Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 11, 1993 TAG: 9302110057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
15-YEAR-OLD FINDS BODY OF MOM; FATHER CHARGED
LaSavior Anderson sat in her Bunche Drive apartment Tuesday night waiting for her mother to come home.Wednesday, the 15-year-old girl found her.
She spotted the strangled body of Delphine Augusta Anderson just a few feet from where she had been sitting. The 34-year-old woman had been stuffed inside a kitchen closet and covered with blankets and a lawn mower.
"I knew who did it," LaSavior Anderson said tearfully Wednesday afternoon as she sat on stairs inside the apartment.
Police have accused the girl's father, Delphine Anderson's estranged husband. Walter Anderson, 36, now faces a murder charge. He was held without bond Wednesday night at the Roanoke jail.
"They were separated," said Carolyn Fields, Delphine Anderson's stepmother. "He just kept hounding her."
LaSavior Anderson said that late last month the hounding turned violent. She reported to police that Walter Anderson was on his way to the Hardee's restaurant where her mother worked, intending to harm her. He returned to the apartment, picked up a butcher knife, and put it down again when police arrived, the girl reported.
Delphine Anderson did not press charges.
Last week, he was charged with assault and battery. LaSavior Anderson said he tried to drag her mother from her job at the restaurant, where she was an assistant manager.
LaSavior Anderson and her 12-year-old brother, Shawn, last saw their mother alive Tuesday morning when they left for school.
"I was waiting for her to call, but she didn't call," said the teen-age girl, who feared foul play. "We went to funeral homes and the hospitals to find her."
She opened the closet only after a friend of her mother's had come to the house and asked her to check and see if Delphine Anderson's luggage was still there.
Carolyn Fields said she knew something was wrong when Delphine Anderson had not contacted her children Tuesday night.
"Her mother did not go off and not call home," Fields said. "It was not like something she'd do."
Keywords:
ROMUR