October 29–30, 1969

The night of October 29–30, 1969, joins a narrow forensic timeline to a much wider dispute over who could have reached the fire tower and when. Chase Andrews died in the early hours, but the trial’s competing reconstructions make the time itself a question of evidence: death can be dated, while the movements attributed to Kya Clark remain under argument.

The Coroner’s Time and Cause of Death

At trial, Dr. Steward Cone placed Chase’s death between midnight and two o’clock on the night of October 29 or the morning of October 30. His account identified extensive injuries to the brain and spinal cord, caused by a fall through an open grate in the fire tower to the ground sixty-three feet below. As Chase fell, he struck the back of his head against a support beam; blood and hair samples taken from that beam confirmed the contact. These details establish a physical sequence and a bounded time of death, not how Chase came to fall or who was present.

The prosecution’s questioning turned from the medical findings to the circumstances behind them. It asked why an intelligent, fit young man would step through an open grate, and whether alcohol or another substance could have impaired his judgment. The available testimony here does not give the answer to that question. The distinction matters: the forensic account describes the fall and its fatal injuries, while the cause of the open grate and the actions leading to the fall remain unresolved in this evidence.

Competing Accounts of Travel

The trial tested whether Kya could have traveled from Greenville to the tower and back within the available hours. Trailways driver Mr. Larry Price testified that a bus journey between Greenville and Barkley Cove and return was possible on the same night. He had driven the Greenville-to-Barkley Cove bus the night Chase died and said that none of its passengers looked like Miss Clark. But Eric Chastain confronted him with an earlier statement about a slender passenger who might have been a tall woman disguised as a man. Price described that passenger as a young white man, about five feet ten, in loose-fitting trousers and a bulky blue cap, with his head down. The testimony therefore offered both a denial of a recognizable match and a description that the prosecution could use to keep disguise in contention.

A separate sighting placed Kya’s boat on the water. Hal Miller said that he and Allen Hunt were crewing for Tim O’Neal as the shrimp boat headed back toward Barkley Cove Harbor. At about 1:45 a.m., roughly a mile east of the bay, Miller saw Miss Clark motoring north-northwest. The direction made the sighting relevant to the case’s question of whether she was traveling toward or away from the tower, but the excerpted testimony does not establish where she had been before that moment or where she went afterward.

The Defense’s Clock

Tom Milton challenged the prosecution’s proposed journey by assembling its legs into a minimum travel schedule. As he presented it, Kya would have had to leave the Three Mountains Motel, walk at least twenty minutes to the bus station, take the 11:50 p.m. bus from Greenville, and arrive late in Barkley Cove at 1:40 a.m. From the bus stop, the alleged route continued by a three- or four-minute walk to the wharf, at least twenty minutes by boat to the cove near the fire tower, another eight minutes on foot, and four to five minutes to climb the tower in darkness. Opening the grate would take seconds; the time she would supposedly have waited for Chase could not be estimated.

Milton added those stages to argue that the alleged trip required at least one hour and seven minutes, without any wait for Chase. Yet, according to his account of the schedule, the return bus to Greenville departed only fifty minutes after Kya arrived in Barkley Cove. On that calculation, the sequence could not fit. Ed Jackson conceded that the timing would be tight, while suggesting that Kya could jog between her boat and the tower or save a minute along the way. The exchange left the clock as a point of direct conflict: a quantified defense argument against a sheriff’s assertion that the journey might still be possible.

Harbor Testimony and the Limits of the Record

The following morning, Tom called Tim O’Neal as his final witness. O’Neal testified that he had been bringing his shrimp boat into Barkley Cove Harbor at approximately 1:45 to 2:00 a.m. on the night of October 29–30. Tom then asked about statements by Miller, who had testified, and Allen Hunt, who had signed an affidavit, that they saw Kya’s boat motoring north past the harbor at roughly those times. The question connected the crew’s reported sighting with O’Neal’s own harbor schedule, but the testimony supplied here ends before his response. It cannot, by itself, turn the crew members’ report into an independently confirmed identification.

The night consequently reaches the reader through evidence presented afterward: medical findings, a bus driver’s account, a boat sighting, and courtroom arithmetic. Each narrows or tests a possible timeline, but none of these excerpts resolves every gap between Greenville, the harbor, and the tower. That separation between what the evidence fixes—the approximate time and fatal fall—and what witnesses and lawyers infer gives the date its importance in the trial: a few early-morning hours become the contested measure of whether Kya could have been there.