Twenty-five years ago, Rita Creasman’s husband said the 20-year-old woman left her infant son, toddler daughter and two stepsons at home with him while she went to run a few errands.
Two days later, the Marietta mom’s strangled and partially nude body was found at the bottom of a creek a few miles away.
Her family has been tormented since then with the knowledge that whoever is responsible for Creasman’s death has gotten away with murder.
Even worse, they suspect what happened to her was not an isolated incident.
Police have long said her husband, Steven Creasman, is a suspect not just in Rita’s death, but in the subsequent disappearances of two of his girlfriends.
“This is three women dead or missing in six years, and they were all associated with Steven Creasman,” said Cobb homicide Detective John Dawes, who took over the case in 2009.
Twyla Mickey, a 30-year-old single mom, had been living with Creasman and his children in Marietta when she disappeared in 1989.
Belinda Norred, 36, vanished from her mobile home in Acworth in 1992. She had been in an on-again, off-again relationship with Creasman.
Both women remain missing and are feared dead, but because no bodies have been found, the cases are classified as missing persons.
Detectives in Cobb County, where Rita Creasman and Mickey lived, and in Cherokee County, where Norred resided, are collaborating on the investigation.
They’ve never made an arrest because they lack sufficient evidence to get a conviction against Creasman or anybody else, said Sgt. L.J. Szeniawski, who supervises the Cobb police homicide unit.
“We are looking at him, but we’re also looking at everybody else who could potentially have committed this murder,” Szeniawski said.
Szeniawski said jurors nowadays are accustomed to watching “CSI”-type television shows with pat endings. And although circumstantial evidence indicates she and her husband argued on the day she was killed, there is no physical evidence that indicates he was responsible for her death.
The fact that the bodies of Mickey and Norred have never been found is a huge obstacle to solving those cases, Szeniawski said.
And so, detectives keep digging.
No charges have ever been filed against Creasman, a former auto mechanic who lives in Statham. He is 53 now, married to a third wife and works in the construction and home restoration business, according to detectives.
Creasman did not respond to messages left by a reporter who visited his house. Attempts to reach him by contacting his wife via Facebook and by calling his parents also were unsuccessful. An attorney for Creasman could not be located and the last time he talked with police, he was not represented by one.
Crack under the door
Lindsi Flanagan, 28, was only 3 years old when Rita Creasman died. But she had a startling story to tell investigators who interviewed her about a year ago.
Flanagan said she and her stepbrothers were lying on the living room floor the day her mother went missing, which was a Saturday. Her mother was about to put a “Winnie the Pooh” video into the VCR for them to watch. Then Steven Creasman came inside.
“He was yelling at her about something,” Flanagan said. “I remember thinking, we’re in trouble, so we all get quiet because he was not a very nice man.”
Flanagan recalls seeing her stepfather drag her mother down the hallway into a bathroom, where he shut the door.
Flanagan lay down on the floor and peered through the crack under it. She could see her mother’s and Creasman’s feet.
“She laid down in the floor, or I thought that’s what she was doing,” Flanagan said. “And when he came out, he screamed at us to get in the living room.”
When Flanagan asked where her mom was, she said Creasman told her she was using the bathroom. She walked down the hall and saw her mother on the floor.
“I remember thinking she was asleep in the bathroom,” Flanagan said.
That’s the last time Flanagan recalls seeing her mom.
Around 3:30 or 4 p.m. that day, Rita Creasman’s mother, Shirley Eubanks, got a hang-up phone call. She heard her daughter say, “Mom,” before the phone went dead.
“I don’t know, I had a mother’s intuition something is wrong,” Eubanks said.
About four hours later, Steven Creasman telephoned his mother-in-law, asking if she had seen Rita.
She hadn’t come home from an outing to a nearby shopping center, he said. It didn’t make sense to Eubanks, who said her daughter never left Creasman with all four of the children.
That night, Rita Creasman’s locked vehicle was found parked in the Blackwell Square shopping center not far from her home.
At around midnight, Creasman called the police to report his wife missing.
A teenage boy walking along Pete Shaw Road discovered Rita Creasman’s body two days later. She had been strangled and dumped off a small bridge that spans a creek. Her sweater and bra had been cut off, but there was no evidence of sexual assault.
Tami Tucker, Rita Creasman’s sister, said her sister’s marriage was troubled.
She was still married to her first husband, although legally separated, when she became pregnant with Creasman’s child. She married Creasman two weeks after her divorce was final.
Tucker said she never understood what her sister saw in Creasman, whose first wife died of cancer, leaving him to raise their two sons.
“When Rita met him, all she could talk about was this poor guy whose wife had died of cancer that had these two little boys,” Tucker said.
Rita Creasman and her husband had separated a few months before her death. But they got back together on a six-week trial basis, which was to end the week she was slain, according to her mother. During those last few weeks, Eubanks was with her daughter nearly every day because she was helping renovate the house.
Eubanks said the tension between the couple was obvious.
On a shopping trip to Town Center Mall with her daughter, Eubanks said she turned to see Steven Creasman staring at them from across the store. He was supposed to have been at work at a car dealership where he was a mechanic.
Another time, Steven Creasman turned up at a nearby lake where they had taken the children for to picnic. He stood and watched them from a distance, Eubanks said.
“He was doing all these strange things,” Eubanks said. “Like everywhere we went, he showed up.”
Eubanks said she was concerned about her son-in-law’s behavior. Rita Creasman told her mother she would handle it.
Still grieving
Like the Eubanks family, Sarah Toole has agonized for years over what happened to her daughter.
Police say Twyla Mickey was living with Creasman when she disappeared. She left a message on her parents’ answering machine on Nov. 30, 1989, saying “I’ve got to get out of here.” She asked them to pick up her son, who was being cared for by Creasman’s mother at the time. Toole never heard from her daughter again.
Mickey’s abandoned Toyota Tercel was impounded in Atlanta and crushed before police could check it for clues.
“It’s been a nightmare for me, it really has, to live that long and not know what happened to my daughter,” Toole said.
The other woman who disappeared after becoming involved with Creasman was Belinda Norred, a single mother from Acworth who ran a house-cleaning business with her sister.
Norred went missing Aug. 16, 1992, leaving behind a 19-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, Shere Mabry.
Mabry, now 33, remembers Creasman as a quiet man who often stayed at their home in the Shadowood Mobile Home Community in Cherokee County.
Mabry said her mother was sweet, loving and funny, but she had a jealous streak. She suspected Creasman was cheating on her.
She was also hard-headed when it came to love. Norred’s mother, Louise Womack, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1992 that Norred didn’t want to heed warnings that her new boyfriend was a suspect in his wife’s murder.
“She didn’t listen to us,” said Womack, who passed away in 1995. “She was crazy about him.”
On the day her mother went missing, Mabry returned home from sleeping over at a friend’s house to find her mom gone. Also missing was a phone cord, a comforter and her mother’s silver Nissan pickup truck.
Her brother, who had been home the entire time, thought Norred must have departed with Creasman before he woke that morning.
Her family reported Norred missing when she failed to return home. Six weeks later, her truck was found parked in a Marietta shopping center.
In the 19 years since, Mabry and her brother have known no peace.
“I don’t even care if justice takes its course or not,” Mabry said. “I just want her body. I just want closure.”
Cherokee County detectives believe Creasman was the last person to see Norred. Investigators said he pawned some of her jewelry after her disappearance — jewelry that her children said she never removed, even in the shower. Detectives also believe that after her death he was in possession of a gun she always carried in her purse, said Maj. Ron Hunton of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department.
Creasman denied having anything to do with her vanishing when detectives quizzed him about it.
Cherokee sheriff’s Detective Kenneth Locke said Norred’s disappearance continues to bother him as he nears the end of his law enforcement career.
“Before I retire, this is the last case I would want solved,” Locke wrote in an email. “It still haunts me to this day.”
Both Mickey’s and Norred’s DNA profiles have been entered in a national database, so they can be matched against unidentified remains discovered anywhere in the country.
After a reporter inquired recently about skeletal remains found beside a rural road in Marietta in 1993, investigators realized DNA had never been extracted from the bones. That technology was still relatively uncommon 17 years ago.
Mickey was ruled out as a possible match to the remains long ago. Norred, however, was not. Police have started looking for a forensics lab to extract DNA and make the comparison.
Detectives are hopeful that analysis could result in a breakthrough. They are also optimistic someone may come forward with new details.
Creasman was reinterviewed when Cobb County detectives got a DNA sample from him in 2009. They wanted to have it on file.
Investigators said DNA was not useful in Rita Creasman’s case because it is not unusual for a husband’s DNA to be found on his wife.
“Although some statements have changed, he still denies having anything to do with any of the three cases,” Szeniawski said.
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Six years, three women
May 30, 1986: Rita and Steven Creasman marry.
Oct. 4, 1986: Rita Creasman is reported missing. Steven tells police she never returned home from running errands. Her locked vehicle is found in a nearby shopping center.
Oct. 6, 1986: Rita’s body is found face-down in a creek a few miles from her Marietta home. An autopsy reveals she was manually strangled.
Nov. 30, 1989: Twyla Mickey vanishes from the home she shared with Steven Creasman in Marietta.
Aug. 16, 1992: Belinda Norred disappears from her mobile home in Acworth.
Anyone with information about the disappearance of Mickey or the slaying of Creasman is asked to contact the Cobb County Police Department homicide unit at 770-499-3945. Anyone with information about Norred’s disappearance is asked to contact the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office at 678-493-4200.
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