Dark and Bloody Ground (52 page)

The story covered the top half of the front page of the
Herald-Leader
on a Sunday in January 1988, with a color photo of a smiling
Sherry and the headline
LOVE, GREED AND EXCITEMENT LED SHERRY HODGE ASTRAY
. It continued over an entire second page, with such tantalizing subheads as “A Robber’s Wife” and “Marrying on the Phone.” “There are three people I would die for,” Sherry was quoted as saying. “My daughter, my dad and my husband. My dad told me, ‘When you meet the man you love, do everything in the world for him, and he’ll return it.’”

Sherry had opened up to Judy Lewis with startling frankness, mixing thrills with proclamations of undying love and hints of, if not quite remorse, at least regret: “You don’t really gain anything from crime. Everything you make you have to spend to keep yourself out of trouble. I did it for a quick dollar, Benny’s love and the excitement. If it came to the point of execution and they said, ‘Sherry, if you’ll take his place, we’ll let him be a free man,’ I would do it.”

Benny’s lawyers were horrified. Sherry’s descriptions of the joyful life of armed robbery could be highly damaging to his chances for appeal and retrials. Benny did not care much for the story either when Sherry sent it to him. He was incensed by the paragraph depicting her as an Indian princess with men at her feet.

Sherry was released on parole on September 27, 1989, resentful that she had spent nearly a year longer than Carol in the pokey. One of the conditions was that she find a job within ten days. She went first to Roane Hosiery, not happy at the prospect of returning to crotch-slitting but willing to take anything. When she told the plant manager where she had been, however, he refused to hire her.

She tried an employment bureau, which sent her to Rockwood Sportswear, a factory located in an old hangar of the abandoned airport. The company manufactured leather jackets and coats, high-quality goods mostly for export to Europe. There the manager, an expansive New Yorker whose family owned the business and had opened the Tennessee plant because of low wages and tax breaks in the state, told her in his heavy Hungarian accent that he did not give a damn that she had been in prison and wanted to hear nothing about what had put her there. His business was garments, not moral judgments. The Christmas rush was on; he needed somebody who could operate a big sewing machine. Everybody deserved a second chance in life; he had had one or two of them himself. She could start work immediately at six seventy-five an hour.

The factory employed as many as sixty and as few as five workers,
depending on demand. Nearly all of them were women. The huge workroom was well lit, clean, and air-conditioned, divided into rows of different sorts of machines that brought the outerwear, as it was called, from the stage of tanned hides to finished garments ready for shipping.

Sherry never missed a day’s work and quickly learned to perform every task in the plant with greater speed and efficiency than anyone else. There was a high rate of absenteeism: workers were always calling in sick or simply not showing up, wandering off to other jobs or welfare. Sherry was assigned different tasks from day to day, which helped counteract the boredom, the lack of a getaway car. When orders slackened seasonally, the manager always kept Sherry on. “If I had five Sherrys,” he liked to shout, shaking his fist at the incompetence of most employees, “I could fire these other slobs! This woman has
standards!
"
Her refusal to join the union did not displease him, either. “A union is for sheep,” she said. “I’ve always got on better with management. What can a union do for me except steal my pay and bring me down to everybody else’s level?”

She was living with E. L. and Louise again. Renee came to stay on weekends. And Sherry accepted Benny’s phone call every Sunday.

She still proclaimed her love, still felt it, but she began to waver now and then. Whenever she hinted to him that maybe she should think about getting on with her life, however, Benny would grow angry and threaten her. She was afraid of him. All he would have to do was tell some prisoner who was getting out that she was sitting on a pile of money, and she’d end up being found in some alley. She also feared many of the drug dealers whom they had ripped off together, now that Benny was not around to protect her. She steered clear of Lake City and other danger spots. But it was Benny who frightened her more, either by hinting that he would put a contract out on her if she abandoned him or by saying that if she did, he’d kill himself. When she drove up to see him on the Fourth of July and other holidays, memories came back and the fear went away and she loved him all over again.

To others, she was quick to defend him. In church one Sunday the minister, the same one who had performed the telephonic nuptials, was preaching about sin and punishment when he made the remark that everyone on death row deserved to be there. After the service Sherry went to him and gave him hell. How dare he say such a
thing, knowing that the man she loved was only a few steps from the chair. The minister explained that what he had meant was that we are all sinners, not just those on death row, and that we all deserve eternal damnation and would suffer it, except for God’s grace and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Sherry was mollified, and she prayed hard that night for her own salvation.

But at last, one day early in 1991, she went to a lawyer in Kingston, the same one who had handled her divorce from Mr. Wong, and asked him to help her file for divorce from Benny. Her understanding was that because of Benny’s situation in another state, the action could be completed without his knowing. She began calling herself Sherry Sheets again, except when she signed in at the Eddyville prison gate.

When, agreeing that Judge Clay Bishop had made reversible errors, notably in refusing to permit adequate questioning of potential jurors, the Kentucky Attorney General ordered that the Morris case had to be retried, Benny was hopeful. Sherry knew that this was foolish, that he would be convicted and sentenced to death again, if he weren’t executed first. All of his state appeals in the Acker case were exhausted, and only the federal courts stood between him and death. No one had been executed in Kentucky for more than thirty years, but times had changed, people were ready to pull that switch again. Benny was probably thinking that at a new trial, he could escape. Sherry now wondered whether she would want to run off with him. On most days, she thought not. She was becoming more determined to stay straight, free, and alive. The strain of being illegal was too great.

In July 1991, she had to testify at the trial of Gene Foust and his wife, which had been delayed until then while the FBI and the IRS continued to investigate the couple’s finances. Foust’s former police chief testified that he had begun to suspect that Foust was dipping into department funds in the fall of 1985, when the detective had begun acquiring expensive cars and clothing. Burl Cloninger, since retired from the Bureau, stated that he had been after Foust even before Sherry had named the policeman as the person to whom she had entrusted over half a million dollars. Foust, Cloninger said, appeared to be living above the level of his pay and, as the head of several narcotics-sting operations, had access to cash.

In her testimony, Sherry was more startling than ever. She
claimed that Foust had used the Acker money to finance a second unsuccessful campaign for sheriff. She also stated that Foust had promised to bring Benny down to Anderson County on a writ and to help him escape. And while freely admitting to a life of crime, she described how she had urged Benny to kill their four accomplices.

Other than Foust’s cars and boat, which he swore had been purchased from savings, the government had not been able to discover anything the cash might have been used for and had located none of the missing money itself. Because of this failure, and because Foust’s principal accuser was a woman of dubious repute, the case against the Fousts was weak. After fifteen hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted them on all counts. One juror spoke of Sherry as “less than savory.”

The whereabouts of some money remained a mystery. Among those close to the case, opinions about where it had gone were not unanimous, but almost no one believed that Sherry still had access to any cash. If she did, she was doing a conscientious job of pretending otherwise, living with her folks, driving a seven-year-old car, and sitting all day at her machine in the factory. Like Rod Kincaid, most agents believed that Sherry had told the truth.

One day that summer a woman who was doing research for a book on the Acker case came to visit Sherry at Rockwood Sportswear, curious to observe at work this enigma who, only a few years before, had been on the run with satchels full of money. The woman had already listened to Sherry through several evenings, had taken her to dinner and heard her size up everybody else in the crowded restaurant—occupations, incomes, estimated worth of watches and jewelry, which ones were running around on their spouses. Sherry took delight in enumerating examples of human folly in that room. The researcher also pored over Sherry’s family photo albums with her and watched her weep when talking about her parents, her daughter, and, even still, Benny Hodge—but there had been no tears for Tammy Acker or Ed and Bessie Morris.

Originally she had been afraid to meet her. Wasn’t Sherry, after all, or hadn’t she been, what people used to call a gun moll? The sessions with her told a lot and resolved nothing. A psychiatrist would label her this or that; someone else would spot in her an example of working-class resentment; another kind of anger would identify her
as a feminist victim; some preacher would call her forward to proclaim sin. Sympathetic one minute, scary the next, the word for her might be prismatic. She spoke of Jesus Christ and the fear of hell. What sort of God did she believe in? As in some medieval grotesque in which a demon and an angel entwine where the tail snakes under a wing, she was something mysterious all right.

Was she in the end only a fool? Was she misguided, or a criminal mastermind after all? It was difficult to say. Was Lady Macbeth misunderstood? Experts disagree. She may have been a goddess or a fiend.

The woman found Sherry that morning dressed in jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, sewing the seam on a suede jacket. The stranger snapped a photograph and, saying good-bye, without thinking bent down to take Sherry’s hand, grasped it, and talked of children, at last finding herself saying that she wished Sherry well. She hoped that Sherry would stay out of trouble. Maybe with her brains and hard work, she could make something of herself. Forty wasn’t that old these days.

“Don’t forget,” Sherry said above the noise, those eyes clear and unblinking behind her glasses, “I’m only a hillbilly.”

33

T
HE GRASS WAS KNEE-HIGH;
soon it would be time to start bringing in the hay. Lester sat in the driver’s seat of the big yellow bulldozer and thought how fresh everything looked, his hills and fields, the lake twinkling below, the high clouds and sky—it was as if he were seeing them all for the first time, as in a sense he was. It was May of 1991 and he had only been home from prison since just before Christmas. Everywhere the ground was smiling at him with wildflowers, except when the farmhouse came into view. He hated looking at it. He no longer even cared for the color of the stone walls he had laid himself years ago. He switched on the engine of the dozer and took aim.

Lester may have felt like a goner when he had heard his sentence pronounced four years ago to the day, but accepting defeat had never been a part of his nature. By the time he entered that prison at Eglin, on the Gulf Coast between Pensacola and Panama City, he was ready to start fighting again. Eglin had amenities and rooms instead of cells, and there was only a white line at the perimeter in place of a guarded wall. But he thought the line was worse, because you could see the world beyond, tempting and taunting. Often he stood with toes on the chalk, gazing out. He immediately got himself appointed law librarian and, when not helping other inmates with their writs and petitions, started preparing his own attempt to have his sentence reduced. This required a great deal of research as well as correspondence with friends up in Kentucky, whom he dispatched to dig up
long-buried documents, some of which he knew certain people did not wish to see exhumed.

After several months, Lester petitioned the U.S. District Court in London, arguing that Judge Eugene Siler was prejudiced against him. The gist of the argument was that back in 1969, when he was a county attorney and Lester was defending a woman charged with murdering her husband, Eugene Siler had been part of a conspiracy to rig the jury selection process, resulting in the conviction of the defendant, whose farm was thereby inherited by one of Siler’s relatives. To prove the conspiracy, Lester had obtained affidavits from the court clerk and her assistant, who swore that the clerk had pulled jurors’ names from an envelope hidden in the selection box, rather than drawing names at random. The judge on this case, later appointed to the Kentucky Supreme Court, had been so enraged by Lester’s accusations that he had convened a “court of inquiry,” to which Eugene Siler had issued subpoenas. A state bar association investigation, however, had cleared Lester and concluded that jury fixing had taken place, although nothing was ever done about it. Wounds from this battle, Lester claimed, still festered and had affected Judge Siler’s sentencing of him.

Lester’s petition, because it involved such shocking accusations against a sitting federal judge and a past Supreme Court justice, and because it was filed by Lester Burns, made him front-page news again in Kentucky. Judge Siler recused himself from ruling on the matter but mocked the accusations, saying that he could scarcely remember the old case, doubted that he had issued subpoenas for the “court of inquiry,” and had not even known that the woman inheriting the defendant’s farm was a Siler. The federal judge who did rule on the petition dismissed it, accusing Lester of “dredging up” a lot of dubious old material and pointing out that he had already received very fair treatment, since he had been permitted to plea bargain and would otherwise have faced a far longer stretch in prison.