Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - See if you can play detective with this story

warrrreagl · 03-27-2005, 07:41 PM

This is a long article timed on the first anniversary of a multiple homicide-suicide that rocked a nearby community to me. The facts of this case (what little they've given us) have always been very puzzling, and it has never added up to me. Something tells me that there's a whole lot more to this story than what the victims' families are telling us, so I wanted to see what some of you think. How many holes can you find?

I apologize for the length of this:

Quote:

In Broad Daylight
Beauregard killings still haunt families
http://www.oanow.com/servlet/Satelli...=1031781813024

Jack Stripling / Staff Writer
March 27, 2005

Editor’s Note: This story is a composite of interviews conducted between March 26, 2004, and March 24, 2005. The Opelika-Auburn News spoke with the victims’ families, law enforcement who worked the case and consulted documentation associated with the investigation.

BEAUREGARD - It was 65 degrees here under some scattered clouds. Wanda McCullars was watching her infant granddaughter, Allison McKenzie Barr, who slept in a playpen near the dining room of this double-wide trailer. Little Allie, just 7 months old, was the light that had finally entered the McCullars’ home. At 25, McCullars’ son, Jason Barr, had already lost a son of his own to premature birth. Today, Wanda McCullars would lose her son too.

There was, of course, no way to know that by the afternoon of March 26, 2004, Jason Barr would be dead. McCullars might have said something different to her son that day had she known it would be the last time they ever spoke.

Instead, it was the sort of conversation they had all the time. Jason, who lived a few steps away in his own trailer, had come to borrow a spade. He wanted to plant some flowers that morning as a surprise for his wife. When her son walked off, spade in hand, McCullars told him “bring it back when you’re done.” It was the last time she ever saw him.

Planting flowers was the sort of thing Jason Barr was beginning to do more often. He was getting serious about being a husband, telling his mother that he wasn’t going to go off to the racetrack anymore without bringing along his wife, Mandi Cole Barr. It wasn’t right, he said, to leave her behind on all the nights he headed out to race four-wheelers with his friends.
“He was so humble, he wouldn’t even take the checkered flag around the track when he won,” McCullars said.

The Ride

There would be time for a short afternoon ride if Barr’s friends got to his house quickly enough. Barr was set to work the late shift Friday, stocking Buffalo Rock Pepsi machines. His friends, Daniel Foster and William “Scooter” Stephens, were rushed to get ready for a wedding rehearsal that night, and by Saturday afternoon they planned to be on the road to Panama City, Fla., for spring break.

Foster, 23, and Stephens, 19, had weddings of their own approaching. In every conceivable way, the three men were at the beginning of life.

The group’s decision to take their ATVs off the beaten path that afternoon is still mysterious to their parents.

“If I had known they were that far out, I would’ve pitched a fit,” McCullars said.

The property at the 1100 block of Lee Road 401 had been in the Foster family before it was sold to Lt. Col. Bernard Vaughan, a 69-year-old veteran who once served as an Airborne Ranger, the military’s elite special operations force.
It is easy to see the appeal Vaughan’s tract of land had for ATV riders. A dried-up pond created a perfect circle - a track - for the men to race around. But in the rush to get to the pond, Foster had forgotten his cigarettes and it wasn’t long before Stephens was getting a thirst for Coca-Cola. Barr’s little brother, Russell McCullars, was tasked with going back home to get the provisions.

Russell, a 15-year-old who at 6 foot 4 inches stood two inches taller than his older brother, had to make another trip back home a short while later. Foster had a loose lug nut on his wheel, so Russell dutifully hopped on his ATV, heading back home across a muddy creek to get a wrench for Foster. When Russell McCullars agreed to do a favor for a friend that afternoon, he sealed his fate as the lone survivor of what would become known as the Beauregard Murders.

“Any way you look at it, he missed being shot by two minutes,” said Wayne McCullars, Russell’s father.

The Witness

The details of what Russell McCullars saw when he rode back to the pond may never be fully known. Police say he came upon the scene and from a distance saw the shooter, whom he described as a male in his 30s, standing over the bodies of his brother and friends.

The McCullars family only knows that when Russell ran into their home, covered in mud, absolute hysteria ensued.

“He came in the door telling me, ‘They’re dead! They’re dead! They’re all dead!” Wanda McCullars said, throwing her arms to her knees.

Wayne McCullars tried to restrain his son, who rushed toward the family’s gun safe and fought with his father over the keys. Young Allie cried in the background. At 1:38 p.m., Wanda McCullars called 9-1-1, screaming to the operator who told her to “keep everyone inside.”

Fearing for the young men’s lives, Wayne McCullars told his son that he was heading out to the site of the shootings. Russell, a burly football player at Beauregard High School, grabbed his father from behind and wrestled him. Wayne McCullars’ cigarettes fell out of his front pocket, scattering across the floor like marbles.

“He said, ‘He’ll kill you, he’ll kill you,” Wanda McCullars remembers.

But Wayne McCullars was undeterred. He went to the home of Ralph Hall, a reserve deputy familiar with the property where the shootings took place. By the time McCullars and Hall got out to the site, a large perimeter was covered with law enforcement officers in bulletproof vests hoisting AK-47s. Hall was permitted to pass through; McCullars was physically removed from the scene and taken back to his truck.

“On that particular day, we didn’t know if we had someone coming into the community and killing people,” Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said.

“Scooter”

By late Friday afternoon, William Stephens was looking at a photograph of a tattoo. Staring at a large cross, tattooed between two shoulders, Stephens confirmed to the coroner that the body in the picture was his son, “Scooter.”

William Stephens, who worked for Dowdle Gas at the time, had nicknamed his son “Scooter” when he was just a baby. Scooter never crawled as a baby; he scooted across the carpet.

“They say you have to crawl before you walk, but Scooter didn’t,” said Sheri Stephens, Scooter’s mother. “He never crawled.”

Scooter was a straight-laced kid in the eyes of his parents. He smoked but never in front of grown-ups. He even lectured his father once for giving a wine cooler to his fiancé, Heather Pearson. They had a deal, Scooter told his dad, that she wouldn’t drink.

Most who grew up here know Scooter’s mother. She drove many of them to school on the bus, and she’s spent 24 years involved in one way or another with the school system. So it wasn’t a surprise that some of Scooter’s friends recognized her that afternoon at Wal-Mart, where she worked a second job.

“They came up to me and said ‘Miss Stephens, what are you doing here? Scooter’s been shot’,” Sheri Stephens recalled.

The Investigation

Russell McCullars’ eyewitness account, which placed the shooter in his 30s, is one of the reasons police say they spent much of Saturday, March 27 focused on two suspects other than Vaughan. Vaughan, who told police he’d been in Columbus, Ga., when the shootings took place, was only interviewed briefly Friday, Jones said.

“The Friday contact with Mr. Vaughan was very superficial,” said Jones, who had known Vaughan for years and called him “a decent guy.”

But police began to rule out their two suspects Saturday, and more signs starting pointing to Vaughan. Vaughan was known to be an avid gun collector, he was the owner of the property where the killings occurred and he was without any real alibi.
“His alibi is he’s in Columbus,” recalled Capt. Van Jackson with the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.

Police have pieced together a rough timeline of Vaughan’s actions on Saturday. He went to Columbus, Ga., police say, where he had a storage unit registered in a fictitious name. There, he traded vehicles, police say. The truck he left in Columbus, which had drops of Vaughan’s own blood on the seat, had been reported stolen from a business that is now an insurance company, Jackson said. Vaughan returned home in a different truck, police say, that was registered in his own name.

“Those were efforts that were made to try to cover up the crime,” Jackson said.

But Vaughan was not brought in for questioning late Saturday evening, nor was he ever brought in for a lineup for Russell McCullars to view. Instead, police waited. Investigators had been awake for more than 30 hours at that point, Jones said, and he did not think they could perform an adequate interrogation of Vaughan.

A Shot in the Dark

A call at 4:26 a.m. Sunday marked another surreal turn in the investigation. Bernard Vaughan had been found dead in his backyard from what police determined to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

While police say they are completely certain Vaughan took his own life, an autopsy report has raised questions for both the McCullars and the Stephens. Vaughan suffered not one, but two gunshot wounds. One shot entered his mid-upper neck and exited through the right side of his nose. A second shot entered his left temple and exited through his right temple. Both families wonder how Vaughan, 69, could muster the energy to lift a gun for a second shot.

Police say Vaughan’s death and that of his son, years earlier, were both ruled suicides after thorough investigation.

Vaughan left an 11-sentence handwritten suicide note, signed “Bernie,” in which he referred to struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Autopsy reports show that Vaughan had two antidepressants in his system, Desipramine and Imipramine, at the time of his death. According to mentalhealth.com, both drugs have occasional adverse effects which include:

* Confusional states (especially in the elderly) with hallucinations

* Delusions

* Anxiety

* Exacerbation of psychosis

* Agitation

* Nightmares

Whether Vaughan reported or ever suffered from any side effects from these drugs is unknown. His wife, Jo Ann Vaughan, declined to be interviewed for this story.

“We’re Not Healing”

After a Lee County grand jury cited strong circumstantial evidence in December that Vaughan likely killed the three men, the McCullars and Stephens found little closure.

“We’re not healing,” Wanda McCullars said. “None of us are.”
Pam Foster, Daniel Foster’s stepmother, said last week that her family was in too much pain to be interviewed for this story.
The lingering question “why” still haunts the families, though most see last year’s murders as a result of a dispute that spun tragically out of control. Emotions now swing on a pendulum from grief to rage. Seated just steps away from his son’s old room Thursday, William Stephens said he still feels anger and confusion.

“I wish I could’ve been the one to have squeezed the trigger (when Vaughan died),” Stephens said, a pinch of Skoal packed in his lip.

Just as quickly, though, his wife says “You would never be able to live with yourself if you did.”

There is still life in the Stephens home, though. Scooter’s friends stop by now and then to play with his 11-year-old sister, Betty “Prissy” Stephens. But in the supermarket when friends bump into the Stephens, they often don’t know what to say. They usually say nothing at all.

“It’s a chore every day to get up,” Sheri Stephens says. “But you put your feet on the floor and face another day.”