None of them suspected that he was on his way to a violent encounter in which his extensive martial arts training would offer no defense.
7
Another shooting. In three and a half years of riding ambulances in Randolph County, Bob Perry had seen his share of carnage from gunshots. Those calls often came late at night, as this one did, the result of drunken confrontations or desperate despondency. Usually, though, these calls weren’t to middle-class subdivisions.
The call came from the dispatcher in Asheboro at 12:36
A.M
. on Wednesday, March 22, 1978. Perry and his fellow emergency medical technician Jim Owen were working a twenty-four-hour shift at the Guil-Rand Fire Department in Archdale.
They jumped up immediately at the alarm and donned bright yellow helmets. Five minutes later, with red lights flashing and siren blaring, the Ford van ambulance turned into the Windemere Heights subdivision, occupied mainly by young families living in three-bedroom brick ranch houses and split-levels.
The house Perry and Owen were looking for was set on a small rise beside an identical house on a dead-end street. A steep concrete drive led to a carport where a yellow 1976 Ford LTD and a 1978 Datsun 510 were parked. The carport lights were on, and as Owen cut the siren and pulled up the drive, outside lights began popping on throughout the quiet rural neighborhood.
Perry was first to reach the carport door, medical kit in hand. The glass storm door was closed, but the inside door stood open to the dining room and kitchen at the back of the house. As he opened the door, a short blond young woman wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt emerged from the kitchen to greet him.
“My husband’s been shot,” she said. “He’s upstairs. I think he’s dead.”
Perry and Owen headed for the short staircase that led to the upstairs bedrooms. The woman followed to the foot of the stairs and stopped.
The victim was tall and thin with dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He lay on his back in bed wearing gray pajamas with red and black stripes. The covers were pulled over his chest. His eyes were closed, and at first glance he might have been sleeping. Perry knew differently. He recognized death when he saw it.
Perry jerked back the rose, aquamarine and white bedcover. The stylish top sheet, patterned in multicolored stripes, was blotched with dried blood. Blood also had dried on the man’s pajama top. Perry reached for a pulse but found none. The man’s face was white. Parts of his body were already purpled where blood had settled.
The man was sprawled across the bed, his head on the right edge of the pillow on the opposite side of the bed from which he lay. His right leg was hanging partly off the bed, his right arm at his side, his left arm flung back.
Perry raised the pajama top to reveal a small bullet hole in the man’s chest, a couple of inches above and to the left of his right breast. There was relatively little blood. Most of the bleeding, Perry saw, had been internal.
Under the covers, near the man’s left hip, was a loaded clip for a semiautomatic pistol. Perry saw the pistol on the beige carpet beside the bed, as if it had fallen from the man’s right hand, the barrel facing the bed. He recognized it instantly as a .25 caliber. His wife had one that looked just like it.
Perry left his helmet and medical equipment on the bed and returned downstairs, where the woman waited. “There’s nothing we can do,” he told her. “I’m sorry. We’re too late.”
Years later, he still remembered how she took the news. “She was fairly cool about it.”
Perry didn’t question her about what had happened, and she offered no explanation. The police, he knew, were on the way, and he went to the ambulance and radioed the dispatcher that the call was code forty-four: dead on arrival.
He thought that his supervisor, Eddie Hoover, should come out. He knew that his wife’s .25 caliber would not fire without the clip, and he suspected that somebody other than the man in the bed had fired the shot that killed him.
Larry Allen was on patrol in northern Randolph County when he received the call. He was thirty-one, the father of two young children, and he had been a sheriff’s deputy for seven years. Later, though, he would acknowledge that his training, while no different from that of most other deputies in the department at the time, was woefully insufficient, consisting of just four weeks of rookie school before he went on patrol.
“Randolph County was probably fifty years behind then,” Allen said. “We had no equipment. I’m not sure investigators were much more trained than the patrolmen were, and that was sad.”
The bedroom at the back of the house seemed too small for the bulky, darkly stained wood furniture that dominated it. On one side of the bed was a nightstand, on the other a long dresser with a tall mirror and nine drawers in three rows. Against the wall at the foot of the bed was a four-drawer chest.
“He’s dead,” Bob Perry said as Larry Allen came into the room.
Allen went to his patrol car to call his supervisor, Sergeant A. C. Bowman, commander of this patrol zone, then returned to the bedroom to try to determine what had happened.
Perry and Owen pointed out the loaded clip in the bed, the pistol on the floor. They raised the body to look for an exit wound but found none.
On top of the chest of drawers, a small green box lay open. It had contained the pistol. In the bottom of the box was a pamphlet marked with bold black letters—
WARNING; READ
—offering safety instructions.
A receipt beside the box revealed that the pistol had been bought less than twelve hours earlier at Hunter’s Haven in Archdale. The price: $79.95. A box of shells had cost $9.15. The open box of shells was on the chest, too, several rounds missing.
Two small red suitcases—both packed, one unzipped—and an upright shopping bag were set in the narrow space between the dresser and the back wall, under a window that looked out onto a children’s gym set in the back yard. A pair of woman’s stack-heeled shoes had been casually tossed beside the bag.
When Sergeant Bowman arrived, he and Allen made a diagram of the room. Allen went to his car for the Polaroid camera his wife had given him and took color snapshots of the scene.
Eddie Hoover, the county’s emergency services director, came in as Allen was taking photographs. Hoover thought that he was coming on a suicide call, but Perry told him he didn’t think the man had deliberately killed himself. Hoover called Dr. Marion Griffin, the Randolph County medical examiner, but Griffin told him that he’d just look at the body at the hospital the next day.
Griffin suggested trying to reconstruct what had happened, and the officers and EMTs searched for the spent casing, finding it at the base of the dresser beside a scruffy pair of tennis shoes. Allen picked up the pistol and tested it several times to see in which direction it ejected a shell. He wanted to try to determine the gun’s position when it was fired.
Hoover recently had attended a seminar on preserving evidence conducted by Dr. Page Hudson, the state medical examiner, and he tied clean plastic bags around the man’s hands before Bowman and Allen gave the okay to load the body onto a stretcher and take it to the hospital morgue in Asheboro, the county seat, fifteen miles away.
Allen went to the kitchen to question the woman while the body was being removed. The man, he learned, was Larry Ford, age twenty-nine. The woman was his wife, Barbara.
Larry had been to his regular tae kwon do class the night before, she said, and had been kicked in the groin. After he got home, they watched TV for a while, then went to bed about eleven. But Larry was so uncomfortable from his injury that he kept tossing and turning.
She offered to go downstairs and sleep on the sofa. He said that he would be more comfortable if she did. She turned the TV back on to watch a movie and had drifted off to sleep when she was awakened by a noise that sounded as if something had fallen upstairs.
She thought that a picture had slipped off the wall and went to investigate. When she found the picture in place, she thought that perhaps Larry had knocked the lamp off the bedside table. She went to the bedroom and found Larry on the bed with blood on his chest, gasping for breath, and she ran downstairs and called for help.
What she didn’t mention was that before calling for an ambulance, she had called her mother in Durham.
“Larry’s hurt, and I think he’s dying,” Marva Terry later recalled her saying in an agitated state. “I knew she did not have a good sense about her,” Marva said of Barbara’s condition at the time. She told her daughter to call the rescue squad.
Allen asked about the gun. Barbara said she had bought it just the day before for self-protection. Her minister, Barnie Pierce, had signed for the permit.
The story sounded plausible to Allen, and Bowman concurred. Allen figured that Larry, unable to sleep, had gotten up to look at the gun because it was new. Like many people, he probably figured that it wouldn’t fire with the clip removed. But when he took the clip out, a round remained in the chamber. Thinking it unloaded, he might have idly pulled the trigger with the gun aimed toward himself.
Allen and Bowman spent less than an hour at the house. Before they left, Allen told Barbara that he would have to take the gun, the clip and the shells and hold them for thirty days.
“Take it,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see it again.”
When Allen typed his report at the end of his shift, he closed it by writing, “As a result of my investigation, I determined the shooting was accidental.” Sergeant Bowman signed his concurrence.
8
Ina Mae Hamblin didn’t make note of the time when her telephone rang, awakening her. She only knew that it was after midnight, and she couldn’t imagine who would be calling.
It was Barbara Ford, who had lived across the street from her for nearly five years. Mae, as most people called Ina Mae, was older than Barbara and wasn’t close to her. They usually spoke only in passing in their yards. All that Mae knew about Barbara came from her fourteen-year-old daughter, Diane, who often baby-sat for her and was fond of her and her two sons.
Barbara sounded frantic. Larry had shot himself, she said. Could Mae come and get the boys and keep them while she rode to the hospital with Larry in the ambulance?
Mae woke her husband, Edgar, to go with her, and they dressed quickly and hurried to help. An ambulance was pulling to a stop in the Fords’ driveway as they left their house.
Barbara had directed the medical technicians to the bedroom by the time they got there. The children were in the living room. Bryan, who was nine, looked frightened and bewildered. The younger child, Jason, three, was crying. Mae took Jason from Barbara, trying to soothe him, and Edgar got Bryan in hand. The Hamblins left with the children before the medics came down to tell Barbara that there would be no need for a trip to the hospital. The Hamblins left the children with their daughter and went back across the street to see if they could be of further help.
Larry was dead, they learned, and sheriff’s deputies were on the way. There was nothing to do but wait for them to arrive, and they sat with Barbara waiting anxiously, uncertain of what to say or do.
When a deputy finally arrived, the medical technicians told him what had happened and took him upstairs.
In the meantime, Brenda Monroe and her husband, Wayne, who lived several hundred yards beyond the Fords on the same dead-end street, had not been awakened by the clamor that had aroused many of their neighbors. Their phone rang around one o’clock and Brenda answered to find a neighbor, Arnold Farlow, on the line.
He told her that an ambulance and the police were at the Ford house. He had talked with Edgar Hamblin, who told him that Larry had killed himself.
Brenda told her husband to call their pastor to make sure that he was aware of what had happened. She knew that Barnie Pierce would come immediately. Brenda’s immediate concern was Bryan and Jason. She hurried to Barbara’s house to see if she could get them and bring them back with her.
The emergency technicians and the sheriff’s deputy were upstairs with the body when Brenda arrived. The Hamblins were with Barbara, who curled on the living room couch with her feet tucked beneath her.
Brenda hugged Barbara and sat on the couch beside her. She could feel Barbara trembling through the cushions. “I don’t know what we’re going to do without him,” Barbara said.
The unspoken feeling among the assembled neighbors was that Larry had deliberately shot himself, although they had no idea why he would do such a thing. He and Barbara had seemed a loving couple with everything going for them. Nobody gave voice to those feelings, but they realized that Barbara must have sensed their thoughts, because several times she said, “Larry wouldn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t commit suicide.”
When Brenda asked what she could do, Barbara asked if she would mind calling her parents and Larry’s. Brenda agreed to call Barbara’s parents because she knew they had been called already. But she didn’t think she could bring herself to call the Fords and tell them that their son was dead. She’d prefer to wait and let their pastor do that, she said.
Brenda and the Hamblins had listened as Barbara told the deputy what had happened. Her story sounded plausible to them. It struck a special chord of truth with Mae when Barbara said she thought the sound she heard was the picture falling in the hall. Her daughter had told her that the picture had fallen on two occasions while she was baby-sitting, frightening her.