Some 20 years ago, when I was in my early 20’s, I had a very disturbing dream that stayed with me for long time before it faded into a memory in the back of my mind.
In the dream, I witnessed a murder of a woman in a community where, when I still lived with my parents, we attended church. There was a older couple that came up from Florida for the summers, M.H. and Rose Goins that attended also. They lived less that half a mile from the church, up on a hill, partially hidden by tall white pines. I had been in their house once, when I was a youngster, and barely remembered much about it. The dream took place in their house.
In the dream, a tall, thin, dark-complexioned man had his arms wrapped around a woman from behind, standing near a door that led outside. In his hand was a large kitchen knife, and he held it across the woman’s throat. He was speaking harshly to her, but it was just garble to me. Then, in the heat of anger, he cut her throat, and the blood ran down her body and pooled up on the floor. At that point the dream ‘went black’, and opened up with a new scene. In it, this man was tossing the woman’s body, wrapped in a sheet, over an embankment lined with rocks. I knew that it was a place on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Two years later, when visiting my parents, I went with them to church. I had not been in that area for about five years, since marrying and moving away. Just before we passed what would have been the Goins’ driveway, I noticed that a modular had been erected on the property adjacent to them. I made a comment to my mother about it, to which she replied that it was where ‘the woman had lived that had gone missing two years before.’
I felt my hands get clammy, and asked her to explain. She went on to say that the woman was a daughter of a member of the community who had married a man from South America, and they had put the modular on a parcel of land given to them by her parents. According to the locals, he was a man who was away a lot on business trip, and sometimes the daughter would go along, and sometimes not.
Two years before, the man had flown to Colombia, where he was from, and then returned a few days later, immediately asking her parents of her whereabouts. They were under the impression that she had gone with him, so a missing person’s report was filed. She never turned up.
I immediately remembered my dream two years earlier. All through the church service, I replayed it over and over in mind. When we got back home, I coaxed my mother into telling me all she knew, without revealing why I wanted to know.
To my surprise, the man was due in court the following week on drug charges stemming from being caught trafficking drugs from Colombia into the US, and the local news had been following the story thoroughly. Numerous questions had been asked of him about his wife, but he maintained ignorance of her whereabouts. Before I left going back home, I told my mother that they~the law enforcement~would find her body on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The next week, after all the court ordeal was over, my mother called me to tell me how the case had ended up. After getting nowhere with a confession, investigators were sent to the modular to search for anything that had been missed during previous searches. The house had stood empty for almost the whole of the two years, and nothing had been moved. While there, a chemical test on the carpet by the front door had revealed that a large amount of human blood had been shed there. Later tests revealed that the type was the same as the missing daughter. When confronted with the new evidence, the man confessed to her murder, and led the law enforcement to the pullover on the Parkway where he had thrown her over. While wild animals had mutilated most of her remains, there was enough to conclude that it indeed was her.
After telling me all this, she asked me how I knew about the body being on the Parkway. I told her about the dream. While we both blown away at the accuracy of what I dreamed, there was a question from my mom about the dream scenario taking place at the Goins’ residence, and not where it actually happened. Thinking about it for a moment, I told her that I had not been in that community since the modular had been put in, so I was given the next closest residence. It made sense to me.
In the days afterward, I realized God had given this dream as a ‘wake-up call’, for me to begin to pay attention to the dreams He gave me. So, I deem that the dream ‘the one that started it all’, because it made me ‘sit up and take notice’ of God’s messages to me.
