Cornered, suspect in 3 slayings kills self

CANDLER – By all accounts, Richard Heatwole just snapped.
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New Year's Eve marked the end of a long, bitter divorce that left him with rights to see the kids on the weekends and a court order to be out of the family home by 5 p.m. that day.
His golf driving range business was losing money, according to court papers, and two months before he was threatened with jail time for not paying child support.
Investigators on Friday were still sorting out the details of what happened from the time Heatwole was to hand his former wife the keys to their Candler home and his apparent suicide in a police standoff 100 miles away.
Deputies found Angie Heatwole, 49, dead about noon Thursday morning in a downstairs bedroom of the house at 272 Old U.S. 19-23 in Candler.
Divina Gracia Agulto, 43, who had been renting a room there, was dead upstairs. Next door, Lesley Curtis Moore Keogh was dead on her front porch.
Agulto lived in Buncombe County since at least 2005, when she had a Fairview address, records show. She listed a Bronx, N.Y., address in 2003. Family members could not be reached Friday.
Before moving to Candler, records show Keogh lived in Asheville, Pennsylvania and Florida. A woman who identified herself as related to Keogh declined comment when reached by phone Friday.
Charles Rice rented the house at 264 Old U.S. 19-23 to Keogh for about five years. Rice said Keogh lived at the home by herself.
“She was a very pleasant lady, who always paid her rent on time and fed the birds,” Rice said. “She didn't work. She had another means of support.”
Authorities would not divulge Friday how the three people died.
About the time investigators found their bodies, Heatwole was seen arriving with his 6-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter at his cousin's house in Taylorsville.
He said nothing about the three people investigators say he had just killed.
“We know that they were going through a divorce, we know that they had some disagreements over some different property that was to change hands between the two,” said Lt. Ross Dillingham of the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office “We know that may have precipitated this incident, but for a definite on what happened, I don't know.”
Richard Heatwole married Angela Neilson on Sept. 4, 1997.
Their first child, Hailey, was born the next year. Their second, Hayes Alexander, was born in 2002.
A year later, Richard Heatwole adopted Chelsea Ann Heatwole, according to court papers.
Richard Heatwole operated a driving range called Big D's. Angie Heatwole worked at her family's fabric shop in Asheville.
They sent their kids to Evergreen Community Charter School and bought a house at the end of a long gravel drive in Candler. It had a trailer on the front of the property that Richard Heatwole used as his business office.
“I'd see him in passing, and he threw his hand up,” said neighbor Clyde Curtis, who lived across the highway. “He seemed friendly enough.”
The inch-thick court file on the Heatwole divorce doesn't say exactly what went wrong in the marriage.
The couple went through mediation in September 2006 and a month later reached a child-custody agreement.
Hailey and Hayes would see their father on the weekends and they would split holidays between the two parents.
Chelsea, who was 10 years older than her little brother, would be allowed to visit her father any time she wanted.
But the Heatwoles couldn't agree on what to do with the house.
She offered to sell him her share for $57,000. He didn't take it.
She wanted to put the property on the market but he wouldn't clean up trash and a junked truck to make it presentable to a buyer, according to the court papers. He continued to live there, refused to cut the grass and rented out a room.
The two sides and their attorneys fought for two years.
In November, a judge ordered Richard Heatwole to be out of the house by Dec. 31 at 5 p.m. He had to have his tenant out as well and leave the place in marketable condition.
On top of that, Heatwole was $1,759 behind in child support payments.
The court in September had threatened him with jail sentence, according to records. He paid his bill in full on Nov. 10, the day before a scheduled court hearing on the matter.
Deputies arrived at the Candler home looking for Angie Heatwole at 11:45 a.m. Thursday.
The deputies issued an Amber Alert for her two youngest children after finding her dead.
The alert sent to TV stations and newspapers caught the attention of a couple who had seen Heatwole drive up to a cousin's house in Taylorsville.
Authorities in Buncombe County had arrest warrants for kidnapping issued in the middle of the night, Dillingham said. Heatwole was charged with kidnapping because he had violated the terms of his custody agreement.
Meanwhile, the SWAT teams at the Alexander County Sheriff's Office and the neighboring Catawba County Sheriff's Office were assembling for a raid on the home of Michael Daniels, Heatwole's cousin. The N.C. State Bureau of Investigation was on the way.
Buncombe County Sheriff Van Duncan and his detectives headed for Taylorsville with the warrants in hand.
At 1 a.m., an officer used a patrol car loudspeaker to tell Heatwole he was surrounded and demand that he surrender.
It would be five hours before the Heatwole children were safe and out of the house.
Dillingham, the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office lieutenant, estimates as many as 60 officers were outside Daniels' mobile home on Ode Kerley Lane when the call to surrender went out.
At 2 a.m. officers heard a gunshot inside the mobile home.
Heatwole had apparently killed himself with a .410 shotgun, Alexander sheriff's Capt. Keith Warren said.
Daniels shouted to police from his back door that his cousin had killed himself. But officers couldn't be sure they weren't walking into a trap. And Daniels was afraid he would be shot if he came out, Sheriff Hayden Bentley said.
So officers continued the standoff for nearly four more hours, talking to Daniels first by loudspeaker, then by a phone they dropped on his doorstep.
They tried to talk Heatwole's daughter into coming out when she stuck her head out the door.
Officers shot out some outdoor lights to keep themselves out of sight of those inside.
To prove Heatwole was dead, Daniels agreed to take an SBI camera into his house. It transmitted video to officers of Heatwole's body on the floor.
They entered the house without incident at about 5:30 a.m., arresting Daniels and ushering the children into a patrol car. more