Murder suspect caught with photos on computer

By Blake Spurney

Editor

The wireless universe carries with it no loyalty, a local teenage girl learned recently.

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Sexually explicit images of her were found by North Carolina investigators on the computer of a Gastonia murder suspect. Those images were traced to Austin Lee Hedden, 21, Franklin, who recently was charged in Rabun County with statutory rape against the girl. Investigators found images of child porn on Hedden’s computer, and he remains the target of a federal investigation.

According to court records, a Buncombe County, N.C., investigator and a State Bureau of Investigation agent were led to Hedden by Yahoo chat log records. He had sent Andrew Douglas Dalzell, the suspect of a 1997 abduction and murder of a 35-year-old woman in Carrboro, N.C., the images of the Rabun County girl.

Hedden told investigators that the girl was his ex-girlfriend and that he had deleted nude photos of her after they broke up in December. He also claimed his computer recently had gotten a virus that put “strange things” on it. Investigators received consent to look at his computer and discovered numerous pictures of nude preteen girls that he said he got from LimeWire, a file-sharing Internet service.

Hedden and the girl had met at the Fun Factory in Franklin, where he worked. He also admitted having sex with her at his home and several times in a car in Rabun County.

When investigators showed the girl the images of herself in April, she expressed surprise because they were supposed to be something private between her and Hedden. She told investigators she met Hedden in June 2008. They went on their first date in July and had sex at his residence. She texted him the next day to tell him she was 15; she initially had told him she was 16. He texted her back that he was upset and that he could go to jail.

However, Hedden continued to see her. He also requested that she send him a sexually explicit video and photos while she was in Florida, and she complied. The two parted ways that summer before getting back together in late fall. The girl had told her parents Hedden was 17. In their last encounter, he picked her up in December and brought her to his residence. He brought out a whip while they were having sex and gave her several alcoholic drinks. He also took nude photos of her with his cell phone, directing her on how to pose.

The girl showed investigators a tattoo of Hedden’s initials on her chest that she made herself using an insulin needle and pen ink. Hedden called off their relationship after their last encounter because he had a girlfriend.

Hedden told investigators he deleted the images of the girl after they broke up. He also told them that of the 2,000 images he deleted, about 10 percent were of girls younger than 10, and about half were of girls between the ages of 10-15. According to court records, he said the images of young girls had begun to make him “sick. … I got sick of myself and didn’t want to look at it anymore.”

Hedden also told investigators he created his Yahoo account in 2005 so he could chat on the Internet. He would pretend to be a 16- or 17-year-old girl while chatting with males. He had been using LimeWire for about two years, and he obtained images by using search terms such as “jailbait” or “young girls.”

Assistant District Attorney Penny Crowder said federal charges against Hedden were pending. The crime lab where his computer was taken for a forensics examination has a six-month backlog on cases. He was charged May 6 with statutory rape in Rabun and remains free on $5,500 bond.

Local authorities say they have been dealing with an ever increasing amount of teenagers sending sexual images of themselves to other teens via cell phones. Those images often get sent to a third party, which can lead to eternal life on the Internet.

“It’s serious, and it’s becoming epidemic in the last couple of years,” said Rabun County Sheriff’s Lt. Kendrick Maxwell, the school resource officer. He knew of six different instances in the past year in which nude images of local youths ended up in the hands of those for whom it wasn’t intended. Typically, it’s a girl sending a picture of herself to her boyfriend, and he forwards it to his friends.

Maxwell said the students didn’t comprehend the severity of what they were doing, either sending or receiving such images, or how easily such pictures can end up on the Internet — forever. Of the cases in which he came across images of local students, he hasn’t found any online yet. “Not saying they’re not out there, we just haven’t run across them yet,” he said.

“With a damn click of the button, it’s out there everywhere,” he said. “They don’t see it that way.”

District Attorney Brian Rickman said his office had been involved with “sexting” cases in all three counties.

Technically, sexually explicit images of an underage person are child porn under the law. However, Rickman said prosecutors had to deal with sexting on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it involved a sexual predator or if it was just a youth making a dumb mistake.

Once an image hits the Internet, it quickly can get in the collection of a pedophile, who “sends it to other pedophiles for their sick kicks,” Rickman said. “Once it gets out there, there’s no way to get it back.”

Dalzell, the murder suspect who received images from Hedden, pleaded guilty in May to enticing a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity. He had gone to Asheville in February to meet what he thought was an 11-year-old girl for sex. He had been communicating on an Internet chat room with an undercover officer posing as a young girl.

Dalzell also was the last person seen with Deborah Leigh Key when she disappeared outside a Carrboro bar in November 1997, according to The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C. He confessed to killing her in 2004, but the confession was later ruled inadmissible because police used false documents to trick him into thinking he already had been charged with murder. He was told he would receive the death penalty if he didn’t confess.

Dalzell also had been charged with six counts of sexual exploitation of a minor for images found on his computer and fraud for using a stolen credit card number to attempt to order a Russian mail-order bride. Both cases were related to the murder investigation, and both were dismissed after it was ruled the evidence was illegally obtained.

Key’s body has never been found, and the confession was the primary evidence linking Dalzell to her death, authorities told The Herald-Sun.