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What a sad story. I never really knew the details.

Was anyone ever charged and prosecuted for these murders? What was the final outcome?

Joey Caldwell, thanks to his wife's testimony against him, was convicted of 57 federal weapons violations, mail fraud and money laundering counts on Sept. 1, 1993. He hanged himself in his jail cell in High Point the night after his conviction.

Bobbie Caldwell, Joey's wife, pleaded guilty in January 1994 to federal money laundering and lying to a grand jury and was sentenced to five years in prison. According to Clark Cox's 1999 story in the Southern Pines Pilot, to which I'll link further down, her current whereabouts are unknown if she's still alive.

Barbara Sullivan suffered a heart attack in Southern Pines on June 15, 1996 and was taken by ambulance to Moore County Hospital. Her husband Clyde shot himself the same day and died a day later. Barbara died 10 days after her heart attack.

As was the case with O.J. Simpson, no one was convicted of murder in this case. But in two civil suits brought by McEachern's heirs, juries named the Caldwells as the killers and awarded damages to the McEachern estate.

Here is Cox's story in the Pilot, http://archives.thepilot.com/October199 ... Greed.html. Cox's book about the murders, Deadly Greed, is available from Amazon.com.

DANG!

The Sullivan suicide is puzzling.

You're right, Linda. There are three stories in the series that Cox wrote for the Pilot, and he, too, said Sullivan's suicide couldn't be explained.

Sullivan was originally a suspect in the McEachern murders because McEachern was getting ready to testify against him in a lawsuit based on distribution rights to the sports drink they were all trying to sell. But on the night the McEacherns were killed, Sullivan was at a party in Southern Pines and there were numerous witnesses to his presence there. Investigators considered the possibility Sullivan could have hired the killer, but as Caldwell's story began to fall apart, they shifted toward him. There also were rumors that Sullivan may have poisoned his wife, causing her heart attack, but her autopsy results disproved them.

Before I wrote my own book, I had read Clark Cox's book on the McEacherns and decided to pattern the murder in my fictional story on the actual killings in his.

Here are the links to all three of Cox's stories in the Pilot:

http://archives.thepilot.com/October199 ... Greed.html

http://archives.thepilot.com/October199 ... Greed.html

http://archives.thepilot.com/October199 ... Greed.html

Somewhere I read earlier that Maceo received call at work from his Mom to come home. Maceo told coworkers that he had to leave and go check on her because she was ill. Was his Mom forced to make that call by her killer? She was a beautiful,sweet lady. Heartbreaking story.

Exactly. Caldwell forced Vela to call Maceo, and that is covered in one of those links I posted. After she made the call, Caldwell ripped the phone cord out of the wall.

Maceo told whoever he was working with at the funeral home that he had to go check on his mother. When he didn't return and nobody could call Vela's house, the co-worker drove there and discovered the bodies.

Cox wrote that the first attempt to kill Maceo was probably a couple of days before. Caldwell and most people thought Maceo lived with his mother, so he put some concrete blocks in her driveway thinking that when Maceo came home, he'd have to get out of the car to move them and could be shot at that point from a hidden location.

It was the failure of the first plan -- Maceo lived in his own apartments in his Hamlet and Rockingham funeral homes -- that forced Caldwell to break into Vela's house. That meant she had to die, too, because Caldwell couldn't afford to leave a living witness.

Caldwell was ruthless. His wife was very brave to wear a wire. She should have turned him in long before though. At least, she appeared to have a little piece of heart left in her......perhaps. I googled Bobbie Caldwell and found that a person with that name recently died in Concord NC. Think it was her???

After further googling, I discovered that the Bobbie Caldwell who recently died in Concord NC was survived by husband Charles. I think I would have changed my name.