The Unsolved Deaths of Heidi Childs & David Metzler
So this case is one that is close to my heart as it took place near my home town. It involves two Virginia Teach students who went out for a romantic evening and never came home alive. The killer hasn’t been caught and this case remains unsolved. Hopefully someone out there will know more information.
Heidi Childs and David Metzler were both natives of the Lynchburg area of Virginia. They met through their church youth group and remained close friends in the years before they entered Virginia Tech. The pair started dating once they got to college and reportedly became inseparable.
Heidi was home-schooled prior to being accepted into Virginia Tech and started taking college courses in the 10th grade. She ran cross country, played basketball for her church team, and loved camping, skiing, and hiking with her friends.
She enjoyed going on mission trips and sharing her faith with her youth group through praise and worship. She played the guitar and sang, but preferred to be in the background.
Heidi’s father, Sgt. Donald Childs, a retired aviation sergeant with the Virginia State Police, said his daughter was an honors student attending college on a full academic scholarship. She enjoyed her freshman year at Virginia Tech studying biochemistry with hopes of eventually going into the medical field.
The 18-year-old was two days into her sophomore year when she decided to enroll in Virginia Tech’s program designed for those interested in a pre-med career path. She phoned her parents on August 26, 2009 to tell them the exciting news.
Her father shared with Dateline that, “She had an appointment with her college advisor the following day. “Heidi called that day and was talking very quickly, as she often did when she was excited.”
David’s family are devout Christians who moved to Lynchburg after serving as missionaries in China. His father, Keith Metzler, practices medicine in Lynchburg. David was an All-American boy who enjoyed watching football, playing golf and strumming his guitar. In high school, he took a shop class where he learned to enjoy woodworking. It was something he had hoped to pursue more.
David was described as good-natured and generally a “homebody.” Even as a teenager he was family-oriented and enjoyed sharing common interests, like deer hunting, with his father. David was accepted into Virginia Tech’s prestigious College of Engineering and was majoring in Industrial & Systems Engineering.
John Vasvary, retired assistant principal and athletic director at Brookville High School spoke highly of David’s character as a student and soccer player. “He was the kind of kid you liked having at the school. He was fun.” Deborah Guthrie, retired assistant principal at Brookville High School, recalls, “David was a wonderful student, gifted student academically and just kind to everyone.”
So these kids were your all American couple and had everything going for them. Which to me makes what happened to them even more tragic.
On August 26, 2009 David told his roommates that he wanted to take Heidi out on a special date. He was taking Heidi to a field in Jefferson National Forest where they would talk and play music. They got into Metzler’s 1992 Toyota as the sun was setting around 8:25 p.m. and drove to Caldwell Fields. This sounds like something out of a cute 1950’s movie!
Jefferson National Forest combines with the George Washington National forest to form one of the largest areas of public land in Eastern Untied states. Together they cover 1.8 million acres!
The section were David took Heidi is located off of Rt. 460 in Montgomery County and is called the “Caldwell Fields Family Campground.” The fields are nestled on a section of Craig Creek Rd., approximately 8 miles from Rt. 460, on Jefferson National Forest property. It’s about 15 miles from the campus of Virginia Tech.
Though the location is common for hikers or tourists familiar with the area, the fields are off of a dirt road, surrounded by mountainous peaks and heavily wooded area. Cell phone service is scarce, and you can go a mile without passing more than a hunting tree stand. The closest business is a summer camp located a few miles up the road.
The couple arrived at their spot around 8:15 and the pair didn’t plan on staying out late because classes had started a couple of days earlier and Heidi had homework.
What happened next is unclear.
What we do know is that at about 8 a.m. the next morning, a man walking his dog found the teens’ bodies. David was found in the driver’s seat of the car; glass scattered the gravel beside the driver’s side door. The 19-year-old had been shot through the driver’s side window. Heidi’s body was discovered outside of the vehicle and that the teen had been shot in the face with a .30-.30 hunting rifle.
Heidi’s purse, her silver Motorola Razr phone, silver Sony Cybershot camera, ID card, Virginia Tech lanyard, and a credit card were missing from the scene.
Prior to the first press conference in March of 2012, few details were released about the murders, aside from the location of the bodies, according to New-Era Progress. State, local and federal authorities comprised a task force challenged with solving the case and a reward of more than $70,000 was being offered for information.
The first press conference revealed that investigators had DNA evidence believed to be from the killer. It was also the first time that the weapon used to kill the couple was a .30-.30 rifle.
This was also when Montgomery County Sheriff Whitt requested the public’s help in identifying the owners of six vehicles:
- A green sedan, possibly a Ford Taurus or Dodge Intrepid, was seen stopping in front of residences on Craig Creek Road around 6 p.m.
- A dark-blue Dodge Caravan was seen parked near the border of Montgomery and Craig counties, near a logging site, around 8:30 p.m.
- A dark-colored van or minivan was parked at Caldwell Fields after dark.
- A dark-colored Ford Crown Victoria of Chevrolet Caprice was seen driving on Craig Creek Road around 10 p.m.
- A red or red and white Dodge extended-cab pickup with dual exhaust, oversized tires and tinted windows was seen driving up Lee Road at about 11 p.m., directly across from Caldwell Fields.
- A gray or cream-colored early 2000s model Pontiac Bonneville, parked near Caldwell Fields around midnight.
A decade has passed and there is still not answers. Both David and Heidi’s families worry that they will never have closure. In a 2019 press conference Lt. Lyon said the Virginia State Police are still actively searching for the killer or killers.
He went on to say, “We still need the public’s help to fit these pieces together, we know there are people in Montgomery County and across the New River Valley who know exactly what happened that evening of August 26, 2009 in that parking lot at Caldwell Fields at the edge of the Jefferson National Forest.”
Authorities announced that a $100,000 reward is being offered for tips that lead to an arrest. This comes as the FBI donates $28,000 towards the cause.
So like with many unsolved cases there are theories as to what has happened.
The popular theory is that they drove up on something they shouldn’t have seen, or that people drove up on them and didn’t want any witnesses to whatever was about to happen. Both these theories seem implausible. Locals say that you can see car lights from a mile down the road — any illegal activity would have been hidden long before Heidi and David arrived at the turning circle. Conversely, if the young couple turned up and found the parking circle occupied, it is likely they would have simply driven off to another location.
Another theory is the hunter theory which produces two possible scenarios.
- A poacher accidentally shot David, killing Heidi either in a panic or in the cold-blooded calculation that she was a witness. The weakness with this theory is that the isolated nature of the area means a poacher could work easily during the day without fear of being caught.
- Someone planned to stalk and kill a couple using the well-known lovers’-lane parking areas. Virginia Tech had started the new academic year two days prior and victims were sure to start showing up over the following nights. The problem with this theory is the lack of similar local crimes over the next ten years.
Now Lt. Lyon recently said in a statement “We have specific individuals we are interested in and pursuing related to this case.”
Of coarse the authorities have not released those names but there are some infamous suspects being considered:
- Jesse Matthew — the violent rapist and murderer was operating in Virginia at the time, but the m.o. doesn’t match and in my eyes he is not a good fit as a suspect.
- Israel Keyes — not necessarily known for lovers’ lane murders, he did admit to watching a couple in a parked car with his rifle aimed at them. Although also not known to be active in Virginia, he did travel thousands of miles by plane and car to avoid detection. He was also known to steal I.D from victims. He was unaccounted for on the date of the murders, according to the FBI timeline available. If DNA evidence in the Childs/Metzler case is not from the killer, Keyes is one of my favored suspects.
- The Colonial Parkway Murders — at 250-odd miles east of Caldwell Fields, I am not a big fan of this theory that the same killer is involved. There is enough speculation as it is that the Colonial Parkway murders themselves are the work of multiple killers.
If the killer of Heidi and David has operated before or since, then it is worth examining some other cases of interest.
First would be the strange case of Karen Noble and Jeff Scott. At 9pm on May 28th, 1978 Jeff (21) picked up his girlfriend Karen (20) from her home in Bluefield, Virginia, for a night out. It is around 67 miles west of Caldwell Fields.
No one knows what happened next, but at some point over the next couple of hours they were killed, and Scott’s truck driven along Route 61 to Wolf Creek with the bodies inside. Around midnight two men driving along Route 61 saw the truck on fire. They pulled a male out of the truck but could see that he was already dead with a bullet wound to the head.
They left the scene to call emergency services and, when firemen arrived, they headed down to Wolf Creek to get water. They came across the body of Karen Noble 30 yards from Scott’s truck, shot in the head twice and face down in the water. The case has never been solved.
The second is of Donna Hall and Mike Margaret. Due to being much further east in Richmond, Virginia, this case is often suspected as being the work of The Colonial Parkway killer. Again we must keep an open mind, but there are notable differences between this case and the murder of Heidi and David.
Unlike Heidi and David, Donna and Mike were known to be involved in the Richmond drug scene. Even so, when they went missing after a party on 17th August, their friends still worried about them. It wasn’t until 21st August that a dog walker found Mike’s jeep backed into a wooded area with doors open and the roof folded back.
I imagine prompted by the behavior of his dog, the man walked past the jeep to investigate and found the bodies of Mike (21) and Donna (18). Police believe they died in the early hours of August 18th, both being drugged with Demerol, stabbed and having their throats slit.
A third person’s DNA was found in the blood at the scene but there is no official word on whether it ever matched anything taken from the other cases mentioned above.
And finally a more recent incident took place on April 5, 2010. Christina Floyd and friend Tim Davis were sat at the edge of Rock Point Overlook, on Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia. Around 7:45pm a man pulled up in a red Ford Taurus and began shooting at them with a shotgun. Davis was hit and fell 150ft off the overlook cliff. Floyd, not realizing she had also been hit, bravely ran up to the man and began wrestling for the gun. At some point he managed to throw her off the cliff but, miraculously, she landed on a ledge 6ft below and managed to clamber back up to the road.
The attacker must have been getting frustrating by this point, as he began hurling rocks at the young lady, fracturing her skull in two places. As he turned back to his car to retrieve the shotgun, she ran down Blue Ridge Parkway. A husband and wife driving past saw her distress and drove her to safety before calling the police.
Tim Davis was retrieved by mountain rescue but died from his wounds four days later.
Ralph Leon Jackson was caught a mere 48 hours after the attack. He pled guilty and was convicted of murder and attempted murder in 2011, to a total of life plus 35 years.
While all 3 incidents have some connections there is no actual evidence to support any of them. What authorities need is for someone to come forward with information that will lead to an arrest.
Sheriff Whitt stated to the Southwest Times that that a person responsible for this type of crime will sometimes act differently in the days after the crime was committed or around anniversary dates of the crime. Such behaviors might include excessive interest in the case, increases anger, increases consumption of alcohol or drugs, and possibly moving from the area.
If this seems like someone you know you can submit tips anonymously to the website vspunsolved.com or you can call 540–375–9589
Be sure to check out my podcast Leave The Lights On for episodes like this and more!
