When they returned that afternoon, Russ stopped by the supply room at four and checked out two Colt .45 pistols. One of them was for another member of the pistol team, Sergeant Gilly Boaz, also a member of the honor guard. He and Russ were planning to get together and practice for the upcoming meet.
Russ had become close friends with his assistant baseball coach, Mike Wood, whom he called “Coachy.” They played golf together, and three times a week they worked out together in the weight room at school, each “spotting” for the other, standing by in the event one or the other got in trouble with a lift too heavy. Russ had been working out hard in the past year, his muscles expanding so much that he had outgrown many of his clothes. He was bench-pressing 375 pounds.
All through the fall, Wood had seen that Russ was not himself. He was quieter, seemed to be withdrawing. Once Wood had walked into the weight room and found Russ sitting on the bench with his head in his hands, as if in despair. Russ had been startled when Wood walked in.
“Something wrong?” Wood had asked.
“Nah,” Russ had said, “my sinuses are just bothering me.”
Wood thought that something was wrong, though, and he tried obliquely to get Russ to talk about it, but he never got anywhere.
When Wood went to work out with Russ on Friday afternoon, January 29, he found Russ acting more like his old self, joking and kidding, as if a burden had been lifted.
“See you Monday,” Wood had said, as he and Russ parted after their workout.
Only later would Wood learn the reason for his friend’s relieved mood.
Russ did not get to go shooting that weekend as he had hoped. On Saturday, he went to the Virginia mountains with Barbara and her family to look at a farm the Terrys were thinking of buying there. Later, Barbara’s brothers would recall him making jokes about the cow pies in the pasture.
On Sunday, Barbara and Russ taught their Sunday school class as usual. Russ wrote a $30 check for the collection plate at the regular morning service. That afternoon, he played golf with his friends and fellow teachers, John Biddle and Bill Page. Russ had a good round and was particularly pleased about shooting a birdie on the last hole. He was in a good mood when Biddle dropped him off at his house about five-thirty. Biddle saw Barbara in the driveway as he was pulling away.
This was Super Bowl Sunday: Washington Redskins vs. the Denver Broncos in San Diego, starting on TV at six. Russ had promised his parents that he would come and watch the game with them. He and Barbara and Jason arrived at their house just as the pregame coverage was beginning. On the way, they had stopped at Red Lobster to pick up a party tray of boiled shrimp. Barbara had paid for it with a check for $19.85 that later would bounce.
They watched the game in the family room and ate shrimp and key lime pie at halftime. After supper, Russ sat in his father’s favorite chair by the lamp, and Barbara, who was seated on the sofa, suggested that he take the other chair so his father could sit there. After Russ took the other chair, which had been pulled to the center of the floor to give a better view of the TV, Barbara got up and went to sit on the floor by Russ’s chair. She took his hand and held it, looking up at Doris as if she wanted her to see her affection for Russ. Doris had never seen her do anything like that before, and she noticed that Russ didn’t respond at all.
Barbara had talked almost unceasingly that night about her concerns for her boss. She was worried that Tim, as she kept calling him, was going to be forced out of his position, and she didn’t know what she was going to do. She talked about it so much that Doris began to wish that she’d just shut up.
Russ seemed his normal self, joking and laughing, happy with his golf game but most unhappy at the way the football game was turning out. A staunch fan of the Dallas Cowboys, he was pulling for the Broncos. He gloated when the Broncos took an early lead, teasing his father, a fervent Redskins fan. But the tables soon were turned, and as it became more and more apparent that his team was going to be humiliated, his sister Cindy even called from Chattanooga to rag him about it. Later, she would take solace from the last thing she said to him: “I love you.” Disgusted by the Redskins’ blowout, Russ decided to leave before the game ended.
He needed to get home and to bed. Monday would be a busy day, the first day of baseball practice. He had a lot to think about, a lot to do. He needed to be sharp. He had great hopes for his team this year.
The parting was no different from any other, and later his parents would not remember what he said to them, or they to him. They returned to the TV to watch the Redskins finish off the Broncos forty-two to ten.
Not until days later would Doris recall anything unusual about that evening. Then she would remember how Barbara had sat on the floor by Russ, holding his hand and making certain that Doris saw it. She had seen nothing ominous about that at the time. After all, how could anybody have guessed that such an apparent show of affection really portended murder?
Part Four
Seeking Motive
17
At forty, the father of a year-old son, Rick Buchanan was a short and dapper man with a touch of gray at the temples. Always neatly dressed, he favored blazers and tasseled loafers, which seemed to fit with the cocky attitude that some accused him of having. He had spent nine years with the Durham County Sheriff’s Department at two different times under two different sheriffs. He had been with the department for five years on this stint, four as a detective. Buchanan had received extensive training in homicide investigation, his chosen specialty, leading to his promotion to sergeant and recognition as the department’s top murder investigator.
He had investigated numerous killings in the past four years, some of which had turned into headline-making murder cases. As he sat in his office with Jo Lynn Snow on February 2, 1988, reading the letter she just had handed him, he realized that what had at first appeared to be an unfortunate accident might be a murder more sensational and bizarre than any he had ever investigated.
At the same time, though, he was a proud man who did not enjoy acknowledging mistakes, and despite his nagging uneasiness about Russ’s shooting, he already had been quoted in the newspaper calling it an accident, saying that no charges were expected, and he had planned no further inquiries into it. Now here was this intense and frazzled woman with her letter suggesting that Russ might have been murdered.
He knew that he had riled her as soon as he said that Barbara’s story was consistent with the evidence, for she fired off a flurry of antagonistic questions as rough as any he ever had faced on the witness stand from defense attorneys.
“What does the autopsy show?” she demanded.
He was forced to admit that no autopsy had been performed. Indeed, the body already had been cleaned, dressed, and embalmed and was now at Clements Funeral Home, where family and friends would be coming to view it later that day.
What about fingerprints or palm prints on the gun? Jo Lynn wanted to know. Did they show that the shooting could have happened as Barbara claimed?
The gun had not been examined for fingerprints, Buchanan acknowledged.
Jo Lynn was incredulous. “I was just shaking my head,” she said later. “I was floored.”
Buchanan always enjoyed a scrap, and he had some questions of his own. What did Jo Lynn know about this first husband?
Very little, it turned out. His last name, she remembered, was Ford. He had died ten or eleven years ago. He and Barbara might have lived in Burlington or Graham, she wasn’t sure. The children were by the first husband, she knew. Russ had adopted them soon after he and Barbara were married, and he had married her soon after her first husband was killed.
There were other questions, and Buchanan wrote Jo Lynn’s answers into his report later that day. “She readily admitted that during the five years that she was married to Russ, he ran around on her, but she was not the easiest person to live with either. She stated she had a terrible temper…”
After describing Jo Lynn’s memories of what Russ had told her about his problems with Barbara, Buchanan wrote: “Told her he thought he was being paid back for what he did in his first marriage and that what goes around comes around.”
Jo Lynn was upset after her meeting with Buchanan. She had expected that a thorough investigation of Russ’s death already would be under way and that Buchanan would be eager to hear what she had to tell him. But the realization that the police obviously had taken Barbara at her word rattled her. And Buchanan’s questions, his detached and skeptical manner, had angered her, leaving her uncertain.
“I thought, maybe I’ve seen too much TV and it doesn’t happen that way in real life,” she recalled later.
Jo Lynn drove straight to the Stager home after leaving the sheriff’s department. She hadn’t seen her former in-laws for nearly ten years, but she was welcomed warmly with tears and hugs, as if she had never been away. She didn’t know what the Stagers thought, so she didn’t say anything about her suspicions or her visit to the sheriff’s department. She soon discovered that Doris was accepting Barbara’s version of the shooting. “I know that Russ would want me to forgive Barbara,” Doris said, and that was her Christian intention. She seemed not to have even considered that Russ’s shooting might have been deliberate, and Jo Lynn couldn’t bring herself to suggest otherwise under the strain of the circumstances.
Not until she was leaving did she see an opening. Russ’s sister, Cindy, accompanied her to her car, and as she was about to open the door, Cindy said, “Did you ever know Russ to sleep with a loaded pistol under his pillow?”
Jo Lynn knew immediately that in Cindy she had found an ally in her suspicions, and she poured out everything to her. Cindy hurried inside to get her husband, David, who at first said that they should leave the matter to the police. But they had accepted Barbara’s story, Jo Lynn pointed out, and she knew that Russ had doubts about the death of Barbara’s first husband and had expressed concerns that she might try to harm him. Hearing that convinced David that Russ’s death had been no accident, and he agreed that the family had to go to the police. Worried about Al’s heart condition, Cindy and David didn’t want to involve him, but they knew that they needed to convince Doris that something was wrong so that she would accompany them, and Doris was in such a daze of grief that they didn’t know how she would react. That job fell to Cindy, who returned to the house, crowded with relatives and friends.
“Mother, would you mind coming out here with me for a few minutes?” Cindy said.
They drove with David and Jo Lynn to a nearby Burger King so that they could talk without arousing the curiosity of their visitors. Doris had to hear only a little of what the others had to say before agreeing that something had to be done. Deep down, she said later, she had known from the moment she had walked into that hospital room and seen Barbara’s face that the shooting of her son had been no accident. The four talked for more than an hour, putting pieces together, deciding what they needed to tell the police. Before they went to the sheriff’s department, though, Doris wanted to go see her minister.
The women dropped off David at the house to stay with Al, and drove to Grey Stone Baptist Church, where they told Malbert Smith of their intentions. Before they left for the sheriff’s office, Smith led them in prayer, seeking God’s guidance for the course on which they were about to embark.
“We don’t want vengeance, Lord,” he prayed. “We want justice.”
When the three women entered Buchanan’s office at 3:50 that afternoon, Jo Lynn found a different person. Buchanan was courteous and sympathetic, eager to listen and quick with questions. Her earlier visit had prompted him to action, and he already had set several things in motion. He had arranged to have Russ’s body picked up at eight the following morning and taken to the university hospital in Chapel Hill for an autopsy. He had learned that Barbara’s first husband had died, strangely enough, from a .25-caliber bullet wound, and he had made an appointment to read the records of the case at the office of the state medical examiner in Chapel Hill the following day. He also had picked up a copy of Russ and Barbara’s marriage license and had checked for gun registrations in their names. The .25 with which Russ had been shot was not registered, he had discovered, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same gun that had killed Larry Ford.
Doris now told Buchanan about Russ and Barbara’s money problems, the book hoax, which Malbert Smith had just filled her in about, and Barbara’s rendezvous at the county stadium. She’d heard, she said, that Barbara once had worked for a bank in Durham and had been asked to resign because of embezzlement. That might be the reason that she and Russ had been denied a loan without explanation during the time of their financial crisis, she thought. She also told about a theft at Russ’s house the previous spring in which some jewelry supposedly had been stolen. Barbara had told her that was the reason Russ had become concerned about prowlers, but she knew that there had been no prowlers and that Russ was not concerned about that at all.
Buchanan quizzed Doris about the death of Larry Ford, but she could tell him little. Larry’s parents, she thought, might live in High Point.
Buchanan thanked the women for coming and assured them that he would be looking further into Russ’s death. This time Jo Lynn left the sheriff’s department more hopeful.