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1990 cold case: Who killed Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson on Lovers Lane in west Houston?

Cheryl was raped and her throat was slit in 1990. Andy was tied to a tree and nearly decapitated. It's a cold case that has haunted two families for decades.

Michelle Homer, Shern-Min Chow

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Published: 4:16 PM EDT August 22, 2023
Updated: 2:26 PM EDT August 24, 2023

It was a summer night in 1990 and Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson were young and in love. She was a 22-year-old bubbly blonde and he was a 21-year-old with piercing green eyes and a Hollywood smile.

"She thought he was amazing, inside and out, and that he had a great smile, but his mind was wonderful, too," Cheryl's sister, Merideth Colvert, told us in 2013.

That night, on Aug. 22, Cheryl and her sister met up with Andy at Bayou Mama's nightclub on Westheimer at South Gessner. That was the last time anyone saw them alive. The couple drove to a then-remote area known as Lovers Lane off Enclave Parkway near Eldridge Parkway in west Houston. The man who killed them was there, too.

When Cheryl didn't come home by the next morning, her family called Houston police.

It was a security guard who found Andy's white car with Cheryl's purse and shoes inside. Her mom, Barbara Craig, rushed to the wooded area. When search dogs found Cheryl's body, officers held Barbara back. They didn't want the frantic mom to see the horrific way her daughter had died.

“To this day, Shern-min, I know if they had let me go to Cheryl, I would have breathed into her and she'd be alive,” Barbara told KHOU 11 News in 2017. All those years later, the memory of losing her oldest child still brought tears.

Andy was found tied to a tree and nearly decapitated. Detectives told his father that Cheryl was killed first.

"Which means he was tied to a tree and listened to her scream, listened to her being murdered knowing that they were going to do the same thing to him and he couldn't do anything about it," Garland Atkinson said. "That's hard to accept."

The killer used Andy's golf balls and golf club to point the way to Cheryl's naked body found hidden under wooden boards, a $20 bill lying nearby.

HPD detective Darcus Shorten called it "very odd" when we interviewed her in 2017.

"I have gotten sick to my stomach thinking of what they endured," Cheryl's sister said.

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