Dark and Bloody Ground (36 page)

Chuck Boling trotted over to relay that SWAT members had caught Bartley as he ran and tried to scramble over the fence. He had surrendered meekly.

Fluherty patted down Hodge’s jeans and in the right rear pocket felt a slender, hard object. He removed a six-inch butterfly knife with dragon designs on the case. He opened it; the surgical steel blade gleamed. As he shoved him into an Ormond Beach squad car, Hodge glowered back over his shoulder: “That’s not my knife. You did not take that off of me.”

I didn’t? Fluherty said to himself. Funny you’re so sensitive about a knife.

Less than half an hour later, Chuck Boling watched as agents and local police forced a red Corvette to the curb on Atlantic Avenue about three miles south of the condo. Monitored by a police airplane, Epperson’s new car had been trailed after it had left the Castaways parking lot.

Epperson refused permission to search the Corvette. It did not belong to him, he said. It was the property of a guy who had loaned it to him that afternoon. There were papers to prove that the owner was named Travis McDowell.

At the Ormond Beach cell where he was held before being transferred with Bartley and Hodge to Orlando, Epperson continued to refuse to sign a “Permission to Search” form, repeating that the Corvette and its contents belonged to Travis McDowell, with the exception of a leather briefcase stashed behind the seat. He would like that returned to him. It contained personal papers.

The police kept the condo sealed off through the night, with two FBI agents on guard. The next day, after warrants were issued and Letcher County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Caudill arrived with two KSP troopers to join Fluherty, Boling, five other agents, and an Ormond Beach police lieutenant, a search was made and an inventory compiled. The place looked as if it had been in the process of being vacated, but evidence remained.

One item caught everyone’s eye at once. On the coffee table in the living room sat a vase holding two dozen red roses, tagged with a card addressed to Roger Epperson from Bob Loturco of Terry Taylor Ford, “in grateful acknowledgement of your valued patronage.”

The hapless Loturco, however, had already been fired. On his way to negotiate for the Corvette, he had been the first guest to leave that morning; his wife had accompanied Roger to the Chevrolet lot. Loturco was sacked, not for accepting cash of dubious origin, but for committing a Ford salesman’s unpardonable sin, encouraging and assisting a customer in the purchase of a Chevy.

Items less sentimental than the flowers included a police scanner, a 9-mm shell found in an ashtray, a map of Kentucky, a police radiofrequency booklet with Kentucky codes marked, currency wrappers from the Bank of Whitesburg, and more than seventy-five thousand dollars in cash. Bill Fluherty discovered one fifty-dollar bill at the bottom of a bed in an upstairs room.

Searches of the various cars yielded drug paraphernalia, small amounts of cocaine and marijuana, a two-way radio, a brown cotton glove, knives, and guns. A homemade garotte, consisting of a rubberized cord knotted at both ends, led Fluherty to request a check of recent Florida homicides to see whether any involving strangulation remained unsolved. The Moon Mullins murder quickly stood out because of the victim’s Tennessee background and the information that his house showed no sign of forced entry, which suggested the possible use of fake IDs. The victim’s occupation made solving this case less than urgent, but Epperson, Bartley, and Hodge became top suspects.

Roger had indeed listed Travis McDowell as the purchaser of the ‘85 Corvette, for twenty-seven thousand. Since the owner of the 300 ZX and the conversion van was recorded as Ron Dykes, the FBI quickly located him, the Oldsmobile, and the second Dodge van. Dykes’s account of how he had unwittingly become an overnight automobile freak led the FBI to Autoputer and Pat Mason who, admitting that she knew Sherry but professing ignorance of the group’s sources of income, added the MR2 to a list that now totaled an expenditure of about a hundred and eleven thousand dollars in six days. Adding this to the cash found at the condo, cash and the down payment receipt for the Pelican Lounge discovered in Roger’s briefcase, and twelve thousand in Benny’s wallet, investigators could account for about two hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars—more than half the amount stolen, according to Dr. Acker’s estimate.

Becky Hannah had left her 200 SX parked in the condo garage. It had a faulty throttle spring, she told Agent Burl Cloninger when he
found her, back in the bosom of her family in Tennessee, eager, she said, to begin her senior year in high school. She provided an account, filled with innocence and bewilderment, of her experiences with Donnie Bartley and his pals, saying that she had no idea where they got their money but had worried that they might have robbed someone. The woman she knew as Booger, or Sherry, had put her on a plane from Miami as soon as news of the arrests became known.

When Mike Caudill came down from Kentucky to interview her, he asked her to describe the personalities of the three men with whom she had been associated, or vacationing, or however she had spent her summer. Becky replied in a dreamy voice that Benny had been like a big brother to her. He reminded her a lot of her own brother:

“Benny does have a temper, I guess, but that’s another thing that reminds me of my brother. And Donnie is—I’ve never met anyone like him before.”

“How is that?”

“He’s extremely sweet to me. This is how they are to me. I’ve just never met anyone like him before.”

“And Roger?”

“I don’t know. He’s sort of quiet and to himself.”

Becky’s Tennessee drawl enhanced the impression of scenes from a girl’s holiday heaven. Caudill, an earnest, hard-working fellow, dark-haired and chunky, was annoyed. Hoping to jolt Becky into some sense of reality, he reminded her of what these kindly fellows had actually done, describing the mayhem at the Acker house, with emphasis on the butcher knife. “Your friend Bartley’s fingerprints were found on the scene. We have a witness. The doctor himself has identified both Bartley and Hodge as being there. Another eyewitness saw all three of them together in the area.” Was Becky under some illusion that she owed something to these people, that she should protect them?

“They absolutely did do it. They absolutely committed a horrible crime. They are very brutal men, and it’s not the first time that they did it.” Caudill did not mention Ed and Bessie Morris; he was guessing that Becky Hannah might know or suspect something about the Gray Hawk killings, or that he might jolt her into making connections in her mind. If she did, she gave no sign. From what he could tell, he may as well have been addressing a houseplant.

She was worried about her car, Becky said. She understood that her Datsun was impounded and sitting out in the hot Florida sun. Someone had told her that a window was broken and sealed with orange tape. She hoped that the tape would not melt onto the paint. Could she have her keys? Mike Caudill gave up.

When Lester Burns descended on Orlando to represent Roger Epperson, Detective Frank Fleming was privately delighted. He did not think that even Lester Burns had much of a chance of getting Epperson off, not with the way the case was developing; but Lester was bound to make things more interesting, certainly more entertaining. Like most mountain people on either side of the law, Fleming admired Lester Burns for having come so far from such humble origins, and he appreciated the humor and the shrewdness Lester brought to everything he did. With Lester on the scene, it would be a different case, because Lester’s effect was like cayenne pepper. Fleming now assumed that it would take weeks of maneuvering to get Epperson extradited back to Kentucky.

To Fleming’s surprise, when he ran into Burns at the Orlando jail, Lester revealed that he was waiving extradition for his client and that Fleming and Lon Maggard could take Epperson home in a matter of days. At dinner at their hotel on August 22, Lester confirmed that extradition would quickly be allowed, although Hodge and Bartley, still without attorneys, continued to refuse it.

Fleming and Maggard had thought that they had come down to Florida only to gather evidence and otherwise assist Mike Caudill in dealing with local authorities and the FBI. They were more than willing to take Epperson home with them, but they had only Fleming’s Chevy Impala cruiser, which was equipped with neither the special restraining devices nor a screen separating front and back seats as required by KSP regulations for the transportation of dangerous criminals over long distances.

Fleming knew Roger Epperson. He remembered having arrested him years before on auto theft and other charges, knew his parents and his brothers fairly well, and saw no reason why two armed Kentucky boys could not handle another unarmed fellow from the mountains. They were all about the same age and size, but Roger was out of shape from a strenuous style of life. By telephone, Danny Webb decided to waive the regulations, agreeing that it was not worth the
cost to send another car and that they might as well haul Epperson back while they had the chance.

They headed for home on Saturday morning, August 24. Frank drove with Lon Maggard beside him, Roger in the middle of the back seat, handcuffed behind his back but otherwise unrestrained. Right from the word go he talked a blue streak, offering suggestions on the fastest route and agreeably entering into conversation about the narcotics trade—how much a mule received for carrying drugs from Florida or Tennessee up to Cincinnati, how much a kilo of this or that brought in various markets, what the markup was from drug grower to dealer, from importer to customer. It was a regular education, Frank thought, even if half of what Roger said might be bullshit. Epperson talked so big, he was the kind of guy who had to have an answer to whatever question, and he had a personal anecdote or two to embellish every point, always with himself as the smart dude, the one who pulled something off when everyone else went down. He reminded Frank of a second-rate Lester Burns, except not as funny or as likeable. He could understand why Roger had hired Lester, who was maybe the only man Epperson had ever met who could out-horseshit Roger and who actually made money at it.

A stranger in that car would have found it hard to believe that these cops and this criminal were adversaries, the talk flowed so easily, so matter-of-factly among the mountaineers who had grown up together knowing the same people up the same hollows speaking the same lilting, snappy lingo. Somewhere in central Georgia, Roger, leaning forward to thrust his head over the seat between the troopers, complained that the handcuffs were cutting into his wrists and stopping his circulation. They hurt so bad. He hated to complain, but they were killing him.

What the hell, Frank thought. He ain’t going nowhere. He told Maggard that it would be all right to take off the cuffs. Roger twisted around and Maggard reached back to unlock them.

“I sure am obliged,” Roger said.

“You want to jump out at ninety or a hundred miles an hour,” Frank said, “go right ahead. If you live, we’ll shoot you.”

What he would really like, Roger said, was a pen and some paper so he could write a letter to his girlfriend. He wanted to tell her that the cops were treating him fine. He knew she’d be worried.

Fleming and Maggard watched from time to time out of the corners
of their eyes as Roger scribbled, then tore up a couple of sheets, tossed them on the floor, and started over. I guess he wants to get whatever he has to say down right, Fleming thought.

Late that afternoon they stopped for dinner at a restaurant off the highway in Atlanta. Fleming and Maggard, in street clothes, did not feel like putting on their jackets, it was so hot; but neither did they want to barge into the restaurant wearing exposed shoulder holsters and service revolvers. They left their guns in the car and, in shirt sleeves, walked casually with Roger, who was wearing jeans and a polo shirt, into the dining room. Only Maggard among them carried any sort of weapon, a small pistol in a holster strapped to his ankle.

All three ordered big steaks and iced tea. It was not that Fleming was growing to like Roger, far from it, but he now felt he knew him well enough to be certain that he would not try to run under these circumstances.

A kind of rapport had been established. If Roger did try to run, Fleming was sure he could catch him and would not hesitate to punish him.

Their corner table permitted conversation. They reminisced about old crimes—rackets, scams, coal schemes. Having listened to him and studied him for hours, Fleming found it difficult to imagine Roger actually stabbing Tammy Acker. Which of the three had killed her was the question that haunted Fleming more vividly and persistently than any other, because he could not forget the sensation of removing that butcher knife. As the one who had pulled it out, he felt a peculiar link to whoever had plunged it in—a bond that joined cop to killer at right hands.

Fleming decided to take advantage of the friendly atmosphere to ask what had been making him wake up in a sweat every night for two weeks.

“Roger,” he began in his blunt, cheerful way between bites, thrusting out his square jaw and cocking his head as he narrowed his eyes, “which one of you all stabbed Tammy?” With his fingertips he touched Roger’s bare forearm. “You ain’t under oath, buddy. I’m not recording this. Just between us, off the record, who did it?”

“I never did nothing wrong,” Roger said, and he looked Fleming in the eye, something Frank had noticed he usually avoided. “Donnie Bartley. Bartley done it.”

“Why? Why like that?”

“He went nuts after she wouldn’t do what he asked.”

“What was that? What wouldn’t she do?”

“Give him a blow job. She wouldn’t come across. He wasn’t real happy about that.”

“So he went crazy?”

“He didn’t have far to go.”

“You want to make that official? It might go better for you if you did.”

“Sure,” Roger said. “I’ll take a deal. Here’s what it is. If I talk, I walk.”

“I don’t think we’ll go for that one,” Fleming laughed. “Let’s have us some of that strawberry shortcake.”