In August 1986, a twenty-one-year-old sheriff’s dispatcher named Tanya Michelle Rhodes vanished on her drive home from the midnight shift in the Low Country of South Carolina. She had been the voice that guided the deputies of Santee County for two years, always ending her shift with the same sign-off: “Y’all be careful, Santee County. ” Each deputy answered in turn, and she never signed off until the last one had. At dawn, her silver Pontiac was found in the parking lot of a boat landing on the Santee River.
The doors were unlocked, her purse sat on the seat, and her dispatcher’s headset rested on the dash. In the sand beside the driver’s door, standing upright, was a single brown Budweiser bottle with an inch of beer still inside. She did not drink. Two days later, her body was found in the cypress knees a quarter mile downstream.
She had been strangled. For thirty-seven years, that bottle sat in a paper bag, sealed by a deputy who had heard her sign off a hundred times. It would eventually lead investigators to a man who had worked at the landing, who drank that brand every night, and who had sat in the back row at her funeral. But the road to that revelation was long and buried.
Cypress Landing was a small town of about 2,800 people in 1986, where the rivers ran black through the swamps and nobody locked a door. The sheriff’s office had eleven deputies and two dispatchers. Tanya was the middle of three children. Her father Earl ran a shrimp boat, and her mother Brenda worked the lunch counter at the drugstore.
Tanya had taken the dispatcher job at nineteen because she liked being the voice that sent help. She worked the midnight shift four nights a week. She was engaged to a deputy named Chris Ballard, with the wedding set for October. Everyone knew Ricky Poole.
He was twenty-four, worked at the boat landing bait shop, and drank Budweiser from the bottle, never the can, every night from the tailgate of his truck in the landing lot. He had gone to high school with Tanya’s brother and had fixed her father’s outboard motor for free. The town would have told you he was a little rough but mostly harmless. That was the last summer any of them believed it.
On Friday, August 15, 1986, Tanya began her shift at 11:00 p. m. At 6:55 in the morning, she gave her sign-off, and eleven deputies answered. At 7:05, the day dispatcher watched her walk to her car.
She never arrived home. At 9:20, Chris Ballard, off duty, found her car at the boat landing. The bottle in the sand was still cold to the touch. A deputy named Wayne Tolbert dropped it in a paper bag with a pen, writing that she didn’t drink.
On Sunday morning, a fisherman found her body downstream. The coroner ruled the death a homicide. The bottle went to the state lab, where analysis showed saliva from a secretor with type A blood, which matched about four men in ten. The case went to Detective Hal Broom, who had answered her sign-off every morning for two years.
He later said he could not hear the radio for a month without waiting for her voice. The first suspect was the fiancé, as is always the case. Chris Ballard had been on duty until 7:00 and then at the Hardee’s with two deputies until 8:00, which cleared him and nearly destroyed him. The second suspect was a man named Dwayne Suggs, recently released from prison.
Broom held him for three days, but Suggs had been in jail on an unrelated charge from 11:30 that night until Sunday, cleared by a time-stamped booking photo. Then Broom interviewed Ricky Poole on August 19 because the landing was his territory. Poole said he had closed the shop at 10:00 p. m.
, drunk a few beers on his tailgate, and gone home by midnight. Broom noted that Poole drank Budweiser from the bottle. He noted from the landing’s first aid kit log that Poole had bandaged a cut on his hand that Saturday morning. He asked for a blood sample.
Poole said he was type A. That afternoon, Poole’s uncle, who was the county council chairman and owned the landing, called the sheriff and said the boy had answered enough. The sheriff, who was up for reelection in November and whose largest donor owned the landing, told the Charleston paper in September that Tanya had likely been stopped by a stranger on the river road. While the sheriff’s office chased strangers up and down the highway, the Rhodes family tried to live.
Earl took the shrimp boat out because the season would not wait. Brenda went back to the drugstore counter, and Ricky Poole came in every morning, and she poured his coffee. Chris Ballard worked double shifts for a year and then transferred to Charleston because he could not hear the sign-off. The years passed.
The Sunbird was sold. Chris Ballard married, and Brenda sent a card. By 1996, ten years had passed. Every August 15, the family drove to the landing and left sunflowers on the ramp.
Hal Broom retired in 2000 and took a copy of the file home in a box that lived in his tackle shed. He read it every August, and every August he stopped on page 26, thought about the first aid log, and told himself the sheriff had been right. The drugstore counter closed in 2004. Ricky Poole took over the bait shop in 2008 when his uncle died, and then the landing itself.
Earl died in 2013. Brenda was the one who never let go. She kept a police scanner on her kitchen counter and listened every morning at 6:55. Every August, she wrote to the state lab asking if the bottle had been tested with anything new.
In 2003, she was told the saliva was degraded. In 2012, the same. She was eighty-one and still listening. In 2022, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division gave its cold case unit money for new kinds of testing.
A special agent named Angela Pruit, who had been born in 1988, opened the box and found the bottle. She read the Rhodes file in a weekend, then drove to Cypress Landing and sat in the lot at the ramp at seven in the morning to see what Tanya would have seen. She noticed page 26, the first aid log, and that the sheriff’s largest donor had owned the landing. She sent the bottle to a private laboratory in Texas that specializes in recovering DNA from tiny, decades-old samples on glass.
In January 2023, the lab reported a full male profile with no match in the national criminal database. So the lab used forensic genetic genealogy, uploading the unknown DNA to public ancestry websites and working backward through family trees. On Tuesday, March 14, 2023, the genealogist’s report came back. The profile belonged to a man descended from the Poole family of Santee County.
One brother had died in 2005. The other was born in 1962, had worked at the Cypress Landing Bait Shop since 1980, and appeared on page 26. Pruit drove to Brenda Rhodes’s house that afternoon. She did not say the name.
She said there was a match and that it was someone Brenda knew. Brenda asked if it was someone she had poured coffee for. Pruit said yes. Brenda put her hand on the scanner and said, “Two sugars, thirty years.
”
Ricky Poole was sixty-one in 2023. He owned the landing and still drank Budweiser from the bottle on the tailgate. He had never been arrested. In hindsight, there had been signs: the cut, the bottle still cold, which meant he had been there minutes before Chris Ballard arrived, not hours.
And there was a note from the day dispatcher saying Tanya had told her that Ricky Poole had started parking his truck outside the sheriff’s office at seven in the morning to say hey, and that she had started leaving by the back door. Broom had underlined it. Pruit needed a confirming sample. On March 25, an agent watched Poole finish a Budweiser on his tailgate and set the bottle in the truck bed.
When he went inside, the agent took it. On April 17, 2023, the lab confirmed it: the bottle in the sand and the bottle in the truck bed had been drunk from by the same man. On the morning of Thursday, April 27, 2023, at 6:50, Ricky Poole was unlocking the bait shop when three unmarked cars pulled into the lot. Brenda Rhodes was in the second one with her scanner in her lap.
Angela Pruit read the warrant. According to the arrest report, Poole said, “Tell Brenda I’m sorry about the coffee. ” Through the window, Brenda said, “Y’all be careful, Santee County. ” The town did not know where to put it.
The church filled on Sunday, and Linda Cooper, the day dispatcher from 1986, told the Charleston paper she had reported the truck outside the office and had never been called back. In September 2023, faced with the DNA and Cooper’s statement, Ricky Poole pleaded guilty to murder. On October 6, 2023, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was sixty-one.
Brenda Rhodes stood at the podium and said her daughter had told eleven men to be careful every morning for two years, and not one of them had been able to tell her the same. After the sentencing, Brenda drove to the landing and left the sunflowers on the ramp. The sign with his name on it had already come down. She told reporters, “I’m going to keep the scanner on.
Somebody ought to be listening. ” The Rhodes case was the first solved by the state’s cold case unit, and the deputies of Santee County still answer the sign-off every morning at 6:55. The bottle in the sand, the cut in a first aid log, the truck parked outside an office at seven in the morning. These things wait.
What seemed settled in Cypress Landing in 1986 was never truly closed.