Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (26 page)

The story hit the St. Louis newspapers the next morning. “Woman Killed, Busch Heir Hurt in Crash in Arizona,” blared the headline in the
Post-Dispatch
. “Busch Heir May Be Charged in Fatal Car Crash,” announced the
Globe-Democrat
. August III reacted to his son's predicament exactly the way his colleagues and competitors would have predicted—he promptly spent a lot of money assembling a formidable legal team to do battle with the Pima County prosecutor's office. Team Busch included one of the top law firms in Tucson, along with Norman London, the prominent St. Louis criminal defense attorney who had represented Peter Busch in the shooting death of David Leeker, and two local private investigation firms. One of the first things the lawyers did was get August IV out of town, telling the authorities that he needed to return home to St. Louis to be treated by his own doctors and spend Thanksgiving with his family. There wasn't much the prosecutor could do about it, since August IV had not been charged with any crime. The Busch attorneys promised to make him available in Tucson if the prosecutor needed further evidence from him.

As a matter of procedure, Ron Benson had to obtain search warrants from a judge in order to examine and test the two key pieces of evidence in the case, the smashed Corvette and the blood and urine taken from August IV at the hospital. The search warrant process took more than a week, and when Benson finally sent a deputy to the hospital to pick up the samples, he got a rude shock. “Bad news, boss,” the deputy reported back. “They don't have it.” The urine sample had been lost, and the blood sample had been run through a centrifuge and rendered useless for testing. No one on the hospital staff could explain how it happened.

Benson couldn't believe it. Never before had the hospital mishandled samples in one of his cases. It was a potentially devastating blow. Now the prosecution would not be able to prove scientifically that August IV was under the influence at the time of the accident. They'd have to build a circumstantial case, relying on witnesses who could testify that he was impaired when he got behind the wheel.

Benson and his investigators conducted more than fifty interviews with August IV's friends and schoolmates, and with employees and patrons of Dirtbag's and Voila. One of August's closest friends on campus told them that August never let anyone else drive his car, contradicting the statement August gave to deputies at the hospital. Another student said in witness statement that August IV was a known “user of cocaine,” which could have accounted for the cocaine residue the coroner found in Michele Frederick's nostrils. But no one said they had seen August using cocaine that night. Nor did anyone recall him behaving as if he'd had too much to drink.

It quickly became clear to Deputy Benson that August III's private investigators were bird-dogging his every move, sometimes arriving at the homes of witnesses just minutes after he had left. While investigators examined every inch of the Corvette, August III obtained an identical car and had it transported to Tucson, where a group of his hired experts blocked off River Road at the accident site and spent the better part of a day with cameras rolling as a driver ran the car through Dead Man's Curve at different speeds. The idea was to gather data that could rebut whatever the prosecution might present at a trial. “They told us what they were doing and invited us to watch,” Benson recalled later. “But when we showed up at the time they told us, they were just finishing.”

August IV's Corvette was equipped with a high-performance Z51 suspension that gave it the road-hugging capability of a Ferrari or Lamborghini, according to
Road & Track
magazine. Benson, who held a degree in automotive engineering, figured the car had to be going at least 55 miles per hour when it entered the S bend—more than twice the posted speed limit—for it to flip over the way it did. Investigators found hair and blood on the visor above the driver's seat. If they could match those to August IV, it would go a long way toward establishing that he was driving. Benson petitioned the Pima County Superior Court for an order requiring August IV to furnish blood, hair, and saliva samples, as well as fingerprints and palm prints. Despite their previous pledge to make August IV available, the Busch legal team fought the order all the way up to the Arizona Supreme Court, which in February confirmed the lower court ruling. The Busch attorneys then claimed their client's three-month-old head injury prevented him from traveling to Tucson. Pima County authorities accused them of “stonewalling,” but agreed to send Ron Benson to St. Louis to gather the samples, provided that August III paid for all the costs.

Benson found himself in the first-class section on the flight to St. Louis. It was his first time. He was met at the airport by an ex-cop security officer from the brewery and was driven directly to St. John Mercy Hospital, where a conspicuous contingent of more than a dozen security men equipped with earphones and radio communications waved them through intersections and traffic barricades to a cordoned-off building with still more security men standing sentinel. With timing that could not have been accidental, August III arrived moments later, emerging from a limousine and striding into the building, where the waiting staff received him as if he were a visiting dignitary, which in a way he was—he sat on St. John's board of directors, and the Busch family and Anheuser-Busch were among the hospital's most generous benefactors.

“The bearing, the manner, the walk—it all conveyed a raging confidence,” Benson recalled. “I think he was trying to show me that he was the man in charge.”

On the plane, Benson had prepared himself mentally for just such an encounter. “I was determined to show that I was not there because he had
allowed
me to be there but rather because we had allowed
him
to do it this way. I wanted them to know that I was calling the shots. I would show tolerance, not deference. I was representing the victim. No one was going to speak for her but me.”

“You will not be taking any statement from our client; we don't want you asking any questions,” London said right off the bat. Benson bristled. “I'm going to ask whatever I need to ask,” he replied, “and your client can answer or not, but I'm not taking orders from someone's defense attorney.”

Despite the initial tension, the blood, hair, and saliva samples were taken without incident. Benson had not spoken to August IV before. He seemed nothing like his father—low-key, unassuming, and deferential to the hospital employees.

From the hospital, they drove in procession to the St. Louis County police headquarters for the fingerprinting. Once again, August III appeared to be in command, as uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives alike greeted him respectfully—“Good to see you, Mr. Busch.” Benson didn't get the same reception: “The only person they stopped and asked for identification was me, a fellow officer looking into a possible manslaughter.”

In the car on the way back to the airport, Benson wondered if the tiny Pima County prosecutor's office was overmatched. Evidence aside, did they even have the resources to go up against August Busch III in a trial? He suspected they didn't, and the thought left him feeling unsettled and vulnerable. It was a cold, gray day with remnants of snow on the ground as the Busch security man pulled the car into the dimly lit airport parking structure. “It was like a scene from a movie,” Benson recalled. “And suddenly it struck me that I was all by myself, far from home and without backup. From what I had seen of their operation, it didn't seem all that far-fetched to think that they could easily do away with some lowly deputy sheriff from Arizona.” The driver handed him his return ticket; it was coach.

Back in Tucson, Benson threw himself into the investigation with renewed zeal. For four consecutive weekends, he sat in his car near the crash site on River Road, writing down the license plate numbers of vehicles that passed by between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. Then he traced the plates to the more than one hundred registered owners and called each one to see if they had driven by and seen anything the morning of November 12. He kept thinking about Mary Jo Kopechne, the young woman who was killed late one night in 1969 when Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts and then left the scene without reporting the accident. Police found Kopechne's body in the senator's submerged vehicle the next morning. Kennedy received a two-month suspended jail sentence for leaving the scene after an inquiry found there was no evidence that he had been driving negligently.

Pima County faced a similar problem with August IV. Even though the blood and hair samples Benson collected in St. Louis turned out to match what was found on the visor above the driver's seat in the Corvette, it only proved that August IV was behind the wheel when the car rolled over, not that he was in any way impaired. There were no witnesses to testify that he was under the influence. No usable fingerprints were lifted from the empty Bud Light cans found by the car. All that could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt was that August IV was driving too fast to navigate a curve that local law enforcement had known for years was unduly dangerous.

The prosecutor's office concluded it was highly unlikely that a jury would return a felony conviction for negligent manslaughter. They felt they stood a better chance of a guilty verdict for leaving the scene, but at what cost to the county coffers? The Busch family was prepared to spend a fortune defending any charges, and it was only a misdemeanor.

So on July 3, 1984, Pima County authorities announced they were ending the investigation into the crash that took Michele Frederick's life and that no charges would be filed against August IV.

“I didn't feel good about it,” Benson said recently. “My gut told me this guy was drunk and killed this girl, and I couldn't do my best for her because the evidence just disappeared. It didn't seem like we got justice done on this one, even though I'm confident that we did all we could.”

In the course of the eight-month investigation, St. Louis press coverage was notable for what it did not contain. No details of Michele Frederick's life were reported beyond her age and occupation at the time of her death. To St. Louis readers, she was merely a “waitress” or a “passenger,” and a faceless one at that. While the newspapers repeatedly published a yearbook photo of August IV looking choirboy innocent in a sports coat, white shirt, and tie, they never printed a picture of Michele, even though her high school yearbook photo was easily obtainable—a particularly surprising omission, given the media's long-standing love affair with stories involving pretty blonde victims. There were no published statements from grieving friends or family members either, not even a “no comment” indicating that a reporter had at least tried to get them on the record.

The family's low profile appeared to be due to a secret settlement agreement negotiated early on by Busch attorneys. A former neighbor noted that the family subsequently bought a Porsche and put in a pool, “in a neighborhood that previously had neither.” Twenty-five years after the accident that claimed her daughter's life, Michele's mother, Greta Machado, declined to talk about it “because it is still so painful.”

August IV didn't return to the University of Arizona, which was probably a wise decision, since the case had sparked bad feelings among his on- and off-campus peers, many of whom believed—incorrectly—that he had left Michele to die and that his family had bought off the authorities. As one high school friend of Michele's said recently, “I haven't had a Budweiser since.”

The Busch family made no public statements about the Tucson case at the time, but years later August IV's mother, Susie Busch, offered a lofty perspective on the sad episode. “I was devastated, absolutely devastated for young August to have to go through something like that,” she said during a conversation with a
Post-Dispatch
gossip columnist. Asked if she thought her son had been treated “justly,” she reportedly replied, “No … because I feel there is no just treatment for families with a name and money.”

After bailing his son out of trouble in Tucson, August III made sure the “Busch heir” had a soft landing back home in St. Louis.

He arranged for August IV to enroll at St. Louis University, where decades of Busch patronage guaranteed special privileges, including an electronic key that gave August IV access to the teachers' parking lot, which was a major perquisite on the parking-challenged urban campus. He replaced August IV's wrecked Corvette with a new Porsche and secured a town-house apartment for him on Lindell Boulevard, across the street from the place he'd rented when he split from August IV's mother.

If August IV had learned any life lessons from the Tucson tragedy, they weren't apparent as he jumped into the social scene in St. Louis's fashionably hip Central West End. His running mates usually included half a dozen other sons of prominent businessmen. The “millionaires' boys club,” as some called them, might start the evening at Culpepper's Bar in Maryland Plaza, then move to Harry's Restaurant & Bar on Market Street and later caravan to Metropole downtown at Laclede's Landing. They all had fast cars, loads of money, and last names that rang a bell, but nothing could compete with the Busch aura, so August IV became the Big Dog and they functioned as his entourage, his protectors, even his advance men. Typically, one of them would be sent ahead to alert the proprietor of the next establishment: “August Busch IV is on his way here, and we will need a table for eight with iced buckets of Budweiser set up; he doesn't want to be bothered by the other customers, and he will not interact with you.”