Evil Season (11 page)

Murphy lost his virginity when he was fifteen. At the time he was camping with his family in South Central Florida at the Fisheating Creek Campground. The titular creek was supposed to be the most “pristine” in Florida, west of Lake Okeechobee and north of the Everglades.

It was a standard camping place: paddleboats on a cypress swamp, hiking through the hardwood forests, activities that were known in camping advertising as “eco-adventures.”

Murphy had an eco-adventure, all right, and it was a doozy. The girl was also fifteen. She was from Miami and very good-looking.

“Dark brown hair and a medium build,” Murphy said. “I do not remember her name.”

They took a walk around the campground in the dark and did it on a picnic table. He did remember an awkward moment as they tried to achieve penetration with her panties just pulled down. It was he who realized that they'd be a lot more comfortable, and successful, if she took off her underwear altogether.

“It was great!” Murphy exclaimed. “And it did wonders for my fifteen-year-old self-esteem.”

 

 

At age sixteen, he discovered scuba diving. He fell in love with it and decided to make diving his career, either as a scuba-diving instructor or as a deep-sea diver.

He went to Hardee High School in poor, rural Hardee County during the 1970s. Although he claimed not to remember her, Murphy's classmate Debbie Gulliver remembered Brutus well—and she had nothing but nice things to say about him. He wasn't the type to get in trouble. In fact, he was considered one of the “smart kids.”

Brutus's favorite high-school subject was drafting and auto mechanics, which he took during the first semester of his senior year.

Brutus was athletic, but he wasn't a jock. He didn't play sports and was not a spectator at sporting events. Every once in a while, he'd watch a football game. His favorite sport on TV was the Olympics, especially the Winter Olympics.

Hardee County, population fifteen thousand, was not exactly the land of opportunity, and the people there were most likely to work in the citrus, cattle, or phosphate-mining industries. Anyone with another ambition split.

During high school, Brutus wrote to all of the diving schools, read the brochures, and picked the one he wanted to attend. He saved most of his money for two years so that he'd be able to attend a “diving instructor college.”

As a teen he didn't require as much solitude as today, and on weekends he could be found raising a little hell.

“I used to go out drinking with my friends,” Murphy remembered.

His best friend during those years was Ralph Lovelady (pseudonym). Brutus was with Ralph the first time he ever got arrested: 1973, possession of alcohol by a minor.

“We had to spend the night in jail,” Murphy recalled. “Kind of funny now. Lovelady went on to be a sheriff's deputy out of school.”

The rest of Lovelady's story wasn't quite so funny.

“Lovelady was still in his early twenties when he himself became a suspect for a series of crimes in Hardee County. When his colleagues at the sheriff's department came to arrest him, Lovelady shot himself.”

Others in Murphy's carousing crowd were Danny Yeomans, of Zolfo Springs, a crossroads a couple miles south of Wauchula, and Randy Wiggins and David Smith, who lived in Wauchula proper.

Murphy's other close high-school friend was Randy Newsome, but he wasn't a drinking buddy. He, too, went into law enforcement for a time, working for the Wauchula Police Department (WPD). For some reason he didn't stick with it, and Randy ended up driving a truck.

“I haven't seen any of them since high school,” Murphy said sadly.

 

 

Brutus Murphy went out on the occasional date during high school, but he had no long-term girlfriends. A couple of the girls he went out with were Deborah Clanton and Lorraine Baucum.

Then there was Rose. Ah, Rose. He remembered many things about Rose, but her last name wasn't one of them. She was from Arcadia, which was about twenty miles south of Wauchula, along Route 17.

But his most memorable experience with a girl during his teen years occurred on his eighteenth birthday, and her name was Sheryl Hayes.

“I'd been socializing with her at Hardee High. She'd agreed to give me some on my birthday,” Murphy recalled. Trouble was, she was only fifteen.

Brutus and Sheryl, his brother Dean and his girlfriend, and a couple of other couples went camping near Sheryl's house. Dean was Brutus's only sibling, fourteen months younger than Brutus.

If only everyone had kept their yap shut, then everything would have been great: “Sheryl made the mistake of telling her younger sister where she was going. So here we were, all camped down by a creek in a pasture, and I had a condom on about to do the deed, when out of nowhere here comes a truck tearing out across the pasture with its lights on coming toward us. Sheryl says, ‘That's my father, Brutus! You better run and hide!'”

Brutus took the advice and scurried—no shirt, pulling up his jeans—behind some brush and trees along the creek bank. He peeked out and he could see three men, all with guns, who looked like Sheryl's father and two brothers. He heard Sheryl's dad barking orders. The whole party was ordered into the back of his truck. Then Brutus heard the man calling out to him.

“I have everyone in the back of my truck at gunpoint. Unless you want something to happen to them, you will come out of your hiding!” the man shouted.

So Brutus came out and got into the truck with the others. The two brothers held guns on them.

Sheryl's father said, “Brutus, how old are you?”

“Seventeen,” Murphy lied.

“It's a good thing you're not eighteen,” Sheryl's father said, “or I'd break your scrawny-looking neck, you being with my daughter the way you were!” He was a big man, outweighed the teenager by a hundred pounds. “Brutus, I called your folks and they are going to meet us at my house,” he said.

When Brutus's parents arrived, his dad defused the situation. The teen had to promise never to have anything to do with Sheryl ever again, and it was a promise he had no trouble keeping.

He went to his senior prom with the new girl in school, named Vanessa Coons. “We had a good time there, but that was it. Afterward, we went our separate ways,” Murphy recalled.

Looking back on his life, Murphy feels like high school was kind of a blank, a waiting period. “It wasn't until after high school that things began happening to me,” he said.

 

 

Brutus moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and attended PADI, which meant Professional Association of Diving Instructors. It was the best school out there. Their registered motto was: “The Way the World Learns to Dive.” PADI was, and is, the world's leading scuba-diving training organization, although Brutus got the impression that tourism was their bread and butter.

The school offered courses right there, locally, of course; but it also offered courses at a variety of global vacation spots. These were courses designed, it appeared, for folks with serious coin.

It was cool that they didn't just teach scuba diving. They did things to help the world as well, through their conservation efforts. The school was less than a decade old, to boot, founded in 1966 after a couple of friends—one teacher and swimming instructor, and one a salesman for U.S. Divers—came up with the idea over shots of Jack Daniel's. Both had come to the conclusion that scuba-diving schools were poorly run and made entry into the world of underwater breathing much more difficult than it needed to be.

Murphy took the ten-week resident training course designed to graduate open-water scuba instructors. He completed the course in December 1975 and received a variety of certifications. He became an instructor, equipment repair specialist, senior lifesaver, and American Red Cross instructor of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

Certificates in hand, Brutus Murphy moved to Key Largo, Florida, where he was self-employed as a scuba instructor at the Bryn Mawr Marina & Campground. He concentrated on speed, and became convinced he could train and certify scuba divers faster than anyone else around. He got so fast that he could do it in three days.

“I definitely taught the shortest course in the United States,” Murphy boasted.

While teaching scuba diving, Brutus did his best to stay up on all of the latest developments by reading
Skin Diver Magazine,
which featured ads for—and feature articles about—new equipment. There was lots of gorgeous photography, and the magazine was part travelogue, with articles about the latest hot spots to dive, always suitable for a luxurious vacation, and other things to do while there. He always learned something with every issue. They had Q&A columnists in different categories, like technology, medicine, teaching, and “turning pro.”

In one issue of
Skin Diver,
Murphy read an article about U.S. Navy underwater photographers. It sounded like the perfect job, he thought—and so he enlisted in the navy in 1976. He endured boot camp in San Diego, California; then he moved to the Naval Air Station Pensacola, where he attended the navy's School of Photography.

From there he spent the remainder of his five-year hitch at the Naval Air Station Bermuda. When it came to military service, this was about as good as it got. Murphy loved it there. He worked in the base's photo lab, which was part of the Atlantic Fleet Audio/Visual Facility.

“It was a great job in a paradise of a location,” Murphy reminisced.

The base he lived on had been an air force base until 1970. He lived in Bermuda for four years. During that stint he took thousands of photographs, both as part of his job and on his own. He was a photographer for the base weekly newspaper, the
Bermuda Skyliner.
For years on end, Murphy had photos in every issue. He eventually got to the point where he was Bermuda's number one naval photographer, photographing naval events at both bases on the island, as well as all sorts of related activities.

Murphy offered a quick aside: The United States left Bermuda in 1995, but the island remained, for obvious reasons, a great place for reunions, not that Murphy ever attended any of those.

“Not that all of the events I photographed were that exciting,” he admitted.

If the military loved one thing, it was ceremonies. There was a ceremony every day, awards, promotions, whatever. Lots of marching, bands playing . . . Brutus Murphy took pictures of them all.

And, then again, some photography jobs were very, very exciting. He was in charge of the aerial photography as well, and he got to ride in a Huey H1N helicopter once a month.

In sharp contrast he also worked as the base portrait photographer and—his camera mounted on a tripod—took thousands of studio portraits of base personnel.

But home base for Murphy during those years was the darkroom, where he spent many enjoyable hours, becoming a master of developing film and printing photographs.

Some of his tasks were downright spooky, in a secret agent James Bond kind of way. Murphy served a role in the then-ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union.

“I had clearance to handle classified material and developed aerial photo surveillance photos taken from a P-3 Orion reconnaissance plane,” Murphy said.

The P-3 was a land-based, long-range, antisubmarine patrol aircraft, flew at 28,300 feet, had a mission radius of 2,380 nautical miles. And, if things got nasty, the P-3 could bite back, as it was capable of holding ten tons of ordnance. Judging by the photos taken from the P-3, Murphy figured there wasn't a Soviet ship or submarine in the Atlantic Ocean that the U.S. Navy didn't know about.

Murphy says that his photographic work became of such a high quality in Bermuda that he was offered a job teaching photography at Los Angeles Community College-Overseas. Brutus explained that he didn't have a college education, but the lady from the college said none was needed. And besides, Brutus came highly recommended by Chief Clinton. And that was how he ended up teaching Photography 101 for three semesters. The course covered photographic and darkroom techniques. After his second semester as a teacher, the college presented him with a “provisional teaching credential.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but Bermuda was mostly just fun. Murphy and a friend of his, fellow Photographer's Mate John Pappas, bought an inflatable boat and motor together. They decided to get the best, so they bought an Avon, the number one manufacturer of inflatable boats since the 1950s. Their boats were built by hand from tough materials and came with a ten-year warranty.

He joined the base dive club, the Reef Roamers, and dove in the ocean at least once a week for the entire time he was there. One of the best things about the club was access to underwater cameras.

“I shot hundreds of underwater photos, including shots of the various shipwrecks along the ocean floor off Bermuda,” Murphy said.

In 1977, his life took an unexpected turn. That year, he was sent back to Pensacola for some advanced photographic training.

“I wasn't there long, just long enough to meet Elaine Crabtree and fall in love with her,” Murphy remembered.

His friend Mark Klothacus introduced them.

“Back then, I was a deeply devout Christian, and so was she. We met at United Pentecostal Church.”

The church taught the Bible standard of full salvation, which was the absolute essentiality of repentance; baptism was immersion for the remission of sins; the speaking of tongues as the “Spirit gives utterance.”

Brutus and the woman saw stars immediately, and their initial romance was brief. He had to return to Bermuda after a week. Once returned to the base, he couldn't get his mind off her. He recorded a marriage proposal and mailed the cassette tape to Elaine; she agreed. Several months later he returned to Pensacola to be married.

The groom was twenty; the bride was twenty-two. He recalled a beautiful ceremony, at the same church where they'd met. A beautiful sun-drenched white church on Sun Valley Drive, right across the street from an equally sunny gas station.

Both sets of parents were there, as well as a contingency from the church's congregation. Best man was fellow navy photographer's mate second class (PH2) Mark Klothacus, the same man who'd introduced them.

The honeymoon was brief, in more ways than one. The vacation was short and the romantic glow quickly faded. The new couple moved to Bermuda and lived in base housing. They were together for three years.

“For the first two of those years, we were Seventh-Day Adventists,” Murphy said.

That group believed that God's greatest desire was for worshippers to see him clearly—not so much to see his face, as some thought, but to see the quality of God's character. As worshippers experienced God's love, they came to see their own lives more clearly as well.

“For the third and last year together, we mutually agreed to become vegetarians,” Murphy added. “The preacher's wife, also a vegetarian, taught Elaine how to cook a variety of nonmeat dishes.”

Murphy was the one who ended the marriage.

“I allowed the devil to get to me,” he later said. He flew to the Norfolk, Virginia, Naval Base for about a week. There he made contact with a woman in the navy he'd worked with in Bermuda. She'd been reassigned to Norfolk and they got together a couple of times in her dormitory room on the base.

Brutus confessed to Elaine that he had sinned and had brought pain upon their marriage through the act of lusting after other women.

Contrary to his wants and needs, Elaine initially forgave him for his lust and stayed with him. She was definitely not getting the hint. For three weeks Brutus had to save up all of his meanness and say every nasty thing he could think of before Elaine agreed to leave Bermuda.

“She moved out on our third anniversary, in 1980. She returned to Pensacola, and I have not seen her since—not even for the divorce,” Murphy said.

She did try to make a collect call a couple of years later, but Murphy didn't accept the charges. But, even in 2011, he knew her current address, including her remarried name and an alias she used sometimes. With his vegetarian-cooking wife gone for good, Murphy spent the rest of his time in Bermuda living the footloose and fancy-free life of a single man.

 

 

Rid of Elaine, and swinging, Brutus rented an off-base apartment and dedicated his leisure time to entertaining a string of tourist women—oh, my—and one naval wife. Oh, the naval wife!

While teaching his photography class, Murphy had a student who was a “delightful-looking twenty-eight-year-old wife of another naval photographer.”

Her husband, apparently, lacked the patience to teach his own wife how to take photos. She needed college credit, so she took Murphy's class, and they hit it off right away.

“I could tell that she liked me a lot, right from the start. She kept looking at me as if I were an icecream treat she wanted to eat,” Murphy boasted.

At one point during the course, Murphy informed his students that he did a lot of underwater photography as a hobby—and that he was a scuba-diving teacher before he was a photography teacher. After that class his favorite student asked him if he would teach her underwater photography. She said that she already knew how to scuba dive because she and her husband enjoyed diving on the many wrecks off Bermuda.

“We own an underwater camera, but I don't know how to use it,” she said.

Brutus happily agreed to go diving with her, and to teach her how to use her own and other underwater cameras. He met her at the front gate of the Bermuda Naval Base, and got her a visitor's pass. She brought her own scuba equipment and camera with her. He was familiar with her camera, a Nikonos, because he'd once owned one just like it. He had his own equipment ready, so together they drove out to the NASA tracking station, which was connected to the base.

“Before we went into the water, I gave her about an hour class in underwater photography, including specific instruction in using her camera,” Murphy said.

They changed into their scuba equipment and entered the water. They only had to go out about sixty feet from shore, and they were in forty feet of water surrounded by a beautiful coral reef and many tropical fish—lots of stuff to take photos of.

The other man's wife began taking photos, and Murphy got close to her in the water so he could assist her in setting the controls. Murphy had his own camera with him, and he took some pictures of her taking pictures.

“I could tell by her facial expression that she was having a blast,” Murphy said.

They were in the water for about an hour. They surfaced and climbed out of the water. They sat together on the lava rock, their feet dangling into a tidal pool. He made her review what she had learned, and he explained in greater detail the usage of different types of underwater cameras.

“All of a sudden, out of the blue, she told me she had an ulterior motive for getting me alone,” Murphy said. “She asked me if I had a wife or a girlfriend.”

He said he was separated from his wife; she was back in the States. She said she was happily married to a good man, who was twenty years older than she was—not that age made a difference, of course. And she'd been faithful to her husband for the entire six years of their marriage.

“It's just that I'm beside myself from thinking about you,” she said. It happened right away. Her eyes had started to twinkle the first time she laid eyes on him, on the first day of photography class, and they had been twinkling ever since. “I don't know how you feel about me, but I would really like to be with you. I would like you to make love to me. Oh, God, I can't believe I just said that out loud! Please tell me that I didn't just make a fool out of myself.”

“No, you didn't,” Brutus said, with a comforting tone. “And I am very flattered that you find me interesting. Well, I guess our photography lesson is over.”

He smiled at her and made his move. He embraced her and made love to her right there in the tidal pool.

“It was great, and so was she,” Murphy said.

After that, Murphy and the other guy's wife met a few more times, always in Murphy's small apartment. They had wine and piña coladas and fantastic lovemaking. After that, the woman said she needed to call it quits, needed to get back to concentrating on being a good wife.

“It was fun while it lasted,” Murphy said. “Great memories.”

 

 

He played hard, and he worked hard. His service to his country was lauded. He received several letters of appreciation for a job well done.

“I was awarded the Good Conduct medal and the Navy Achievement medal,” Murphy said. The latter was for doing an excellent job as the petty officer in charge of the Atlantic Fleet Audio/Visual Facility. His rank at that time was actually E5, petty officer second class.

After all of those millions of photos Murphy took of naval ceremonies, now he got to be the subject of just such a photo, proudly receiving his medal. The photo ran in the
Bermuda Skyliner
.