Billy Ray Irick: ‘He knew what he was doing’

Paula Dyer walked half a mile to school in the rain the day she died.

She ate her last meal as a cold supper of canned corn and peas.

She died in her mother’s bed, fighting for air against the man she called “Uncle Bill.”

“That was her last day on Earth,” said Don Wiser, who worked the case as the Knoxville Police Department’s lead investigator. “I saw her body at the hospital that night — just a beautiful little girl. You had to wonder who could do something like that to a 7-year-old child.”

A day later, Wiser looked the man who killed her in the eye — and 33 years later, he’s counting down to that man’s last day on Earth.

‘I can’t wake her up’

Billy Ray Irick never told police why. He was 26 when he moved in with Paula’s mother and stepfather, Kathy and Kenny Jeffers, already hardened by a life of alcohol, drugs and drifting. He helped babysit the couple’s five children from assorted marriages and relationships, even saved two of their boys the night the family’s home caught fire in March 1985. When the couple moved to a new house on Exeter Avenue in Knoxville’s Beaumont neighborhood, he followed.

Then at midnight on April 15, 1985, Irick called Kenny Jeffers at work from a neighbor’s phone.

“It’s Paula,” he said. “I can’t wake her up.”

Jeffers came home to find Irick waiting on the porch and Paula’s body lying half-naked on her mother’s bed, a puddle of blood between her legs.

She never woke up. Doctors pronounced her dead that morning.

By then Irick was gone.

‘I lost it’

An autopsy found Paula died of asphyxiation — maybe strangled, maybe suffocated by a pillow — after being raped twice, orally and vaginally.

Wiser, now retired, still remembers the burst blood vessels in Paula’s face and eyes.

The family buried her with a Cabbage Patch Kids doll beside her in the childsized casket.

The search for Irick ended the next day when a passerby’s phone call led Wiser and other KPD officers to find him at the Baxter Avenue ramp to Interstate 275, trying to thumb a ride out of town. A few hours later, he admitted killing Paula, signed a confession — even made a few edits, Wiser recalls. He still never said why. “At first he denied it and all, but once he saw we had the evidence, he admitted to it,” Wiser said. “We had the hairs from the bed, the neighbor who let him use the phone. He knew that physical evidence was there. But he didn’t want to give us any details. He was ashamed. His statement was just a couple of sentences.”

Irick told police Paula woke up in the night with a fever. She’d been complaining of feeling sick ever since walking through the rain that morning to school. Irick said he carried her to her mother’s bedroom and lay down with her to help get her back to sleep.

Irick claimed he didn’t remember what happened next, that he blacked out from drinking beer and smoking pot.

“When I lost it, it was when I raped her,” he said.

‘He knew’

Wiser believes Irick killed Paula to get even with her mother — that he was tired of babysitting, angry at the couple, looking for any way to lash out. Kathy Jeffers had warned her husband she didn’t want to leave the children with Irick that night, that she’d seen him muttering to himself in a half-drunk rage on the porch before she left for work.

“He blamed it on drinking beer and smoking marijuana,” Wiser said. “Well, I’ve known a lot of people who drank beer and smoked dope, but they never killed any little girls.”

Defense attorneys have since argued Irick’s spent a lifetime battling mostly untreated mental illness from childhood abuse. Witnesses have said they overheard him talking to the devil in the days before Paula’s death, that he complained of hearing voices. Wiser didn’t buy it, then or now. “Billy Ray knew right from wrong,” the detective said. “He didn’t stand the test of being retarded. He wasn’t a pedophile. He knew what he was doing. Billy Ray was just mean. He was mad, and he wanted to get back at ‘em.”

Tennessee Department of Correction officials placed Irick, now 59, on death watch this week as his execution date, set for Thursday night, draws near. His attorneys have made a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wiser said he’s not been invited to attend the execution, but he’s been keeping up with the news coverage through the years and reading back through copies of his case file — his notes, copies of crime-scene photos, even a copy of Paula’s homework from that day, where she wrote about her walk to school through the rain.

“Billy Ray’s lived a long life, probably better than he’d ever have had outside prison,” Wiser said. “He denied that little girl that. All these constitutional rights of his that they talk about, she never got. He’s had every chance. Now I hope he’s read his Bible and gotten right with Jesus, because it’s time to answer for it.”