The Mountain and the Locked Gates: Kimberly Whitton and Haleigh Culwell

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

June 11, 2022

Kimberly Whitton, born Kimberly Compton and known as Kim, was thirty six years old in June 2007, living in a log cabin on a forty acre property in Section, Alabama, a remote stretch of Jackson County reachable only by a driveway secured with two locked gates. She stood five foot nine, weighed around two hundred seventy pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Her daughter, Haleigh Breann Culwell, was eleven years old, five foot two, a hundred ten pounds, blonde hair and brown eyes, and wore orthodontic braces. Kimberly had been married for eight years to a man named Barry Van Whitton, who was Haleigh's stepfather, and the family lived together on that isolated mountain property, a home that neighbors and investigators alike would later describe as difficult to reach and easy to disappear from without anyone noticing right away.

On June 21, 2007, Kimberly drove to her job at Cloverdale Manor Nursing Home in Scottsboro to retrieve some paperwork, then began the drive back home. On the way, she called a friend, but the call dropped due to a bad connection, and Kimberly told the friend she would call back within five minutes. She never did. Neither Kimberly nor Haleigh was reported missing until a full week later, on June 28, when Kimberly's coworkers noticed her prolonged, unexplained absence from work and alerted authorities.

A Van, a License Plate, and Twenty Thousand Dollars

When investigators questioned Barry Whitton about his wife and stepdaughter's whereabouts, he told them that shortly after Kimberly arrived home from work that day, both she and Haleigh left together in a white Ford van or truck bearing Alabama license plates. Barry claimed he had given Kimberly twenty thousand dollars in cash before she left, and at various points suggested the two of them may have traveled to Montana, though no confirmed sighting of either Kimberly or Haleigh ever emerged from that state or anywhere else in the years that followed.

Investigators found Barry's account difficult to reconcile with the physical evidence they gathered from the property. They recovered blood inside one of Barry's pickup trucks, and separately found blood on the handle of a hatchet, though the source of that blood was never publicly disclosed. Barry was never charged in direct connection with Kimberly and Haleigh's disappearance, and he never confessed to harming either of them, but he became, and has remained, the central and really only suspect investigators have ever seriously considered in the case.

A Felon With a Gun, and a Ten Year Sentence

While the investigation into Kimberly and Haleigh's disappearance continued without producing charges, authorities did find enough to prosecute Barry on an entirely separate matter. He had a documented criminal history that included convictions for receiving stolen property back in 1988 and 1991, a record that made his possession of firearms illegal under federal law. Investigators arrested him on weapons charges, and later that same year, 2007, he was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm and sentenced to the maximum term available under the charge, ten years in federal prison.

That sentence took Barry off the mountain and into federal custody, but it did nothing to resolve what had actually happened to Kimberly and Haleigh, whose case remained open and unsolved even with their most likely suspect now serving time on an unrelated conviction.

A First Wife Buried Under a Cliff

While Barry Whitton served that federal sentence, investigators revisited an older, entirely separate case connected to him: the 1997 disappearance of his first wife, Michelle Townsend Whitton, who was twenty eight years old when she was reported missing on December 7, 1997, nearly a full decade before Kimberly and Haleigh vanished from the same mountain property. Michelle's body was discovered on January 20, 1998, buried in a shallow grave beneath a cliff in neighboring DeKalb County. An autopsy determined she had been bludgeoned in the head with a shotgun, and had also suffered superficial wounds to her face and neck along with a stab wound to her chest, injuries consistent with a knife or similar blade.

That case sat dormant for years until 2008, when investigators received new information that finally allowed them to move forward. Barry Whitton was formally indicted in December 2014 and charged in January 2015, while he was still serving his federal sentence for the weapons conviction. His murder trial began in mid-2015, and on September 24, 2015, a jury of eight men and four women deliberated for roughly two hours before finding him guilty of murdering Michelle. He was sentenced to life in prison, and the Alabama Supreme Court later upheld his conviction on appeal.

A Mountain, Three Women, No Answers for Two of Them

Barry Whitton's conviction for Michelle's murder gave investigators, and the broader Jackson County community, a confirmed answer to what had happened to at least one woman connected to him, more than seventeen years after her death. It offered no such resolution for Kimberly and Haleigh, whose disappearance a decade later shared unmistakable echoes of Michelle's case: a wife connected to Barry Whitton vanishing without explanation, blood evidence that was never fully accounted for, and a husband whose account of what happened never held up to scrutiny, yet was never enough, on its own, to bring formal charges.

Local coverage of the case at the time described the property and the broader mountain community as a place shadowed by fear once the pattern connecting all three women became public, a remote stretch of Jackson County where one woman had been confirmed murdered and buried under a cliff, and two more, a mother and her eleven year old daughter, had simply vanished behind a pair of locked gates and never been seen again.

Kimberly and Haleigh's case remains open with the Jackson County Sheriff's Department. Barry Whitton has never been charged in connection with their disappearance, and neither Kimberly nor Haleigh has ever been found. Haleigh would be approaching her thirties today had she lived, a childhood and an entire adult life stolen from her alongside her mother, on a mountain where a serving of raw, unmistakable violence had already once been proven, and where investigators have long believed, without ever being able to prove it in a courtroom, that it happened again.

The gap between the two cases says as much about the limits of circumstantial evidence as it does about Barry Whitton himself. Michelle's case eventually produced a body, an autopsy documenting the exact injuries that killed her, and physical evidence, a shotgun blow, knife wounds, a shallow grave under a cliff, specific enough to build a murder charge around, even if it took investigators seventeen years to assemble it into a case a jury would accept. Kimberly and Haleigh's disappearance has never produced any of that. Blood in a truck and blood on a hatchet handle pointed investigators toward exactly the same conclusion they eventually proved in Michelle's case, but without remains, without a scene, and without the kind of forensic specificity that turned suspicion into a conviction the first time, prosecutors have never had enough to bring charges a second time, even against the same man, on the same mountain, under circumstances that read, to nearly everyone who has studied the case since, as unmistakably similar.

Anyone with information about the disappearance of Kimberly Whitton and Haleigh Breann Culwell is asked to contact the Jackson County Sheriff's Department at 256-574-2610.

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