PETERSBURG – Twenty years ago, Ettrick grocer Walter Henderson Eley was robbed and shot three times in front of his supermarket on East River Road. Eley, then 56, survived the assault. But the incident left him traumatized to his dying day.
“He often had nightmares, all the way to the end,” his wife, Rae Eley, said. Walter Eley died in 2009.
Two decades later, the Ettrick shooting is still a cold case. The identity of the gunman remains unknown to this day. But Lindsey Eley, the victim’s granddaughter, has made it her mission to find the shooter and bring him to justice. She has raised a $2,000 reward for anyone with information leading to an arrest, and she even managed to breath life back into a police investigation that had long been in a dead end.
“The case is freezing cold, but I want to make it hot,” Lindsey Eley said.
Friday, Oct. 4, 1991, was a warm and dry fall evening in the Tri-Cities area. At 10 p.m., Walter Eley closed down his market as he did on every weekday. He left the store through the back door and got in his Ford van, which he had parked in the back, to drive it to the front entrance.
When she saw her husband step out of his van, Rae Eley, who was waiting for him inside, walked towards her own car, which was parked just a few yards away from the van.
Walter Eley punched in the security code at his shop’s main entrance. Under his arm, he carried a brown paper bag. Inside, a six-pack of Coors Light – Eley often enjoyed relaxing with a few beers after work – and a deposit bag with about $17,000, most of it in checks. It was early in the month, and many Ettrick seniors had received their social security checks that they cashed at the supermarket.
Rae Eley spotted her husband by the door and waved at him. “I got in my car and leaned over the passenger seat to put my bag on the floor, when I noticed the sound of a car pull up,” she said.
And then she heard the sound of a voice that she and her husband would never forget.
“Give me your money or I’ll shoot,” the man shouted.
Before Eley could comply, his wife heard three shots belting through the parking lot. “It was like ‘bang, bang, bang.’ The man didn’t even hesitate,” she said.
When she came back up to peek through her car window, she saw the man, standing by the front of her husband’s van, one hand on the fender. With the other hand, he picked up the bag with the Coors Light and the deposit bag that Eley had dropped when the bullets hit him.
“I got very scared when I saw that man,” Rae Eley said. The shooter was tall and dressed in all black. He wore a jacket with the collar up, black rubber gloves that reached to his elbows. His head was covered with a black ski mask. Rae Eley knew that he meant business and that he had come to kill.
She watched in fear as the man left the scene and got into a white Cadillac that was waiting for him, the engine running. “I’m sure that he did not see me, or he would have shot me, too,” she said. As the Cadillac sped away, Rae Eley jumped out of her car and ran towards her husband’s van, where she found him on the ground, in a pool of blood.
“He was fully alert and trying to get up,” she said. “I told him to get in the car so I could take him to the hospital.”
But they didn’t get far. “Walt had left his keys outside the door and he told me to turn around so we could get them,” Rae Eley said. “It was the keys to the store, to the safe, everything, and he didn’t want to leave them there.”
Back at the market, Rae Eley noticed that her husband’s condition worsened. “He was white as a sheet and his eyers were glassy,” she said. “He was bleeding a lot, so I called 911.”
While waiting for help, Rae tried her best to keep her seriously injured husband from passing out. “I just sat there, holding his hand, and I just kept talking to him,” she said, still choking up when thinking of the most frightening minutes of her life.
When the ambulance arrived, Walter Eley was rushed to Southside Regional Medical Center, where he was treated immediately. Doctors found that Eley had been shot three times – in the stomach, in the back and in his left lower arm. He went into surgery less than one hour after the shots were fired.
The stomach wound concerned doctors the most. “There was no exit wound, but he had a large hematoma with a retained bullet in the back,” the surgeon wrote in the operating report.
While Eley survived and was released from the hospital a month after the shooting, he had to undergo physical therapy for many years. But what was worse were the emotional scars, which he kept for the rest of his life. “He suffered so much,” his wife said.
The nightmares never stopped. And Eley continued to live out the rest of his life in fear of the gunman, who he thought might come back one day to finish him off. “Walt believed that the shooter wanted him dead so he could not identify him,” Rae Eley said.
The Eleys decided to leave Ettrick, to get far away from the masked shooter, the fear, the scene of the assault. They sold the supermarket, which they had owned for 25 years, and in early 1992 moved to North Carolina, the Outer Banks area.
Their granddaughter Lindsey, who was just 8 years old when her grandfather was shot, remembers these trying times too well. “Grandpa became very paranoid, and he never went back to the supermarket again,” she said. “The only time he would come back to the Petersburg area was for holidays or family celebrations. This thing messed him up so bad that he never talked about it.”
Lindsey believes that her grandfather left everything behind because he knew who had shot him. “I think he did recognize his voice, but he did not want to tell police because he was scared of testifying in court,” she said.
Rae Eley doesn’t know what to make of this. “I know Lindsey believes that Walt knew who shot him, but if he did, he never told me in all these years,” she said.
And Walter Eley did not say anything to police either. “He never told us that he knew the gunman,” said Maj. Terry Patterson with Chesterfield County Police.
To local law enforcement, the case is still active. “The case status remains pending, because it is still unsolved,” Patterson said. But until recently, no detective had been working the case for many years. “The last entry on the file was in 1995,” Patterson said.
But then Lindsey Eley decided to “make it hot.” Disappointed in failed police efforts, Lindsey wants closure for her family. She has few good things to say about the Chesterfield County Police. “I am not going to comment on them,” she said.
While Patterson understands the family’s frustration, he believes that there is little hope to ever get justice for Walter Eley, who died two years ago of natural causes. “After all this time and with no new leads, this would make it a hard case to prosecute, even if we found a new witness,” he said.
But Patterson still gave in to Lindsey Eley’s request to keep looking and assigned a detective and a crime analyst to the 20-year old case. “What makes this so hard is that there are no witnesses who actually saw what happened, except for Mrs. Eley,” Patterson said.
But the victim’s wife has never identified the man who pulled the trigger.
“Our detective actually managed to find many of the witnesses who came to the crime scene after the shots were fired and the gunman had left, but they did not come up with any new information,” he said.
Patterson said that police also tried to use modern technology to re-evaluate the forensic evidence gathered from the Cadillac used in the robbery, which the gunman and his driver left behind less than five minutes away from the crime scene.
But it was another dead end. “They didn’t have the car for long, it was reported stolen from a used car dealership right before the robbery,” Patterson said.
Lindsey is determined to find the gunman even without the help of police investigators. Recently, she managed to get Chesterfield County Crime Solvers aboard, offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. She also hired a private investigator, who put up another $1,000. She printed and passed out leaflets with her grandfather’s photo, hoping someone might know something.
Police are not too fond of Lindsey Eley’s efforts. “Mrs. Eley is putting herself in a possibly dangerous situation,” Patterson said. “We are concerned for her safety, and we told her so,” he said.
But Lindsey Eley brushes all concerns aside. “I am not scared,” she said, adding that she hopes the gunman might eventually identify himself. “Maybe he has changed over the years and now has a lot of guilt,” she said.
And Lindsey has the support of her grandmother. “Police should do something about it, but they haven’t found the shooter,” Rae Eley said.
If anything, Lindsey’s determined search might deter others from committing a similar crimes, Rae Eley hopes. “It would do me good to know someone else will not have to suffer as we did,” she said.
And that might the best the family can hope for, Patterson said. “This case is like putting together a 20-year-old puzzle,” he said. “But unfortunately, too many pieces are missing.”
http://liarcatchers.com/cold_cases.html
