Ten years later, a case is cold and a family has only memories

Ten years is a long time.

For @Erica Dawn Abram, a young woman who spent the second half of her childhood without her mother, Rhonda Gaye Abram (Vicks) , it’s an eternity.

It’s not that Erica, 20, of Mebane, was alone. She had her dad and her younger brother, @ Mark Anthony Abram, and plenty of other people in her extended family to lean on. But she’s lived the past 10 years with so many unanswered questions, so much unfinished business, and she knows that the answers — at least some of them — may come with a cost that she might not be ready to pay.

“I want to know how she spent her last time on earth,” Erica said. “I hope she wasn’t miserable. I hope she wasn’t in pain.”

Rhonda’s death was anything but easy, and it still remains a mystery to Rhonda’s family and to the detectives at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department who investigated it. For a long time, Erica convinced herself that perhaps her mother wasn’t really dead.

Now that she’s an adult, Erica wants to acknowledge her mother’s death so she can move on. By digging up the past she might finally be able to fill in the gaps in her memory, but it also means facing some truths that might be difficult to bear.

“As much as I want to know what happened, I don’t know that I want to hear anything else bad about her,” Erica said.

The Saturday, March 25, 2000, that Rhonda disappeared from her Mebane home, Erica, who was 10, and Mark, who was 9, went to spend the weekend with their dad in Creedmoor in Granville County.

After his divorce from Rhonda in November 1994, Phillip Abram usually visited his children in Mebane but that weekend they went to stay with him.

“If we were not home with her, when we got home, unless it was raining or nasty outside, she was outside waiting on us,” Erica Abram said.

But when @Phillip Abram’s girlfriend brought Erica and Mark home on March 26, 2000, Rhonda wasn’t waiting outside.

“Where’s mama?” Erica remembers asking Phillip Eason. “He said, ‘for all I know she is lying on the side of the highway dead somewhere.’”

The children were concerned. They called their dad. He told them to go to bed.

The next day when they returned home from school, Rhonda still wasn’t home. Erica Abram called the Alamance County Sheriff’s Department and attempted to report her mother missing before Phillip Eason returned home. The deputy wouldn’t take the report from her because she was a child.

When Phillip Eason returned home, they pleaded with him to file a missing person’s report and he finally made the call. He reported that she left home at about 8 p.m. March 25 and was going partying.

“He told the police she was known for running off and being gone,” Erica Abram said. “She didn’t run off and leave us. She wasn’t the kind of mother to leave us.”

It was more than a week later that Erica, a fifth-grader at South Mebane Elementary School, and Mark, a fourth-grader, were pulled out of class and told to go to the guidance counselor’s office. Erica still recalls walking in the hallway with her brother.

“I remember telling Mark it was a bad prank — it was a bad April Fool’s joke,” she said. “I thought she was there to see us.”

When they arrived at the office, they were met by their father’s girlfriend. She was crying.

“They set us down and told us they found her,” Erica Abram said. “There were tears running down their cheeks. They told us she wasn’t alive.”

Rhonda's remains were found on an embankment about 25 feet off of Interstate 85/40 in Orange County by an N.C. Department of Transportation clean-up crew on April 5, 2000. She was 32.

The same crew was working March 31, 2000 and Eason’s body was not there at the time, according to an autopsy report from the state Medical Examiner’s
office in Chapel Hill.

Her body was decomposed, and she was identified by fingerprints and dental records. Other than a laceration to her lip, Eason’s body showed no sign of traumatic injury.

“She had not been shot or stabbed or beaten or strangled,” said Tim Horne, an Orange County Sheriff’s investigator who works on the department’s cold cases. He recently delved back into Rhonda’s case after Erica Abram went to him seeking answers about her mother’s death.

A toxicology test, which at the time tested for only alcohol and cocaine, indicated there wasn’t a sufficient amount of either to cause Eason’s death and it remains “undetermined,” according to reports. The details about what actually killed her and how she ended up on the embankment off the interstate remain a mystery.

“It could have been an accidental overdose of some sort,” Horne said. “It could have been a natural death because of the life she led. It could have been a suicide, although that’s not likely, or a homicide. She absolutely didn’t die in that place. She was brought there and left.”

Orange County detectives investigated the death at the time, but answers were difficult to come by. The information isn’t any clearer now 10 years later.

“We retraced a lot of stuff,” Horne said. “We did tons of interviews. They remember less now than they did in 2000 when we initially spoke with them, which is normal.”

Rhonda’s death will remain a cold case until it is solved and then it will be closed.

“This time, we certainly feel like we’ve exhausted the leads that we had,” Horne said. “… I’ve spent a couple of weeks now retracing steps and talking to individuals, but you can’t force people to talk to you. Some people don’t want to be found. They don’t want to talk to people in general, and you can’t force them to.”

Authorities know that on March 25, 2000, Rhonda signed a guest list at the Outback Saloon Too, which was on Trollingwood-Hawfields Road. Authorities said she also was seen as late as April 1, 2000 in an Alamance County business. Horne isn’t releasing any other details, although he recently did share more information with Erica Abram.

The time immediately after their mother’s death was hard on Erica and Mark. Their stepfather disposed of all their belongings, including their mother’s stuff — her clothes, her photo albums and other mementos they desperately wanted. It took them six months to get her prized possession, a Pomeranian named Jeb, back.

But Erica and Mark, who went to live with their father after their mother’s death, both graduated from Alamance Burlington Middle College, a non-traditional high school, and are trying to lead responsible lives.

“I think the good Lord took one life to save three,” said Mark Abram, 19. “My dad was headed down the wrong road. I think it was time for him to step up.” And he did.

The mystery that surrounds their mother’s death remains a part of Erica’s and Mark’s lives. They both have wondered if maybe things could have been different.

She doesn’t know if she’ll ever have the answers she is seeking. Regardless, Erica is more at peace now.

“I have put forth an effort to find out and learn how she spent her last time on earth,” she said. “I hope that somebody will one day be able to tell me what happened to her. … She was my mother. I know she was not the best person but the few memories I have left, I’d love to remember those than the bad things other people want to say about her.”

Anyone with information about Rhonda Vicks Eason’s death can contact Tim Horne at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department at (919) 644-3050.