Dark and Bloody Ground (49 page)

“I knew I’d won when the jury brought out their handkerchiefs. The woman walked, God bless her, and she hasn’t killed another husband since!”

By twilight Kincaid had managed to convey to Lester most of what the government wanted him to know, offering no deals but implying without promising that, in return for an admission of some guilt, Lester might possibly avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars. Unstated was the assumption that he would be willing to testify against Dale Mitchell and Sherry Hodge. Kincaid declined Lester’s invitation to dinner but agreed to meet him for breakfast at Jerry’s Restaurant.

There were many meetings between the two. At one in Kincaid’s London office, he was taking a phone call when he saw Lester’s hand reach slowly toward a document that was lying on the desk. Kincaid grabbed it. Lester grinned as if to say, “I was just testing you.” The man would not give up. He began telephoning Kincaid at home, even
dropping by the agent’s house—just to chat, he said, feeling lonely and, well, rather worried about his future. Kincaid enjoyed hearing Lester talk so much that he didn’t really mind, but he had to cut him off at last. After all, this was the FBI, and Lester would have to make a decision, finally, on his own.

On November 10 Lester went before Judge Siler and entered guilty pleas on two of the nineteen counts against him. He admitted conspiring with Dr. Billy Davis to defraud two insurance companies by faking an automobile accident; and he pleaded guilty to knowingly receiving stolen money and transporting it to Kentucky. On the second count he asked that the record show that in no way was he pleading guilty to having known beforehand of the plans for the Acker murder and robbery. The judge accepted this, and agreed to the U.S. attorney’s motion that all other charges against the defendant, including that he had conspired with a since-convicted judge to stage a car theft, be dropped. He was guilty of nothing other than what he had admitted, Lester said.

He described having taken too much whiskey and too many painkillers during the previous year, because of his hip, but denied that these had influenced his judgment. He had simply been an idiot. Had he been suffering from some mental problem?

“Your Honor, to be frank, I know where my life is. It’s in your hands. Now, I believe I do have a mental problem—a total lack of sense. I’m disgusted with myself.”

Lester’s family and many of his friends were in the courtroom, along with Kincaid, James Wiley Craft, and Tawny Acker. Everyone found it a melancholy occasion. Danny Webb, reading about it in the papers and noting that for the first time anyone could remember, Lester refused to talk to the press, said it must have been more like a funeral than a conviction. It was hard to accept that Lester Burns was finished. It was like seeing a great tree fall.

Lester asked that his sentencing be postponed at least until April 15, so he could make arrangements for his mother and the rest of his family and make restitution to Dr. Acker. The judge agreed. Just before the New Year—in time to take the deduction on his 1986 taxes—Lester sent Dr. Acker a check for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. James Wiley Craft, who was still Commonwealth’s Attorney but continued acting as Dr. Acker’s lawyer, received the check, deducted fifteen thousand for his fee in negotiating the settlement,
and presented the balance to the doctor,
BURNS RETURNS MONEY
, said the
Mountain Eagle.

Lester also made a separate deal with Craft, trading him the Rolls-Royce in exchange for Craft’s Jaguar sedan plus twenty-five thousand dollars. “Glad to get that clunker off my hands,” Lester said privately.

Four days before Lester entered his guilty pleas, concluding that she no longer had any choice, Sherry agreed to talk to Rod Kincaid. He interviewed her for nearly three hours at the Lexington detention center and was impressed by the precise detail of her accounts of everything that concerned the Acker case. She appeared to have every dollar received accounted for in her head, a veritable hillbilly Meyer Lansky. As for her attitude toward what had happened, Kincaid could not fathom it. She had isolated the murder of Tammy Acker as if it had been an unfortunate by-product of an otherwise straightforward robbery and only turned her head aside when Kincaid showed her photographs of Tammy’s body, trying to test her for some reaction. She was insistent that Benny could not have done it.

Why had she allowed herself to be misled by Benny? Kincaid tried to probe her attachment and loyalty to this man.

“Ain’t nobody misled me,” she bridled. “People’s always blaming everything on Benny. My folks does. They don’t know me. Nobody knows me. I have always knowed what I was doing. Let me tell you something. I’m no Patty Puritan.”

Kincaid could not get this last phrase out of his mind. It was, in all her bravado and self-knowledge and matter-of-fact criminality, her motto. It had its humorous connotations; it had the virtues of bluntness and honesty and self-irony; all the same, it was chilling.

It was because of her candor that Kincaid believed her when she said that only a few days after the Florida arrests, she had given more than half a million of the stolen money to a Detective Gene Foust of the Oak Ridge police force. She had flown back to Tennessee with the money in what she called her pilot’s case, had distributed the Bartleys’ share to them, and had put the remainder in a garbage bag and given that to her brother to store under his house. The sum was somewhat greater than her and Benny’s share because, she admitted, she had “conned” some extra from Carol. After all, the banker deserved some sort of fee for her work, didn’t she? She then contacted
Gene Foust, who agreed to help her invest or launder the money. She met her brother at an abandoned airport, took the money to Foust at a Knoxville motel, and gave it to him. He planned to set up a phony company, Sherry claimed, called Triangle, with himself, her, and a friend of his as partners.

Subsequently, Sherry continued, Foust gave her back more than two hundred thousand of the money to pay Dale Mitchell and, along with the other Triangle partner, accompanied her to Lester Burns’s farm to give Mitchell his fee. She had asked Foust and his friend to come along as protection because she did not trust Lester Burns or anyone else.

It was true that, incredible as it seemed, Mitchell had given her a receipt for the one hundred and fifty thousand. She had told him that she had torn it up, but if there was one thing she wasn’t, it was stupid. She described the doll and indicated its location on the shelf of her bedroom. It had tickled her to death when the FBI had torn her room apart without thinking to check the dolls, although she doubted they would have found the receipt, the way it was hidden. It had been all she could do to keep from telling the agents how they had been fooled.

Since paying Mitchell, she had not been able to extract another dime from Foust, she said, and no longer trusted him. She believed that he had some of the money stashed in a safe under the carpet in his house. The safe was makeshift, dug into the foundation and covered with wire mesh and gravel. Foust kept the combination on the back of one of his credit cards. When the FBI got around to checking this out, they would know she was telling the truth about where the money went. How else would she know about the safe?

Sherry claimed to know nothing about the Gray Hawk killings. As far as she knew, the boys may have raided a poker game that night. Someone was trying to blame them for an unsolved crime if they were being blamed for that, too.

Kincaid recalled, without mentioning it, that Carol had accused Sherry of having been the one to urge that the boys leave no witnesses. To Gray Hawk? To Fleming-Neon? Or was Carol lying about that? What Sherry really had known and said was probably beyond knowing or proving in its totality.

She kept insisting that Donnie Bartley must have killed Tammy. He had come back to Florida with blood on his shoes. That could have been Dr. Acker’s blood, Kincaid said, and Sherry scoffed.

Kincaid asked her to describe in detail the scene at the condo after the boys had returned. Were they all crazy? Had anyone indicated what had actually happened at the Acker house?

“I’ll tell you how crazy,” Sherry said. “I told Benny he should kill the rest of them.”

“Roger and Donnie?”

“The women, too.”

“Why did you suggest that?”

“So’s me and Benny could run.”

“Mass murder?”

“That kind of money can make you real strange,” Sherry said. “I guess you wouldn’t know about that.”

In his car on the way home to Somerset, Kincaid tried to gain some perspective on what he had heard. This woman had been willingly involved with the lowest of the low. He had heard from colleagues in the Bureau and from others who had dealt with Sherry the opinion that she had actually been the brains behind the whole gang. Kincaid thought this only partially true. If she had been, they probably would not have been caught so quickly.

Her frankness was disarming. Her love for Benny Hodge was the most confounding thing about her. Women loving outlaws was a common enough theme, but this was something else besides, and somehow love did not seem the right word. Obsession? Compulsion? This was a woman with some grievance, some anger at something in her past that must have twisted or erased a part of her. But she was no ordinary psychopath. Her self-knowledge was too complete.

What he remembered from the tapes that had been confiscated from her bedroom told a lot about the kind of relationship she had with Benny. The tapes were so rank, so vile, that Kincaid had chosen not to listen to more than excerpts from them, leaving it to others to try to decipher anything incriminating that might be in them. Aside from their grossness, Kincaid interpreted them as examples of Sherry’s and Benny’s mania for mutual self-destruction and thought they sounded more like war than love. If love was life, this dark passion was death. “I’m no Patty Puritan"—she wasn’t kidding. And she collected dolls!

Kincaid informed Burl Cloninger about the doll. It was exactly as Sherry had said, with the receipt tucked away and signed by Dale Mitchell. Cloninger then organized a raid on Gene Foust’s house and
found the safe. It had little in it other than some counterfeit watches and other costume jewelry. The agents did seize, however, twenty-four hundred in cash, a Bronco, a Cadillac Seville, a Corvette, and, later, a twenty-thousand-dollar motorboat at a Knoxville marina. Not bad for a detective. Foust was immediately suspended from the Oak Ridge force and, when he was indicted for receipt, concealment, and disposal of stolen money, he was terminated. For the time being he turned his attention to Rings And Things, a gift shop he and his wife opened.

On January 28, 1987, Sherry and Carol received nearly maximum prison terms. Facing a possible five years each, Carol got four, Sherry four and a half. It was the original crime itself, Sherry’s lawyer, who had told her to expect the maximum, reasoned. Less than that meant that the judge had taken into account Sherry’s cooperation with FBI investigators. But where the money had come from, that was what the judge must have been thinking—and about Tammy Acker.

During that week when Sherry and Carol were sentenced in Lexington, snow was falling up in the mountains, the first real blizzard of that winter. On Friday night, January 23, Dr. Acker, after another long day at his clinic, was asleep in his bedroom. About two
A.M
. he awoke suddenly to see a flashlight shining into his room from the hallway.

He grabbed the loaded pistol he now kept on his bedside table and shouted, “I’ve got a gun!”

“I’ve got a gun, too,” a male voice replied from behind the light.

“Well, one of us is going to die, then,” Dr. Acker said.

The intruder left. Dr. Acker called the sheriff, who found two sets of footprints in the snow. The men had smashed the glass on the patio door to get in. Frank Fleming, still with the KSP, told the
Eagle
that he was sure that the burglars were local people who had read or heard about the money Dr. Acker had received from Lester Burns. Everyone should know that Dr. Acker no longer kept money in the house. The money from Lester Burns was already in a trust fund.

Five months later Lester stood before Judge Siler for sentencing. Dr. Acker was not in court for the event, but a letter from him was read to the judge by an attorney (not James Wiley Craft) representing the doctor. Dated May 13, 1987, it urged leniency:

I, Roscoe J. Acker, M.D., through counsel have been informed that Lester H. Burns, Jr., has been very cooperative in attempting to recover property stolen from me. This cooperation has been in the form of [his] returning $175,000 paid to him as a fee by the defendant Roger Dale Epperson and making himself available to my attorneys in an effort to collect and recover the remaining sum stolen from me. In addition, Mr. Burns has agreed to continue his cooperation beyond his prior efforts and has stated that he will do everything possible to assist in the recovery of these additional sums. I believe Mr. Burns realizes he has done wrong, and it is my opinion that a man with many years of public service could perhaps serve society in a more meaningful manner through some form of public service work rather than detention in a federal correctional institution. It is my desire and wish that this statement be read into the record at the sentencing hearing ...

Dr. Acker’s attorney added that, in his own opinion, Mr. Burns was extremely remorseful for his act: “I believe it’s destroyed his life.”

James Wiley Craft also spoke on Lester’s behalf. He had known the defendant for many years, Craft said, believed him to have been a brilliant attorney, especially in the early years, but felt that recently his effectiveness had declined, possibly because of an alcohol problem. Mr. Burns had been in pain during the Acker trial, but had carried on at a very high level. Since then, he had helped recover stolen property and had assisted the U.S. government in identifying a police officer who had allegedly received stolen money.

Another attorney testified to Lester’s abhorrence of drugs. The surgeon who operated on Lester’s hip stated that the other hip was also in need of replacement. Lester’s own attorneys, both of them women, spoke of how many people he had helped, of how impeccable his record had been until the lapses to which he had pleaded guilty, and of how he had already suffered humiliation and degradation. They argued for community service. And on his own behalf Lester, in a lengthy, somewhat rambling discourse, argued that he had been tricked by Comer and McNeal and even then, acceding to the insurance scheme out of compassion for Comer and believing in “that fine fellow” McNeal, he had refused their other enticements. He had been recorded by McNeal making many statements that were obviously nothing but empty, false boasts, and many exculpatory statements of his had either not been recorded or had been erased.