On a cold Saturday night in late November nineteen sixty nine, twelve year old Nora Kathylene “Kathy” Jones left her house at 304 Lutie Street in the Woodbine neighborhood of Nashville. She slung a pair of white roller skates over her shoulder, tucked a dollar from her mother into her pocket, and headed toward the glow of the Roller Drome skating rink on Thompson Lane.
The plan was simple. Walk the mile or so to the rink, meet up with friends, and call home for a ride when she was done. It was a walk she knew, through a part of South Nashville that mixed small houses, churches, industrial lots, and the busy intersection of Nolensville Pike and Thompson Lane. Kids in that neighborhood made that trip all the time.
Kathy never called.
By about eleven that night, her mother Nora had not heard from her. She got in the car, drove to the Roller Drome, and found it dark. Staff told her the rink had already closed at ten. There was no sign of Kathy on the route home either. From there, the night turned into a missing child report.
This was nineteen sixty nine. There were no Amber Alerts. No cell phones. No national rapid deployment teams for child abductions. The first landmark research on how quickly abducted children are killed would not be published for years. We now know that in many of these cases three quarters of child victims are killed within a few hours and nearly nine in ten within the first day.
At the time, police had only instinct, telephones, and shoe leather.
By Monday, a Youth Aid officer had been assigned and Civil Defense volunteers were out searching. They walked through alleys, vacant lots, and drainage ditches in Woodbine and nearby streets.
For Kathy’s family, those days blur into a cycle of waiting, making calls, and answering the same questions over and over. Had she run away before. Was she upset about anything. Was there a relative she might be staying with.
On Tuesday December second, just before midday, Civil Defense searchers moved through a weed filled lot behind the Krispy Kreme at 2806 Grandview Avenue, a short distance from the intersection of Nolensville Pike and Thompson Lane. In the winter grass, one searcher saw something white. It was not trash. It was a roller skate.
A few feet away, they found Kathy.
She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed. Her arms had been bound. One of her socks had been shoved into her mouth and throat, and she had suffocated. The medical examiner estimated she had been dead about twenty four hours by the time she was found. For at least a day, while her family and volunteers searched, she lay in that lot behind a busy doughnut shop.
Detectives processed the scene, collected the skates, her clothing, and other items nearby. But this was long before modern DNA testing. There was no way to pull a full genetic profile from a trace sample and run it against a national database. Kathy’s case would have to be solved the old way, through witnesses, interviews, and persistence.
Over the next decade, Nashville police investigated dozens of possible suspects. In the late nineteen seventies, they charged a former Roller Drome bus driver named Warner Edward Adcox, a man with prior convictions for sexual offenses against children. The case relied heavily on the word of a jailhouse informant who claimed Adcox had confessed. When prosecutors looked closer, the story did not hold. The physical evidence could not tie him to the crime, and the charge was dropped before trial.
Later, cold case detectives went back through the file and concluded that Adcox was not Kathy’s killer. They have said publicly that they have identified another man as their primary suspect, someone who was in Nashville at the time and is still alive. They have not named him, saying they do not yet have enough evidence to bring a case to court.
Kathy’s murder also sits inside a disturbing pattern. In nineteen sixty five, eleven year old Wanda June Anderson was raped and beaten to death in a basement apartment near Music Row while she was babysitting. Six months later, fourteen year old Reba Kay Green was stabbed once through the heart in the bed she shared with her twin sister in North Nashville. In March nineteen seventy, another twelve year old girl in South Nashville was abducted from her home, bound and gagged, and left in a field in the same general area where Kathy was found. That girl survived.
Writers, researchers, and some detectives have asked whether these cases might be linked. Others believe there may have been several predators operating in Nashville during those years rather than one serial offender. Officially, no one has been charged with all of these crimes.
What is clear is that Kathy’s case is not an isolated tragedy. It is one piece of a larger story about how cities respond to violence against children and about how quickly predators can exploit small gaps in everyday routines. A short walk to a skating rink. A field behind a doughnut shop. A child trusted to go a few blocks on her own.
Today, the Metro Nashville cold case unit estimates there are more than five hundred unsolved homicides on their books, including Kathy’s. Her case file lives both in a physical drawer and on a public website. The entry is brief. It notes when she left home, where she was headed, when she was found, and how she died.
The rest of her story lives in the memories of people who knew her. Classmates at Woodbine Elementary. Kids who skated at the Roller Drome. Neighbors who still remember newspaper photographs of small white skates lying in the grass.
In this episode of A Heavy Weight, we walk through Kathy’s last known steps, revisit the investigation, and look at what has changed and what has not in how we treat cases like hers. We also share how you can contact Metro’s cold case unit.
If you grew up in Nashville, if you skated at the Roller Drome, if you remember something about that November night in nineteen sixty nine or about a man who talked about hurting a girl near Krispy Kreme, even a detail that seems small, you may still have something that matters.
Kathy’s walk from Lutie Street to Thompson Lane was less than a mile. The space between what we know and what we still need to know is much larger.
