This is an automated archive.
The original was posted on /r/unresolvedmysteries by /u/queenofsmoke on 2023-12-29 16:47:24+00:00.
I'm a longtime lurker, but this is my first writeup. The case of Debbie Wolfe is a bizarre one, and I rarely see it mentioned (though there have been a number of great writeups over the years).
The Disappearance
Deborah Ann Wolfe was born on 19 June 1957 in Blytheville, Arkansas, to US Air Force sergeant Jerry Wolfe and Virginia 'Jenny' (nee Vernon). She had two older siblings and one younger, all brothers; in a tragic twist of fate, her oldest brother Jerry 'Pete' Wolfe Jr would also die young, passing in 1982 at the age of 27.
At some stage Debbie's parents divorced, and in 1970 Jenny married - as the second marriage for both spouses - Army sergeant John Edwards. Little information about her earlier years is available, but by 1985 Debbie was a recently graduated nurse living on McArthur Road four miles outside Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her cabin was isolated and she lived alone, but did have two dogs named Morgan and Mason. Also on the property was a lake, not far from her front door.
Christmas Day 1985 was a Wednesday. Debbie spent the day at her mother and stepfather's house, alongside assorted family members and friends; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Her next shift at the Veterans Administration Medical Centre finished at 4 pm on Thursday 26 December, and a witness saw her drive away. Whether she ever made it home without issue is not clear.
Debbie failed to show up for her 8 am shift on Friday 27 December, an uncharacteristic occurrence - particularly as she failed to call the hospital, and was known to be punctual and reliable. Nor did she answer calls to her home phone. Concerned, her colleagues alerted her mother and stepfather, who drove to her cabin accompanied by a family friend named Kevin Gorton.1
The state of Debbie's cabin immediately raised red flags for the group. Morgan and Mason were roaming freely in the front yard - not of itself unusual - but they appeared to be hungry. Several empty beer cans littered the yard; not only was Debbie said to be a tidy person, but they were of a brand Jenny stated her daughter did not drink. Her car was parked in a different place than usual, and the driver's seat had been pushed back much further than the 5'3" Debbie normally pushed it.
Inside her house, things were reported to be an 'absolute mess'. Personal items were scattered on the floor, and a nursing uniform was lying on the kitchen floor. The uniform however was not evidence that she had returned safely home the previous afternoon and undressed; Jenny stated categorically that her neat daughter would never have left her clothes lying on the kitchen floor. Even more strangely, in the first of many clothing oddities related to this case, this was not the uniform Debbie had been wearing on her shift the day before. It was short-sleeved, whereas a hospital colleague who had had coffee with Debbie on that shift stated she had been wearing a long-sleeved uniform, upon which she had spilt coffee. The long-sleeved uniform with a coffee stain has never been found.
Gorton and the Edwards also noticed, and listened to, a male voice message left on her answering machine earlier that day. The phone call had been made from the hospital.
“Hey Deb. Missed you here at work today. I, uh, just wondering how you’re doing. Umm…if you’re able to give me a call up here at the ward, I’m at ***-****. Or gimme a call at home tonight. Uh, you been out a lot of days, you make me worried when you miss another one. Just want to make sure you’re okay. Bye.”
This struck them as suspicious. The voice message had been left on Friday 27 December 1985; considering Debbie had worked her shift on Thursday 26, she had certainly not been 'out a lot of days', nor had she taken any days off work in a while.
Unable to find any clues as to Debbie's location, the group rang the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department, and were reportedly informed that a search for a missing adult could not begin until 72 hours had elapsed.
The Discovery
The police search of Debbie's property took place on the morning of Tuesday 31 December 1985. Although bloodhounds were brought in, no new evidence was uncovered. Jenny Edwards, for one, considered the search to have been lacklustre; she stated that the deputies walked around but did not look in the lake, which in places was at least 5.5' deep. For his part, Captain Jack Watts of the Sheriff's Department, who was present at the search, claimed that the deputies believed the Edwards had already looked in the pond, and therefore did not look themselves.2
On Wednesday 1 January 1986, a dissatisfied Jenny hired her own diver - Gordon Childress, another family friend with search and rescue experience - who entered the lake himself. Childress reported that after two minutes in the water, he saw two sets of 'footprints and drag marks' at the bottom of the lake; the lake was only around three feet deep until five feet from the bank, and he followed the marks deeper. 30 feet in and 5.5' deep, he saw a body partially hidden inside what he described as a burn barrel, a 55-gallon oil drum with holes. Debbie had used one such barrel to store firewood (or for target practice) outside her cabin. Surfacing, Childress asked those on the bank to call the police, who were able to recover the body. It was confirmed to be Debbie's.
The Investigation
The oil drum - the 'barrel' - is an unexpected point of contention. The body was recovered without the barrel; Jenny Edwards stated that afterwards, she walked away, hearing investigators behind her discuss methods of raising the barrel, and was told that it would be left in the lake overnight and retrieved the next day. When she asked about the barrel the next morning, it was gone - and bizarrely, the police were denying that it had ever existed. Lowering the water of the lake did not reveal any sign of it, and despite Childress's insistence that he had seen the body inside a barrel, police suggested that he had merely seen Debbie's jacket 'ballooned' out around her in the water. No further trace of the barrel, assuming it existed, has ever been found.
The autopsy was performed on Thursday 2 January 1986 by Dr William Oliver of the North Carolina Medical Examiner's Office. Debbie's cause of death was ultimately reported to be drowning, a finding which her family resisted; her upper bronchial area contained only half a teaspoon of water, she lacked the white froth typically exuded by drowning victims who enter the water alive, and her eyes and mouth were closed - another departure from the usual appearance of drowning victims. She was also found to have abrasions on her fingers. There were no drugs or alcohol in her system.
With the autopsy results in hand, the police considered the case closed. It was an accidental death - caused, Captain Watts suggested, by Debbie slipping into the pond while playing with her dogs, and becoming too disoriented to get out. The December temperature in Fayetteville was below zero, and the cold water of the lake was topped by a layer of ice; hypothermia could have set in, leading to her inability to escape a largely shallow body of water. The cold water also meant that Dr Oliver had been unable to determine when she had died.
Jenny however could not accept this hypothesis. After all, most of the lake was quite shallow, and it sloped gently deeper - there was no steep drop-off. The return of Debbie's clothing to her several months later was further proof against accidental death. When found, Debbie had been wearing a pair of brown corduroy trousers too long for her height; a bra also too large, being 38C to Debbie's 34B; and a pair of US men's size 6 Nike trainers, much too big when she was a ladies' size 7. She had also been dressed in a seemingly new Army field jacket with no name tag (when she usually wore one of her brothers' field jackets, which was still hanging in her cabin) and a black Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt nobody had ever seen her wear.
Jenny's suspicions were further aroused by the extreme cleanness of the clothes, considering they had apparently been underwater in an extremely silty lake for almost a week. The shoes were particularly pristine, but when questioned, the State Bureau of Investigation denied having cleaned them. Jenny also received back a handmade Indian necklace with an 'evil eye' in a pouch - something she had not known Debbie owned.
Franz Shoaf, a family friend who visited the cabin later to feed the dogs, discovered Debbie's hat in the mud on the bank of the lake, at the opposite end to where Debbie was believed to have entered. Due to the ice on the lake, it was unlikely the hat had simply floated its way over. This provided yet more evidence that Debbie had not simply entered the lake by accident.
The Suspects
Two men in Debbie's life posed the most potential threat to her. Both were hospital volunteers; as part of Debbie's duties, she coordinated the volunteers, leading to her interactions with them. The first man - who had a history of psychiatric illness - had a habit of phoning Debbie at home frequently, and wanted to become romantically involved with her. Though questioned by the police the night her body was found, he provided an alibi and left the state a few days later.
The second man also would constantly ask Debbie out for a date, and was each time rejected. He is thought to have been...
Content cut off. Read original on https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/18trg1x/body_in_the_barrel_the_strange_death_of_debbie/