gunshot ring out.

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  The witness reportedly told folks he confessed to that Dean, who'd been holding a shotgun, apparently hadn't wanted Carla to get out of his truck, but in a moment of chaos, the gun had gone off, which could explain why she'd suffered point-blank injuries to her face and been left so much closer to the roadway. The witness said her shooting freaked Vicky out, and so she'd taken off running into the woods, but Dean tried to stop her and assured her that he could get the whole thing sorted out if they just went and talked to someone he knew in law enforcement. But apparently, Vicky was too panicked and kept running, which resulted in Dean then firing at her from behind. So, not exactly an accident scenario, but you get the picture Dean's friend was trying to paint in his alleged confession.

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  The impact the online blog post had on the case and how some of the claims in it got the attention of a newly-elected district attorney general named Ray Crouch Jr. can't be understated.

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  In 2014, Crouch had just taken office, and he made it a priority to connect with Trish and her family, as well as speak at an annual candlelight vigil that they'd been holding for the girls. Crouch also let Trish see all of the TBI's files on the case, and she got to review information and documents that no one except law enforcement had ever laid eyes on. The case file Jack Charlton and other state agents had kept on the case was no bigger than a small notebook, but there were pictures from the crime scene in it that showed Carla and Vicky's bodies when they were first discovered. Initially, Trish said that DA General Crouch was hot to trot in thinking the convicted felon who'd been investigated in 1993 was the killer, but his attitude changed over the years the more he listened to Trish

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  and the more he learned about the guy who I've been referring to as Dean. Interestingly, in 2014, Dean, the subject of the blog post, sued the author of that post, who turned out to be Dover's mayor. However, according to Amelia Courtney, the case never went to trial. Dean reportedly kept delaying it until 2015, when the parties eventually agreed to a settlement. And that settlement included language demanding that the post be taken down. What I find super intriguing, though, is that according to coverage by the Stewart County Standard about this lawsuit, at one point, two different circuit court judges had to recuse themselves from the case. And the Tennessee Attorney General filed a motion asking that a certain TBI agent

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  not be compelled to testify in the case because, quote, "The testimony would result in the premature release of confidential information related to the TBI's open criminal investigation, creating an unreasonable risk of jeopardizing the state's criminal prosecution of an open double murder case," end quote. Now, who that TBI agent was the Tennessee AG's office didn't want to testify was not Jack Charlton. At least, I don't think, because Jack died in 2001. Which is a bummer, because I would have reached out to Jack as a matter of due diligence to clarify a lot of lingering questions I still have in this case. Same goes for the sheriff of Stewart County from back in the day.

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  But according to Trish, he's deceased now as well. So whatever information those two men might have known about this crime, possible suspects, or anything else, went with them to their graves.

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  In 2015, the TBI announced that it was renewing efforts to identify the man in the blue truck, and even went as far as releasing two age-progressed sketches of the guy's likeness. But the images were, in my opinion, vague at best, and to date, the man has not been identified. That same year, Ray Crouch Jr. and Trish sent letters to the FBI in Memphis requesting federal assistance in the investigation, but the FBI either didn't respond, or possibly declined to come on board right away. Which was frustrating to Carla and Vicky's family, because they felt like a strong argument could be made that the FBI should have been the lead agency over the murder case from the get-go, since the girls' bodies had been found on federal land.

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  However, I guess since the case originated as a missing persons investigation in Stewart County, that's why the FBI wasn't in charge and had never been in charge. But lack of input and presence from the feds on the case changed by 2016, thanks in large part to the work advocates for the case were doing behind the scenes. Amelia Courtney told me that currently there's a federal probe investigating the unsolved murder of another young girl in Alabama, that may be linked to certain persons of interest also being investigated in Carla and Vicky's case. But details beyond that, I probably shouldn't share until more information is released by authorities.

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  In August 2016, Tennessee's then-governor established a new $5,000 reward in the case, which was then increased to $15,000. But so far, answers and suspects in this case have continued to elude law enforcement.

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  Trish told me that back in 1980, no one could think of why someone would want to harm Carla and Vicky, unless it had something to do with one of their family members. Their mom, Margie, told newspaper reporter Charles Crouch back in the day that Carla and Vicky were young teenage girls with no known enemies. They'd grown up in a single-parent household with a mom who did the best she could to make ends meet, and the girls were also self-starters who babysat and cleaned houses to earn spending money. They weren't troublemakers, had never been arrested, and were overall just really friendly and caring. Especially when it came to taking care of their younger brothers. Their older brother Randy, though, was a different story.

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  Like I mentioned earlier, he had some drug use and criminal charges in his background, and Trish explained that he was the kind of person who liked to party. He was in jail the entire time the girls were missing and didn't get out until after their remains were discovered. But Trish told me that in the wake of the murder, she and others in their family assumed that what had happened to the girls was likely related to some nefarious activity or people who Randy was connected with. She said that not long before the girls disappeared, she and her husband visited them in Dover. And right before the couple left, Carla and Vicky ran out to them. And Carla had asked if she and Vicky could come live with Trish and her husband, which obviously Trish couldn't say yes to at the time.

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  But now, all these years later, she wonders if maybe the abrupt request was because the girls had become aware of something going on that they wanted to get as far away from as possible. Trish told Fox 17, she's wondered if maybe she had said yes and let Carla and Vicky come live with her, that they might still be alive. One theory she and Amelia Courtney told me that her brother Randy has is that maybe the abduction was planned ahead of time and intentionally carried out on the day he and Randall were scheduled to turn themselves in to authorities. Randy expressed that he believed everything that had happened on September 17, 1980, felt like it was the culmination of one big setup.

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  He claimed one of the reasons he felt so strongly about that theory was because the circumstances leading up to him and Randall getting busted for cannabis possession during the summer of 1980, months before the girls were killed, seemed awfully fishy. He said when they got arrested for that offense, cops had arrived on the scene almost instantaneously, kind of like maybe someone had tipped them off ahead of time. He wondered if maybe he and Randall had been set up, which then later created the perfect opportunity for someone to target the girls while he and Randall were behind bars. With them out of the picture, they wouldn't be around to protect the girls. In September 2020, after the first season of Murder at Land Between the Lakes podcast

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  was released, DA General Ray Crouch Jr. told newspaper reporter Danny Peppers that he was hopeful more attention on the case would help solve it. He revealed that, to date, several people had been conclusively excluded as suspects, and the pool of suspects they were presently the most focused on only consisted of three or four people. Crouch also explained that DNA testing on old evidence had been approved, but there were some challenges investigators were going to need to work around to determine what physical evidence was suitable for testing. He said that a lot of items authorities had collected were preserved improperly, but current investigators were going to do the best they could with what they had.

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  About a year later, the results of the first round of testing came in, and Crouch told the press that three items of evidence had produced results, but what exactly those results were, he didn't disclose. When reporters asked Trish how she felt about the progress of the case, she told the Stewart County Standard she believed she knew who killed her sisters. But stopped short of giving a name or going into the reasons why she felt so confident she knew the identity of the killer. In 2024, 2025, and every anniversary that passes until they find justice for Carla and Vicky, Trish says her family plans to continue hosting memorial vigils for them. The pain of what her family and others who were close to the girls have endured for

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  more than 45 years is hard to put into words. Members of the family have faced a lot of hardships, and Margie, the girl's mother, is in her 90s with still no answers about who killed her two youngest daughters. A lot of people have been afraid to come forward with information about this case, but Amelia and Trish hope that by featuring the girls' story on this platform and other media outlets, that folks will stop being so afraid to share what they know. Though the girls' remains were eventually cremated, their family still held a graveside service at Standing Rock Cemetery in Dover. They were laid to rest next to one another, and their neighboring plots at the cemetery are still a place their loved ones visit

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  to remember them for the bright, friendly, young teens they were. If you have any information about the unsolved murders of Vickie Stout and Carla Atkins, please contact the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-824-3463, or by emailing tips@[email protected]. You can also reach out directly to the FBI Field Office in Nashville or the 23rd Judicial District Attorney General's Office. Links to those resources can be found in the show notes and blog post for this episode.

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  Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com, and you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators.

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  I think Chuck would approve.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else. Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow, a doorway. In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling new tales, immersive sound, and no promise that you'll find your way back. So step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week wherever you get your podcasts.