WVVA.com
Very lengthy article.
Police reopen 1986 cold case of Oak Hill teen
Jan 2 2021
By Jessica Farrish
''West Virginia State Police are investigating a new but undisclosed lead in the 1986 disappearance and death of an Oak Hill girl, State Police Cpl. J. Kincaid said this week.
Theresa Ann Woods was 14 and a new student at Collins Middle School when she disappeared Feb. 20, 1986, reportedly from a gas station beside the now-closed school.
Later that year in June, two men were looking for fishing bait when they found her remains at the bottom of a cliff near Laurel Creek in Fayette County.
Over the years, the State Police, Oak Hill Police Department and Fayette County Sheriff's Department have searched for the girl's killer. Her father, Donald "Hank" Woods, of Kimberly, died in August 2014 without knowing what had happened to Theresa.
Until his death, Hank gave interviews to local media in an effort to find who had killed his daughter.
Kincaid said Tuesday that a new lead was given to police earlier last year.
"I'm still investigating it," Kincaid said on Tuesday. "(Police are) following up on leads."
A shy girl who liked music
On Feb. 20, 1986, Theresa was a new student at Collins Middle School. Her family had just moved to Oak Hill three months earlier.''
''At 5 feet 2 inches and 90 pounds, Theresa was petite. The photo that appeared on missing flyers showed a teen with a careful smile, her auburn hair cut into the same "shag" style that had appeared on the February 1986 cover of Seventeen magazine.
In those days before Apple Music and Spotify, Theresa listened to local radio stations in her spare time, her mom said. She often sat with her mother on the sofa in the evenings to watch television. She was a "straight-A student." She played the saxophone and electric keyboard. Her family said she was shy and did not make friends easily, and her dad reported that she liked nice clothes.
Until October 1985, Theresa had lived in Powellton with her mom, Betty Holcomb, and her stepfather, Rick Holcomb. Both of the Holcombs worked for B&B Ambulance in Oak Hill, which was owned by Billie Skaggs and had an office on Main Street across from Wendy's, the Skaggs' daughter, Angel Skaggs Thompson, recalled.
Shortly before Theresa's disappearance, the Holcomb family moved to Oak Hill.
"They (Rick and Betty) worked for my mom," Thompson said. "Instead of them traveling every day from across the mountain to come to work, my mom owned the trailer on the property beside her house, and they moved in there."
''A short time before she disappeared, Theresa had asked her mom to let her return to her former school, Betty Holcomb reported in 1986. Holcomb said she told Theresa that she could finish the school year at Collins Middle School and then decide if she should move.''
''Shortly before she disappeared, Theresa told Skaggs that she had a crush on "Allan," a boy at her middle school. She said Theresa and Allan had a date planned for the weekend after Feb. 20.
"Going to a movie, with his parents, was their 'date'," recalled Skaggs.
When Theresa told her mom and stepdad about the plan, according to Thompson, it caused an argument.
"The night her mom told her she could go, there was a huge fight and argument," she recalled. "Not anything physical, but an argument over whether or not she was old enough to date."
Teresa's dad, Donald "Hank" Woods, owned a grocery store in Kimberly.
Woods reported that Theresa spent weekends with him in Kimberly and the two were close.
Hank said that, shortly before she disappeared, Theresa was clearly upset but did not tell him why.
"I think whatever happened started three weeks before she disappeared," Hank said in 1986, prior to Theresa's body being found. "She wouldn't tell me what it was.
"She asked to come and stay with me."
On the last Sunday that Theresa visited Hank, she was crying. She would not tell her dad why but said that she would get in trouble back in Oak Hill.
"She was upset," the father told WVVA shortly before his death. "She didn't want to go back home, back to Oak Hill, for some reason."
When Theresa left the valley that winter Sunday in 1986, he would not see her again''.
"I worry about her, what happened, what she went through," he said in one of his last interviews with local media. "She went to school that day, and then she disappeared on the way home from school."
''On the day she disappeared,Theresa had dressed in blue jeans and a purple top. She'd also donned a jeans jacket and a pair of suede boots — trending pieces that were staples in many Oak Hill girls' wardrobes in 1986. Theresa's boots were gray.''
"The police preached to me for hours that she was a runaway, but I knew she wasn't," Woods said in November 1986. "I knew my girl better than that."
"She wouldn't have got in a car with nobody she didn't know," Hank added in a later interview with a local TV station.''
''Theresa's skull, her clothing and some of her jewelry helped State Medical Examiner Dr. Irvin Sopher to positively identify her. Sopher ruled the death a homicide but did not disclose how the girl had died.''
