By Monte Mitchell
JOURNAL REPORTER
Thelma Hurley watched from her kitchen window as her grandson, Jimmy Blevins, walked out of his trailer and climbed into Freddie Hammer’s truck.
It was the burgundy-and-white dump truck that Hammer used to deliver firewood. She had heard the throaty rumble and watched as Jimmy came out wearing a sweatshirt. She saw them drive away together.
“Never saw him no more,” she said.
It was the early evening on Feb. 24, 2007. Blevins left chicken cooking in a Crock-Pot and the lights and television on.
The next morning was Sunday, and Hurley called down to Blevins’ trailer to see if he wanted to go into town with her and her husband as he usually did. She called and called. His mother tried, too, but she couldn’t get an answer either.
Jimmy Blevins was 41 and had been living in the trailer, which was little more than a camper with an attached shed, on his grandparents’ property on N.C. 16 for about 20 years. On Monday, Blevins’ brother, Joe, and a friend cut the padlock off the door and went in. The lights and television were still on.
His parents contacted the Ashe County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, and that evening the New River Volunteer Fire Department started a community search behind the trailer.
Dogs came the next day, and deputies used them to search the area. The state brought in a helicopter on Friday. And on Sunday, a full week after Blevins had last been seen, dozens of volunteers were scouring the countryside.
Searchers in canoes checked the North Fork of the New River, which flowed near Blevins’ home. Dive teams checked the deeper holes. A psychic contacted the sheriff’s office to say that she saw the body in an area of hills and valleys, a description that fits just about all of Ashe County.
A few days after the search for Blevins began, Hammer paid a visit to Bobby Blevins, one of Jimmy Blevins’ lifelong friends.
“You talked to the law yet?” Hammer asked him.
“Yeah, I’ve talked to them. I ain’t said nothing yet,” Bobby Blevins told him.
“I don’t like this ‘yet’ s---,” Hammer had said.
After he left, Bobby Blevins went straight to authorities and told them about the threats that Hammer made just a few days before Jimmy Blevins disappeared.
A ride in the night
Jimmy Blevins’ family asked Hammer what had happened that night. Hammer told them about the drive he took with Blevins the night that Blevins disappeared.
Hammer said he picked up Blevins at the trailer. They turned north onto N.C. 16 and almost immediately crossed the bridge over the North Fork of the New River and turned left at a white cross that marks the spot of an unsolved murder in 2005.
They followed the curvy back roads past mountain churches and fancy new vacation homes until they came to Weaver’s Ford Bridge, a high single-lane bridge over the river, about seven miles from where they started. The pavement ends here. Just past the bridge, they stopped at a fishing hole, where Hammer said he and Blevins drank a few beers.
Jimmy Blevins’ family would later retrace the route, looking for clues, even picking up a half-dozen cans of Budweiser that they believe Blevins and Hammer drank by the fishing hole.
The route that Hammer described got back on paved roads and passed the general store where Jimmy Blevins’ mother, Janet Blevins, works. Along the route there are at least two outhouses, old barns, vacant homes and acres of woods — thousands of places, they imagined, to hide or bury a body.
Hammer told Janet Blevins that he dropped off her son back at his trailer. He told her that he returned to his home off Old N.C. 16, about two miles away. He walked up the hill to check a fire pit at his business, Freddie P.’s Firewood. He was home by about 8 p.m., he told authorities.
Hammer’s account made investigators all the more suspicious. They questioned the route and whether he really was home by 8 p.m. And they wondered what Hammer had been doing at his fire pit after he came back from that ride.
On May 30, 2007, armed with a search warrant, a team of investigators descended on Hammer’s home and firewood business. A trackhoe dug down 14 feet into the fire pit. Anthropologists sifted through buckets of earth. Investigators looked to see if Blevins’ body could have been fed through a wood grinder. They had earlier sprayed Luminol in Hammer’s truck to see if they could find traces of blood.
There was no trace of Jimmy Blevins on Hammer’s property. That didn’t stop people from talking, or driving past Hammer’s house to stop and stare.
The rumors kept growing until eventually some around Ashe County came to believe that maybe Hammer had something to do with the unsolved shooting death of Tim Shatley two years earlier just north of the bridge on N.C. 16, about 250 yards from Blevins’ trailer.
Shatley’s van had crashed into a road barrier and his body was found slumped inside with a bullet wound. But there was little evidence in the case — no fingerprints, no weapon, not even a tire track.
One clue was a report of four gunshots that were heard by a waitress just home from work at the nearby Riverhouse Inn and Restaurant, that established the time of the killing at 11:19 p.m. on Nov. 19, 2005.
The waitress couldn’t see anything and went back into her house. Hearing shots in the distance wasn’t that unusual. People sometimes shot guns near the river for fun.
A driver saw what appeared to be a wreck and called 911.
At first, emergency workers thought that they were responding to a fatal wreck. Then they noticed the bullet hole in the side of the van. The autopsy would show that a large-caliber bullet had passed through Shatley’s body, starting at his shoulder and going through his lungs and aorta.
Three miles from the bridge, Shatley’s wife and young son waited for him to get home from his first night at a new job cooking at Pa-Paw’s Bar-B-Q in North Wilkesboro.
Shatley was 30 and trying to build a better life for his family. He was finishing up requirements for a degree in the culinary-arts program at Wilkes Community College, and told the owners of Pa-Paw’s that he felt good about his first busy Saturday there.
Only one lane of the bridge was open because of construction, and temporary lights had been set up to control traffic. William Sands, the investigator from the Ashe County Sheriff’s Office who was heading the Shatley case, believes that Shatley had stopped near a traffic light at the north side of the bridge when he was shot. Casings from a .44. magnum bullet were recovered at the light at the north end of the bridge. Shatley’s window had been found rolled down — on a freezing cold night. That makes Sands think that Shatley had stopped to talk to someone.
After the first shot, the van lurched forward about 250 feet before crashing against a concrete construction barrier.
Once Blevins went missing and Hammer was a person of interest in his disappearance, Sands started thinking about Hammer as a possible suspect in the Shatley case.
Some people, including Blevins’ family, suspected that Blevins knew that Hammer had something to do with Shatley’s killing and that he got rid of Blevins to silence him.
Hammer denies killing Shatley.
“I don’t even know what that boy looks like,” he wrote.
Sands said there’s no evidence to link Hammer to Shatley’s death. None. But he believes that Hammer is his best lead so far.
“That to me is probably as good as anything we’ve had, but it’s all speculation,” he said.
Rumors and crank calls
All the rumors tore at Hammer’s wife, Brenda. She got crank telephone calls — Freddie Hammer had been arrested for the crimes. He had been shot by police. They found two bodies in his front yard.
She would frantically call Hammer, crying on the phone.
“Crazy,” Hammer wrote. “A man can only handle so much.”
He answered questions for investigators on several occasions. He hired a lawyer. He even agreed to take a lie-detector test in the hopes of clearing his name. Hammer took the test but never received the results, which he thought were promised to him.
Sheriff James Williams of Ashe County said that the test results indicated that Hammer was being deceptive. But without a body, authorities didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Hammer still insists that he passed the test.
“I’m telling you right now, I passed. I know I did,” he said. “Because I had nothing to do with his disappearance. I know I passed it. I guarantee I passed it.”
Hammer said that a witness had spotted Blevins the day after Hammer had dropped him off and had seen Blevins cutting wood. Authorities talked to the witness, who told them that he had seen Blevins but wasn’t sure of the day.
Some time after Blevins disappeared, Hammer came into the Riverside store where Janet Blevins works. He walked past a missing-person poster of Blevins hanging in the window and another at the cash register, and gave Janet Blevins $200 of the money he owed Jimmy. Then, just before Christmas last year, he came to her home and gave her $250.
They talked for a bit, and she asked Hammer if he had seen the .22 Ruger pistol that Jimmy Blevins had bought the night before he disappeared. He had been showing it to everybody, but the pistol had been missing since the disappearance.
Hammer said he didn’t know anything about Jimmy having a new pistol. That made Janet Blevins suspicious.
“He would have showed it to him,” she said. “He’s like a kid with a new toy. He would have showed Fred that pistol.”
Something else chilled Janet Blevins during that conversation at Christmas. She begged Hammer to tell her whether he had taken Jimmy somewhere else, but he said he hadn’t.
“I watch Court TV,” he told her, “and they’ve been looking for a man for 10 years, and the law had walked all over his grave looking for him.”
Firewood business failing
The rumors about Blevins and Shatley ruined Hammer’s firewood business.
As his financial crisis deepened, he would stop by the sheriff’s office demanding that authorities clear his name. They couldn’t do that, authorities have since said, because they still considered him a suspect. Hammer also visited the local newspapers.
He came in to the sheriff’s office often enough, and his agitation was such that the sheriff told his receptionist to immediately alert officers when she saw Hammer approaching.
And insurance agencies notified the sheriff that Hammer had tried to take out life-insurance policies on the sheriff, an investigator, a judge and the district attorney.
“Are you not expecting me to be around?” the sheriff asked Hammer.
Hammer explained that he just wanted to make sure that there would be money in case he decided to sue.
“So you’re just hedging your bets?” Williams asked.
An order modifying the Hammers’ bankruptcy plan was entered on Aug. 13, noting that the firewood business had “substantially subsided.” The court reduced their payment to $110 a month.
Shortly before Jimmy Blevins disappeared, Hammer had bounced checks, and on Nov. 19, he was convicted in Iredell County of writing worthless checks. The 18-month sentence was suspended, and he was put on probation.
The Hammers weren’t making their bankruptcy payments. On Dec. 19, the court entered an order saying that the Hammers must resume payments.
A handwritten notation said: “Pay by end of January or case dismissed.”
With his protection from creditors about to end, Hammer now faced a crisis.
The week before the bankruptcy deadline, on Tuesday, Jan. 22, Hammer showed up at the sheriff’s office one last time. He complained about a loan company and made threats.
Hammer also stopped by the West Jefferson office of Hudler Carolina Tree Farms.
He told the secretary that he owed money to Bill Hudler, a son of owner Ron Hudler, and wanted to know where Bill was. He also asked where Ron was. He was told that Ron Hudler was out of town and was expected back at the end of the week.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.