A history of murder:

By Bill Archer

MAYBEURY — Trooper D.R. Moore of the Welch Detachment of the West Virginia State Police drove into a nightmare on Wednesday night, July 16, 1975, and the memory of that moment remains ingrained in his mind as vividly as anything he encountered during his career in the state police.

“It was chaotic ... horrible,” Moore said of the scene he encountered that night. “The young man who died that night in Switchback Bottom was in the Army. He was just getting ready to back to his base in Alabama. I was there when he died. He died in my arms. He was asking me for a drink of water. It’s a horrific memory.”

Switchback Bottom is a small community that is accessible through Power House Road, a single-lane road that passes beneath the Norfolk Southern main line near Maybeury and runs parallel to Elkhorn Creek. Coal baron James Elwood Jones built the company houses that line both sides of the road that passes the former site of the old brick Pocahontas Fuel Company store that was razed six years ago.

Thomas Creighton Shrader, now 55, came to the Miller home in Switchback Bottom on July 16, 1975 carrying a high-powered rifle. Neighbors said at the time that he had been driving past the home a few times before, but hadn’t stopped. There is just one road that leads through the community to a dead-end against a mountain. The road is paved now, but it’s only big enough for two cars heading opposite directions to pass.

During one of his earlier visits, Shrader kicked up gravel as he sped out of the community. One former neighbor of the Miller family was upset because his children were playing near the place where Shrader had spun out. When he saw the man return in the same car, he walked down the road to confront him about the danger he posed to the children. When he saw Shrader get out of his car with a rifle in his hand, he stopped dead in his tracks. Like most people who were interviewed for this article, the former neighbor asked not to be identified by name in this story.

Shrader walked the short distance from his vehicle to the front of the Miller residence and fired one shot through the door. The bullet struck Geneva Miller, the mother of a teenage girl Shrader had dated in 1973 and ’74. He opened the door, saw Howard William “Rusty” Adams Jr., 20, of Northfork, in the home and shot him in the stomach. Shrader fired one more time as Miller’s daughter fled from her home through a side door and ran behind the back of the home of her next door neighbor, Charles Kowaleski.

Miller’s daughter ran around to the far side of the Kowaleski home, went inside and closed the door with Shrader in close pursuit. Shrader fired two more times. One round broke through one of the glass panes in the top of the door and disabled a refrigerator. The other round went through the lower part of the door — wounding one of Charles Kowaleski’s teenage sons in the arm.

“My brother was an amateur boxer who won 20 straight bouts he had when he was serving in the Navy during World War II,” Walter Kowaleski, 86, said. Walter and his four brothers all served in the military during World War II. “He got the Shrader boy down and several other people from the neighborhood came in and helped tie him up.

Charlie always had a great garden,” Walter Kowaleski said. “He told me the strangest thing about it all was that after he was tied up, the Shrader boy got calm and started acting like nothing had happened. He talked to Charlie about his garden.” Charles Kowaleski died in 1999.

When Trooper Moore arrived on the scene, he came to the Kowaleski home, took control of the rifle and returned to the Miller residence to give first aid to Mrs. Miller and Adams. The McDowell County Rescue Squad arrived and Moore directed them to the victims. He traveled with the ambulances to Stevens Clinic Hospital in Welch. Charles Kowaleski and his son were treated at the Bluefield Sanitarium.

Mrs. Miller died on July 26, and McDowell County authorities added an additional first degree murder charge. By this time, Shrader, a resident of Duhring in Mercer County had retained counsel from one of Bluefield’s most prestigious law firms, Norris Kantor of the Katz, Kantor, Katz, Perkins & Cameron firm. Newspaper reports indicate that Shrader was hospitalized on July 18, claiming that he had a brain concussion as a result of the scuffle following the shooting.

Shrader was a 1972 graduate of Bramwell High School where he was active in several clubs and student organizations. He served as vice president and later president of the Vocational Industrial Clubs of America at BHS and was a first place winner in the Science Fair. His classmates voted him, “Biggest Pest” in the Senior Superlatives of the 1972 edition of “Pinnacle,” the BHS yearbook.

Although Harry Camper was the McDowell County prosecuting attorney at the time, Moore worked with the late Wade Watson to prepare the case for trial. “I remember that Mrs. Miller’s daughter was terribly afraid,” Moore said. “There was no relationship between her and Mr. Adams at all, but Shrader shot him. He (Adams) was just there that day. They were friends. He had just stopped by to see them. He was headed back to his military assignment.

“On the night of the murder, I remember thinking that Switchback Bottom was just a close, coal community,” Moore said. “I had been to several other murder scenes, but nothing that could compare to that night. I remember that after I returned from the hospital, conducted interviews and completed my investigation of the murder scene. When I started to leave, the battery on my car had gone dead from running my blue lights.”

Kantor declined comment citing lawyer/client confidentiality matters, but Moore recalled that as the trial date neared, he and Watson went back and did follow up interviews with all the witnesses. “I remember that the service station owner over in Maybeury had a considerable amount of information. I thought we were well prepared for the trial.”

People who attended the trial recall that the courtroom was packed when jury selection got underway on Jan. 20, 1976, in McDowell County Circuit Court in Welch. Circuit Court Judge Jack Marinari substituted for Judge Rudolph Murensky who was off the bench due to illness. When the jury was impaneled, and before opening arguments, Shrader pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and the malicious wounding charge in exchange for a recommendation of mercy.

“The reason we recommended that the court accept the plea was because this man had a psychiatric history,” Camper told Bluefield Daily Telegraph reporter Maryanne Stevens after the plea. “One of the defenses was that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and they had medical tests and evidence that they would have produced.”

Camper told Stevens that he made the recommendation to the court after talking it over with his staff, the investigating officer and the families of the victims. The sentences were set up to run “concurrently,” and the “only significance of the recommendation for mercy (being) he is eligible to apply for parole in 10 years,” Camper told Stevens. Guy Perkins assisted Kantor in representing Shrader.

Shrader went to Moundsville, but he didn’t stay there for long. “He got himself moved to Welch on a writ of habeas corpus,” Moore said. “I can’t remember exactly when it was, but it happened before I was transferred to the Beckley Detachment in April 1977.” Kantor said he had no knowledge of a writ involving Shrader after the trial.

Once he was in the McDowell County Jail, Shrader escaped and remained at large for some period of time. “He got caught out in Texas,” Moore said. “I remember flying out there to pick him up. We talked on the flight back here. I asked him how he got out, but he never would tell me.

“When we landed at the airport in Pittsburgh, there were people from Moundsville State Penitentiary waiting there to meet us,” Moore said. “I returned him to their custody right there, and that’s the last time I saw Mr. Shrader.” Moore served with distinction in the West Virginia State Police and was a member of the department’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations.

In the years that followed, Shrader continued trying to contact Mrs. Miller’s daughter by calling her and sending her letters. In 1978, while incarcerated, he filed a civil complaint in Mercer County circuit court alleging that the victim’s daughter breached a promise to marry him, according to count one of a federal indictment returned on Dec. 1. Shrader is charged with “stalking by use of interstate facility,” a crime punishable by as much as five years in prison and as much as a $250,000 fine.

The Internet has additional information concerning other pre se (self-filed) civil complaints he filed naming McDowell County judicial officials and at least one prison warden as defendants in the complaints. He was released from prison in 1994, and returned to Mercer County and resided in the Duhring area again. He was off parole in 1999.

The new federal indictment alleges that Shrader persisted in trying to contact the daughter of the woman he murdered even though she was married and had moved out of state. The indictment alleges that when Shrader learned the new address of his victim’s daughter, he started calling her again and on Oct. 26, sent her a 30-page letter via Federal Express shipped from Bluefield that Special Agent Terry Schwartz of the FBI said contained “numerous threats and harassing language.

“Fearing that this last letter may be a final warning from Shrader, (the victim’s daughter) contacted the FBI,” Schwartz stated in his Nov. 12, affidavit that resulted in the government filing a criminal complaint and ultimately, in the Dec. 1, indictment.

Federal Magistrate Judge R. Clark Vandervort scheduled an arraignment for Shrader at 1 p.m., on Dec. 15, at U.S. District Court in Beckley.

– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

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