The Chaparrel Murders: Dollar Store Justice

 

On a muggy August night in 1982 sixteen-year-old Terry Roberts sat with his girlfriend, Betty, on her front porch listening for the familiar rumble of his dad's red Ford pickup truck. His brother Timmy had promised to come and take him home, but that was hours ago. At 5:00 a.m., Terry started walking. Six miles and almost two hours later, the weary teen reached his mobile home just as the warm morning light was lifting vapor ghosts from the blacktop. Hoping to avoid his father's grilling, he quietly slipped through the back door near his bedroom, nudged his runners off, and fell into bed.

 

A couple of hours later, neighbor Dave Bankhead was banging on Terry's bedroom window. Dave bellowed that customers were waiting at the Roberts' gas station and seafood store, a small cement block building between the family's trailer and the highway. Terry got up and walked toward his parent's bedroom at the far end of the trailer, looking for his dad. He found him sprawled across the floor of the galley kitchen in a pool of blood. Glenn Roberts had been shot dead and robbed. The gas station and store had been vandalized. His red Ford pickup was missing, along with Terry's seventeen-year-old brother Timmy.

 

Three weeks later, in the densely wooded area of the Clover Run, police discovered an abandoned pickup and another death. The decomposed body belonged to the suspect in the father's shooting, Timmy Roberts-also dead from a shotgun blast.

 

Blame in the small West Virginia mountain town shifted to twenty-three-year old Russell "Rusty" Phillips, who was later charged with the murder of the local business owner and his son.

 

No one knows what happened. "There are just too many pieces missing in this puzzle. We may never know what happened that night," the public defender said to the jury. The prosecutor told the judge at the closing of the trial, "The State has absolutely no idea of the actual happening of this event." On leaving the courtroom, as the jury began deliberation, the prosecutor exclaimed to a witness, "We will be lucky to get a hung jury."

 

Professing absolute innocence, Rusty Phillips was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life without mercy for killing his friend, Timmy Roberts. The charge for the father's murder was later nulli?ed for lack of evidence. Phillips remains incarcerated in the maximum-security Mount Olive Correctional facility in West Virginia to this day. Prison authorities have denied all requests for us to meet, even with his consent.

 

Edith Roberts, the destitute widow, was refused victim compensation amid police allegations that she hadn't cooperated with authorities and rumors of her connection to the murders. Edith is desperate to know what really happened that night.