The Daily Courier, Forest City, NC, Thursday, December 31, 2009 — 3
STATE
After 37 years, suspects in NC Marine’s murder will finally face charges By KEVIN MAURER Associated Press Writer
JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — William Miller’s final errand was supposed to be a good deed, helping his estranged wife with car trouble. The Marine sergeant left home one night in 1972 and within the hour was found dead on a rural road. Thirty-seven years later, three people face trial on murder charges for what prosecutors say was an ambush triggered by a love triangle around Miller’s wife and violence between Marine pals. The case remained unsolved until Miller’s sister contacted a newspaper reporter looking into cold cases and the resulting investigation elicited new information from a 1970s baby sitter. Miller’s ex-wife Vickie Babbitt, 58, is scheduled to go to trial in March on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Also charged with murder and conspiracy are George Hayden, 57, who married Babbitt after Miller’s death and later became a small-town police chief, and Rodger Gill, 56, an ex-Marine who was friends with the others. “All these years I’ve been carrying on this crusade trying to get the cold case reopened. Everything fell into place. I just know we have divine help,” said Miller’s sister, Sharron Aguilar, 68, who with her husband owns an automotive air conditioning and restoration company in Houston, Texas. Lawyers for the three people charged either declined to comment or did not return calls. Trial dates for Hayden and Gill have not been set yet. All three are free on bond. Miller, Hayden and Gill were all friends in the Marines Corps. On September 16, 1972, court records say Miller got a call from his wife asking for help with car trouble. A month earlier, he had kicked
her out of their Jacksonville house after returning from a year’s service in Okinawa, Japan, to find George Hayden living with her. He beat up Hayden to get him to leave. When his wife of two years walked out with Hayden, they took the Millers’ 1-year-old daughter, Wendy. Miller borrowed a neighbor’s car for the late-night trip to help his estranged wife and took a .22-calibre pistol with him. He had told his sister days before that he felt threatened. Passing motorists found Miller’s body near Camp Lejeune less than an hour after he left home. He’d been shot twice. Prosecutors say Babbitt faked car trouble to lure Miller to a secluded stretch of rural road in Jacksonville. They say Hayden was waiting in a ditch with an M-16 rifle and shot Miller in the temple and back. He appears to have been surprised: When police found the car, its engine was running, the headlights were on and Miller’s pistol remained in the front seat, unfired. “I spoke with him for the last time when he called crying to say he found George living with Vickie. He stated George would not leave, so he beat the living hell out of George,” Miller’s sister Aguilar said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “George then threatened Bill stating ’I have an M-16.’ He told me he was getting a lawyer to divorce Vickie and fight for Wendy.” Aguilar said she always suspected Babbitt. When her brother died, Babbitt called the family and told them he had been killed but didn’t offer any details. She attended the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery with Hayden, but wouldn’t talk with the family. Babbitt and Hayden married four months after Miller’s death, then divorced four years later. Hayden retired from the Marine
This undated photo provided by Sharron Aguilar shows Marine Sgt. William Miller with his then wife Vickie Babbitt and their daughter Wendy in Jacksonville, N.C. After thirty-seven years, Vickie Babbitt, 58, of Bend, Ore., and 57-year-old George Hayden, a former police chief once married to Babbitt, face charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Miller. Her trial is to begin in March.
Associated Press
Corps in 1989 and worked for the Carteret County Sheriff’s Department before becoming chief for the Cape Carteret and Belhaven police departments. Hayden’s son, Joshua Hayden, a Cape Carteret police officer, told WNCT-TV last year that he didn’t think his father is a criminal. “My father is a good man, very law abiding, a strict law abider,” he said. “I don’t see him committing a murder now or 36 years ago.” He did not return calls from The Associated Press seeking comment. Babbitt remarried and worked as a bookkeeper at Austin Tile Design Studio in Bend, Ore. Aguilar never quit trying to get the case open. When Lindell Kay, a crime reporter for The Daily News of Jacksonville, started working on a project about unsolved murders, Aguilar sent him the initial investigation report and Kay wrote two stories about the case. After Kay’s stories appeared in
August 2008, a former baby sitter for Miller’s daughter named Bonnie Sharpe came forward with key information. Sharpe was engaged at one time to Gill. Sharpe told investigators that Gill had witnessed the shooting, according to news reports. Sharpe did not return AP calls seeking comment. Sharpe’s tip became the starting point for a new investigation and led to the arrests of Babbitt and Hayden one week before the 37th anniversary of the murder. Police charged Gill in January 2009 with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He was arrested in Athens, Ill., a small town near Springfield. Aguilar said she plans to be at Babbitt’s trial in March. “I know we’re going to get justice. I don’t have any doubts because I know I had divine help with this,” she said. “Every step of the way, a path opened. I don’t think I was led this far to be disappointed.”
Sen. Soles, target of probe, won’t run again n He
has served 21 terms in North Carolina General Assembly, Senate By GARY D. ROBERTSON Associated Press Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina’s longest-serving state senator said Wednesday he won’t seek re-election next year as prosecutors pursue criminal charges over a shooting at his home in August. Sen. R.C. Soles, D-Columbus, announced he won’t seek a 22nd consecutive term. He’s the state’s longest continuously serving lawmaker, first elected to the General Assembly in 1968 and in the Senate since 1977. State prosecutors announced this month they plan to seek a felony assault charge against Soles after a grand jury found probable cause that he acted criminally when he shot a former law client. Soles has said he acted in self-defense. “I plan to serve out the remainder of my term with the vigor and diligence my constituents deserve and I will
continue to practice law,” Soles said in a statement announcing his decision. “Public service is a noble calling and I have tried to live up to the ideals of Sen. Soles a true leader.” Soles made no reference to the case in the statement. But he said in an interview with The Associated Press he would be less than truthful to say his legal troubles played no role in his decision. “It sure was not the motivating force,” said Soles, who turned 75 on Dec. 17. “That alone would not have kept me from running.” Soles is the latest powerful Democrat leaving the Senate. Outgoing Majority Leader Tony Rand of Cumberland County is to resign Thursday to head the parole commission. Finance Committee co-chairman David Hoyle of Gaston also won’t seek reelection. Soles said he had considered
not running in 2008. He said his Senate district, which includes Columbus, Pender and Brunswick counties, has been increasingly difficult to win as transplants arrive from other states and register as Republicans. Soles won by less than 3 percentage points in the November 2008 election while spending more than $839,000 in campaign expenses. “It’s not that they dislike me. They just don’t know me,” Soles said. The soft-spoken attorney made headlines in the past two years when a house that he paid a former client to build caught fire and when young men he described as former clients were charged with trespassing. A former client claimed recently that Soles molested him a decade ago, but the accuser later said he made the story up. Neighbors have made dozens of emergency calls in recent years telling police they heard gunshots, screams and loud arguments coming from his home or law office. Most recently, the State
Murderer loses his appeal
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A man convicted of killing his father and dumping his remains in the woods of North Carolina lost his appeal and request for a new trial on Wednesday. Derek Anderson was convicted in 2006 of first-degree intentional homicide in the death of his 55-yearold father Allen Krnak and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He appealed and sought a new trial, but the 4th District Court of Appeals rejected all of his arguments Wednesday. Anderson argued that the admission of hearsay evidence violated his right to confrontation and that his due process rights were violated by allowing the jury, rather than the judge, to consider whether the police altered evidence and by incorrectly allowing expert testimony about mass murders. His attorney, Tim Provis, said Anderson will appeal the case to the state Supreme Court. A spokesman for the state Department of Justice did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Anderson’s father, his mother, his brother and the family dog all disappeared from their rural Helenville home over the Fourth of July weekend in 1998. Helenville is in Jefferson County about 50 miles east of Madison. His father’s skeletal remains were found by hunters in 1999 in the Roy Taylor National Forest of Jackson County, N.C., less than 10 miles from Western Carolina University, which Anderson attended in the early 1990s. Anderson was arrested in 2001 after his father’s remains were identified. An autopsy found Krnak was killed by a blow to his face and head that broke his jaw into two pieces. Anderson’s mother, Donna Krnak, and his brother, Thomas Krnak, have never been found. Prosecutors said they believed Anderson also disposed of their bodies in the same woods. Anderson, 40, changed his name from Andrew Krnak after his family disappeared. Prosecutors based their case on circumstantial evidence that they contended ruled out anyone other than Anderson.
Bureau of Investigation looked into the Aug. 23 shooting of Thomas Kyle Blackburn. Authorities say Soles shot Blackburn after he and another intruder kicked in the front door of his secluded Tabor City home. Blackburn wasn’t badly hurt. Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office said earlier this month that it plans to submit an indictment in January on a felony charge of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury, which the grand jury would have to approve. Soles declined to comment on the case Wednesday, referring questions to his Raleigh attorney. Soles said fellow Senate Democrats in Raleigh didn’t ask him to resign immediately and that he had no plans to do so. Soles was emotional when he discussed his time in the Legislature, where he served as chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee and the Democratic caucus. The Senate even approved a resolution in 2005 officially calling him a “North Carolina institution.”
Sewage spill in French Broad ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A power outage at a western North Carolina sewage treatment plant sent 374,000 gallons of untreated sewage into the French Broad River. The Asheville Citizen-Times reported Tuesday that the outage on Christmas morning at the Buncombe County Metropolitan Sewerage District treatment plant led to the spill.
Attorney Brian King
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