Mother, attorney seek call to police in Heather Teague case. KSP has said it doesn't exist
Sarah Teague finally got a chance to hear it.
After spending years filing open records requests, Kentucky State Police allowed her to hear the call an eyewitness made to KSP’s Henderson post mere minutes after her 23-year-old daughter, Heather, was abducted from Newburgh Beach on Aug. 26, 1995.
It was now 2008. She and her attorney, Chip Adams, came to police headquarters and had them play the tape. They say they heard the witness tell a female dispatcher how a shirtless man possibly wearing a wig or mosquito netting emerged from a nearby grove of trees and dragged the sunbathing Heather away, never to be seen again.
Neither Sarah nor Adams were given a recording of what they heard.
Eight years later, they had a chance to hear the call again. But this time, it was different.
The dispatcher was male, they said. And unlike before, the caller made no reference to a wig or mosquito netting: two details that could possibly explain why KSP’s main suspect – Marty Dill – didn’t match the eyewitness sketch they released days after Heather’s disappearance.
Even though he’d had long hair and a beard in the past, Dill had short hair and a clean shave by the time Heather was taken.
After a contentious lawsuit, a judge ruled in Sarah’s favor in 2017 and ordered KSP to hand over its case file. But despite it containing numerous other recordings, the tape she and Adams say they heard in 2008 was missing, they said.
Only the call heard in 2016 was included, and lawyers for KSP have repeatedly stated in court that only one call exists, Adams said.
He now says he doesn’t believe the audio they heard in 2008 was “genuine.” And although he doesn’t have proof and calls it “pure speculation” on his part, he believes someone in the KSP “created” that call.
“They maintain there’s only one. So the explanation is you fabricated the first one to bolster or validate the story they were trying to sell Sarah Teague from day one,” Adams said. “Or two, there were two calls, but you lost one. That’s also a possibility, to just be objective about it. … And then the third possibility is we’re wrong. But I’m not.
“I’m 1,000% sure: that first call I heard had mosquito netting and wig, and the sexes between the two dispatchers were different,” he continued. “I’ve signed an affidavit to that extent. It is in the record. And I’m an officer of the court. You can take that on whatever value you think that is. Hell, I’m a 50-year-old man with kids and a long history in practicing law. … I’m in good standing with the court and the community.
“But they say they only have one call. And I will absolutely go to my death saying I’ve heard two.”
The Courier & Press sent a detailed layout of Adams' and Teague's comments to KSP, and spokesman Trooper Corey King said he’d forward them to a sergeant.
“I was told Sarah and Chip (have) the entire case,” he responded a couple days later. “And they can share it with you as we don’t have anything more than what they do.”
Sarah Teague and Adams say they don’t have the audio they heard in 2008, either. And if they’re right that they’ve heard two calls – which they swear they are – where did the other one go? And why has KSP testified that it only has one?
Those questions are just part of a case that’s gotten more and more complicated as the years have lurched on.
Five days after Heather disappeared, Dill killed himself while authorities surrounded his Poole, Kentucky home. With KSP's main suspect dead, the case didn't bring any arrests or convictions. But for Sarah, it was far from over.
Almost three decades after that awful day at Newburgh Beach, she continues to do whatever she can to drag the investigation forward.
“I know one thing: 28 years after Heather was taken, I shouldn’t have to be filing open records requests and filing appeals about that call,” she said. “Especially six years after (a judge) ruled that we were supposed to be given all versions of the … call.
"They've just not done the right thing."
The call that was released
The eyewitness – who the Courier & Press isn’t naming since he’s a private citizen who’s never been charged in connection with Heather Teague’s disappearance – said he’d been having lunch with his wife at home in Warrick County, Indiana, when he decided to peer through his telescope at the thin strip of glorified “beach” that splayed just across the Ohio River.
In the audio that was eventually released – the audio Adams and Sarah Teague say they heard in 2016 – the man speaks at a fast clip as he relays what he saw unfold several minutes before.
There was a girl alone on the left side of the beach, he says, sunbathing facedown with her top undone.
“About this time a guy come running out of the trees on the lefthand side and he ran down and grabbed her by the head of the hair and jerked her up,” he says. “And she grabbed her towel and he walked her up into the trees up in the riverbank over here. And I been watching now for 25 minutes, and I ain’t seen her come back.
“… I swear this guy looked like he had a gun,” he continues. “He come down, he had a chrome-plated – I could see it glistening in the sun. And it looked like a revolver.”
The woman was Caucasian, he said, with long brownish-black hair that stretched to the middle of her back. She wore floral bikini bottoms and clutched a “pinkish” towel to her chest in an attempt to cover herself after her top fell off.
The abductor was white, too, and “kinda heavyset.”
“He just had like blue jean / cutoff pants on and tennis shoes and I couldn’t tell if he had a full beard or if he just had real shaggy hair or something over his face,” the caller says. “… Maybe it’s nothing, but god**** it scared the s*** out of me.”
Mosquito netting or wigs are never mentioned, and the dispatcher hangs up and relays the details to a patrol officer.
“10-4,” the officer says. “I just drove through that area where the dam is. I didn’t see anyone there, but I’ll go back.”
In the recording, the patrol officer said he was in Broadview Subdivision in Henderson at the time – a several-mile circuitous drive made even longer by the fact that Newburgh Beach was extremely difficult to reach by land. Boaters had it easy, but motorists would have had to brave “a rut-filled road that winds for several miles through farm fields,” the Evansville Courier reported two days after the kidnapping.
By the time authorities arrived, the only sign of Heather were the things she left behind.
The third call
The recording says something else too: that the eyewitness made at least one other call.
At the beginning, the caller says he first phoned Indiana State Police, but that they told him to call KSP instead. He repeated this to the Akron Beacon Journal in 2005, when they ran a series on an Ohio man and former Henderson resident authorities there believed could have been linked to Heather’s disappearance.
Sarah Teague said the case files note that an ISP dispatcher took the call, but apparently failed to record it. The Courier & Press asked an ISP spokesman if any recording of the call existed. He didn’t respond.
All that bothers Adams. ISP would have “had to” record that call, he said. It’s a “certainty.”
“There’s a problem even with the tape we have: That this eyewitness says I’ve already been on the phone with another law enforcement agency,” he said. “And listen, there’s no record of that call. So what is going on?”
‘I’ve listened to the tape, and I’ve never heard that’
Apparently the only call that survives is the one Sarah Teague and Adams heard in 2016. And thanks to Sarah, any member of the public can now hear it. After a judge ordered KSP to release its investigatory file, she posted the audio to YouTube.
But when she first heard it in 2016, it was all new.
Back then, anytime she called to ask about the status of the case, KSP routed her to now-retired Detective Sgt. Jason Pagan.
He didn’t become a trooper until years after the Teague case. He didn’t even know about it until getting promoted around 2014 or ’15, he told the Courier & Press last month.
“As a trooper, we’re not privy to detective cases,” he said. “And it was an old case at the time, so it wouldn’t have been brought up to us.”
But he eventually became familiar. And while talking to Sarah one day, he heard her mention the eyewitness’ call to KSP – and those references to mosquito netting and a wig.
“And I believe I made the comment, ‘You know Sarah, I’ve listened to the tape and I’ve never heard that,” he said. “So I invited her and her attorney to come to post and listen to the tape – the one that I had that was in the filings.
“And when they listened to it, they were like, ‘This is not the same tape however many years ago.’”
Pagan said he never heard another tape. He retired in 2017.
The chain of custody
According to Sarah Teague, the differences didn’t end at mosquito-netting and the gender-swapped dispatcher. The whole abduction played out differently. For decades, she’d heard that the man crept, not ran, along the dunes, almost stalking Heather, before sneaking up, putting his hand on her back, and wrapping her hair around his fist.
“And it absolutely devastated me, because for 20 years I had imagined it (the other way),” she said.
Adams will freely say he believes the call was “created,” and that no one else but KSP could have done it. But when it comes to how or who, he says it would be “horribly reckless” to speculate.
One way to get to the bottom of everything would be to unearth the tape’s chain of custody: the paper trail that shows who’s accessed the audio since investigators lodged it into evidence.
Sarah and Adams received those files after a long court battle, but they’ve only raised more questions.
In one KSP document Sarah provided to the Courier & Press, the chain of custody jumps from Aug. 28, 1995 – when a “reel to reel tape” was placed in evidence storage – to Aug. 17, 2007, when it was “released for examination.”
It went back into storage the next month before being handed over to the FBI in November 2007 for “testing.” According to Adams and Teague, they first heard the audio a few months later.
“(KSP has) given us what they say is a complete chain of custody. And when they provide that, they can raise their hands and say, ‘We’ve provided it,’” Adams said. “I can’t prove otherwise that they haven’t complied with what the court ordered them to do.
“I can tell you I’ve heard two phone calls. I can tell you that the eyewitness states in a recording that he made two phone calls.”
On Nov. 9, the Courier & Press filed an open records request with Kentucky State Police asking for “audio of all calls made to KSP Post 16, as well as any 911 audio, the KSP has in its possession related to the disappearance of Heather Teague.”
KSP said they were processing the request and would respond within a matter of days.
“I've never heard of a case similar to this before," Adams said. "... I’ve never read about it – let alone heard or been involved in something like this. This is alarming.”
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Mother at odds with KSP over mysterious call in Heather Teague case
