A mother ‘aches’ for her murdered daughter

Rebecca Diane Lucas will never forget the last thing her daughter told her: “See you tomorrow. Bye.”

It was a Saturday, and Angela wanted to put off a visit with her mother until the next day so she could go for a motorcycle ride with her roommate’s brother, Mike Bassett, who was visiting from his Army base.

Tomorrow came, but without the teenager described as easygoing and always smiling, an aspiring veterinarian who would bring her mother baby birds that had fallen from their nests.

After Angela Dawn Lucas was murdered on April 25, 2004, a sheriff’s deputy went to see Rebecca Lucas at a boarding house where she lived behind the Waynesboro bowling alley.

“It’s not good; she’s dead,” Rebecca Lucas heard him say.

“Was it Chad?” she asked. “Where is Chad?”

“He killed himself,” she heard the deputy say.

“Thank God,” she replied, then punched a piece of Plexiglas until it broke.

Asked last week why she was glad Woodson had ended his life, Lucas, 48, a manic-depressive who struggles with alcoholism, says: “Because he would not have made it through the night. One of Angela’s friends, or her brother, would have gotten him.”

Angela Lucas graduated from Waynesboro High School in 2003 with good grades and wanted to go to college, but got pregnant by Woodson her senior year.

She earned her certified nursing assistant’s license and worked at King’s Daughters Nursing Home in Staunton.

Chris Fitzgerald, Angela’s brother and best friend, remembers warning her many times to leave the abusive Woodson. The couple met in late 2002 through a mutual acquaintance.

Woodson, 18, would not allow Angela to speak with her old friends and was jealous, overprotective and insecure, Fitzgerald says.

“She was fully devoted to him,” he says. “She had to drop everything for Chad.”

Rebecca Lucas remembers that Woodson would not let her daughter visit on Mother’s Day 2003 because she insisted on wearing maternity clothes he thought were too tight.

Angela Lucas continued to have a blind spot for Woodson, even as the beatings continued and a judge in November 2003 ordered him into anger-management counseling.

A week before Woodson shot her twice—once each in the face and head—Angela Lucas moved in with her friend, Jenny Bassett. They shared a trailer off U.S. 340, a mile west of Stuarts Draft.

“Chad was a good kid for the most part, but he had issues,” Rebecca Lucas says. “Angela had gotten on Chad for control issues.”

“I ache for her very much,” she says, her tears dropping to the front porch of a friend’s Waynesboro home, where she has lived for eight months, waiting to qualify for disability because of her depression.

“I ain’t had no closure. I keep expecting her to drive by,” she says.

Fitzgerald says he lost not only his lone sibling, but also his best friend.

They shared everything with each other. When Angela suffered a miscarriage years before, she told only Fitzgerald.

“That was my everything, that was my best friend,” the 22-year-old Waynesboro resident says of his sister. “She came to me when she lost her virginity; we were that close. She came to me first about everything.”

At the funeral home after her murder, Rebecca Lucas met Mike Bassett and wanted to know one thing: Did her daughter get that ride on the back of his motorcycle the day before she died?

“Yes, ma’am, she did,” she heard.