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Mother keeps son's memory
Suspect in jail for killing 3 others
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Published: November 19, 2009
JEFFERSON - Four years ago today, Tim Shatley was shot to death near a bridge over the North Fork of the New River.
Now authorities say new interviews make them think that the man who killed him may already be in custody.
That man is Freddie Hammer, whom authorities mentioned as a suspect in Shatley's death soon after Hammer was charged with killing three people on a Grayson County Christmas tree farm on Jan. 24, 2008.
Hammer is serving five life sentences without parole after pleading guilty to those murders.
While in prison, Hammer admitted killing his nephew Jimmy Blevins and told authorities where to find the body in August. When he admitted killing Blevins, he also told them he killed Shatley, but authorities said at the time that Hammer didn't offer details that the killer would have known.
But authorities have since talked to Hammer again.
"He told us things more in line with the facts as we knew them than he did the first time," Ashe County Sheriff James Williams said yesterday. "We looked for the murder weapon where he threw it in the river and we made an effort to find that."
A dive team and others searched the river on Nov. 7, but didn't turn up a weapon.
Williams said it would be premature to say they'll charge Hammer, but he plans to meet with the district attorney's office soon about Shatley's death.
Shatley's mother, Inez Reeves, is convinced that Hammer killed her son. She says authorities have told her that Hammer did it.
"They said he did tell them what they needed to know that only the killers and the cops would know," she said.
Reeves plans to visit her son's grave today. This time, she says she knows who killed him.
"When (sheriff's officials) came and told me, I knew it was true," she said. "I felt a sense of relief…I've prayed for a long time about this, and I felt it was God's way of letting me know, but I still don't know why. I do not know why."
It was on Nov. 19, 2005, that Shatley was killed as he drove home from his first night as a cook on a busy Saturday night at Pa-Paw's Barbecue in North Wilkesboro.
He and Kathleen Shatley lived off N.C. 16 in Ashe County with their son, Seth, who was then eight years old. Both were waiting for him to come home.
He almost made it.
Shatley, 30, was killed near the intersection of N.C. 16 and Old Field Creek Road, just north of the bridge over the North Fork of the New River.
The bridge, then under construction, was one lane, with traffic lights at each end of the construction zone that created a bottleneck traffic pattern where Shatley may have slowed or stopped.
Based on where shattered glass was found, investigators believe that the van Shatley was driving was between the two lights when shots were fired from close range. The van accelerated, traveling about 200 or more feet after the first shot. Four windows were shot out. A bullet went through the front window.
An autopsy showed that a large-caliber bullet passed through Shatley's body, going through his left shoulder and traveling backward and down through the lungs and aorta. Investigators later established that the killing happened about 11:19 p.m., based on when someone who lived nearby heard gunshots.
There are common denominators in the deaths of Blevins and Shatley.
Blevins lived within a few hundred yards of the spot where Shatley was killed. Hammer lived south off N.C. 16, and frequently visited Blevins and the area around the river. Both killings happened on a Saturday night. Both men were shot to death.
For people who live in such a rural part of the mountains, having two unsolved murders connected to a 300-yard stretch of a road seemed too much a coincidence.
Authorities have found no one who saw what happened to Shatley.
But when Blevins disappeared, on Feb. 24, 2007, a witness saw him get into Hammer's truck and ride away.
Blevins was missing for more than two years. Authorities dug up his body in August from a pit in Clifton. Hammer told them he had shot Blevins in the head over a dispute about money, and left his body in the pit where he fell.
Hammer has not yet been charged in either the death of Shatley or Blevins.
He did admit in court to killing the three men on the Christmas tree farm off N.C. 16. Although the turnoff to the farm begins in North Carolina, the dirt road crosses the state line and the men were killed a couple of hundred yards into Virginia.
The fact that Hammer is in prison in Virginia complicates the legal process of charging and trying him in North Carolina for the deaths of Shatley and Blevins.
Inez Reeves said she wants to visit Hammer to ask him about her son.
"I'd like to face him face-to-face and let him know that Tim had a mother and a wife and a son and two brothers and a half-brother who really loved him," Reeves said. "I'd like to let him know that we loved Tim and he took something very precious from us…Everybody tells me he's a dangerous person, but I feel that need to meet him face-to-face."
She said she's forgiven Hammer, because God has forgiven her, and her son would want her to forgive Hammer.
It's been hardest, she said, on Shatley's son, who will turn 13 on Saturday. For him, and for the sake of her own son, she wants people to remember.
"I don't want Tim forgotten," she said. "He was too special a person. He loved people. He loved elderly people, and he loved children and he loved me."
mmitchell@wsjournal.com
667-5691
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