Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Smoky Mountain Mystery

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

After nearly two decades of silence, a man known as the Smoky Mountain Gypsy comes forward with information that could lead police to solve not one, but two different murders, which had never before been connected.  Sponsors: Nutrafol: Take the first step to visibly thicker, healthier hair. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners ten dollars off your first month’s subscription and free shipping when you go to Nutrafol.com & enter the promo code FILES. Find out why over 4,000 healthcare professionals recommend Nutrafol for healthier hair. That’s Nutrafol.com, promo code FILES. Simplisafe: Right now, Cold Case Files listeners get a special 20% off any SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. This huge offer is for a limited time only. So visit SimpliSafe.com/COLDCASE There’s no safe like SimpliSafe.  Skims: Believe the hype - SKIMS has over 100,000 five star reviews for a reason The Cotton collection and more are available now at SKIMS.com. Plus, g et free shipping on orders over seventy five dollars! After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you! Select 'podcast' in the survey and select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.  Angi: Download the free Angi mobile app today or visit Angi.com   Progressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 29 million drivers who trust Progressive.  

On April 15, 1979, Harriet Simmons left her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, for a weekend trip to Nashville. The drive should have taken about eight hours, but Harriet Simmons never arrived at her destination. Her family feared for her safety and reported her missing. This is her son-in-law, Ronnie DeMint. It was totally out of character for a mom not to call when we knew she would, because her kids were her life, and she would never go that long and not be in touch with them. One third of all murder cases in America remain open. Each one is called a cold case, and only 1% are ever solved.

This is one of those rare cases. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. The family joins in the search. Ronnie retraces the route that Harriet would have taken to get to Nashville. Two and a half hours into the search, he finds an important piece of evidence. Harriet's car. The car was parked just off an exit lane leading out of a rust area. This is Ronnie again.

Seeing the car where it was, I know it was out of character that her mom would never stop the car in that position. I just knew something happened as she was leaving that rest area. I didn't know what, but I knew she would never stop her car there. The police searched the car for clues of Harriet's whereabouts. It's what they don't find that makes them suspicious. Her keys and purse are missing. They also notice that the car has a flat tire and theorize that Harriet might have asked a stranger for help.

That stranger might have been responsible for her disappearance. It was a new car. Who leaves, I mean, a new car in her situation, a brand new car that was in running condition and working order. That was Richard, Harriet's son. Richard and his six siblings, raging in age from 9 to 22, were growing increasingly anxious for information about their mother's disappearance.

Harriet's children suspected that the police were not taking her case seriously. This is her daughter, Julia. They acted as if she was a runaway mother. You know, they stereotyped, she's single, she's da-da-da. You know, and until, I mean, I actually remember talking to an investigator and them actually saying, you know, the oldest one of you guys is 19 or 21, you know. And they just really basically treated us like we were a bunch of little kids crying, hey, I want my mommy, where is she?

Even if the detectives had the best of intentions, there was no body, no fingerprints, and no usable evidence from the car. Harriet Simmons' case was going nowhere. That is, until 11 months later, when her missing persons investigation became a murder investigation. In a rural area 260 miles from Harriet's home in Raleigh, Captain Mike Wright discovered a human skeleton. Mike Wright, Raleigh Resident, The skull had been moved from the location of the rest of

the bones by probably by animal activity. And so we did a grid search of the surrounding area and then located articles of clothing and additional bones and evidence in the leaves. The bones, clothing, and other additional evidence were taken to the medical examiner for possible identification. He determined that the victim was a woman between the ages of 45 and 55 years old. He also noticed four cuts in the victim's clothing that matched identical cuts in the victim's bones. This is Dr. John Butts, the medical examiner. What we're looking at here is one of the ribs on the left side, and right here above the label, you can see a little nick in the bone.

So we put those together, the injuries to the bones, the injuries to the label, you can see a little nick in the bone. So we put those together, the injuries to the bones, the injuries to the clothing, the fact that we have a relatively young individual, and the conclusion would be that she's died as a result of being stabbed. Using dental records, Dr. Butts was able to determine that the remains found in the woods belonged to Harriet Simmons. The police notified Harriet's children. This is her son, Jeffrey. Of course, it's always a shadow hanging over your head.

Again, we were so relieved that she was found and we were able to bury her. But, of course, you don't want someone to be caught for it. With no suspects and no leads, Jeffrey's hope for justice doesn't seem likely. That is, until Captain Wright receives an early morning phone call. I was at home, and it was around 4 o'clock in the morning, and the dispatcher called and said that a body had been located. The location of the second victim was only 18 miles

from the spot where Harriet had been discovered. Captain Wright responds to the scene on the bank of the French Broad River in Asheville, North Carolina. A local resident tells Captain Wright how he discovered the woman. And she had been stabbed to the chest and a local resident here had heard her call for help when she had crawled up out of the water and he had attempted to give CPR. Investigators began to search the crime scene looking for evidence looking for a way to identify the victim. Investigator David Massard was working at the scene when another call came in. An abandoned car had been found nearby. This is Investigator Bassard.

City police officers initially found the car. They had been contacted by a Southern Railway dispatcher. The train crew had seen the car while the train was crossing this trestle here, and the vehicle was in the river about 20 feet off the shore, upriver from the bridge, and the car was partially submerged about 20 feet off the bank. The police wondered if there was a connection between the abandoned car and the murder just down the river. They run the license plates through the database at the Department of Motor Vehicles. It's registered to a local woman, Margaret McConnell.

They said that they had found the car in the river and they explained what had happened. Then they asked some of the family to come downtown. That was Margaret. She wasn't the victim found by the river, but she knew who was. Her 21-year-old daughter, Betty Sue, had taken the car to work earlier in the evening. Betty Sue never came back home. Margaret identifies her daughter's body for the police. I can't explain how we felt, how, you know, it was the most terrible thing I'd ever gone through. A team of local and state investigators is assembled to work on the case.

They start by looking into the life of Betty Sue, her friends, her family, what she liked to do, and where she worked. Betty Sue worked the night shift at a local donut shop. She left work at 1 a.m. on the night she was killed. It would have been physically possible for someone to have killed the victim at the other location, driven the car back here, pushed the car into the river here, and climbed up a very small embankment following along the trestle and be back to the railroad yard where all the railroad workers would be expected to be within a matter of minutes. That was Investigator Bessard. The investigation team had also uncovered the fact that the donut shop was frequented by railroad workers.

This is Special Agent Bill Matthews, another member of the investigation team. There were quite a few railroad men that would come and go in the course of two or three days. Once we determined who all was there, we had to find out where they lived and try to interview them that way. In addition to identifying and interviewing suspects, the investigative team also turned their attention to the car, which had to be dried out after being retrieved from the river. There were no fingerprints, no blood, and no leads. With no viable leads, Betty Sue McConnell joined Harriet Simmons in the file of cold cases.

In the year 1998, 19 years after the murder of Harriet and Betty Sue, a man known as the Smoky Mountain Gypsy brought a renewed focus to their cases. His given name was Jerry Harmon, and he had a secret. I grew up very much around storytelling and was a

storyteller myself, and the most devastating thing that ever around storytelling and was a storyteller myself. And the most devastating thing that ever happened to me was a story that I felt I couldn't tell. I was afraid to tell. What could terrify a man into keeping a devastating secret for 19 years? It turns out that Jerry Harmon was partially motivated into silence by guilt and shame. The same feelings that are often associated with an alcohol use disorder. I lived in a bottle for a long time. I climbed inside of a bottle and I stayed there and I didn't feel anything.

And then the time came when that didn't work anymore. And finally, it just got to the point to where it was just unbearable. That unbearable feeling led Jerry Harmon to the office of Captain Pat Hefner at the County Sheriff's Department. Harmon told the police that he knew things, things that the police needed to know. I knew that I had been with someone who had committed whole-blooded murder. Captain Hefner listened as Harmon began his story. It started on August 25th of 1979. He and his friend had been drinking and partying and driving around for most of the day.

Jerry Harmon was 19 at the time, and his friend, Terry Hyatt, was 22. After a day of drinking and driving around town, the two men visited a local bar. Around 2.30 a.m., they decided to leave, loading back into Terry Hyatt's truck. Here's Jerry Harmon telling the story of what happened next. There was a young lady pulled up on the driver's side at a traffic light, and Terry made an obscene gesture towards her, and then when she turned to the left, he ran her off the road.

And then he jumped out and ran up to her car and jerked the door open and yelled back at me and said, follow me. And he jumped in her car and took off. Harmon did as he was told and followed the car in Terry Hyatt's truck. They drove for a few miles and then turned down a dirt road. And then he got the girl out of the car, came back to the truck,

got into the truck with her, and I got away from there, you know. And it was obvious what was going on. He was raping this young lady. And I was just terrified. And then when he finished, I remember he came up to me and said you know asked me if I was gonna do anything and I said oh no no no no no well he got in her car and started driving up and down the road extremely fast you know and I remember telling her

get out here go, go, leave. And she kept saying, that's my sister's car, I can't leave my sister's car. And I said, forget your sister's car, you know, just get away from here. The woman doesn't leave, and Terry Hyatt pushes her back into the car. He starts to drive, once again ordering Jerry Harmon to follow. And no one could ever be as hard on me as I've been on myself. I should have done this, I could have done that. But at the time, it was just, I was totally freaking out. And I just followed him.

I couldn't comprehend what was happening. Why did I not try to do something? But still, the thought had never occurred to me to ask me if someone was going to die. That just didn't seem real. You know? Then we went and he took her car by some water.

Hyatt pulled the woman out of the car and dragged her towards the river. And then I heard this girl screaming. It was I assumed he was raping her again or something. You know? I mean, that's what I figured was going on. And he came back up there.

And then it dawned on me. I didn't hear the girl anymore. And I said, you killed that girl, didn't you? And then he told me, yeah, he had. Hyatt took the car up the river a couple of miles and pushed it into the water. When he got back into his truck, his message to the understandably upset Jerry Harmon was clear. I was just freaked out, and he said, you better not ever tell anybody about this,

because you were here with me and you'll go to prison rest of your life just like I will. After 19 years of silence, Captain Hefner was the first person to hear this horrific story of rape and murder. Harmon was even able to provide the captain with the location where the body and the car had been dumped. This is Captain Hefner. That's what keyed me off because I knew that they had recovered a body at or near the French Broad River from 1979 or 1980. So I began researching the ones from 1979 and came up with the name Betty Sue McConnell. Captain Hefner assigned the case to Detective Ann Benjamin and Agent Tim Shook. Both were part of the state's cold case team. They started their investigation by talking once again to Jerry Harmon.

Harmon was old enough to remember when the murder happened, but was his account of the crime accurate? This is Detective Benjamin. His statement about where it occurred, the description of her car, the fact that it was left in a river, all those statements that he made led us to believe that he knew exactly what he was talking about. He had mentioned that if we really wanted to verify his story, we needed to talk to Mr. Hyatt's best friend at the time, which was Lester Dean Helms.

The investigators, surprised by this additional information, attempted to Lester Dean Helms. The investigators, surprised by this additional information, attempted to locate Lester Helms. They wanted to speak to him as a witness to see if he would corroborate Jerry Harmon's story. We weren't really accusing him of anything except guilty knowledge of things that Terry Height would have done. It took two months, but Detective Benjamin and Special Agent Shook found Lester Helms. He was a resident in a nursing home.

They asked Helms what he knows about Terry Hyatt and the murder of a woman. Lester Helms, without hesitation, confirms that Terry Hyatt had committed murder. However, the details that followed were not what the investigators expected. This is Special Agent Shook. And when we ask him to relate what he recalls, he starts talking about a lady with a flat tire being abducted along the interstate. Lester Helms was recounting the details of a murder, but it didn't appear to be the same murder that Jerry Harmon had shared.

In Lester Helms' statement, Terry Hyatt had raped a woman and then dumped her body in the woods, 18 miles from where Betty Sue was found. Though initially confused, it didn't take the investigators long to relate the news story to an old crime. As we're walking out to the car, I remember turning to Tim and saying, what was that all about? And he says, I think I know. I had read the file and it began to click. That sounds like the Harriet Simmons murder because her skeletal remains had been found in Buncombe County up near the Blue Ridge Parkway. The cases of Harriet Simmons and Betty Sue McConnell had never been connected

before. Both women had been abducted from a car and stabbed several times, and both victims had been dumped in a remote location. This discovery did, however, leave one question unanswered. If these cases had gone unconnected for 19 years, was it possible that there were even more victims? Detective Benjamin looks up Terry Hyatt's criminal record and discovers that he'd been sent to prison in 1979 for kidnapping. The kidnapping had occurred just a few months after Betty Sue's murder.

The woman's name was Carolyn Brickman, and she had survived the attack. She was alive. Detective Benjamin spoke with her. Ms. Brickman was very, very fearful all these years of him. He had threatened her that he would come back and get her at the trial. She didn't have a driver's license. She didn't want anybody to track her.

So I actually found her through her children. Carolyn Brighman had been walking down the street when she noticed a man who appeared to be having trouble with his truck. As she walked by, the man reached out and grabbed her. He put a knife to her throat and told her not to yell and to get into the truck. Carolyn, even 20 years later, struggles to talk about what happened to her. This is her daughter, Melissa. My mom was trying to convince him to let her go, that she wouldn't tell anybody.

After a while, he told her that he was going to do something he had never done before, and he was going to give her back her life. The details that Carolyn Brighman shared about her attack were almost identical to the two unsolved murders that Terry Hyatt was suspected of committing. In order for the investigators to convict Terri Hyatt, they needed the testimony of Carolyn Brigman. She was very willing to go ahead and testify in court, which we, you know, we desperately wanted,

and she agreed to. Trauma affects people in different ways. There's no right way to react to trauma. People also recover from trauma using different methods. I hope this was a healing experience for Carolyn Brighman. On November 19th, 1998, Terry Alvin Hyatt was brought in for questioning about the murders of Harriet Simmons and Betty Sue McConnell. Now 40 years old, Terry Hyatt brought

his father with him for support. He seemed fairly willing to talk, but his father was very apprehensive and, you know, would rather we weren't there. But of course, Terry was in his 40s then, and he made the decision to talk to us. He's first questioned about Betty Sue McConnell. Hyatt places himself at the scene of the crime, but he denies that he killed Betty Sue. The investigators then begin to ask questions about Harriet Simmons. Hyatt doesn't answer, and then he asks for an attorney. He's arrested for the murder of both women.

Rodney Hasty was the prosecutor in Terry Hyatt's case, and even though it appears obvious that Hyatt was the culprit, the physical evidence was lacking. We didn't have any, you know, hardcore DNA evidence that could show that he was the person that raped them. But we had lots and lots of pieces of the puzzle that, when assembled, painted a clear picture that this guy is the one that committed these murders. Despite the lack of DNA, the prosecution seeks the death penalty.

And on January 6, 2000, Terry Alvin Hyatt's trial begins. The first to testify on behalf of the prosecution is Jerry Harmon. I knew I was finally doing what I should have done before. He'd killed an innocent woman that had a family and had done nothing to him whatsoever. No kind of self-defense was involved. It was just cold murder. Harmon's testimony is followed by Lester Helms.

The final witness for the prosecution is Carolyn Brighman. Rodney Hastie, the prosecutor, describes the impact of her testimony. I have not seen more chilling testimony come from the witness stand than I did that day when all of the family members were there in the courtroom lined up hearing this for the first time. And here this woman is, brave enough to be the only one that lived, and at the time she testified for all she knew the jury might let him go and walk out of that courtroom. On January 31, 2000, a jury finds Terry Hyatt guilty on all counts.

The judge then announces his sentence. Terry Alvin Hyatt will be put to death as by law provided. While on death row, Terry Hyatt's DNA was collected and entered into the state databank. Another match is found. A woman named Jerrianne Jones was raped and murdered in Charlotte. When faced with the DNA evidence and offered a deal to avoid a second death sentence, Terry Hyatt confessed. I was killing time, riding around drinking, getting high. Hyatt confessed. That's when we killed her. So she couldn't tell anybody what you'd done? She tried to run.

Okay. From the back of the truck. I grabbed her. I grabbed her and stabbed her at the same time. The families of Harriet Simmons and Betty Sue McConnell were present in the courtroom on the day that Terry Hyatt pled guilty to the murder of Jerry Jones. Here's Jeffrey Jones, Harriet's son. I would grieve for the other Jones family. And we offer our complete support.

And we're glad that he's being exposed for what he is. In 2009, Terry Hyatt filed a motion with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals claiming that he was improperly questioned without an attorney. A three-judge panel denied his claim and upheld his conviction and sentence. Terry Hyatt has been on death row for the past 17 years. Margaret McConnell continues to grieve for her daughter, Betty Sue. When asked how she feels about Terry Hyatt's sentence, this is what she had to say. Some days I think he should sit there and suffer, but I don't think he's doing that because I really don't think it bothers him.

I may be wrong, but I really don't. So I think he should just be put to death. I really do. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings. Produced by Scott Brody, McKamey Lynn, and Steve Delamater. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're distributed by Podcast One. Thank you.