Feature image: Mindy McCready and David Wilson
The two deaths came several weeks apart but at the exact same location. Both the man and the woman died from gunshots to the head. There were no witnesses.
Was it murder, suicide or a bit of both? The mystery of what happened at Heber Springs has lingered long after the gun smoke has cleared.
As night descended on Jan. 13, 2013, so did the first responders to a house on Fox Chase Road. With urgency, a bloodied man was loaded into an ambulance, but despite the best efforts of a team at a local hospital, he was pronounced dead after fewer than two hours.
The deceased was David Wilson, 34, a Nashville songwriter and music producer, the boyfriend of country music artist Mindy McCready. At the time of the incident, the couple had been staying at the Heber Springs home for more than a year. Yes, McCready had been there when the fatal gunshot was fired; in fact, she would be the next to die, but not just yet.
The story begins in 1994, when a teenage McCready packed up her karaoke tapes and headed for Nashville, the city known as the cradle of country music. Her mama made McCready promise she would be back in Florida in college somewhere if she did not make something happen in a year. Eleven months in, BNR Records announced its newest singer, the very determined McCready.
The album Ten Thousand Angels was released in 1996, and industry insiders sat up straight as it went double platinum, propelled in part due to the saucy No. 1 hit “Guys Do It All the Time.” McCready’s nomination for Top New Female Artist at the Academy of Country Music Awards signaled success just might be there to stay.
However, the next year, McCready’s sophomore album If I Don’t Stay the Night failed to uphold the promise of her first record. By 1999, her third album, I’m Not So Tough, dropped and flopped like the second, costing McCready her contract with BNR. Her 2002 self-titled album, produced by Capitol Records, was hoped to offer redemption but failed to deliver, and it was clear it would take more than a change of management to stop her career free fall.
The buzz was that McCready herself was the problem and that the doors of the country music industry had slammed hard and fast on her as a result. In 2012, a year before her death, McCready posted to her fan website: “I haven’t had a hit in almost a decade. I’ve spent my fortune, tarnished my public view and made myself the brunt of punch line after punch line. I’ve been beaten, sued, robbed, arrested, jailed and evicted, but I’m still here.”
So was the media. McCready’s multiple parole violations, drug overdoses and three suicide attempts, one of which happened while she was pregnant with her first son, kept her in the headlines long after the music died.
In fairness, she fed the media what they wanted. In 2008, she publicly outed a major league baseball player, a married father of two, as a longtime lover. In 2010, porn channel Vivid Entertainment announced the release of the sex tape Mindy McCready: Baseball Mistress. Sometime prior, McCready had not only given legal permission for the film to be made, but she embraced her part in it with a boyfriend of the moment.
The Wilson family summer home on Fox Chase Road in Heber Springs
In between those headlines, she joined the 2009 cast of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew Pinsky on VH1. There, her substance abuse issues were fully revealed, although McCready firmly maintained her only true addiction was violent relationships.
Despite rehab, McCready relapsed again in 2010. That year, she also released an album with Iconic Records titled I’m Still Here. There were no major hits from it, but the album had positive feedback from the music critics, at least. It might have been a career U-turn had it not been for the events to come.
McCready had a 6-year-old son, of whom McCready’s mother had custody. During an allowed visit in 2011, McCready took the boy without the court’s permission. Realizing Nashville was too obvious of a destination, she took the child to the Wilson family summer home on Fox Chase Road.
By 2012, she had not yet delivered on the book or the reality show promised to fans, but she did deliver Wilson’s baby boy. Her intense battle for her first son continued to make headlines, and by December, she was successful in regaining custody. Her life with Wilson and her babies was now perfect, she declared to her fans. In weeks, it would all implode.
Following the event of Wilson’s death, the headlines multiplied exponentially after the National Enquirer quoted then-Cleburne County Sheriff Marty Moss:
“It could take weeks for the state crime lab to complete tests on Mr. Wilson’s body, and if you’ll notice, it was Mindy McCready’s spokesperson — not anyone involved in the investigation — who made the determination that Mr. Wilson’s death was due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
What the sheriff did not mention was results were pending from the gunshot residue test officers had taken on McCready shortly after Wilson was taken to the hospital.
During a Dateline interview conducted in Heber Springs by reporter Andrea Canning, McCready adamantly denied killing Wilson, saying the police were on a “witch hunt.” Asked if she was sure it was suicide, not murder, she replied, “I don’t know.”
The implication there might be a third party involved was catnip for any reporter, but Canning did not push harder. That might have been because of McCready’s obviously fragile state during the interview.
To those who knew him, Wilson’s death, whether by suicide or murder, was unfathomable. Friends described Wilson as a quiet, calm guy who always found the positive in things even after the deaths of both his parents. It was not like him to stay down, much less be suicidal.
A level of shock swirled at his memorial service — held in Fayetteville where he had been University of Arkansas student and Sigma Nu member — as did a number of unanswered questions. McCready was noticeably not in attendance.
Then, one friend told E! News he had been in contact with Wilson just days before the death. He revealed that Wilson, on his 35th birthday on Feb. 11, was to inherit a considerable sum of money. His friend added that Wilson had started celebrating early, buying a new truck.
What the friend told E! News next was equally explosive: For a short time prior to his death, Wilson had been staying at a hotel instead of the Heber Springs house. Clearly he was enthusiastic about his role as a new father, but the happy relationship that McCready was now claiming to the media was simply not there.
“He wanted a way out, and he didn’t know what or how to get out,” the friend said.
It was a painful repeat of the end of McCready’s 1999 engagement with actor Dean Cain, who played Superman on the television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. As their relationship deteriorated, Cain also fled the home he shared with McCready for a hotel. Interviewed after her death, he explained what had happened to reporters.
“She would start arguments, start drama,” Cain said. “Things weren’t allowed to be good.”
McCready seemed unable or unwilling to sustain personal or business relationships, something even she seemed to understand as per a revealing interview with the Associated Press.
“My entire life, things have been attracted to me and vice versa that turn into chaotic nightmares, or I create the chaos myself,” she said. “I think that’s really the life of a celebrity, of a big, huge, giant personality.”
Cain made it a year with that big, huge, giant personality, and Wilson was on his second. The child they had together, conceived shortly into their relationship, might have sustained a relationship that Wilson would not have otherwise intended to make permanent. Nashville had been the center of his personal and business life, but he had stayed with her in Heber Springs, supporting her during the pregnancy and the yearlong custody battle.
Meanwhile, the 37-year-old McCready, mother of two, might have felt threatened by the possibility of his leaving, especially if there was the chance of a custody battle over the baby. With his death, though, her life was once again in shambles.
A friend who stepped in to help her after Wilson’s death said, “I was trying to make things as normal as possible for the kids because they weren’t being taken care of by Mindy. She needed her Adderall and her Xanax on a daily basis, but also, she was drinking straight vodka.”
At the request of her concerned father, the courts ordered McCready into rehab Feb. 6 for mental health and substance abuse evaluations. She packed up and went home in less than 48 hours. It was an empty house to which she returned, her children having been taken by child protective services when she went into rehab.
Midafternoon on Feb. 17, 2013, a second call came into the Cleburne County Sheriff’s Department. On the front porch of the home on Fox Chase Road, law enforcement found McCready dead of a single gunshot wound to the head. Wilson’s dog had also been fatally shot.
An autopsy later confirmed McCready’s death as suicide. But Wilson’s? RadarOnline in February 2015 pressed then-prosecuting attorney Holly Meyer.
“The Wilson case is still considered open with insufficient evidence to conclusively determine whether homicide or suicide,” Meyer said.
Suicide or murder, and, if the latter, who murdered who? Was a third party ever a suspect? The mystery continues.
McCready’s very public life had long careened between a dance with death and a will to live until reaching its tragic end, leaving behind nothing — not even the answers to what happened to the couple in Heber Springs.
