The Roanoke Times

File 2008 William Ray Hagy Jr., in prison since the mid-1980s for the rape and sodomy of a 14-year-old girl, is scheduled to be released in 2011.

Photos by ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Roanoke Circuit Court files show William Ray Hagy in the 1980s (above), and damage from a 1979 fire that Hagy pleaded guilty to having set at the Roanoke Livestock Market (below).

Photos by ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Roanoke Circuit Court files show William Ray Hagy in the 1980s (above), and damage from a 1979 fire that Hagy pleaded guilty to having set at the Roanoke Livestock Market (below).

UPDATE (Monday, March 22: 10:52 a.m.): Hagy wants trial by judge; testimony to begin today

Two Roanoke women killed less than six months apart. Their unclothed bodies left about a mile from each other. Both strangled during or after sex.

For almost a quarter-century, any connection between the slayings of Cynthia Denise McCray, a 21-year-old black woman dumped under an Interstate 581 overpass, and Audrey Anne West, a 33-year-old white woman propped on her son's teddy bear pillow in Old Southwest, was cloaked by their differences. In West's case, investigators doggedly pursued her ex-husband, who was cleared years later by DNA testing.

A computer finally made the connection in 2007. After the development of DNA testing and the state criminal DNA database, a fresh analysis of evidence from the mid-1980s homicides led to a surprise suspect: a man who had spent nearly all the time since the slayings behind bars, serving a decades-long sentence for the rape and sodomy of a 14-year-old.

William Ray Hagy Jr., 49, known as "Ray" in his life outside prison and as "Shaky" behind bars, goes on trial today in Roanoke Circuit Court in the 1984 slaying of McCray. The case against him will rest on the new DNA tests and on the word of a jailhouse snitch -- a convicted swindler who said Hagy implicated himself in prison conversations.

Hagy faces other trials, for the 1985 rape and killing of West, and the abduction and rape of a teenager in 1984. Those cases and McCray's were linked in 2007, when a cold-case detective submitted old evidence for testing that wasn't available in the 1980s.

Retired Roanoke police Officer Covar Gardner, who spent decades with the force and helped investigate both the McCray and West cases, said last week he's still shocked that Hagy was implicated in both.

"His name never came up. He was never suspected of anything," Gardner said.

Left beneath the overpass

McCray's body was found six days after Thanksgiving 1984.

She was a strong young woman who dropped out of Lucy Addison High School, lived with her mother and sisters in an apartment on Hunt Avenue and attended Pilgrim Baptist Church. Family members said she loved children and loved playing basketball. Her mother said she ran with a wild crowd, fueled partly by a settlement check from a car accident.

Her body was left beneath I-581 off Campbell Avenue, naked below the waist except for her socks, and with signs she'd been dragged. Her panties seemed to have been cut away with a knife, a prosecutor said in a pretrial hearing last week. She had been strangled, apparently soon after having sex, police said.

Police said McCray worked as a prostitute. Gardner recalled interviewing other streetwalkers. But nothing turned up.

A peaceful killing scene

In May 1985, Audrey West's body was found in the lower bunk in her son's bedroom in her Walnut Avenue home.

West was a former model who tried a variety of business ventures. She and her husband had recently attained more financial stability, according to a newspaper account at the time. They were planning to sell their Roanoke house and move to Richmond.

West was found wearing only her socks. Her head lay against a teddy bear pillow. "It was one of the most peaceful killing scenes I've ever seen," an investigator told the newspaper.

West's body, like McCray's, showed signs of being dragged. Her wrists apparently had been bound with shoelaces that had been cut away, police said.

Investigators focused on several men close to West, including her husband and a friend. Suspicion soon centered on West's ex-husband, Stephen Urick, who found her body.

Gardner said investigators thought Urick uncooperative. He took a polygraph test, but hired an attorney.

"This guy's got something to hide," Gardner remembered thinking.

No concrete evidence emerged. In 1998, DNA tests ruled out Urick as a suspect.

Urick, who lives in Roanoke and works in real estate, said the cloud of suspicion never cleared.

"People still come up to me, point at me," he said Friday. "It's ridiculous, but it's gone on for 25 years."

Making the link

Similarities between the West and McCray slayings "didn't set off any alarms," Gardner said. The two women just "lived totally different lives."

McCray lived in Northwest Roanoke and worked the streets. West was a mother and homemaker with aspirations of interior design or sales.

"Geographically, it's not that far away. But in other ways, it's a world away," Gardner said.

Both homicide investigations went dormant. Roanoke Detective L.P. Manning, the police department's cold-case specialist, unearthed McCray's files in 2007. He decided to submit DNA evidence to the state lab so it could be compared with state databases of prisoners and felons.

About the same time, the son of West and Urick asked the detective to take another look at West's killing. Manning submitted DNA evidence from her case, too.

Both cases matched Hagy, whose DNA had been catalogued for other convictions.

During a pretrial hearing last week, prosecutors aired a theory of how Hagy, homeless and jobless after an early-1980s prison stint for arson, bridged the worlds of McCray and West.

He supplied both women with marijuana, Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Sheri Jones said in court. He traded pot for sex with McCray, and sold it to West.

The source for the information was another man with a tangled criminal history in the Roanoke Valley: Roy Alonzo Dickinson, who as chief financial officer for Couvrette Building Systems, an automated teller machine maker in Salem, tried to loot the company.

Dickinson, serving time after pleading guilty in 2008 to fraud charges stemming from his time at Couvrette, has been described by his former boss and prosecutors as a consummate con man. Behind bars, he became adept at gathering incriminating information from inmates and snitching. In February 2009, his help with other prosecutions helped win him a below-sentencing-guidelines prison term of three years in his fraud case.

Just before that sentencing, after inmates broke his wrist because they learned he was an informant, Dickinson was jailed with Hagy at the Roanoke City Jail.

The two men struck up a friendship that included Dickinson setting up long phone conversations between Hagy, who has Parkinson's disease, and Dickinson's wife in California, who also suffers from the illness. More than 50 hours of those conversations were recorded, court filings said.

Dickinson said Hagy also told him about McCray and West, according to testimony at a December hearing. Hagy drew maps of where the women died and where their bodies were found, according to the prosecutor.

Hagy's attorney, Gary Lumsden, questioned whether Dickinson got his information by asking his wife to search Google, rather than from Hagy.

Dickinson was later sent to a federal prison camp in California.

He has since been indicted on four charges of forging documents from another inmate who Dickinson said was plotting to murder a federal prosecutor and a Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer.

As a child and teen, Hagy bounced among homes in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio. He was convicted of indecent exposure in Columbus, Ohio. By 1979, he was living with his father and stepmother in Roanoke.

In December 1979, Hagy and two other men threw matches into the hay at the Roanoke Livestock Market on 25th Street Northwest, heavily damaging the market. Hagy drew a five-year sentence and was paroled in December 1983.

In the next year and a half, Hagy was accused in a string of crimes.

n A 17-year-old girl said Hagy abducted and raped her. She didn't appear in court to testify against him. The charges were set aside, then revived almost a quarter-century later after the DNA tests renewed authorities' interest in Hagy.

n A 14-year-old girl said Hagy grabbed her as she walked home, showed her a knife, forced her to perform oral sex and raped her.

n Hagy was arrested in the attack on the 14-year-old in July 1985, after the victim spotted him in Fallon Park and called the police. He was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison. McCray and West by then were dead.

Under the state laws in effect in 1986, when Hagy was sentenced, he will be released in 2011, barring additional convictions.