Ron Peterson Jr. - Under the Trestle: The 1980 Disappearance of Gina Renee Hall & Virginias First No Body Murder Trial.

Under
THE
Trestle

The 1980 Disappearance of
Gina Renee Hall & Virginias First
No Body Murder Trial.

RON PETERSON, JR.

UNDER THE TRESTLE

THE 1980 DISAPPEARANCE OF GINA RENEE HALL & VIRGINIAS FIRST NO BODY MURDER CONVICTION

Copyright 2018 Ron Peterson, Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6349-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6350-3 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 12/14/2018

Contents

The scuba diver moved slowly along the bottom of the lake, eighty feet below the surface, searching for a dead human body. It was a sunny day at the surface, but eighty feet down, he could not see his hand in front of his face. This was a black water dive. He relied on his fingers sense of touch, feeling the silty lake bottom as he inched along. He was performing what search-and-rescue divers call a fingertip search body recovery operation, hoping to literally run into the body.

The diver had been underwater for twenty minutes, covering fifty feet of the lake bottom, moving along a straight line. Eleven other search divers, arranged on both sides of him at even intervals, moved along a parallel grid in the same direction. So far, their collective hands and fingertips had encountered nothing but the silt and sediment along the bottom, along with the occasional remnants of an old tree stump.

He was startled when his right hand suddenly came in contact with an object. Could this be the body? he thought to himself. His first tactile impression was that the object had the same general degree of firmness as a human body. In the blind darkness, he explored the object, inch by inch, using all ten of his fingertips. Yes, although he could not feel the texture through his gloves, the degree of firmness was consistent with that of a human body. And the object seemed to be resting on the bottom, not sunken into the lake bed like a tree stump. It rose up about ten inches above the bottom, consistent with the profile of a body. His pulse rate quickened as he felt its curvature, again consistent with a body. As he took another minute to examine the object with his fingers, in the pitch blackness, he became positive. It was not a human body. It was a discarded automobile tire that someone had tossed into the lake years ago.

Claytor Lake, a freshwater paradise in the majestic mountains of Southwest Virginia, is an outdoorsmans dream. The huge, 4,000 acre lake features miles of wooded shoreline, dotted with hundreds of lake cottages. Anglers fish the coves for bass, sailboats enjoy the steady winds, powerboats pull water-skiers and young swimmers do cannonballs off docks into the cool mountain water.

Located fifty miles from Roanoke and three miles from Radford, the lake was formed in 1939, when the Appalachian Power Company constructed a massive dam, impounding the New River. The result was the 21-mile long lake, half a mile across at its widest point, following the winding contour of what was previously a river valley. The project provided hydroelectric power for the region while also forming the abundant recreational mecca that folks in this corner of Virginia have enjoyed for generations.

But tragically, on this particular Saturday July 12 th , 1980 Claytor Lake was the scene of one of the largest body searches in Virginia history. Law enforcement had called in every resource imaginable to hunt for the remains of 18-year old Gina Renee Hall.

Gina Hall (photo courtesy Dlana Hall)

Two weeks previously, the petite Radford University freshman visited a night club near Virginia Tech to go dancing on a Saturday night. She left the club with a man shortly after midnight and had not been seen again.

Starting at daybreak, over one hundred law enforcement officers from three states combed the surrounding water and banks of the lake in their search for Gina, who had now been missing for fourteen days. The twelve scuba divers meticulously searched the underwater lake bed. Because the deepest section was 125 feet, a mobile decompression chamber was on site, in the event a diver suffered the bends.

In other sections of the huge lake, where the bottom was free of underwater obstructions like tree stumps, rescue squad volunteers rode slowly in a small john boat. In a process known morbidly as dragging the lake they were trying to hook a body. While one of the volunteers navigated, another was at the back of a boat, holding onto a thick fifty-foot long rope as if it were a fishing line. On the other end of the rope, about thirty-feet down at the lake bottom, was a twenty-pound iron grappling hook with two large, sharp prongs, looking like a gargantuan fishing hook. The trick for the man working the drag was to keep the rope taut and the grappling hook sliding just at or inches above the lake bottom. Easy to say, but hard to do. It was a grueling task, one that made your arms ache after just fifteen minutes. And this volunteer had been at it for four hours.

Four search-and-rescue dogs, trained in cadaver scent detection, had been brought in from Northern Virginia. Each of them had undergone years of training, much of which involved search-and-find exercises with rotten pig flesh. They had the amazing ability to pick up the faint scent of a decomposing corpses gases, rising up to the waters surface. These dogs had previously found dozens of bodies.

One of the dogs, a bloodhound, Bambi, rode leaning precariously over the bow of the boat, hanging her nose so close to the water that her handler worried she might fall overboard. As she sniffed the waters surface, her handler closely observed her behavior, looking for the telltale sign of an alert, or change in demeanor of his dog, like barking at the water, indicating she had caught the scent of a dead body.

A mysterious RV was parked at the lakes edge, with signage reading Nationwide Tracking, Search and Rescue. Police were closed-mouthed about the identity of the owner. No one realized it, but in six months, the German Shepherd and his handler residing in the camper would become star witnesses in a murder trial unlike any in Virginia history.

A $10,000 reward for information leading to Gina Halls remains was publicized, so in nearby areas, adjacent to the lake, volunteers of a more mercenary nature conducted impromptu searches of surrounding forests and farmland. Many were high school kids who had gathered a group of their pals. As they searched, the teenagers talked enthusiastically of what they would do with the reward money if they found the body.

Pulaski County, which surrounds Claytor Lake, is known for having many caves in the hollows and valleys of the rugged mountain terrain. Since there were several caves within walking distance of the lake, a group of amateur cavers, from nearby Giles County had been invited to join the search. The spelunkers were currently on the far side of the lake, negotiating through a substantial cave whose beach-ball sized mouth was obscured by brush on one of the steep lake banks. You had to know the cave was there to find the entrance. They were close enough to the lake that they could hear the boats from within the caverns darkness. The spelunkers shined their bulky carbide lights, predecessors to the LED lights now used, throughout the nooks and crannies inside. The search organizers had instructed them to depend most on their sense of smell, as they would most definitely smell a two-week old corpse way before they would see it.