Dark and Bloody Ground (23 page)

“Well, good luck to you all,” Sherry said. “C’ain’t have no criminals running around, Lord knows. Times is bad enough.”

They held their breaths until the roadblock was well behind them, and then they let out whoops and hollers and yip-yip-yips and shouted hallelujahs.

“You are one cool-headed bitch,” Bartley said.
"
God
damn!”

“Don’t you forget it, numbskull.”

Deciding that the entire Harriman–Oak Ridge–Knoxville area was too hot, Sherry drove to Gatlinburg, seventy-five miles distant, and deposited the boys at the Homestead House motel in a room with a view of the Smokies and a kitchen. She stocked the refrigerator with food and drink and told them they could expect to stay put for a couple of days. The cops would be unlikely to look for them at a resort,
but they should take no chances. They should not leave the room except maybe to take a quick swim in the pool while they let the maid clean up, so as not to arouse suspicions. She told Donnie, who was worried about running short of coke, that Roger would rejoin them soon. As she left, she hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob.

Inwardly Sherry was eaten up with anxiety. She spent the next forty-eight hours on desperate errands. Closing up her house, she distributed her furniture and other belongings among various relatives and tried, and failed, to convince her mom and dad that she was doing the right thing by helping Benny. Like everyone else in East Tennessee, they knew that he was on the run. They begged Sherry to give him up; she said she could not, he was her one true love, she could not desert him now. But where would she go? What would she do? Sherry said that she did not know what would happen to her, but she had made a commitment and would stick by it. Her old room was waiting for her, E. L. and Louise told her, if only she would come home. She left her doll collection and other belongings with them, said she would be back one day, and asked them to pray for her.

As for Renee, Sherry told her only that it was time for Mommy to take a holiday. She would not be gone long. Renee cried when Sherry kissed the child good-bye.

Getting Roger out of jail required some doing, but Sherry managed it, midway through the first week in June. Because Roger was unable to tell Carol where he had buried money that could finance his seventy-thousand-dollar bail, Sherry gave some of her jewelry to a Chattanooga bondsman as down payment on the required ten percent, securing his release along with the Thunderbird. Because Roger had never been convicted of a felony, the judge accepted his promise to return the car as evidence for the trial.

It was time for a powwow at Gatlinburg. Sherry, Carol, and Roger gathered with Donnie and Benny in the motel room to map strategy. Although he was technically free for the time being, Roger knew that the evidence against him in Rome was overwhelming; he had no intention of standing trial and was as committed to escape as the others. To Sherry’s dismay, despite the Rome fiasco and other proof of his incompetence, Epperson at once assumed again his role as Straw Boss. What was worse, Benny and Donnie listened to him
with childlike attention, hanging on his every word and telling Sherry to keep her mouth shut. She may have issued warnings that had proved correct. She may have saved their necks by hiding them. She may have been the one person shrewd and brave enough to have gotten them past a roadblock and to have squirreled them away where they were safe for now—but she was still a woman and ought to know her place. When Benny threatened to cream her if she kept interrupting Roger as he held forth on the future, she bolted from the room, jumped in her car, and took off for home, convinced at last that her parents were right.

But on the road she knew that her heart could not let her abandon her Biggin. Why am I so crazy lonely over you, she asked herself. “I just went to get you all some beer,” she said when she returned, knowing she would never leave him again.

Kentucky was the answer, Roger said. He had endless contacts up there, and they would be better off out of Tennessee.

“You said I needed a vacation,” Carol said. “You promised you’d take me to Florida.”

“Chop,” Sherry said, “what you need is a brain transplant.”

“We’ll go anywhere we want,” Roger said, “after we knock off that doctor.”

On June 7, the five of them headed for Kentucky in the Thunderbird. Sherry left her Charger with her parents, telling them not to object when the repo man came for it. She figured that her car was too well known to the FBI, too much associated with Benny, and that it was not worth worrying about the payments while on the run. She gambled that the police would not be looking for the T-bird, since Roger was legally out on bond and the police would assume that he would be smart enough to stay clear of his fugitive companions. In Roger’s case, the way Sherry saw it, it was less a matter of outsmarting the cops than of his being more of an idiot than anyone could imagine. She was permitting herself to be drawn along in the wake of Roger’s decisions because all she cared about now was to be with Benny when whatever happened happened. Agitated one minute and emotionally wrung out the next, she felt that she had finally lost control of her life and had no choice but to surrender to events. If that was what standing by your man meant, so be it.

There was hardly enough room for the five of them in the car.
With all their suitcases and belongings, including Benny’s weights, they decided to rent a U-Haul trailer. They set off looking for all the world like a family that had pulled up stakes. On the way north they stopped off at the veterans’ bar in Lake City so Roger could negotiate with the fence for marijuana and cocaine and various weapons and ammunition—an arsenal that included high-powered rifles, pistols of various calibers, and a .45 caliber Mini-Mac 10 handheld machine gun that Roger said was a favorite of international dope smugglers, as lethal a weapon as money could buy. Let the FBI come after them. They would be ready.

For once, Sherry managed to keep her opinions to herself, but beneath her uncharacteristic silence she began to wonder whether Roger was not only stupid but stark raving mad. It was all a game to him, cops and robbers. As a kid he had probably played Junior G-Man. Now he was pretending to be Al Capone.

They stopped that evening at a motel in Corbin, twelve miles south of London on I-75. After a dinner of prime rib, they sat around smoking dope and Roger revealed his latest brainstorm. They needed to buy time, he said, to pull a job or two first, because they were running low on cash. They would have to buy a different car. Then they could close in on the doctor over in Fleming-Neon. The big job would have to be planned down to the least detail; there could be no screwups this time.

They would get off the road, away from the pressures of the hunt, to stay in a place where the cops would never think to look for them. Now that he was back in home territory, ideas were coming to him thick and fast. What they would do was to hide out in the woods for a spell. He knew just the spot.

“You mean camp out?” Sherry asked, emerging from a dopey reverie. She was onto her second joint, double what she normally permitted herself. “You mean sleep on the ground? Straw Boss, I ain’t no damn heifer. I didn’t make this trip to drop dead of pneumonia.”

The weather was mild, Roger said. They would secure some equipment. He had been in the Navy, and he knew what bivouacking meant and what survival meant. Do what he advised, and everyone would be fine. Weak sisters were invited to decamp pronto.

Donnie complained that he was the only one without a girlfriend along. He was no outdoorsman; it would be no fun out there in the woods alone, without a warm body against him. He spent the next
couple of hours on the phone to various females, including his ex-wife and Rebecca Hannah. He told them to hang tight, lover boy would be sending for them. They were in for one romantic holiday.

In the morning Roger drove them along a back road that skirted a section of the Daniel Boone National Forest. This was not the mountains but a hilly terrain of piney woods, rivers, and glimpses of broad lakes through the green. Daniel Boone had passed through there on his way north from the Cumberland Gap; it had been the site of Kentucky’s bloodiest Indian wars. A heavily visited recreation spot during the height of the summer, it was nearly deserted early in June.

After a few miles they came on a man and two boys, stripped to the waist and pouring sweat, and a woman working in a vegetable garden beside a creek. Donnie and Benny recognized the man as Harold “Sky” Clontz, an old friend of Roger’s whom they had met on their previous Kentucky foray in May. Clontz did not appear overjoyed to see them. He paused in his digging, leaning on his hoe, eyeing them. Roger got out to speak to him as the boys and the woman continued turning over the earth in silence.

Roger said that Clontz would help them. You could always count on old Sky. He had asked no questions. They waited for Clontz at his log house up the road.

Clontz proved hospitable enough. He gave them moonshine, pouring the clear liquid from jars. When Roger asked him if he was having any trouble from the FBI, he said no, but that the FBI might be having some. They were trying to nail him for interstate transportation of stolen property and were coming up empty. He loaned the gang a tent big enough for the five of them.

Sherry and Carol drove into London to buy sleeping bags, air mattresses, a Coleman stove and lantern, frying pan, coffeepot, cups and plates, and other provisions from a list Benny wrote out. Together, with the boys lying low, they registered at the entrance to the Holly Bay campground, paying a fee for the 8th through the 10th. Carol signed in as Carol Malone.

They picked out a campsite on the shore of Laurel River Lake—idyllic, a vacationer’s dream, the only sounds birdsong, the wind in the pines, and the lapping of the waters, a fantasy in blues and greens. Occasionally the sound of an ax cracked through the air, or a car starting up; there were a few other campers here and there, nowhere close.

That night they roasted wieners and marshmallows and smoked dope. Roger, Carol, and Donnie did a few lines while Sherry watched Benny work out in moonlight on a weight bench borrowed from Clontz. She played her newest tape on the T-bird’s deck, the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” a hardassed redneck beat invading the night.

Except for the occasional shower and one big storm, a rolling black blizzard that sent them to huddle in the car, it was like that for several nights and days. They extended their registration through the 16th. Benny managed a version of his beef stew; Carol, the resourceful earth muffin, produced bread from an oven of heaped stones. They swam in the lake, showered in stalls provided—a more wholesome display of vigor could not have been found at a Scout Jamboree, except for the dope and sex.

And constantly they schemed. Roger summoned a Knoxville fence who supposedly would set up jobs but who proved more interested in camping than robbery. He was sent packing after two days. Donnie’s ex-wife, pregnant and not in the mood for outdoor living, arrived and quickly departed. Another of his women came and went. At night the occasional grunt and cry escaped the tent to mingle with an owl’s hoots, but the mood was more somber than passionate. Scoring cash was on their minds.

When the men left the campsite, they did so before the ranger’s hut opened or after it had shut for the evening. They set off talking of raiding a dope dealer or a fence or, one night, of swooping down on a high-stakes poker game that Roger knew of in the mountains. Each time, they returned empty-handed. There was talk of robbing the house of the mother of TV’s Bionic Man, Lee Majors, who supposedly owned property in the area, but this, too, came to nothing.

Tempers shortened. Roger grew especially irascible, cuffing Carol around and complaining of having too much responsibility for the general welfare. When Benny made squirrel chili—the bounty of target practice—Sherry refused it, calling it trash food. The chef sulked. They could not nest there forever, Sherry said, living off the land and Straw Boss’s horseshit. If they had to camp out, Carol whined, why not on the white sands of Florida?

Sunday, June 16th, 1985, was Father’s Day. At about seven o’clock that evening, Roger, Donnie, and Benny drove to Clontz’s house.
They found Harold sitting on a log drinking beer with a few men who had been cutting pine posts that day. Roger asked to borrow Harold’s 1975 blue and white Chevy van, saying Harold could use the T-bird if he needed to go somewhere. They wanted the van for a few hours, that was all. Harold said he wasn’t going anywhere and gestured toward the cases of beer stacked up. He said the keys were in the van.

At about eleven-thirty that night up in Jackson County, some forty miles northeast of Laurel River Lake, two young men in a pickup were driving home on a two-lane blacktop road. This was rolling farm country, towns and villages few and far between. Frankie Baldwin and Mike Riley had spent the evening at the Hilltop drive-in movie. Heading toward Annville, they crested a hill and were passing through the village of Gray Hawk when all of a sudden a van pulled out of a driveway directly in front of them.

Baldwin slammed on his brakes, fishtailing and coming within inches of slamming into the rear of the van—which lumbered ahead, slowly picking up speed, then quickly veered right onto a side road as Baldwin leaned on his horn.

Baldwin and Riley marveled at the close call and cursed whoever was the idiot driving that van. What had the guy been thinking, and whose van was it, anyhow? They agreed that it had been black or dark blue and white or silver but could not settle on the make. A strange vehicle was rare in those parts. It had lurched onto the road from the driveway of Ed and Bessie Morris’s house—they were certain of that: the driveway ran between the Morris place and the gas station and post office the family owned. Frankie Baldwin had known the Morrises all his life; his father had been in the car business with Ed. Why would those old folks be having late-night visitors, and on Father’s Day of all Sundays? None of their children owned a van, Frankie thought. It didn’t make sense.