On December 4, 1997, a Georgia couple who cared for foster children, along with two of their own children, were shot to death while they slept by an intruder who then took three other children from the home.

Later, the children were found alive by a farmer along a country road about 30 miles away. The children said Heidler had kidnapped them as he fled the murder scene. Heidler was also charged with molesting one of the surviving girls, miles away.

Toombs County Sheriff Charles Durst said Jerry Scott Heidler -- a man who is not related to any of the children -- was arrested and charged with the killings. The dead, identified as Danny and Kim Daniels, their 16-year-old daughter and their 12-year-old son, were all shot in their beds as they slept.

The kidnapped children were the couple's 10 and 8-year-old daughters, and a 9-year-old foster child, also a girl. The girls were dropped off on the side of a road in Bacon County, two counties to the south. A farmer found them and called authorities, who alerted police in Toombs County. Left alive at the blood-splattered home were a 10-month-old boy and a 5-year-old boy, who was the brother of the 9-year-old foster girl.

Information obtained from the surviving children of the Dasher Lane Massacre led investigators to Jerry Scott Heidler -- who the children knew as Scott Taylor -- for the murder of their foster parents and their two childen. Heidler, 20, was charged with murder, kidnapping and burglary. The Daniels were residents of the curiously named town of Santa Claus, a community 70 miles west of Savannah where the streets are named for reindeer.

Before the killings, Heidler had briefly lived with the family while trying to overcome drug and alcohol problems. According to his mother Heidler, who had dated Jessica Daniels, was distraught because his girlfriend had given birth to a stillborn baby two days earlier. GBI agents found Heidler hiding under his mother's house in Alma. According to testimony in hearings, Heidler said he remembered the killings as a dream.

Heidler, who had open-heart surgery when he was 4 years old, was placed in two foster homes because of poor supervision by his mother. He had imaginary friends, a mouse that he carried around in his hand, said Sylvia Boatright, Heidler's foster mother when he was 11. "Scotty was also afraid of the dark. He was afraid a knife would come through the ceiling and cut him."

Later, when he returned to his mother, he attended a school in Baxley for children with learning disabilities. He mutilated himself by picking at his skin until he bled, testified Marilyn Dryden, his teacher at the time.

James Maish, a forensic psychologist from Augusta, testified Friday that Heidler suffered from a severe case of borderline personality disorder. He said Heidler had eight of the nine symptoms, including suicide attempts, outbursts of uncontrolled anger and "frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment."

On July 6, 1999, Heidler, along with nine other prisoners, escaped from a Toombs County, Georgia, jail cell. He was quickly found and returned to captivity.

On August 27 jury selection began for his four counts of murder and three counts of kidnapping.

On 4 September Heidler was sentenced to death for the murders of four members of the Daniels family. The execution date was set for between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8, although the sentence will be automatically appealed to the Supreme Court of Georgia within 30 days.

Mayhem.net

The Santa Claus murders

By Bill Kelly

CyberSleuths True Crime

High above the gravel road, where migrant workers planted Viidalia sweet onions in rows of plowed furrows, on Dasher Street, lived the Daniels family. The one-story-red-brick house, with a huge oblong chimney protruding from the front, was nestled snuggly at the end of a cul-de-sac, about a half-mile of lonely road from U.S. 1, in the town of Santa Claus.

The village of 300 residents, located some 70 miles west of Savannah, Georgia, was named for Father Christmas. A sign at the edge of town hailed Santa Claus as "the city that loves children."

Seven children lived in the picture-post-card house, including three foster children the Danielses were planning to adopt. Danny, a rural mailman working out of Lyons, met attractive Kim Lampp seven years ago.

Despite the fact that she was a drug addict, living out of her car, he helped her fight off her addiction and they were married. They liked it there, were highly religious and well liked throughout the community. The house was wedged between two catfish ponds and backdropped by tall pine trees and tangling grape vines that helped quell the reverberating booms of the shotgun blast from neighbors on Rudolph Way, Dancer Street and as far away as Sleigh Street. It happened just after midnight on Thursday, December 3, 1997.

Around four o’clock in the morning, a farmer and his wife were awakened when their dog wouldn’t stop barking. They looked out the window and saw three children walking down the road in their nightgowns. They called police, who arrived within minutes at their Carter Pond House Road.

The three tykes, ages 8 to 10, shivering and abandoned on the side of rural Bacon County Road, some 45 miles from their home on Dasher Street, were in shock but coherent. They said they had been taken from their Santa Claus home earlier that morning. The oldest girl had been raped and sodomized.

The frightened children told the police where they lived and two deputies were dispatched to the ranch-style house, arriving shortly before dawn.

The morning’s stillness was made even more eerie by the incessant insect sounds and by an occasional car passing on Highway 1, making the deputies feel even more uneasy, when they called into the house and no one answered. The door was ajar, yet not a creature was stirring in or around the house.

It was pitch dark inside the house. After several fruitless attempts to arouse somebody, the deputies thought they had better go inside and investigate. They switched on lights, using there flashlights, so as not to disturb any fingerprints, as they cautiously went from room to room, guns at-the-ready.

When they reached the master bedroom, the deputies reeled back horror-struck at the atrocity that lay before them. 43-year old Danny Daniels lay sprawled beside his 33-year old wife. They were drenched in blood. The heavy-caliber murder weapon had done its work with shattering effect.

Down the hall, the law officers found Jessica Daniels, a 16-year-old adopted daughter of Danny from a previous marriage. In life, she was quite beautiful, but in death her appearance was grotesque. Still in her nightgown, she was stretched out on the extensively bloodstained hallway carpet, apparently shot at close range.

In the electric atmosphere of an adjoining room, the policemen found 8-year-old Bryant, a natural son of Daniel from a previous marriage. He had been sleeping with his teddy bear in his bedroom when someone shot his face away.

After gaining their composure, the deputies, carefully checked the victims for the faintest sign of life. They found none. After making sure the perpetrator was not on the premises, the deputies searched the house to make sure there were no more bodies. There were.

Huddled in a closet, trembling like abandoned puppies, they found Corey, 4, and Gabe, 10 months, both foster children. Taking the children with them, the deputies cautiously retraced their steps out of the house, not wishing to disturb any crime scene evidence.

The police were extremely shocked about what had happened in their normally peaceful Santa Claus town. Nothing of this magnitude had every occurred before. But because of all the pandemonium and hysteria that would follow, authorities knew it would be a while before they could unsort the melee.

It was a wild, chaotic night for police who discovered that the killer gained entrance through an open window at the rear of the house. After killing casually in a way that would defy comprehension, he left without taking any of the Danielses wordily possessions with him. Nor had the tidy house been ransacked.

During that Saturday morning police learned from the surviving children that they were awakened by the bursts of fire, before being taken hostages. He drove them out into the boonies, where he raped the oldest girl, then drove them 45 miles away and turned them loose on Bacon County Road.

The children described the kidnapper’s car as a black van with tinted windows. An all-points bulletin flashed across the airwaves, with a precaution that the suspect was to be considered armed and dangerous.

As the investigators would soon learn, the marriage seemed placid and ordinary enough, and the Danielses were socially popular. Nothing much happened in their lives until an intruder crept into their house and murdered them for no apparent reason.

Toombs County Sheriff Charles Durst was located and notified of the carnage at the Daniels house. In a switch of hurry, he commanded the area sealed off from all unauthorized personal and recognized as an official crime scene. Homicide officers arrived abruptly, accompanied by a medical examiner, a crime scene technician, and a deputy district attorney.

Each of the victims, the coroner observed, had been shot through the head execution-style, and could not have been a threat to the intruder. Danny Daniels appeared to have been shot in the back of the head and probably never knew what hit him. Tissue, blood, bone, and brain matter had been dispersed about the room as a result of the force of the powerful shotgun gust. Red gore splattered the walls and ceiling. His younger wife had been shot in the face, resulting in severe disfigurement. It also appeared that she had been awakened by the blast that killed her husband and might have seen the man who killed her.

Little Bryant, had also been shot point-blank through the head as he slept, clinging to his teddy bear. The female victim in the hallway had her face almost entirely removed by the force of the murderous weapon.

There was so much blood in the bedrooms that authorities couldn’t help but wonder why there weren’t more bloody footprints. They also found several 1100 Remington shotgun shells laying on the floor of each bedroom where the murders occurred. The cartridges laying on the bed beside Daniel and Kim had tissue fragments adhering to them.

After the scene was carefully photographed in both color and black and white, then videotaped, crime lab technicians collected blood and other bodily fluids samples, which they cautiously marked according to source and location. Next, they vacuumed for trace evidence of hair and clothing fiber, using divided filter bags for each location, and searched for identifiable latent fingerprints.

When the criminalists were finished with the bodies at the crime scene, morgue drivers placed the corpses inside body bags and removed them one at a time to a waiting morgue wagon. As a small gathering of disbelieving neighbors looked on from behind yellow-tape barriers, the frightful-looking body haulers left for the morgue where definitive postmortems would be performed.

While sheriff’s investigators and crime lab technicians searched for clues and collected evidence at the crime scene over the next few hours, the sheriff and several Toombs County deputies questioned neighbors in search of the killer’s identity. Unknown to them, the three children had already provided information that ultimately broke the case wide open.

Whereas the identification of the killer had been made in a relatively easy manner, Toombs County prosecutor Rick Malone told a hastily gathered group of reporters that authorities were still investigating the girl’s accounts and released few details. He said they weren’t positive what triggered the vicious midnight attack against the family. "We do not think it was a random attack. We know that he did know them, said Malone. "It seems he was a friend of the family, or at least knew them."

Suddenly the little community named by an entrepreneur to attack tourism was on the map. The little town known for its Christmas-season decorations and communitywide display of luminaries, suddenly came alive with out-of-town curiosity-seekers.

Everything pointed to the inconceivable. A man named Jerry Heidler had entered the house and started shooting at random for no apparent reason. Maybe something else happened. Only the suspect knew at that point what the "something else" was.

Theories and speculation abounded in the once-happy and serene Georgia city, now unbelievably stunned by the shocking mass murder. It was almost too much to believe. Things like that just didn’t fit into the normality of a tranquil town called Santa Claus. Most of the notorious crimes occurred closer to Savannah, 70 miles away, or Charleston, on the coast.

It was a frightening thought, but maybe one person had been the primary target and the others were assassinated because they were potential witnesses. But if this were true, why didn’t the killer get rid of the three children he let go, surely he must have known they could identify him. Several theories were taken into consideration by the lawmen, as happens in every case, and each auspicious idea was pursued to its limits.

During those first critical hours the manhunt for Jerry Scott Heidler shifted into full gear with uniformed patrolmen and plainclothesmen ferreting out across Bacon County, where he was last pinpointed, clear to Alma, where his family lived.

As far as murder chases are concerned, the hunt for Jerry Heidler was not very exciting. Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents Jerry Roe and Bill Butler were dispatched to Alma, where Heidler had roots.

"Behind the house was a street and there the van sat," said GBI spokesman John Blankhead. Jerry Heidler was walking out the front door as the police car pulled to the front of the house. They made eye contact and Heidler turned and ran back into the house.

Agents Rose and Butler radioed for a backup then ran to the back of the house to prevent a possible escape. At that point, Jerry Heidler’s brother came out and told the officers he was the only one in the house. Bacon County sheriff’s detectives answering the backup call arrived and initiated a search of the house. They found Heidler huddled in a crawl space beneath the home.

When Heidler refused to come out, two officers with drawn guns crawled in and dragged him out. They arrested him on an outstanding warrant of probation violation. Heidler’s brother was arrested for obstructing justice and lodged without bail in Bacon County Jail along with his brother.

On Tuesday, December 9, 1997, funeral services for the slain family were held at First United Methodist Church of Lyons after the bodies were released for burial by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab in Atlanta.

Danny Daniels, the mailman who taught Sunday school at Mount Vernon Pentecostal Church lay in a brightly varnished wooden casket at the far left of the church surrounded by flowers. To his right, his wife, Kim, lay in a white casket adorned with white and pink carnations. A third casket held Jessica. Her playmates and school friends passed by solemnly, each in turn placing a kissed red rose on her casket. The tiniest casket at the far end held the body of Bryant. From the pulpit, the Rev. Ray Wood, who was the Daniel’s pastor at Mount Vernon, described Bryant as a energetic child whose aim in life was to drive the church bus.

"This family invited him to their church and he had lived with them in their home briefly in the past few months," Wood told the massive congregation that filed into the church to say good-bye to the slaughtered family. "He didn’t have to steal a van, if he had been in need, for the price of a phone call, Brother Danny and Sister Kim would’ve driven to Alma to get him. That’s the kind of people they were."

Rev. Wood told the teary-eyed and sobbing congregates, "We’ll never again hear Sister Kim sing and play the piano or her family singing in the chorus." Where the killer was concerned: "You may hate his deed, but you better love his soul." There were scattered shouts of "amen."

The five children curiously left behind by the killer, were in the front pews, protected from the media by police bodyguards. 20 pallbearers took up remaining seats beside them. Homicide detectives continued to probe the background of the lives of the killer and his victims, trying to determine if some personal motive existed. One silver streak broke through the dark clouds surrounding the case. It wasn’t much of a lead at the outset. A detective chief in charge of the investigation revealed the motive appeared to be moderately different from the nascent reconstruction of the crime, which had been based on very finite information from the surviving victims.

Now a relative leaked to the detectives that Jessica had broke off a brief romantic affair she was having with Heidler, and that may have triggered the nightmare.

Although many in Santa Claus didn’t believe the growing speculation and increasingly wildness of the rumors, it would explain everything. It wouldn’t be the first time a spurned lover vented his anger on an entire family.

"They had a boyfriend-girlfriend affair," said Sheriff Durst. He refused to elaborate any further.

Many of the mourners had come directly to the church from Heidler’s first court appearance before Toombs County Magistrate Ezra Aaron, who asked the snugly handcuffed suspect if he understood the charges of multiple murder, kidnapping and burglary. In the horror-struck courtroom, Heidler kept his eyes downcast as he answered in sullen, dull monotone, "Yes, sir," and "No, sir."

When Heidler said he didn’t understand what could happen to him, the judge, without lifting his face from the papers before him, said, "You could be executed."

A statement as recalled by Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents who interrogated Heidler, was a chilling one. Without flinching one iota, Heidler told them, "I killed them all."

One agent, Lee Sweat, said Heidler was not especially emotional about his confession, nor did he show any signs of remorse. "He was quiet," Sweat said, "but he was responsive from the very beginning. He told me he killed the Daniels family."

While Heidler’s attorneys were feverishly trying to get his confession thrown out as evidence, developing information had gleaned from the surviving children who had sat in their nightgowns untangling a web of mystery for Bacon County sheriffs. Otherwise, the whole horrible story might have been lost in the darkness of history.

The children said they were awakened by ear-splitting gunshots. Then a man who had once dated their sister, Jessica, entered the bedroom and took them with him in a strange van. He took them far from home and they were crying. He put them out on a deserted, dark road, and they were frightened. The girls did not know at the time the extreme grossness of the case. They had no idea a portion of their lives were gone forever.

Heidler’s story, as related to GBI agents, was that he used a stepladder in the garden to hoist himself up to the bathroom window and enter the Daniels home. He shot Bryant first, using a loaded shotgun, then Jessica as she ran towards him, apparently while running to alert her parents. He shot Kim and Danny in quick succession.

Special Agent Dean McManus said it all seemed like a dream to Heidler and he wanted him and agent Sweat to "get into his dream with him."

Heidler’s accounts of December 3 and 4 were that he attended the funeral of a stillborn baby he had fathered to a woman he never saw before. That night, he walked to the home of a friend, where they played pool and watched men playing dominoes. He had two beers then walked to his mother’s home, where he was staying without paying.

When people in the home began talking about the stillborn baby, Heidler said he ran out of the house, swiped a friend’s van, then drove U.S. 1 to Santa Claus. After entering the Daniels home, he took a semi-automatic shotgun from a gun cabinet in Kim and Danny’s bedroom then went looking for Jessica, whom he wanted to kill because she jilted him.

He remembered continuously pulling the trigger. He even recalled having to reload and how the kick of the shotgun hurt his shoulder and the clamorous thwack of the blast hurt his ears.

He said he shot Bryant in a trancelike dream and was awakened out of it when Jessica called out his name. After the shootings, he ushered the three kids out of the house and into the stolen van.

Continuing with his story, Heidler told the officers that he remembered driving to the Altamaha River bridge between Appling and Bacon counties, where he took the 10-year-old to a boat ramp, and sexually assaulted her out of sight of the others in the van.

After the rape, the sobbing little victim asked him to get rid of the gun because he was scaring them. So he tossed it in the Altamaha River where it would never be found.

He abandoned the girls and drove back to his mother’s house. Sweat said although at times Heidler laughed, or cried, he was relatively unaffected by what he had done. "He understood what he was saying," said Sweat, "We had all range of emotions. But the gravity of what he’d done -- he was indifferent to that."

For the most inept, cruelest massacre that ever happened in Toombs County history, death penalty specialist Mike Garrett, the most brilliant and sought after attorney in Augusta, and public defender Kathy Palmer of Swainsboro, were brought in for the trial. The plan of operation would be for the defense attorneys to file a notice of intent to present evidence on mental health issues. After talking with Heidler, Garrett told reporters, "He’s physically sick and mentally disturbed."

The defense immediately filed for a change of venue. Garrett said Heidler would be tried far away from the graveyard and the blood-splattered house where people still thought Santa Claus was a symbol of good fellowship and gift sharing.

District Attorney Malone agreed that the gruesome trial should be held somewhere else. He said too many times the Georgia Supreme Court overturned death penalty cases from rural counties where cases were grossly overly publicized.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, July 6, 1999, while awaiting trial, Heidler escaped with tracking dogs and helicopters on his heels. News flashes across Georgia said anyone who crossed paths with the 20-year-old escaped convict were in extreme danger. Jailers searching his cell found 75 homemade weapons he had made from unscrewing wire cages and smoke and fire alarms. They said he routinely threatened to kill jailers and other inmates who preferred to give him a wide berth.

He didn’t get very far. He was quickly captured and returned for trial. The trial opened before a jury of seven men and five women on August 30, 1999 in Judge Walter McMillan’s Walton County Courthouse. Prosecutor Malone said he would seek the death penalty. Heidler’s defense team chose to seek pity from the jurors by using the mental illness defense. In his opening statement, prosecutor Malone painted a bizarre picture of
the suspect. He said he was arrested in May for breaking into Taylor’s Treasures and stealing porcelain dolls, Nintendo games, knives.

A young mother testified she had hired Heidler to baby-sit her three children in exchange for a room in her home. She said he was good with her children and she couldn’t have managed without his help. She described him as a quiet person, a regular couch potato who seldom went anywhere and worked on her car.

As for his mental level, she said he was like a teen-ager in a 20-year-old body. "I’ve seen him go out looking for jobs and no one would hire him," she said, adding, "I can’t believe this is happening."

A neighbor who lived next to the Heidlers on 12th Street in Alma, said the family lived there for two months. They moved there from a government housing project on Mills Street and had no money.

In the days that followed jurors heard from one side or the other about Heidler’s tough life, or his refusal to accept authority. Born June 9, 1977, he became a high school drop out in the 10h grade. He never worked because soil rhymes with toil. He never owned a car and he never lived in a place he could call his own. Any money he ever had was mooched from somebody else.

Despite his unseeming lifestyle, he was never arrested for violent crimes. Aside from burglarizing Taylor Treasures, he stole a Kawasaki four-wheeler from a garage on South Church Street and was currently facing felony counts in Alma. He was newly on probation in both Toombs and Bacon counties for driving while intoxicated. That was the extent of his criminal record.

Several of Daniels’ neighborbors testified about gathering in their yards to watch police cars, media vans with dishes on top, and more strange cars than they had ever seen driving up Dasher Street toward the crime scene. They spoke of the good times they had fishing in Daniels’ fish pond, and picking grapes from his vineyard.

"They were good God-fearing people," one neighbor told the court. "They were a storybook family. They took children nobody else wanted and gave them a decent home."

County Sheriff Durst testified that in his talks with Heidler, "his only explanation is that he doesn’t know why he did it. He said a dive team that searched the 29-foot-deep Altamaha River failed to find the murder weapon that Heidler said he tossed off the bridge from U.S. Highway 1.

A defense witness testified that in Heidler’s hometown of Alma, about 30 miles from the crime scene, he had enhanced his reputation as an "odd ball" from a family who moved from one place to another, like gypsies. He said Heidler spent time in foster care homes but eventually had to be placed in a special treatment state school because of his emotional problems.

Garrett, however, was unable to sway the jury, who, after wrestling with indecision for a scant 20 minutes, found the mass murderer guilty on Friday, September 3, 1999.

The penalty phase took less than two hours, and this time they envoked the death penalty.

Sickly, scrawny, Heidler sniffled and wiped his nose on his shirt as the four death sentences were pronounced. Judge Walter McMillan handed him an additional two life sentences plus 110 years on three counts of kidnapping the three Daniels children and three counts of sodomy and child molestation and one burglary.

The remaining Daniels children have been placed with relatives.

Using methodology almost routine in cases of murder, the Toombs County Sheriff’s Department and the GBI had been able to get to the bottom of the matter -- thus insuring that justice was seen to be done.

Santa Claus, Ga. -- The slaying of four members of a family who tried to keep Christmas all year long has uncovered depths of misery dark enough to overshadow every icon of stereotypical Southern Gothic.

The Danielses, evidently, died for the sins of others.

Kim Daniels, 33, who became a foster child after seeing her father slain, lost her own children to state custody while a teenager. She lived in her little car, deep into drugs and alcohol, until she met Danny Daniels, 47, about six years ago. Married to the gentle letter carrier, she fought off her problems, got her children back and devoted her life to her church and to children -- her own and others who needed love.

On Wednesday, she and Danny celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. In their comfortable brick house at the foot of Dasher Road there were seven children -- Danny's adopted daughter, Jessica, 16; Kim's three children, Amber, 12, and 8-year-old twins Brooke and Bryant; and three foster children, Amanda, 9, Corey, 4, and Gabriel, 10 months.

And then, police say, a few hours after they went to bed, one of Kim's many efforts at salvation came back not to haunt them, but to kill them.

His full name is Jerry Scott Heidler, and he is 20 years old. He goes by Scott. To the Daniels family, he was Scott Taylor.

He has been charged with murdering Danny and Kim and Jessica and Bryant in their sleep and forcing Amber, Amanda and Brooke into a stolen van and dumping them on a dirt road some 50 miles away. The infant Gabriel was left crying in his bed, and the terrified Corey hid under a table in the blood-spattered house.

No one can imagine why.

Some suggest it was, somehow, connected to unrequited love for Jessica, whom investigators believe was the first to be shot. Others say it perhaps was triggered by the stillbirth on Saturday of Marie Spivey's second child, who may or may not have been Heidler's.

Scott Heidler himself says "he doesn't know why he did it," according to Toombs County Sheriff Charles Durst.

"He has no remorse," the sheriff said Friday. "He slept like a baby last night."

Few others who knew the Danielses did. "There's a lot of sorrow, a lot of grief" in Toombs County, Durst said.

Latrelle Moseley, the suspect's mother, and her daughter JoAnn spent Friday morning at the mobile home of another daughter, Lisa Augula, in a rural trailer park north of Baxley on U.S. 1.

They said Scott met the Daniels family about two years ago when JoAnn was in foster care with them for a few months, which Latrelle said said was because she fell ill and couldn't care for her daughter. Not long after that, Heidler himself stayed briefly at the Daniels house; friends said they were trying to help him beat alcohol and drug problems.

JoAnn, 12 now, said between puffs on a cigarette that she enjoyed her stay with the Danielses; her mother said she had sometimes talked with Kim on the telephone since then.

Latrelle said Scott dated Jessica then. "They sat together at church; he was over there all the time." They had stopped dating but were still friends, she said, and Heidler sometimes stayed overnight at the Daniels home in Santa Claus, she said.

She said her son arrived at her house in Alma early Thursday and fell asleep on the couch. She said she left shortly before noon to go to the beauty parlor after telling him to get in bed. When she got home, she said, police had taken him away.

She went to see him Thursday night before he was taken from the Bacon County jail in Alma to the Toombs County jail in Lyons. 

"Scott sat there, real pale, not looking at me. He didn't look like himself. He said, 'Mama, I just got a minute to say something.' The police said, 'Scott, tell your mama about it.'"

And curiously, what he told her, she said, was "Mama, I killed Kim." Not "Mama, I killed Jessica," or "I killed four people." 

"I said, 'No, you didn't,' and he said, 'Yes, I did.' They wouldn't let him say any more. I believe they made him say that.

"He's just not a killer. If he killed anybody, it would have been his stepfather." When he arrived at her house Friday, she said, "He would have had blood on him. There was no blood.  His clothes wasn't messed up."

Farther down U.S. 1 in Alma, 18-year-old Marie Spivey agreed.

"Scott always told me the Daniels were his friends," she said. "He said he liked them a lot. He always bragged on them. He said they were like a family to him. He adored them people."

Spivey said Scott and his stepfather did not get along.

"He accused Scott of all kinds of things he didn't do," she said, without elaborating. "There was several things wrong with that family. Not his mama nor his daddy was there for him. If he wanted something, he had to ask over and over for it. If his sister wanted something, all she had to do was ask one time."

Spivey is the mother of Heidler's son, Joshua, now 2, but she isn't sure who the father of her stillborn son is. She is married to a man named Spivey, but they lived together only three months and she said she has been planning to divorce him since September, when she and Heidler got back together.

She said Heidler has been depressed all week about the baby's death. "He loves kids. He loves my sisters and he's always took care of them. He's always been there for Joshua."

Heidler wrote her a disjointed poem full of jumbled, gloomy religious symbols and references to a gospel hymn, "Sheltered in the Arms of God," the day the baby was stillborn, just hours before the birth. He gave it to her Sunday and had her read it to him at least once a day through Wednesday, she said.

Spivey said she doesn't know what to make of the poem, but she said Heidler believed he didn't have long to live because of heart and lung problems. She couldn't specify the lung problems but said he had undergone surgery to correct a cardiovascular birth defect. She says he has always been sickly.

Heidler often stayed over at the house where she lives with Joshua, her mother, stepfather and 4-year-old twin sisters, Spivey said. She said he came Wednesday and stayed most of the afternoon. "We took him tome [to his mother's house] around 4:30 [p.m.] because he was getting a virus and wanted to take a shower and then come back over," Spivey said.

Heidler did not return. He called her hourly, up until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m., she said. The later calls, she said, were made from the Alma home of Jerry P. Johnson.

Johnson, 59, who has been wheelchair-bound since a 1960 car accident and lives with a helper, said young people often drop by to shoot pool on his back porch or just hang out.

On Wednesday, Heidler arrived around 8 p.m. and left around 10:30 p.m., apparently on foot. Johnson believes he returned later, entered the house, stole the keys to a maroon and silver Dodge van, and took a small amount of money and a wooden box containing bank statements, Johnson's Social Security disability check and personal letters.

Police found the van parked behind Latrelle Moseley's house early Friday morning, shortly after Johnson reported the theft and gave police Heidler's name.

"I really didn't know that much about him," Johnson said. "The other people I got around my house , they don't steal and they don't use my vehicle without me knowing it."

Sylvia Boatright, who was Heidler's foster mother for about a year when he was 11, also lives in Alma. On Friday she was in a Jacksonville, Fla., hospital, recovering from surgery. She was unaware of the killings when asked to recall his stay with her but assumed he was in trouble. She would not discuss what he was like.

"I loved him very much. I still do. I would help him if I could. I pray that the Lord will reach down and touch him," she said.

Her 41-year-old daughter, Shirlene Wykle, was less circumspect. "He was mean as all get-out," she said. "When they would come to my house, I was proud to see the day that they left. I was afraid he would hurt my mama, and him just a child." However, she too refused to discuss his specific behavior. 

In her mobile home just south of Santa Claus, Christy Wood, who considers herself Kim Daniel's best friend, disputed the idea that Heidler ever "dated" Jessica.

People teased Jessica about how much Heidler liked her, Wood said. Jessica was a self-conscious girl of 14 or 15 then. Heidler was 18 or 19.

"He'd, like, always call her over to the car and want to talk to her," Wood's  daughter Sheena said.

"He knew that Jessie was too young, but we had the feeling that she was the reason he hung around. She wouldn't have anything to do with him," Christy Wood said.

Rachael Phillips, 24, a family friend who went to the Daniels house Wednesday night, is one of the last people know to have seen them alive. She said a small Christmas tree stood on the kitchen table and as many as 60 wrapped presents covered the living room floor of the comfortable brick ranch home.

The house was set in a swale in front of two large tree-lined ponds. Dasher Road bends around the unused field in front of the home, approaches it from the side and then ends up by the house. Across that unused field is a broad field where, on the day that the Danielses died, Vidalia onions were being planted.

From the road in front of the Daniels house, two other dwellings can be seen, a large mobile home aglow with Christmas lights and a spacious new home on a hill. But the Daniels home cannot be seen from the mobile home, and because of the trees, only the roof is visible from the hilltop house.

Danny had adopted Kim's three children this year, Christy Wood said, and intended to adopt the three foster children too. Kim, she said, doted on the children as if they were her own because she could empathize with them.

When she was 3, Kim's father was killed in front of her, said Wood, 48, whose husband, the Rev. Ray Wood, led services for the Danielses and other members of Mount Vernon Pentecostal Church. The death pushed Kim into a foster home. She bounced from one foster home to another during the next several years.

Kim battled alcohol and drugs as a teenager, friends said, and she had reached the bottom when she showed up barefoot on the front steps of a pink single-wide mobile home on Green Oak Road that doubled as a church outreach building.

The state had custody of three of her children -- Amber, Brooke and Bryant. She lived out of her car.

"She came to our church in a little bitty car crammed with everything she owned in the world," Wood said.

She met Danny, a quiet man who delivered mail and taught adult Sunday School class at Mount Vernon. The couple married about a year later, regained custody of Kim's three children and moved into a brick house along with Danny's daughter, Jessica.

The house burned several years ago, but the Daniels rebuilt it. They decided to accept foster children.

It was about this time that they noticed an unfamiliar face in the congregation that huddled inside the pink single-wide for Tuesday night prayer services. It was Scott Heidler.

Heidler went to church for about two months," the Rev. Wood said.

"He was quiet and withdrawn. He didn't have much to say," Wood said.

Christy said Heidler made her uncomfortable.

"I feel like the reason people weren't comfortable around him is that he wasn't comfortable around them," Ray Wood said. "His social skills were zilch."

Christy said Kim did all she could to give her children a better life than she had.

"She wanted the safety and security for her children, which she never found," Wood said.

HEIDLER v. THE STATE.