THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406260107
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940626 LENGTH: IVOR
His surfer clothes. His spiked hair. His diamond earring.
{REST} The three bullet holes in his head.
Any unsolved killing is unusual in Southampton County, where the sheriff remembers murder victims by name.
But it's been three years since police found a 6-foot-tall, 247-pound, red-headed man dead in the woods. And they don't even know his name.
``It simply amazes me,'' said Jim Covington, a detective with the Southampton County Sheriff's Office. ``It's like a body just dropped out of the sky.''
For three years, the body found in the woods outside Ivor on April 19, 1991, has been stored at the state morgue in Richmond.
Last week, the body was shipped to the medical examiner's office in Norfolk, with instructions to send it back to Southampton County for burial.
State medical examiners need room in the morgue for cases they think they can solve.
``It's the kind of case that normally you would solve,'' said Covington, a Southampton police officer for 16 years. ``It's not like we haven't done the work.''
Police spent weeks scouring the woods with dogs and metal detectors, but found nothing to tell them how the man got there.
They searched his pockets and his clothes, and the coroner looked under his nails, in his teeth and inside his stomach and his bladder, but found nothing that told them where he'd been.
He had been stabbed years before in the heart, and had a surgical scar from his neck to his navel. Police advertised in medical journals, searching for a doctor who remembered him, but never got a response.
The man's fingerprints and picture have gone to every state. His description has aired on the local news and appeared in local papers.
Tips trickle in from around the country every few months, but none ever lead anywhere.
Sheriff Vernie Francis started planning a funeral for the man last week.
``Some homicides are harder than others, but at least you know who the victim is,'' Francis said.
``This one is like a big question mark, always there,'' he said. ``We don't even know how to start.''
The man in the woods isn't Hampton Roads' only nameless murder victim - a body found in Virginia Beach in February 1991 was just released for burial, too. The Norfolk morgue has two skeletons that also have not been identified.
But the man found in Virginia Beach was badly decomposed and didn't have a head or hands when he was discovered.
The man in the Southampton County woods was still a little warm when two farmers spotted him lying face down about 30 yards from a narrow dirt road.
They had been checking for gobblers off Va. Route 625. Turkey season was just a few days old.
The man looked too blue to be alive, but the farmers got off their tractors and yelled and shouted anyway. They were afraid to get too close. They went to a gas station and called police.
Covington got there just after 6:15 p.m. The man was wearing an Ocean Pacific T-shirt, lime-green pants and brown leather boat shoes. He was dead.
He had a folding knife in his pocket, and a diamond stud in his left ear. His blood-alcohol level was .22 percent.
Besides the three .32-caliber bullet holes in his head, there was a fourth in his chest, and he had scratches on his legs.
One bullet went in one side of his head and out the other. Another went in the back of his head and lodged near his eye.
The fatal shot, Francis thinks, was the one fired just behind the man's left ear. It was an execution-style ``contact wound,'' as investigators call it - the barrel of the gun was against the man's head.
Some evidence suggests the man died in the woods - his hands were tucked under his body and one leg was bent, as if he had fallen. A run through the woods in shorts would explain the scratches on his legs.
But there also was evidence that the body was dumped there - very little blood on the ground, no trampled weeds from a fight or struggle, and shots fired from the side, not behind as if the man were fleeing.
Animals might have made the scratches on the man's legs after he died. The medical examiner couldn't be sure.
But there were no tracks into the woods, and no footprints up the soft bank near the road.
The man weighed almost 250 pounds, a lot of weight to haul 30 yards from the road.
There were no signs that he was dragged.
Francis said he and other officers have flipped through the evidence file for the man in the woods hundreds of times. It's only half an inch thick, not much for a homicide case.
The next thing to go into the file will be details of the man's burial.
The body will be buried, not cremated, Francis said. Maybe it can be exhumed if police ever get any leads.
Until then, the body will lie in an inexpensive burial plot. A small, metal marker will indicate his grave.
``I don't know what it will say,'' said Francis, leaning back in his office chair and folding his arms.
``John Doe, I guess. Maybe something else. I don't know.
``I wish I did.''
{KEYWORDS} MURDER SHOOTING UNIDENTIFIED BODY
by CNB