[Mary Allen speaking]
[Buddy Allen] Family occasio were always special,
particularly in the Allen family.
[Mary speaking]
[Heather speaking]
[Buddy] We just wanted our kids to grow up happy.
To see the love and the fun that we were experiencing
during these times is just, uh, priceless.
-[Mary speaking] -[Buddy speaking]
[Mike Vickers] Everything was perfect.
Up until that day, and I just couldn't stop it.
[police officer on phone]
[911 operator on phone]
That was the night that our entire lives changed.
[911 operator speaking]
I just couldn't believe that that was someone's plan.
-[noisemaker blowing] -[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] It's April 20th, 1986 in Snellville, Georgia
[Mary] Look at buddy so he, I mean, look at-- yeah.
[narrator] The Allen family is celebrating the birthday of two-year-old Heather.
[everyone singing]
[cheering and clapping]
[Buddy] The family was all there.
It was, really, the first birthday that we knew she was gonna remember.
It was just a big celebration.
Just a lot of fun for everybody.
-[noisemaker blows] -[Mary speaking]
[all cheering]
And Heather was just so excited to be the center of attention.
She, she loved it.
[Mary speaking]
-[Heather babbling] -[Mary] Yeah.
[Buddy] There's Mary, her mom, behind her.
She's an excited little girl. Mommy's excited too.
Of course she loves to rip the paper.
-[Heather babbles] -[Mary speaking]
We just, we felt like birthdays were very special.
And it was that person's one day to shine.
We kind of blew the budget when it came to birthday months.
[Mary repeats]
[woman speaking]
[narrator] Heather's parents 29-year-old Buddy
and 26-year-old Mary have strong Christian values.
[Buddy] Our faith was very important to us.
Mary and I meet at a church camp in middle Georgia.
Uh, a nice Presbyterian church camp called Camp Calvin.
I was working there on the summer service staff at the time.
Yet, after camp was over that year, I went back home to Decatur
and Mary went back home to Woodrow, South Carolina
which was where her dad was a minister.
So, it was a while before we saw each other again.
Uh, but we, we wrote letters.
Mary and I got married in 1980.
That's about, I don't know, five or six years after we initially meet.
The wedding ceremony was held in Woodrow
because her dad was the minister of the Presbyterian church ther
And, of course, we got married with her dad in the pulpit.
Heather was our firstborn.
Born on Friday, April 20th, 1984.
It was such a joyful occasion.
Mary was laying on the gurne and Heather was laying
beside her when I first, first time I saw them and
she looked at me and she said,
"It's a girl, Buddy. It's a girl!"
You know how things are with dads and their daughter
Especially the firstborn daughter.
I wasn't any different for Heather and I.
We were, we were really clos
[Heather speaking]
[Buddy] When Heather as almost four, Henry was bo
and she was excited.
She was gonna have a baby brother.
Mary got her up in the bed with her and let her hold
Henry on his first day on the planet.
[Mary speaking]
[Buddy] And um, it was just... It was just really neat.
Really cool to watch those two and how she welcomed her
baby brother into... Into the world.
After Henry was born, and of course,
Heather was about four years old at that point,
um, we continued to go to Redeemer Presbyterian Church.
[singing indistinctly]
[Buddy] It was about a mile down the road and we had lots of support there.
[singing continues]
[Buddy] And one of the thing they did, was they would teach the kids songs
and, uh, you know, work on Bible verses and things like that.
And they had the kids sing for the Sunday service.
Heather, being the person who likes to be a part of
the energy in the room, she was part of the singing.
And, uh, she enjoyed being a performer and being out in front of the crowd.
[indistinct singing]
I think she just got more joy out of just performing.
She was in the moment when that was going on.
[applause]
[Buddy] In 1990 when Heathe was six years old,
we went up to see Mary's brother, John
at the lake he was living on It was Lake Bowen
outside Spartanburg, South Carolina.
And, uh, he had a boat, you know, um,
and he also had skis.
So we went out there, got on the boat
and I skied for a minute.
John, or Uncle John, as they all called him,
said, "Heather? You want to try and ski?"
[indistinct conversation]
And her eyes just got really big and she said, "Can I?"
And she looked at me, "Can I?"
And she looked at Mary, "Can I?"
We got her in the water and we got the skis on her.
Uh, and he said, "Okay."
And he gave her a couple of instructions
and he pulled off.
And dog gone if she didn't pop up on top of the water.
[cheering]
"Good job."
We were laughing that she got up so quickly.
And we were, I mean, I'd say we were amazed.
Yeah, Heather wasn't one that liked to sit around and watch TV.
She always wanted to be doing something.
And she really enjoyed all the little activities
that they had for kids out in that Snellville area.
There was a gymnastics studio and we got her involved in that.
And then there was a ballet studio and we got h involved in that.
And then there was cheerleading that came abou
because there was a big athletic community
in the Snellville area.
Hey.
[Buddy] It just was non-stop
The great thing about Heathe is that you are never sure
100% of what you are gonna get.
But you knew you were gonna get 100% of whatever it was.
I do remember it was just a good family time.
We saw such great things in her future
if she continued on the path that she seemed to be on.
[Buddy speaking]
From the age of nine to about 13,
Heather was moving. She was transitioning,
uh, from a girl into a young lady.
Uh, Heather had her own styl
And so when she got a little makeup case
for Christmas, she was very excited.
Then she could further her own style and her own personality
through what she wore.
[Buddy] When Heather was 16, she was attending
Shiloh High School in the Snellville area.
At that point, Mary and I decided that we needed to
change the church we were going to.
And so we found a church called Calvary Chapel
in Stone Mountain, which wasn't far from where we lived.
Heather started going to the teenage youth program
and that's where she meet Steven.
[narrator] Sixteen-year-old Steven Strube is a student
at a different school in nearby Stone Mountain.
He and Heather share mutual friends.
I believe he brought her home after the church get together one evening.
That was our first encounte and, uh, he seemed to be a very decent young man.
He spoke kindly to us and with respect.
And, uh, Heather was smiling which was a good thing, you know.
They were a cute couple.
Of course, she was the tiny thing at 5 foot 5,
and he was the tall thing at 6 foot 1.
But, you know, they were cute together.
By 2001, Heather was 17 years old.
And we had some really nice neighbors.
And she babysat for them sometimes and
their children loved Heather, you know.
[Buddy] At that point in tim Heather was progressing
in high school very well.
Taking, uh, as many credits as she could each year.
She got to her senior year and she truthfully
only needed one credit to graduate.
So, what she was gonna do was she was gonna go work half a day at schoo
and work the other half the day at the local flower shop
It enabled her to work aroun flowers, which she loved,
and to be creative and to make people happy.
Mary and I kind of got the feeling that we wanted to move.
And so we looked further outside of Atlanta.
And we found a little community called Covington.
An idea that we came up with was to maybe do
a flower business of some kind.
[Elysee Lewandowski] The first flower shop was Blooms Flowers and Gifts.
And then they eventually bought another one
in Conyers called Flowers of Olde Town.
[Buddy] We had Mary and Heather.
Mary as owner, Heather as designer.
Heather also did consultations on weddings and things like that.
[Elysee] The flower shop wa definitely like a big family
Um, anyone that was a part of it was so supporti
because it takes a lot to run a shop
smoothly and to Heather and Mary's standards.
Steven was in the flower shop a lot.
He helped us out when we really needed the help
and Heather and Steven worked very well as a team.
[Buddy] They were very much in love with each other and
they spent as much time together as their jobs would allow them to.
Heather and Steven married in May of 2004.
All of Steven's side were beaming.
I believe they all had fallen in love with Heather
Which was no big surprise to me, of course.
His mom, Joanna, and her husband, Gerald.
Everybody there was very hap that these two young people were coming together.
In the springtime of '07,
there was a little bit of a surprise that came about.
And that surprise was that Heather found out that she was pregnant.
We were really excited because we knew what kind of mom Heather would be,
having been so good with children all along the way.
We knew how loving, and cari and how she would be able to raise this child.
The magic happened on September 20th of 2007.
Carson came into the world a very healthy child.
Everybody wanted to be there.
Especially all the grandparents.
Mary was there. I was there
Joanna, Steven's mom was there.
Everybody was just ecstatic
Carson was healthy and Heather was healthy.
You couldn't have asked for a better outcome.
Both Heather and Steven wer just so loving with Carson.
You know, you just felt like they were both very intent
on raising this child the best way possible.
[Steven speaking]
[Elysee] Heather incorporate being a mother and running a business seamlessly.
[Heather speaking]
[giggles] Very busy with th flower shop and with Carson
Um, but she enjoyed it. She loved it. She loved being a mom.
And he was a good baby, you know?
Didn't cry very much and, of course, you know, he would be at the shop
um, so Heather could, could watch him.
[Heather speaking]
[Buddy] Joanna, Steven's mom would volunteer,
uh, to help out if she had a few days here or there.
Or on the busy times.
And so she'd come in. She'd run the desk or
take orders or run deliveries or whatever needed to be done.
So, it became, you know, all hands on deck family business.
[Jennifer Bagby] You know, Joanna would come in
and she would, you know, snatch Carson up like
pretty much any grandma would do.
And would hang out with him as well.
Heather would talk about how she would come in
and she would pick him up and she would put him in the stroller
and she would take off out the door.
Heather began to, kind of, put her foot down and,
"No, you may not come in an take my son and disappear."
You know, "You're his grandmother and you're welcome to be with him,
but you're going to do that on my terms."
Joanna might have had a little more involvement then desired.
Around Valentine's Day of 2008,
Joanna presented Heather with a receipt for
a piece of jewelry that Steven had purchased.
And, um, Heather looked at the receipt and she goes,
"He didn't give me this. You know, this, this,
I don't have this piece of Jewelry."
Heather did have suspicions that Steven was being unfaithful.
And when the receipt was presented to her,
it was just her confirmation She knew.
This was serious to her. Marriage was not negotiable
Divorce was not an option.
So it took her a very long time before she finally
just reached the place of, "Okay, I'm done. I'm done."
[Steven speaking]
[Elysee] The news of the divorce was a shock to me.
I had always pictured Heather and Steven
to be a very solid couple.
And I really didn't expect this.
Heather and Steven's custod arrangements with Carson
was that Heather was the main custodian
but Steven got Carson every other weekend.
[Heather speaking]
[Jennifer] It all become abo Carson first and foremost.
And what was best for him.
And Heather decided to focus on the future for her and her son.
[narrator] In March, 2008, Jennifer introduces Heather
to restaurant manager Mike Vickers.
I was going through a divorce myself, um, at the time.
I had gotten married in 2007 and by the time
I had met Heather, we had already separated.
After I met Heather is when I really kind of knew what love was like
and, you know, what it was about.
[Heather speaking]
Mary and I were both so happy that she had found somebody that she could trust again.
And, of course, then Mike met Carson
and they got along like two peas in a pod.
[Heather speaking]
[Mike speaking]
[Mike] He called me by "Mike when we were together.
He's a great kid.
When I met Carson, all you got to do is smile.
He has the same smile as Heather.
So, it's like, you melt right away.
In April we were talking marriage,
we were talking kids and, you know, everything.
[Buddy] They were waiting for the divorces to be final
um, before any changes occurred in Heather's life.
Heather would have primary custody of Carson.
And Steven had visitation rights.
[Elysee] As the divorce progressed and, you know,
things were getting tied up and severed and emotions were high.
And Heather really wanted to do custody swaps in a public place.
She couldn't wait for all this to be over,
so that she wouldn't have to deal with this conflict all the time.
That Friday night, Heather dropped Carson off for the weekend at Target.
And then Saturday night, we would do game night with my family.
And then that next day, we spent the morning together.
I went to work, she said she was maybe going to church
and that she would come and pick Carson up,
then she'd come to my restaurant.
I said, "Okay, goodbye. Love you."
[phone ringing]
[woman 1 over phone]
[woman 2 over phone]
[Roy Whitehead] On April the 26th, 2009, shortly after 6:00 p.m.,
I received a call from the Snellville Police Department dispatch.
There'd been a shooting at a local shopping center.
When officers arrived, they saw a maroon Cadillac Escalade
parked in the parking lot with a woman lying on the parking lot,
clearly suffering from a gunshot wound to the head.
They looked into the vehicle and saw that there was a child,
approximately 18 months old, in a car seat located within the vehicle.
[Trey Downs] When the officers located the victim's wallet,
uh, they located her driver's license
and we were able to identify the victim as Heather Strube.
[Buddy] We were driving through South Alabama, when Mary's phone rang.
And, um, she answered and it was her dad, Bill.
He said, "Heather's dead."
And she just... She didn't quite get hysterical, but pretty close
And about three or four minutes later,
I just pulled the car over and we just cried on each other.
[Mike] I'll never forget the frantic phone calls
that I made to her to try to find out what was going on.
I was the boyfriend, you kno
I told her I'd make sure everything was okay.
And I couldn't that day.
[Roy] Once we had begun to secure the area,
we went into the store to view video cameras,
'cause you could tell there were some
on the exterior of the building.
The witnesses, they had seen Heather parked in the parking lot,
saw a green minivan and a man took the child
out of his car and handed him to Heather, who was securing him in her vehicle.
And while she was doing that the green van drove away.
And soon as she got the child in the car
and started around back to the driver's side of the car,
this person who'd been laying in wait just came directly up to her.
The witnesses described the interaction,
prior to the shooting, of the suspect and the victi
as they were having an argument.
And that would lead us to believe that the victim
and the suspect knew each other.
[Roy] The witnesses describe the person as a male,
very slender with what they believed to be was a wi
sort of a wild wig and a mustache,
carrying a shoulder bag, wearing a button-down, uh, shirt
and what appeared to be, I believe, khaki pants.
[Trey] The suspect entered the parking lot and approached the victim
and then we see the suspect leave in the same direction that the suspect came in.
What stood out to us in the video
was how calm the suspect was and how slowly they walked away, they didn't run.
What we were also able to observe from the video
was the suspect had kind of a hitch in their gai
in the way they walked, it was distinctive.
We knew from witnesses' statements that the suspect
had walked around the left side of the shopping center.
So we called in our canine unit and had them attempt
to track where the suspect went.
They went around behind the shopping center
into a parking lot behind it it was adjacent to a local hotel.
The dog lost interest in the track
and it was clear to us that that person got in
a vehicle and drove away at that point.
[Trey] We knew that Heather went to the shopping center to do a custody exchange
with her soon to be ex-husband, Steven Strube.
When we were able to identify Steven Strube,
we obviously know now that he was the last person
to have had contact with Heather.
[Roy] When we made the notification to Steven
that Heather was dead and what had transpired,
he clearly broke down, he was very upset by it.
[Trey] After watching the initial surveillance footage,
we were able to determine that Steven Strube had came in a green minivan
to exchange custody with Heather Strube.
We asked Steven Strube where he went after he exchanged custody.
And he said he left from the and went straight home.
We knew from the video surveillance that he was seen leaving the parking lot,
but we couldn't rule out, at this point, that he played some role in her murder.
Approximately two days after the murder,
we received a call from a person who was stayin
in the Extended Stay hotel behind the shopping center.
He saw a white Ford pickup truck
sitting in a motel parking l where he was staying
and it stood out to him, because he saw a person inside the truck
that appeared to be wearing a disguise,
he described what he thought was a fake wig and a mustache.
And they were either looking at the back
of the shopping center with binoculars or they wer
taking photographs of the back of the shopping center.
[Dan Mayfield] After the homicide occurred,
the police asked the eye witnesses to meet with a artist
to try to produce a renderin of the appearance of the shooter.
Several of them contributed to this effort.
And, in fact, the artist produced a rendering
of a small stature man with a crazy hairdo
and a sort of a funky mustache.
[Roy] As a result of that sketch being seen,
we had a gentleman who was staying at the hotel,
uh, who was an over-the-road truck driver, who said he saw
the person in that sketch get in that vehicle and drive off.
He described it as the olde model white F-150 extended c
with a very unique, uh, body side molding.
[Dan] The detectives went to Steven Strube's parents' house,
in order to continue their investigation.
They were talking to all the family members
that might have information about who the shooter might be.
While the investigators were there, they noticed a white pickup truck.
We asked the witness if he would be willing
to take a ride with us, so we could drive him
by a house and see if he recognized any
of the vehicles at this residence.
He immediately said, "That's the truck.
That's the truck I saw at the motel parking lot."
We were able to identify that truck as being registered
to Steven's mother, Joanna Hayes.
On April the 29th, we went back to the house
to serve the search warrant on that truck.
The truck was pristine, it had been cleaned unbelievably well
The only thing we found was this receipt
from this fast food restaura on the night of the murder.
And one strand of something that appeared to be consiste with the hair of a wig.
[Dan] The investigators talk to Joanna Hayes
about her whereabouts on the day of the murder.
She insisted that she had driven to Luthersville
before the murder occurred and was there working
on her parents' house, doing some maintenance.
And that this was miles away from the murder.
Joanna Hayes insisted that she had no reason to kill Heather.
That she loved Heather as a family member
and that the divorce wasn't personal to her
and that she would never kill Carson's mother.
She said that she had an alibi,
because she had a receipt in her truck
that showed she had gone to a fast food restaurant
down near Luthersville at the time of the murder.
[Trey] We know the murder's at 6:00, we see that she had stopped
and purchased this ice cream at 7:19.
So we decided, well, let's drive it.
Let's drive it from her hous we'll do the speed limit.
We were able to determine that you could commit the murder at 6:00 p.m.
and easily make it to this fast food restaurant an hour and 19 minutes later.
[Dan] Nine days after the homicide, the investigators brought i
Steven Strube again to talk to him at the police department.
But this time, they had the sketch
that was produced by the eye witnesses and the artist.
They showed that sketch and they showed
the video recordings from the parking lot to Steven Strube.
[Steven speaking]
[investigator speaking]
[Dan] You can see Steven Strube go through the process.
His mind doesn't want to go there, but the evidenc leads him there.
And he slowly comes to an opinion
that that was his mother that committed the murder.
[investigator speaking]
[Trey] His reaction, the receipt, you know,
we've got the eye witness, uh, in the truck, you know,
we're really putting this case together now.
[investigator speaking]
We decided that, you know, we were gonna take him outside
and get him in one of our cars and have him call his mother, so we could record it.
[phone ringing]
[Joanna over phone]
[Steven over phone]
[Joanna over phone]
[Steven over phone]
[Joanna over phone]
[Steven over phone]
[Joanna over phone]
[Steven over phone]
[Joanna over phone]
[Steven over phone]
[Joanna over phone]
[Steven over phone]
[Roy] The way she responded her tone of voice, her attitude, the delays,
all of that came together to let us know that we knew we had the right person.
[Joanna over phone]
[Steven over phone]
[Joanna over phone]
[Trey] On May 7, 2009, we interviewed Joanna Hayes
[Joanna speaking]
[investigator speaking]
[investigator] Mmm-hmm.
[Trey] When we very first starting talking to her,
she was calm, um, as the interview progressed
and we started asking her direct questions
about the murder, she was confident in her answers
almost to a point of arrogance.
[investigator speaking]
[Trey] What we learned, during the course of this investigation,
from speaking with people that had known Joanna Hayes virtually her whole life
is that Joanna Hayes was a very controlling person,
especially when it came to her grandson, Carson.
She wanted to control everything that the child di
Uh, she wanted to control Heather and what she did with Carson.
She knew that once Heather and Steven divorced,
that she was not gonna have the same access to Carson that she had.
And this didn't sit well with her.
And we believe that was her motivation to commit the murder.
[investigator speaking]
[Dan] After the interview with Joanna Hayes,
most of us were convinced that she committed this murder.
The problem was, we had to be able to convince a jury.
On June 25th, investigators talked to Steven Strube Senior.
He indicated that he was married to Joanna Hayes
and before the divorce, things were really bad.
He described that she took a gun, in the course of an argument
and put it on his forehead, which is exactly how Heather Strube was killed.
The handgun described by Steven Strube Senior
was a Rossi .38 caliber handgun,
that had belonged to Joanna Hayes years before.
Forensic analysis of the bullet that killed Heather Strube
showed that the bullet was a .38 caliber
and it had been fired from either a Rossi
or a Taurus manufactured handgun.
We couldn't prove that the bullet matched the gun
that Joanna Hayes owned years and years and years ag
But it was one more circumstance that pointed
to Joanna Hayes as possibly being the shooter.
We charged Joanna Hayes with murder.
And she was taken into custody without much of a fight.
[Buddy] When we found out it was Steven's mother,
it was shocking, I mean, to say the least, it was shocking.
To me, it was just an extremely selfish act when you boil it down.
She didn't care about the consequences.
We started trial on May 2nd, 2011.
There was a tremendous amount of evidence and a lot of witnesses.
There were a lot of little circumstances
that need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
It was apparent to me that Joanna Hayes
had carefully planned this murder.
She had arranged everything.
She had the wig, she had the clothing,
she had everything she neede placed where she needed it to be.
When she walked up to Heather's car and starte that conversation,
she was committed.
Heather was placing Carson into a car seat.
Obviously Heather knew that was Joanna Hayes.
Obviously she knew she was gonna be murdered.
Heather was trapped.
I think she knew it was inevitable.
Joanna Hayes was convicted of murder of Heather Strube
and sentenced to life in prison.
[narrator] Investigators accept that Steven Strube
was unaware of his mother's plan and that he played no role in Heather's murder
[Jennifer] Heather's legacy is compassion.
And when I think of her, that's one of the biggest things that I think of.
Heather was one of a kind.
[Mike] Anybody that came in contact with Heather
would be ever grateful that they got to meet her.
You know, she was a good person.
She was a wonderful person.
I would switch places with her in a heartbeat.
[Buddy] Carson is now 13 years old.
He is about six feet tall, he would have dwarfed Heather by now.
He's an amazing young man.
[Elysee] Heather would want Carson to be whatever
he wanted to be, the very best version of it
And there's no doubt in my mind that, you know,
he's got the best angel looking down on him
and ensuring that he has every opportunity to do that.
[Heather] When I grow up, I wanna seeds on it.
[Buddy] The thing that I mis the most about Heather
is how she loved you.
It radiated from her.
And she sparkled like a diamond.