Ashley Flowers

This is a crime scene.

And the entire family is thinking like, how?

How can they leave Cheryl out there?

But they don't have a choice.

So they go and investigators have to get to work.

Jill Tyra reported for Wilmington Morning Star that Cheryl's body had been found by a scent tracking dog about 200 yards from Andy's car, just barely into the wooded area past the field.

When she's found, she's naked, lying face down on the ground, and her hands are actually bound behind her back with rope.

And she has what looks like jagged wounds to her head and her neck, and her throat has been slashed.

And her killer, it seems, made a half-hearted attempt to conceal her body under some pieces of like wood from this like rotting fence.

And then they find her clothes nearby, a single $20 bill as well.

Her pretty turquoise summer dress with like red accents had actually been cut from her body.

And Shane thinks maybe her underwear had been too, she told us, which suggests to investigators that whatever horrors Cheryl had been met with probably involved a sexual assault.

Now, at this time that they find Cheryl, there's still no sign of Andy, though as they secure the scene and get Cheryl to the morgue, searching for him does continue.

But by the wee hours of the morning, they decide they need to break till sunrise.

This is all absolute torture for Andy's dad, Garland.

He got to the scene not long before Cheryl's body was found, and he, like, set out walking the tree line, too, only to be hustled away almost without explanation.

Garland passed away actually recently in October of 2024.

But I found this interview he did with Linda Sheldon Fell for a series that she hosts called Moments of Hope.

And when he's talking to her, he gets choked up because he talks about this HPD officer who actually asked to stay at the scene until the search could pick back up at sunrise.

And he explains that at the first hint of daylight, that officer starts walking the same tree line that Garland walked multiple times the night before.