Authorities Baffled Over the Mysterious Death of Lone Hunter

Authorities first thought a car wreck killed Roy Dixon on a lone hunting trip. But then investigators found multiple stab wounds on his battered and burned body.

Sexual paraphernalia were found littered around the scene.

Police are baffled as to what happened to the 52-year-old man who loved to hunt, fish and camp. They say the attackers unleashed the kind of rage and anger on Dixon that hasn’t been seen in this remote Sierra Nevada Gold Rush area in a long time.

“There was some real trauma that was beyond what you or I could have ever caused with hands and feet,” Calaveras County Sheriff Dennis Downum said. “There was a lot of rage in that attack.”

Dixon left his Modesto home the evening of Oct. 13, telling his wife of 31 years that he’d be back in a couple of days. His campsite was about 80 miles east, so it should have taken him two hours to get there along winding mountain roads.

But about six hours later and 18 miles short of Dixon’s destination, some residents in the town of West Point called 911 after hearing gunshots.

“We found a yellow Jeep Cherokee fully engulfed in flames, and a body outside the car with multiple injuries,” Sheriff’s Det. Robert Mortimer said. “The gunshots were actually bullets exploding in the burning car.”

Although the Cherokee was charred, there was no apparent crash damage to the vehicle.

Mortimer said Dixon was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of long underwear, but his pants were pulled down to his ankles. His slender 6-foot-2 frame was partially burned, including the chest area where coroners later found stab wounds.

Downum said investigators found sexual paraphernalia near the victim’s body, but there was no evidence of sexual assault.

Dixon’s face was so severely beaten that his wife couldn’t recognize it.

“He didn’t have a nose, no eye, didn’t really have a chin. I was hoping for an open-casket funeral, but we couldn’t have one,” said Kathi Dixon. She buried her husband on Oct. 30, exactly 32 years after she met him.

Kathi Dixon, 49, said her husband had hunted in the West Point area for about four years, but seldom alone.

“He used to make short runs up and down,” she said. “He usually takes his grandsons or me. It was coincidental that he was alone this time.”

In fact, he was in the area just two days before the slaying, hunting with his 9-year-old grandson, Matthew.

“Matthew said Roy had a run-in with some guy up there. . . . Matthew knows who these people are,” Kathi Dixon said. “I’m scared for Matthew’s life too, and I’m scared for mine. I don’t want these crazies to come down here.”

Downum said he had not been told of Matthew’s recollections, and there are no suspects.

“We’re not getting anything from the local community,” Downum said. “Generally, homicides up here are people getting into arguments with family members or friends. We don’t get stranger homicides.”

West Point residents told investigators that they have never seen Roy Dixon. That conflicts with Kathi Dixon’s account that people have recognized her and her husband in the past as regulars who passed through the town of 500 people during deer-hunting season.

“When I went up there after [the killing], I went to the gas station and the gas station attendant saw me and shook like hell,” Kathi Dixon said.

Whenever Dixon passed through West Point, all he did was stop at a service station. He was never known to go to a bar or make any other stops in the area, Mortimer said.

Dixon also didn’t seem to have any enemies.

“He was supposed to be a very well-liked and nice person,” Mortimer said.

Dixon was a hard-working maintenance man at the Del Monte plant in Modesto for 22 years, said his wife, who works as a supervisor at the plant. The couple had four daughters, each now married and living in the Modesto area.

“He fishes and he goes hunting,” she said. “His grandchildren were his life. . . . We went to places. I got family albums that show camping trips after camping trips with his grandkids.

“That was our life. We worked together, we came home together. The last four years had been like a honeymoon with no kids at home. So we had gotten a lot closer.”

Kathi Dixon said she was a wreck for nearly three weeks, coping with the loss of her high school sweetheart.

“I don’t want my husband’s death to go away as an unsolved mystery,” she said. “I want to know what happened.”