20-year-old Rachel Good disappeared from Elkton, Virginia on October 18, 2003. We covered her case in the hopes that someone out there would hear it who knows something and will come forward with information.
Who is Rachel Good?
Rachel Good was born on October 6th, 1983 in Harrisonburg Virginia to Cary Good and Brenda Brown, and a few years later Cary and Brenda had a son named Adam. Cary wasn’t around a lot when Rachel was growing up, he was a truck driver so he spent a lot of time out on the road with the kids staying with their mother. Around 1990, Brenda and Cary divorced, it was not an amicable split and they didn’t get along after the fact. Brenda did and up remarrying, and According to a blog post by Chris Slater who wrote about this case in 2012, Cary said that Rachel didn’t have the best time with her mom after Brenda remarried. He recalled one time she had called him saying that her stepfather had taken all of her belongings out of her bedroom and that she was left to sleep on the floor.
Rachel attended Ft. Defiance High School and loved the outdoors and hanging out with her family and friends. Her father said that as she became a teenager she started to run with the wrong crowd and was getting herself into trouble. At a young age, she got pregnant and she had 3 children by the time she was 20, 2 boys and a girl. She was described as a free spirit and a good mother. Friends said that she had the ability to bring out the best in them and how much she loved to talk, with her friend Danielle Dovel saying “she’d have 30 minute conversations with the people at the gas station” and she was great at being a telemarketer which she did for a little while. She was always down for an adventure and once climbed onto a children’s ride at a carnival to encourage her friend’s children to be brave enough to go on.
It seems as if she had some run-ins with the law in 2002 and 2003, she was arrested for charges of forgery, uttering, obtaining a service by fraud obtaining money by false pretenses, and failure to appear. This suggests to me at least that she may have been writing or attempting to cash false checks, but I couldn’t tell you for certain.
(Forgery and uttering are both common law offenses. Forgery is defined as the creation and fabrication of a document with the intent to defraud and uttering is the passing or publication of a forged document that someone else had made with the intent to defraud according to bostoncriminaldefenselawyers.com)
The Disappearance
In October 2003, she was 20 years old and 10 weeks pregnant with her fourth child. 22-year-old Adam Williams. According to her father, she was attempting to turn her life around, according to her father but one night in early October, she called asking to borrow 100$ eh said of course but only if she went to church that Sunday, the 12th. She showed up and was excited to tell her father about the man she had been seeing for the last couple of months. A police officer by the name of Adam Williams. That was the last time Cary would see his daughter. On October 18th She was with friends in the Elkton Volunteer Fire Department Parking lot at around 6 pm which was near the coin laundry off Spotswood Trail in Elkton Virginia. After hanging out with her friends she was seen driving off in her Dodge Neon.
On the 19th, the next day, her best friend is trying to get in touch with Rachel, but can’t get a hold of her so what it seems like is that this friend goes to Rachel's apartment and sees Rachel’s car, but Rachel is nowhere to be found so this friend call’s Brenda, Rachel’s mom. Brenda is obviously concerned when she can’t reach Rachel, so Brenda and her son Adam call the police to report Rachel missing. A police officer shows up to take the report and Brenda says this officer is shaking so badly as he’s doing that that he can barely hold his pen in his hand. The Officer taking the report? Adam Willians.
The Investigation
For the first four days, due to the small size of the police department in Elkton, Adam was the lead investigator and during that time, family members claimed that he entered Rachel’s home and removed things from the home as evidence, although no one seems to know what he took. Soon Enough, Rachel’s parents found letters between Adam and Rachel that revealed this romantic relationship that they had There was also the discovery that not only was there a conflict of interest with Adam being involved romantically with a woman who had disappeared, he was also married. According to family members, Rachel had told Adam that she was pregnant and she wanted him to leave his wife. He allegedly said no and wanted her to get an abortion which he provided her money to pay for. She allegedly said no, but kept the money. Brenda learned about this anad decided to go around the police and tell then-Elkton Mayor Wayne Printz about what had happened. Printz said he was very upset when he learned about the situation with Williams. He said he immediately confronted Chief Pullen saying that Williams needed to be taken off the case, and he began working to correct the mishandled investigation.
When Brought to his attention, police chief Richard Pullen claimed that he had no “official knowledge of the affair between the two" which Cary has since come out and said he does not believe. Printz said he is unsure if that is true or not.
10 days after she disappeared, the Virginia state police took over the investigation for the Elkton PD due to the conflict of interest involving Adam Williams. A month after her disappearance, in November of 2003, Adam submitted his resignation to the Elkton Police Department which would be taking effect in January of 2004. He was subsequently placed on administrative leave that December after a search of his home is conducted. After his resignation what does Adam Williams do? HE MOVED OUT OF STATE.
The Lawsuits
11 months after Rachel went missing, Rockingham County Commonwealth’s Attorney Marsha Garst called a special grand jury hearing to present evidence in Rachel’s case. She said during a news conference that police were still working on Rachel’s case and they were looking into leads from people that weren’t interviewed at the beginning of the investigation. It was also said at this meeting that Senior Special Agent Joe Ritchie of the Virginia State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations was certain Rachel’s case was a homicide. She also said that the FBI and the US Attorney’s office were involved in the investigation. During this meeting, Marsha also said that police had a person of interest and this person of interest was the same person they were interested in talking to when Rachel First went Missing, this person being Adam Williams. Unfortunately, after the grand jury was convened, no indictments were handed down.
In 2010 Rachel was declared legally dead 7 years after her disappearance. In 2012 Cary filed a wrongful death suit against the town of Elkton Former police Chief Richard Pullen and Adam Williams sought 5 million dollars in damages, which the attorney representing Elkton, Nathan Miller believed would be dismissed. In February 2014, a judge dismissed the suit but only against the city of Elkton and Richard Pullen, not against Adam Williams. Adam Williams frequently failed to show up for court in this issue citing medical issues. On September 16th, 2016, two years later Brenda and Cary sued Adam for the wrongful death of Rachel seeking 50,000 dollars in damages. This was the second attempt at going to trial as in the first, Adam failed to show up for court again.
However, when the case was to go to trial Brad Pollack, their lawyer failed for a continuance at a later date because the Virginia state police were not providing cell phone records between Rachel and Adam which pollack believed was critical to the case. The original records were destroyed by the cell phone providers and the state police were not providing the copies they had due to her case being technically considered an active investigation. They were given six months to set a new date but the following month, the suit was dropped over the issue of the cell phone records. In March of 2017, a new suit would be filed against Adam Williams, and in 2018 he was allegedly going to actually show up for the court hearing according to his lawyer Braxton Puryear. For this lawsuit, Adam was asking for the suit to be thrown out because the statute of limitations on the wrongful death suit was up being only 2 years. He also claimed that the suit failed to claim that a wrongful act was committed but Brad Polluck argued that Adam Williams was too late in filing to dismiss the case. He was served on April 24th and had 21 days to respond, which would be the 15th of may, he responded on the 16th. Puryear argued that there should be an exception to this rule as Adam Williams was living in Louisiana and the mail delayed his response.
The last update I found in the case was from breaking through news in 2018. He did appear in court and told circuit court judge that he tried to file electronically but he was denied. To clarify he allegedly tried to respond via email and that was the issue the response had to be filed through the certified electronic filing system. A hearing date was allegedly going to be set to potentially hold Adam Williams legally responsible for Rachel’s death, as failing to respond in time pushed the suit to default meaning he could be held liable for damages if found guilty though not criminally which frustrated Pullack because he wanted to take Williams to trial, but would be denied the chance to do so. Unfortunately, there was no update on any hearing or resolution to that and Rachel’s case is still unsolved and she has never been found. Interestingly enough, Cary actually stated that he would actually forgive Adam if he was responsible for his daughter’s death if he apologized and asked for forgiveness. He said he just wants to find his daughter as his health is failing, He is in his 70s, and at the time of Rachel’s disappearance “they were just kids” he said that he isn’t interested in the money either “ I don’t want nothing. I don’t want a penny. I want my grandkids to know what happened to their mother. That’s all I want."
Theories
There have been leads about the location of Rachel’s body over the years, one being that her body was in a well in Lake Arrowhead. Cary said that the police went to the location and did discover a well, but it had been covered up sometime around 2012 the price to dig up the well was easily 10-12 thousand dollars, so they never did anything with it. There was also a house nearby the well with a basement that had been remodeled around the time that Rachel Disappeared something that Cary does not believe to be a coincidence. He said, “maybe she was killed in the basement and thrown into the well.”
There’s also the theory that Adam if he did kill Rachel, did not do it alone, Cary believed he possibly had help from his father. According to Cary, he spoke to Adam’s mother, his parents lived in Florida, and she said that her husband would go up to Virginia every spring to see his son, but in 2003 he went up in October. Cary believed that it’s possible that Adam told his father about the affair and that maybe Rachel was threatening to tell Adam’s wife about it and her pregnancy so he came up to “take care of it” Cary believes that Adam could have talked Rachel into driving down to florida and she was killed there.
Special Agent Chris Deploy of the Virginia State Police is the lead investigator on the Rachel Good case.
While he couldn’t go into many details about the investigation, Deploy said he hopes that technologies that have developed or been improved upon over the last 20 years can help get a breakthrough in the case.
Anyone with information on the Rachel Good case is asked to call Agent Deploy at (540) 829-7400
