Trooper Down! (22 page)

Melinda Harmon and Giles's parents were instructed to come to the Haywood County Hospital, where they were notified by the physician on duty that Giles was dead. Late into the night, patrol wives and troopers came to sit with the family and offer their support. They would remain a steady source of comfort throughout the days ahead.

For the men on duty, work took on a new meaning. Someone had killed a law enforcement officer—the first North Carolina patrolman to be slain since “Pete” Peterson's death six years earlier in 1979—and it was now the highway patrol's job to find out who had done it, and why.

Immediately after the shooting, Billy McQueen and Charles Barker sped up Interstate 40 in Barker's dark green 1969 Oldsmobile, taking the first exit into an area known, ironically, as Harmon Den. From there, they drove onto a U.S. Forest Service gravel road and stopped. McQueen, who was driving, got out, pulled the yellow stakes from the entrance to a side road, and backed the car into the woods—reinserting the stakes so that no one would suspect he had driven the car off the main road. He then cut some small trees, placed them over the Oldsmobile, and covered it with a quilt.

The Asheville Communications Center began receiving eyewitness
reports describing the vehicle shortly after Giles was killed, but kept getting conflicting information.

Part of the problem was that Giles had not radioed in prior to stopping the driver. As a result, there was no quick way to track down the license tag number or registration. To back up their radio systems, some troopers carry a device that records vehicle information and then automatically signals the telecommunications center to send help if the officer fails to return to his patrol car within three minutes.

Giles had such a device and used it regularly. But that day, Tuesday, April 9, it was being repaired in the highway patrol's Asheville garage.

Meanwhile, the North Carolina patrol established a command post at the North Carolina welcome center, less than three miles from the tunnel, while the Tennessee state patrol blocked highways from Newport to the North Carolina state line. Troopers from as far east as Raleigh were mobilized and told to head for the mountains of western North Carolina.

By Wednesday, the area was saturated with law enforcement officers—from N.C. Department of Correction employees who brought their tracking dogs, to U.S. Forest Service rangers who evacuated campers and fishermen. The FBI, the SBI, wildlife officers, deputies from surrounding counties, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents, and nearly every top-ranking officer in the highway patrol were there. Those without a specific assignment sat around makeshift tables at the welcome center sipping coffee and speculating on why Giles had been killed.

Below the welcome center in Harmon Den, men were spaced every few hundred yards, watching and waiting for any unusual signs of activity. Overhead, National Guard and highway patrol helicopters, along with fixed-wing aircraft, scouted the dozens of logging roads that snaked across the rugged terrain.

But there was no sign of the dark green car or its occupants. All the patrol knew so far was that the fugitives could possibly be the same men wanted in connection with an armed robbery that had taken place earlier Tuesday in Tennessee.

Then a major break occurred in the case.

About 1:00
P.M.
on Wednesday, less than twenty-four hours after
the shooting, Steven Burns, a forestry technician with the U.S. Forest Service, was cruising an isolated road in Harmon Den when a car approached. The driver, who identified himself as Charles G. Barker, stopped and motioned to Burns.

Dressed in soiled, wrinkled overalls and looking like he hadn't shaved in days, the older man appeared scared and nervous.

“Help me!” he said.

“How can I help you?” Burns replied.

“I've been kidnapped, robbed, and shot.”

“At first,” said Burns, “I thought he was a nut. I figured he wanted money from me or some kind of favor. I didn't believe his story.”

“Say you've been kidnapped, robbed, and shot? Well, why didn't you tell the patrolmen stationed at the top of the mountain?”

“I haven't been to the top of the mountain and I didn't see no patrolmen,” Barker said. Then he opened the car door and raised his right pants leg to show Burns an obvious gunshot wound.

“Help me,” he repeated. “He shot that patrolman for no reason at all.”

“You mean you saw that patrolman killed?” Burns asked, startled.

“Yeah. And he's gonna come back and kill me if he finds me here. He told me not to leave until after five o'clock.”

“All I can do is turn you over to the highway patrol,” Burns said,

“Okay. Just help me.”

Burns instructed Barker to follow him out of Harmon Den but to stop and pull over when he got to Interstate 40. He, Burns, would then radio ahead from his Forest Service vehicle, explain what had happened, and have a trooper meet them there.

But the highway patrol refused the request. Certain they were on the right trail with the Arkansas fugitives, it appeared they could not be bothered with what they thought was a false lead.

Asheville Citizen-Times 
reporter Bob Scott remembers seeing Barker and Burns arrive at the welcome center command post and try to approach several officers who all but ignored them.

“Everyone thought Barker was just a drunk who had wandered in,” said Scott. “He looked rough, like he'd been behind a mule all day. There were two holes in his right trouser leg and some bleeding from what appeared to be a gunshot wound. I went over and started talking to him and he told me how this patrolman came up to the car and that his buddy, for no reason, had shot him point blank. So
I went to Charles Chambers, head of the SBI, and said, ‘You need to talk to this guy. He claims he was with the fella who shot the trooper. And look at his car. It matches the description the truckers gave.'”

All of a sudden the officers realized they had an important witness in hand, rushed over to Barker and Burns, and shuffled them off to a room for questioning. Since Burns had accompanied Barker to the welcome center, both cars—Burns's light green U.S. Forest Service Jeep and Barker's dark green 1969 Oldsmobile—were immediately impounded and searched for evidence.

Barker recounted his story that he had been kidnapped by his companion, twenty-five-year-old Billy McQueen, of Lexington, Kentucky, forced to draw sixty dollars out of a safety-deposit box, then brought to North Carolina where he was robbed, shot, tied up, and abandoned on one of the back roads in Harmon Den.

After McQueen ran off into the woods, Barker managed to free himself and was attempting a getaway in his car when he spotted U.S. Forest Service employee Steven Burns. He either could not or would not explain why McQueen had kidnapped and abused him, but repeatedly told the officers that McQueen “shot that trooper for no reason at all.”

It was a strange tale, but at least now the patrol had something to go on.

Barker was taken to a local hospital where he was treated for his wound and brought back to the scene at Harmon Den. Accompanied by highway patrol and SBI officers, he pointed out where his car had been hidden and added that McQueen had a .22-caliber pistol and a rifle with a scope. It was later established that the gun—which was never located—belonged to Barker. A .22-caliber shell casing was found in the car, along with bloodstains (apparently from Barker's leg wound) and several empty beer cans. Both men had been drinking heavily the night they were stopped by Giles Harmon.

With that, the search for McQueen began in earnest and intensified throughout Wednesday night and the next day. About 4:00
P.M.
on Thursday, a motorist on Interstate 40, three miles from where the shooting took place, spotted someone scrambling across the highway and down into a gorge. The driver stopped a short distance away and told patrolling officers what he'd seen.

Trooper Mike Thompson used his binoculars to pinpoint the man's whereabouts. The physical description fit the suspect (six feet one, dark brown hair, wearing brown zip-up coveralls, a denim shirt, and a tan vest) and Thompson was sure he had McQueen in sight.

“I saw him walking out of the edge of the woods along a shallow river bed about thirty feet wide. I yelled to him to lay down, spread-eagled, and he did. Then I told him to get up and walk towards the river. I was trying to get him out into the open. He went about thirty yards up the center of the creek bed where I told him to lay down again.”

By now, the highway patrol's helicopter was hovering overhead and a number of officers from different law enforcement agencies had arrived to help with the capture. It was rough terrain—steep mountain walls and thick, scraggly bushes lined both sides of the creek bed.

Trooper David McMurray, a Vietnam veteran and trained sharpshooter, was the only man with a sniper rifle, so he climbed a rock overlooking the river and aimed his gun at McQueen, telling him not to move or he'd pull the trigger.

Among those who scurried down the bank after McQueen was Trooper Randy Campbell.

“The gorge went straight down and I didn't want to carry my shotgun, so I remember handing it to another trooper before going over the side. There were about ten officers standing at the top of the ridge by then.

“When I reached McQueen, he was on his stomach with his hands behind his head. I pulled my revolver and approached him from his feet. I placed the gun behind his right eye, put my knee in the small of his back, and told him if he moved I'd kill him.

“‘I'm not gonna do anything,' McQueen said.

“Then I put his left arm behind his back and cuffed him. Other officers joined me and someone read him his rights while the rest of us got him to his feet.”

McQueen was literally hoisted up the gorge by a rope that had been tied and thrown to the men below.

“About halfway up the bank, we stopped to rest,” recalled Campbell, “and McQueen said, ‘You've asked me several questions. Now I want to ask you something. Does this involve murder?'”

McQueen was told he wasn't getting any information, but one officer, unable to restrain himself, muttered, “It involves the electric chair, if that tells you anything.”

McQueen was silent for a moment, then asked, “Did he have any kids?” An officer answered no.

All the way up the steep bank, McQueen, whose shirt was torn and hands were scratched by the rocks and briars over which he was being dragged, remained quiet and cooperative.

Then his attitude abruptly changed.

“I was behind him, carrying a couple of rifles,” said Campbell, “and all of a sudden he started screaming, crying, and yelling that we were hurting him. By this time, we had come up over the top of the ridge and the scene had altered drastically. Earlier, there had been only a few people standing around. Now it was a mob.

“I thought, ‘My god, where did all these people come from?' Cars were parked all over the place and spectators were rushing up to see what was going on. The media were there, along with dozens of officers, and the helicopter was still flying overhead. It had turned into a zoo.”

Campbell speculates McQueen knew he had an audience and wanted to give them a scene they would remember.

He was taken to Haywood County jail where he was held without bond pending a hearing. Barker was released, with no charges filed against him.

Six months later, Billy McQueen, Jr., was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in a trial that lasted only eight days. The case is currently on appeal.

During the courtroom proceedings, he appeared each day dressed to the nines, dark brown hair neatly combed (“He looks more like an attorney than his attorney does,” someone remarked), and testified that he remembered only bits and pieces of what had happened the night of April 9.

He said he and Charles Barker had been drinking steadily for about twenty-four hours prior to being stopped at the tunnel. He recalled nothing about the shooting. It was this defense—that McQueen's judgment was severely impaired by alcohol and emotional problems—which contributed to the life sentence imposed rather than the death penalty.

But it was not a verdict with which everyone agreed.

Giles's parents—who attended the trial daily and sat teary-eyed as one witness after another was called to the stand—expressed disappointment that McQueen got off without the death sentence.

“We don't think it's fair this man took our son's life and the jury consented to life sentencing,” explained Frank Harmon. “How can you justify this type of person coming into the state and killing another human being who was just doing his job?”

A number of highway patrol members agreed.

“If we get killed as law enforcement officers and the public doesn't choose to back us with the death penalty,” said one trooper, “how can they turn around and expect us to protect them?”

“Giles was gunned down execution-style,” said another officer, “and that's justification for capital punishment.”

On Friday, April 12, 1985, Giles Harmon was laid to rest in his hometown of Brevard, North Carolina. The service was attended by more than 300 law enforcement officers, friends, and family members. He was twenty-six years old.

His death—as the forty-second North Carolina trooper killed in the line of duty since 1929 and the fifteenth officer fatally assaulted—deeply affected everyone who knew him and even some who did not.

Aside from the personal and professional loss, troopers who seldom worried about their safety on the road began to rethink the possibility that something could, indeed, happen to them.

“I pay more attention to things around me now,” said a patrolman who admitted that, prior to Giles's death, he had grown careless on the job. “It's made all the troopers more aware, more cautious. It's taught us not to take anything for granted when we stop someone on patrol.”