Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 10, 1993 TAG: 9305100036
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ORANGE LENGTH: Long
The couple who lived in the cabin haven't been seen since Feb. 22, a day after they left their 6-year-old son with his grandparents. The boy's seventh birthday came and went April 1. Still no word from his folks.
Relatives and police would like to think A. Lynn Redmon Jr., 40, and S. Kim Garrett Redmon, 28, are out there somewhere, but they are losing hope.
The local sheriff has searched with dogs, aircraft, divers and state police. Investigators have interviewed at least 250 people. In a community where everyone knows most everyone else, no one seems to know what happened to the Redmons.
They just vanished.
"You could say, after all is said and done, they just left and don't want to be found. There is no law against that. It's not like they abandoned their child, because they left him in a safe environment," said Investigator D.D. Brooks of the sheriff's office.
"But someone is harmed. How bad, or what for, we don't know."
Everything seemed normal that last weekend.
As always, Kim Redmon called her sister, Tammy Waugh, on Saturday. Kim asked Tammy to baby-sit while she and her husband ran errands.
The Redmons went to a shopping center. They took their red pickup to have its rebuilt engine checked. They put new tires on their car.
The next day, Kim took the child to her husband's parents' house in the town of Orange. (Family members asked that the child not be named in this story; other children have taunted him, they said.)
Every week, the senior Redmons took the boy to Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church; they also often kept him on weekdays while both parents worked.
Only in the last six months or so had Lynn Redmon added regularly to his wife's income. She toiled for years in an automobile brake reconditioning factory; he found work here and there, finally settling in last fall as a truck driver for a construction company.
Monday morning, Feb. 22, Lynn showed up at his parents' house with clothes, shoes and books that the child would need for school.
"He didn't seem upset," said Lynn's mother, Dorothy Redmon. "He just brought the clothes by, and he said his back was bothering him. I said, `Well, take care of yourself.' "
And that was it. The boy spent that night with his grandparents, and the next and the next. Finally, on Thursday, Lynn's younger brother decided to check on the couple and feed their dogs.
The Redmons lived at the southeastern edge of Orange County, about 30 miles from Fredericksburg. They were caretakers for a 100-acre farm owned by a Maryland man. Getting to their house means threading country lane after country lane, bouncing up a dirt road and leaving that for a one-lane path that's not even on local maps.
The path passes the owner's house, which is seldom occupied, and dead-ends at the Redmons' cottage. Rectangular, made of light green wood with an overhang on every side, the house looks like a state park shelter. Sliding glass doors - now boarded shut - open onto a scene from a landscape painting: rolling brown and green fields ringed by woods, a meandering pond, and beyond that a weathered red outbuilding.
Redmon's brother, Greg, did not go inside when he visited that Thursday. He fed the family's two dogs, which roam free on the property, and left. Saturday, A.L. Redmon Sr. came out for a look. He fed the dogs, then went in the house, which was unlocked.
"He came back and said to me the table leg was broken," said Dorothy Redmon. "I did not pay any attention to him because he didn't seem too disturbed at first."
She decided the next day they should go over and let her grandson take pictures of the dogs and have a closer look at the house.
"A basket of clothes was sitting there at the door where we went in," she said. "And I looked and I saw the big coffee table with four legs broken, four legs broken off. It kind of concerned me, I didn't know why. Then I saw something on the carpet beside the basket, and I said, `Oh, look, what's that?' "
Both grandparents and the child studied the spot on the floor. "I said, `Could it be blood? Could it be? What could it be?' And [the grandson] said maybe it was Kool-Aid or maybe the dogs had been in. We had no idea if it was blood or what, so we came home."
The next morning, a Monday, Dorothy Redmon called Kim's sister.
Tammy hadn't heard from Kim since baby-sitting the weekend before. She had expected the regular phone call on Saturday, and when it didn't come, Tammy figured Kim was especially busy.
Now it sounded like something was wrong. Both Tammy's husband and the Redmons called the sheriff.
Investigators went to the house and found the broken table, the spot on the floor and another spot in another part of the house.
There were other signs of a "slight altercation," but nothing appeared to have been stolen. No doors or windows had been forced open. Kim's pocketbook and wallet were in the house. The red pickup was in the drive. The only thing missing was the couple's blue, 1986 Oldsmobile Calais with Virginia license plates HIQ-285.
Brooks and other deputies called in dogs and state police to help search the grounds. They looked for shallow graves. Divers combed the pond. Airplanes scoured a five-mile radius.
They found no clues.
In the weeks since, with interviews and reported sightings leading nowhere, investigators have resorted to sending fliers and descriptions all over the country.
It especially bothers them that no one has seen the missing automobile. "It's like it vanished, or it's being kept hidden purposely," Brooks said.
The spots on the floor turned out to be human blood, all from the same person. The state crime laboratory is still trying to decide whether the bleeder was male or female.
The case officially is classified as an abduction/homicide. Whether that means some third party snuck through the wilderness and took them both, or whether one of the pair might have harmed the other, Brooks can only guess.
Neither had a criminal record, he said. Police had been called to their house only once, several years ago, and no one could remember whether it was to break up a family argument.
The couple had few friends, and spent most free time fishing or camping. Relatives couldn't remember how the two met, only that they dated awhile and showed up one day married.
Already, searchers describe them in the past tense: He was big, 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds, with black hair and beard as shaggy as a bear. Despite his appearance, Brooks said Lynn Redmon was "sort of submissive. He wasn't aggressive." Redmon was shy about extended family gatherings; he either stayed away, in-laws said, or came and kept to himself.
Kim Redmon was 5-foot-7 and about 125 pounds. She had light brown hair that hung to her waist in a thick braid. On her left shoulder, from wilder teen-age days, was a tattoo of the defunct "Deakons" motorcycle club.
Both loved the outdoors. Kim always wore jeans and T-shirts, and said she liked the hard, grimy work of her factory job.
"She wasn't perfect, oh, no, I'm not trying to say that," said her mother, Joyce Clarke. "We had our problems, like any family. But she was just a happy-go-lucky young person. She had just gotten to the point where she was more outgoing, and she would hug us, and all."
What Kim loved most of all, her mother said, was her son. Having a child calmed Kim and seemed to let loose a tenderness she had always tried to conceal, she said.
That's why no one can believe she would let her son's birthday pass without being there.
"That's not my sister," said Tammy Waugh. "That child meant so much to her. She would never leave him without calling to check on him. I know my sister; if she was able to call, she would."
Clarke is steeling herself for the worst. Which is something she has faced all too much: Clarke's first two husbands died, one son was killed in a car accident, her home and all possessions burned five years ago and her third husband has cancer. Now this.
"I realize we may never know what's happened to them," Clarke said. "Now we're just all trying to pull together for [the grandson]. Because he really needs us more now than he ever has during his short life."
by CNB