Victim’s father speaks out
Murdered mom of four
was working to get her
life in order, says dad
by Teresa Eubanks, CLJNews.com
Before the heartbreak, there was happiness.
“She just got a new place and she was tickled about it,” said Greg Dykes about his daughter, Brittney.
“It was a couple of miles up from the 275 and 20 crossroads in Calhoun County,” he said. “She had it for one week.”
The 29-year-old had been through a lot in recent years and had some struggles. Her father said she was working toward bettering herself. “She was doing super good,” he said. “I was so proud of her.” Despite the many problems she had experienced, “I have always been proud of her,” he stressed.
Until recently, she had been living with her father in Wewahitchka. He helped her enroll in classes in Marianna to get her high school diploma. While admitting she may have “done a couple of 360s along the way,” he said she had been heading down the right path for the past year.
And she had some good help. Her father was raising her four-year-old daughter while her eight and nine-year-old sons have been in the care of other relatives.
• • • • •
Brittney had been seeing Charles Matthew Gable for the past seven or eight months. “I knew him from way back,” said her father. “He seemed like a good guy. Brittany had known him her whole life.” He had no reason to be alarmed.
“He was real quiet; it seemed like everything was good between them,” he said. He was stunned when he recently learned that Gable had an arrest record, which included a couple of charges involving violence and another arrest stemming from a road rage incident. “None of that came up until after the fact,” he said.
His daughter’s body was found wrapped in a sheet and dumped in a creek bed last week. An investigation into her death led authorities to Gable, who has been charged with second degree murder.
The grieving father said he understood that Gable told someone that he “drank the wrong thing” the night his daughter was killed.
Now, he said he realizes, “He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”