A Cold Case Of The Dead Accountant

On Tuesday, June 29, 1984, an accountant by the name of Randy Barlow didn't show up for work and he hadn't called in. According to the HR department of the accounting firm where he worked, Mr. Barlow hadn't missed a day in the three years he'd worked there. Mr. Barrow's supervisor tried calling his house but Mr. Barlow didn't answer. When he didn't show up the next day, the supervisor asked the Knoxville PD to do a wellness check.

After the uniformed officer pulled into Mr. Barlow's drive, he walked up to the front door and rang the bell six times. Nobody answered except for the dogs he could hear barking on the other side of the door. He tried the door and it was locked.

Since he didn't have a plausible cause to crash the door, the officer walked around the house to the fenced back yard and found nothing there either except for a small patio with two lawn chairs, a chaise lounge, and a table with an umbrella. It looked to the officer like the yard had been recently mowed, and the two flower beds he saw didn't have any weeds like they would have if they'd been neglected for very long. On his way back to his car, the officer looked in through the windows he could reach and didn't see anything that looked out of the ordinary.

The officer then talked to the neighbors on both sides of Mr. Barlow's house. Both of them gave him the same story. Mr. Barlow was a good neighbor who kept up his house and yard and never bothered anyone. They both said he was sociable if they said something to him, but he'd never just walk over to talk if he was in his back yard at the same time they were.

Both neighbors also said Mr. Barlow seemed to go somewhere each weekend, although he never told them where he went or why. When the officer said he'd heard dogs in the house and asked if Mr. Barlow would normally leave them while he went somewhere, both neighbors said he always took his dogs with him when he went anywhere.

It's not a crime to leave your own home or to leave your pets at home, so the officer had no recourse other than to report what he'd seen. The only thing the officer could write in his report was that he'd checked the residence and didn't find Mr. Barlow at home, but he'd seen nothing out of the ordinary.

When Mr. Barlow didn't call in or show up for work the following day, his supervisor again called the Knoxville PD for a wellness check. As it happened, the same uniformed officer made the check and found everything just as he had the day before. He talked to both neighbors again and both told him they hadn't seen Mr. Barlow or his Chevy van since the Monday after Memorial Day.

While the officer still didn't have just cause to enter the house in search of Mr. Barlow, he did have a reason for Knoxville Animal Control to do so. The dogs were still in the house and if Mr. Barlow hadn't been back home for three days, those dogs hadn't been fed and they didn't have water. The officer called Knoxville Animal Control and asked for an officer to meet him at the house.

The Animal Control officer arrived at the house and after listening to the patrol officer, tried the door. It was still locked, so the Animal Control Officer called a locksmith. An hour later, the locksmith had picked the lock and left. When the Animal Control officer opened the door, two dogs were standing there with their tails wagging.

The Animal Control officer took one look and said they were Maltese dogs and that they hadn't been taken care of very well because their long, white coats were starting to mat. He went back to his truck and returned with two small carriers, caught each dog and placed it in a carrier, and then left for the Animal Control office. He said he'd take care of the dogs until the owner returned and paid the fine he was going to have to pay for his ticket for animal neglect.

The patrol officer did make a quick walk-through of the house, but just as he'd seen through the windows, nothing appeared to be out of place except for several dog droppings on the floor in the kitchen. He left the house after locking the door when he went out. In his report he stated that it looked as if Mr. Barlow had just left to go somewhere and hadn't come back, but it was odd that he'd left the two dogs alone.

Mr. Barlow's disappearance was solved that Saturday. His body was found by a troop of Boy Scouts on the private trail to their usual campground off Acuff Lane. The Scoutmaster looked at the body and then told the troop he was canceling their weekend camping trip. He walked his troop back to the pickup truck they'd just come from and started driving them back to the city. He stopped at the first house he came to and called the Knoxville Police to report the body

The Knoxville Police dispatched two uniformed officers to the scene along with Harry, a KPD detective, Bill Jackson, the Corner, and two of Bill's crime scene techs. While the uniforms secured the scene, the Coroner examined the body and the techs took pictures and began searching for evidence.

Based upon the state of rigor mortis, Bill told Harry Mr. Barlow had been dead for between twenty-four and forty-eight hours, but said he'd have to get the body back to his morgue before he could give Harry a cause of death. Bill did tell Harry that it didn't look like Mr. Barlow had had a heart attack or had died from some other natural cause because it didn't look like he'd rolled around like he probably would have if he was struggling for breath or had had severe chest pains. Based upon that, Bill told Harry he was leaning toward murder, but couldn't be sure until he finished his autopsy.

Bill's techs didn't find anything on the body or around it other than the footprints left by the Boy Scout Troop. They thought they might have seen a few impressions left by the lug tires on an ATV, but it had been dry for a week so the trail was hard and dusty and the Boy Scouts had disturbed the trail enough the techs couldn't get a definitive cast.

When Bill finished his autopsy, he called Harry and explained what had killed Mr. Barlow. According to Bill, Mr. Barlow's blood sample showed an extremely high concentration of carbon dioxide, so high that Mr. Barlow basically suffocated from lack of oxygen.

His opinion was that Mr. Barlow had inhaled carbon dioxide gas at a concentration several times the OSHA permissible exposure limit, and that had to have been either an industrial accident or a murder. Since Mr. Barlow was an accountant for an accounting firm, had no reason to be around any industrial process that used carbon dioxide, and the fact that no industrial accidents of any type had been reported over the Memorial Day holiday, Bill called the case a murder. Harry agreed and began his investigation.

Mr. Barlow had no living family that Harry could find, so Harry interviewed all his neighbors and everyone who worked in his office. None of them knew anything except that Mr. Barlow seemed to be a kind man who was very good at his job and kept his property up to standards.

The one thing that did present another avenue for Harry to explore was what another accountant at Mr. Barlow's office told Harry. She said she thought Mr. Barlow was probably gay. She said she knew Mr. Barlow wasn't married and that she'd been giving him hints that she liked him in hopes that he'd ask her out, but he hadn't. She said he seldom talked to anyone at work except about business, and he especially didn't talk to any of the female employees.

Harry asked at all of the Knoxville bars that were known to be frequented by gay men. A few of the patrons said they wished they did know him, but they all said they didn't recognize the man in the picture Harry showed them.

Harry found the license and VIN numbers for Mr. Barlow's van and issued a statewide BOLO for it. That generated the last bit of information about Mr. Barlow's death. His Chevy van was found a month later sitting in the parking lot of an apartment building in Johnson City. It had been there for three weeks and hadn't been moved, so the apartment supervisor called the Johnson City Police Department to report it as an abandoned vehicle.

Harry had the van transported back to Knoxville and the Crime Scene Techs swept the van for evidence but didn't find anything except for Mr. Barlow's fingerprints and several long, white dog hairs on the seats.

That's where Harry left the case because he didn't have anything more to work with. Mr. Barlow was apparently a quiet man who just did his job and then went home. None of his neighbors or co-workers had anything bad to say about him and if he was gay, he didn't seem to have any friends in the gay community of Knoxville.

When Harry turned over his file to me, he frowned.

"Somebody killed this poor guy but I couldn't find any reason to suspect anybody he was ever in contact with. I thought it might have been a gay thing, you know, we were together and now we aren't and I'm going to make sure you don't find somebody else, but I couldn't find anybody in the gay community who admitted to knowing Mr. Barlow. You'd think if he was gay at least one of them would have seen him, but every one I talked to said they didn't know him so I don't think he was gay.

"I thought maybe since he died from carbon dioxide poisoning, he might have been close to some industry that used the stuff, died, and the company hid the body to keep OSHA off their ass. The problem I had with that theory is that it wouldn't be just one man who was involved. It would have been multiple people and it would have been reported to OSHA. I checked with OSHA and they never had any report of an industrial accident involving carbon dioxide around that time frame anywhere in the US.

"All I was able to find out was that he was dead and there didn't seem to be a motive or an opportunity. Apparently the guy just stayed in his house with his dogs when he wasn't working."

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I took that case home with me to see if it interested Rochelle. I'm Richard Owens, a cold case detective for the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department and Rochelle is my partner in solving those crimes. She's a writer who writes murder mysteries based upon the cases we've solved. We also live together because on our first case together, we discovered we had something in common, namely the libido attacks Rochelle seems to have about every other day and my ability to cure those attacks.

That's not the real reason we live together, of course. No matter how great the sex is, if two people don't connect in most other ways, it never works. Rochelle and I see eye to eye on most things in life and when we disagree, we can usually talk it out. As sappy as it sounds for a veteran police officer to say, we're also deeply in love with each other. We're just waiting to tie the knot until we're both sure because both of us have been married before and neither marriage worked out.

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After Rochelle read what little file there was she looked up at me and frowned.

"Carbon dioxide poisoning? I've never heard of that happening in the US unless it was some sort of industrial accident or the people were just really stupid. It happened in 2018 to a woman who put dry ice in a normal cooler and then drove home with her car windows up and the air conditioner on. The dry ice evaporated and filled her car with carbon dioxide gas and killed her.

"I can buy dry ice at the grocery store, but there are warning signs on the chest they store it in that tell you not to put it in a regular cooler and put that cooler in your closed up car. The woman either couldn't read or she just ignored that warning.

"I don't know how else this Mr. Barlow would have been around enough carbon dioxide to kill him unless he decided to take his own life that way, but if he'd done that where they found him, there would have been at least a little evidence. The dry ice would have evaporated so it wouldn't be there, but he had to get it there somehow, like with an ice chest. I suppose he could have stuck his head in the ice chest and breathed in enough carbon dioxide to make him pass out, but then he'd have fallen down and started breathing normal air again and wouldn't have died. Since the coroner said it didn't look like Mr. Barlow had rolled around or had convulsions, I think somebody killed him and then took him out to that hiking trail and dumped him there."

I frowned.

"Well, that's what Harry thought too, but he couldn't find anyone who had a motive or the opportunity."

"What about the gay thing? Johnson City is where Mr. Barlow's van was found and from what I've read, Johnson City has a relatively large gay community."

I shook my head.

"Harry asked a lot of people in the gay bars in Knoxville and didn't find anyone who knew or even knew of Mr. Barlow. When the Crime Scene Techs didn't find any thing in Mr. Barlow's van except his fingerprints, Harry evidently decided Johnson City was just where Mr. Barlow left his van. He didn't investigate any of the gay bars in Johnson City because there was no evidence suggesting that the murder happened there. I wouldn't have either unless I had a different set of fingerprints or something else that indicated someone besides Mr. Barlow had been in that van."

Rochelle closed up the file.

"So where do we go from here?"

"Well, the first thing I'm going to do tomorrow is run Mr. Barlow's name through every database I can. He has to have had at least a parking ticket somewhere before. If I can find out what he'd done in the past, maybe that will lead us to what got him murdered. You have any other ideas?"

Rochelle shrugged.

"Just what I always do. I'll go search the archives of the Knoxville newspapers from that time and see if he made the news somehow. I can at least find out if he was born and grew up in Knoxville and the names of his parents. They're probably not still alive, but maybe there's something in their past that will connect him with somebody else and that somebody else decided to break that connection by killing Mr. Barlow."

Rochelle thought for a few moments and then frowned.

"Maybe it was a gay thing after all. Before 1970, being gay meant you could be arrested and put in prison. Most businesses would fire you if they found out you were gay. It was even illegal in New York State to sell alcohol to a gay person.

"By 1974 it was pretty well recognized that gay men and lesbian women did exist and on both the East and West coasts, the laws were changed to remove homosexuality as a criminal offense. Here in the Bible Belt, that change didn't come until 2003 when the Supreme Court ruled that whatever consenting adults want to do in the bedroom is legal. The current laws at the time weren't really enforced much, and most employers didn't ask the question, but the threat was still there.

"Maybe that connection I talked about was that Mr. Barlow was gay and had a partner, but that partner didn't want to risk being exposed. He could have been convicted of sodomy and either fined or sent to prison, and it's almost a sure thing that he'd have lost his job. A sure way to make sure that didn't happen would have been to kill Mr. Barlow."

I asked if that was the case, why hadn't Harry been able to find any gay men who knew Mr. Barlow. Rochelle smiled.

"If you were going to have an affair with another woman, would you do it with a woman who lived in Knoxville? Knoxville's a pretty big city, but with your position on the police force, there's still a chance somebody would recognize you. You'd probably meet her somewhere else, somewhere close enough I wouldn't think you were gone for a long time, but far enough you and your lover could spend time together.

"What if Mr. Barlow's lover was well-known where he lived? They might pick a hotel someplace within a couple hours driving distance to meet. Mr. Barlow's neighbor said he went somewhere on the weekends. Maybe that's what he was doing -- meeting his lover somewhere. That his van was found in Johnson City supports that theory. Maybe they met at that apartment parking lot and took the lover's car somewhere else, someplace that had a lot of carbon dioxide."

"Well, that's a good theory for a motive and maybe for an opportunity, but it still doesn't answer the question about method. If Mr. Barlow and his lover went to that place together, wouldn't they have both been killed by the carbon dioxide? That's what stopped Harry from investigating it as an industrial accident."

Rochelle grinned.

"Not if the lover figured out a way to kill Mr. Barlow with carbon dioxide while staying safe himself.

"Now, speaking of figuring things out, I've been writing all day and I've written myself into a corner. I need a different way to describe a man and a woman having sex that's erotic but not too descriptive. Think you could help me out with that?"

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I'm not sure Rochelle figured out a different way to describe sex or not, but she was really happy the next morning. So was I. It wasn't one of Rochelle's "let's see how many ways we can do this" night. It was just once. She let me drive and then we had a snuggle and a kiss good night.

When I got to my desk that morning, I started with the NCIC database. It would have any interaction with law enforcement by Mr. Barlow both in Tennessee and in any other state as long as the information had been sent to NCIC. There was a possibility that some state had neglected to send the information, but it was the best place to start.

After two hours, NCIC was also the best place to stop searching. Mr. Barlow had never committed a crime, had never been reported missing, wasn't an illegal alien wanted in a foreign country, or any of the other things that get entered into the NCIC records.

My next stop was the TBI database, but it didn't have anything either. Neither did the Tennessee DMV other than Mr. Barlow was thirty-six when he was killed and that he'd had had a Tennessee Driver's License since he was sixteen. He'd changed his address from Chattanooga to Knoxville in 1981. I wrote down his license information for both cities.

None of the DMVs of the surrounding states had anything on Mr. Barlow except for South Carolina. Mr. Barlow had been cited on July 15, 1983 for running a red light in Greenville, South Carolina. He'd paid the fine and court costs the following Wednesday.

By then, it was time for lunch, so I grabbed a chicken sandwich at a local fast food place and then went back to my desk.

There was always a chance that Mr. Barlow had had some interaction with law enforcement that hadn't been reported. NCIC and the TBI database go back a long time, but sometimes a minor offense, like shoplifting, doesn't make it to either database. It takes a clerk to report that information, and sometimes they get busy. The case gets filed in the court records for that court, but never makes it's way any further.

Since Mr. Barlow was living in Knoxville when he was killed, I started with the Knoxville court records. After searching for Randy Barlow, Randall Barlow, Randy Batlow, Randall Batlow, Randy Barloe, Randall Barloe, and all the other typos I could think of, I still hadn't found anything. Yes, typos do get through the system sometimes. Unless they're found by someone who knows the truth, they never get corrected.

It was possible he'd moved from Chattanooga to Knoxville to get away from someone or something, so I ran the same string of names through the court records for Chattanooga. I found nothing.

There were a lot of other court records I could have searched, but I doubted I'd find anything. People usually commit crimes relatively close to home, so anything Mr. Barlow had done other than a traffic ticket would probably be in the court records of either Chattanooga or Knoxville.

I called it a day then and went home to see if Rochelle had found anything. She's pretty resourceful, so I figured she'd have found out at least something we could try to expand on.