Everyone who witnessed Heather Strube’s killing described the same haunting scene: a man approached the 25-year-old and shot her in the crowded parking lot of a Target in Snellville, Georgia.
After pulling the trigger, the gunman quietly walked off, leaving Heather’s 19-month-old son, Carson, buckled into the backseat of her SUV while his mother lay dying nearby.
As investigators began piecing together the shocking case later featured on Oxygen’s Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, they quickly discovered the story was far more complicated than it first appeared.
Who Was Heather Strube?
Friends and family remembered Heather, a gifted florist and loving mother, as someone with a rare warmth who made people instantly feel at ease.
“She’d always been such a ray of sunshine in everyone’s lives,” her father, Buddy Allen, said in the “Deadly Swap” episode. “I would describe her personality in one word, and that’s bright, because she always brought light into an area or into a relationship that she came into.”
Heather married her high school sweetheart, Steven Strube, when she was 20, and the couple welcomed Carson three years later. She went on to launch her own flower shop, often setting up a playpen there for her son while Steven worked construction. Yet the pressure of raising a young child while managing a new business gradually took a toll, and the marriage started to fall apart.
“There were absolutely times where I just held her as she cried,” friend Jennifer Bagby remembered. “Where it just became overwhelming and too much and too heavy. She was broken. She took her vows very seriously.”
At the time of her death, Heather was in the midst of a divorce and custody battle with Steven.
What Happened to Heather Strube?
She had been meeting Steven to do a custody exchange of their son just before 6 p.m. on April 26, 2009 in a busy Target parking lot.
But just moments after Steven’s car drove away, witnesses reported seeing a man approach Heather’s SUV on foot and shoot her in the forehead. The shooter then calmly walked back toward the store and around the building as frantic witnesses called 911.
As Snellville Police Chief Roy Whitehead noted, “It’s pretty brazen that you’re willing to walk up in daylight in an area that’s so densely populated and perpetrate this crime.”
When an officer arrived at the scene minutes later, he found Heather dead next to her SUV and Carson inside the vehicle.
“The child was still sitting in the back seat,” Whitehead explained. “The officer immediately took the child out of the car and put him in his patrol car.”
Witnesses Describe Heather Strube’s Shooter Wearing Fake Mustache, Wig
At the scene, detectives were struck by the fact that there were no signs of a struggle or evidence that anything had been taken from the vehicle, suggesting that Heather had not been killed in a kidnapping or robbery gone wrong.
The only blood at the scene belonged to Heather. A K-9 was able to track the suspect to a parking area of an extended stay hotel located behind the Target store, before losing the scent.
Investigators believed that’s likely where the suspect got into a vehicle and drove away. Surveillance footage also captured the suspect following that same path with a distinctive straight-legged gait, seemingly confirming their theory.
Witnesses to the shooting described the suspect as a thin, white male, who approached Heather as she was loading her son into the back seat of the car, then stood in front of the driver’s door to prevent her from entering the vehicle.
“I got the impression that they knew each other,” a female witness told investigators. “It seemed odd to me afterward…When I first saw it I thought it was a confrontation.”
The witness added that as she was driving by the car, she heard Heather say “help.”
Another 18-year-old witness driving by with her parents told detectives that she believed Heather knew it was a “dangerous situation.”
She also provided another telling clue: The suspect had been wearing what looked like a “really fake” mustache and what may have been a wig.
The central theme from the witnesses was it looked like the killer was wearing a disguise.
“It was certainly bizarre,” Detective Trey Downs remarked, “and so we’ve got to figure out why.”
Witnesses Described Distinctive Truck Belonging to Heather Strube’s Killer
Detectives believed Heather had likely been targeted by a killer lying in wait and focused their investigation on the 12 people who knew she was meeting Steven in the parking lot that day.
Authorities learned that Steven had an affair during the marriage and often had heated custody exchanges with his now-estranged wife, but they were able to rule him out after his vehicle was seen pulling out of the parking lot not long before the shooting.
Heather’s new boyfriend Michael Vickers had also been miles away at work, making it impossible for him to commit the crime.
Investigators caught the break they needed when a truck driver—who had been staying at the hotel behind the Target—called police to report that he had seen a person wearing a wig and mustache in the back of the parking lot a few hours before the shooting. The person was driving a white F-150 truck that was distinctive because of after-market black trim around the bottom of the vehicle.
Who Killed Heather Strobe?
The vehicle description matched the truck Steven’s mom Joanna Hayes drove. Joanna also looked eerily similar to a sketch created from witness descriptions.
Joanna claimed that she’d taken a three hour drive that night to visit her parents, stopping at a Wendy’s along the way. But the time stamp on the receipt showed that she still would have had time to kill Heather and still make it to the restaurant.
Detectives also learned from Heather’s friends that she had a difficult relationship with Joanna, who was often controlling and wanted to dictate how Carson was raised.
While Joanna insisted she had nothing to do with the murder, detectives turned their attention to her son Steven and called him in for questioning.
After showing him footage of the shooter walking through the parking lot and the artist sketch, Steven appeared to recognize the suspect as his mother and crumbled.
“Holy crap,” a visibly emotional Steven said in the interrogation room. “Oh my God.”
Though Steven agreed to help police by calling his mother and confronting her, she continued to insist during the call that she didn’t kill her daughter-in-law.
A defiant Joanna continued to stick to her story even after detectives brought her in for formal questioning.
In the months that followed, detectives found other circumstantial evidence to link her to the crime, like a single fiber in her truck that may have come from a wig. Some of the eye witnesses also identified her as the possible killer.
Was Joanna Hayes Convicted?
A grand jury ultimately indicted Joanna on charges of murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm. She was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison with the chance of parole after 30 years.
Heather’s parents gained custody of her son Carson—though Heather’s mom Mary died just three years after the trial. Her dad Buddy continues to honor Heather’s memory as he her son on his own.
“That’s what hurt more than anything,” Buddy remarked, “because to deprive that little boy of that wonderful woman changed the whole trajectory of his life.”
