Oadis White lll

You won’t ever hear about this on TV because the victims were homeless drug addicts.

Back in 2010, a local sheriff requested my presence at a meeting involving murders in several jurisdictions in the connecting tips of Virginia and Tennessee. The deaths involved the murders of five white women living on the periphery of society. They were homeless

drug addicts who were circumstantially linked to one man - Oadis William White lll.

The drive was 5 hours for me, but I attended the meeting to discuss options. Some locals didn’t show up, others were not interested in furthering their investigations. A Southwest Virginia serial killer task force was never formed.

It was decided then and there that the strongest case would be pursued, that of the strangling death in March 2010 of Angela Statzer in Bristol, VA. The conventional wisdom being that time and money would not be spent on difficult investigations and trials, and White would still end up in prison. White was convicted of Statzer’s death in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison.

Oadis White was a bad dude. From age 15 to 25, he was arrested for assault, larceny, forgery, and making threats. In 1981, he beat and robbed a man at gunpoint. After getting out of prison in 1986, he fathered a child with a 22-year-old woman. Later, he raped and sodomized her and received 11 more years in prison.

In July 2004, three days after moving into a house in Johnson City, TN, White called police and reported finding a 19-year-old girl dead in his basement. Three years later in Bristol, Tenn., the remains of two other young women were found months in the same creek. White knew them both and was the caretaker for an abandoned house nearby.

By 2005, White was a known drug dealer in Bristol, TN. Then, in October 2008, a badly decomposed body of a woman was found in a vacant farmhouse in a Washington County, Va., owned by White's late stepfather.

Though there were rumblings in the press about ignoring justice for marginalized victims, I do not believe the other murders mentioned have ever been solved.