by Mark Bowden
As Ames and the vet worked, I looked across a green field and saw a large silo, a small ranch house, and some paddock fence. Is that where Brooks and Ames faced off? Or was it there, on the gravel drive outside this barn? Standing there, trying to get my bearings, I felt the full force of what had happened. It was everywhere and nowhere—the idea that right there on that ground, where a white cat perched on a stall post, where the cows shifted and clanked in their chutes with hypodermic needles planted in their backs, as the vet remarked on the unexpected difficulty of the morning’s work, Perry Brooks was shot dead at close range by his neighbor.
PAUL ORLETT BELIEVES HIS FRIEND was aiming to avoid confrontation on the morning he died. “[Ames] told Perry’s people to come over there before 9:00 A.M., with five hundred dollars to bail out the bull, but Perry said: ‘Hell no, we’ll wait ’til ten. He’ll be gone to Richmond by then.’”
This echoed an earlier episode, when Brooks, learning that his bull was over at Holly Hill Farm, called the farm manager in the middle of the night and suggested the two of them free the bull. “No need to tell the boss,” Brooks advised. When the manager refused the offer, Brooks hung up.
Brooks did not appear to regard this new expedition as risky, Orlett recalled. “Perry said he was going to go get the bull and then come back and work in his greenhouse.”
But the farmhand, Michael Beasley, had misgivings. “I didn’t want to go,” Beasley testified later. “But I didn’t try to talk him out of it, because it wasn’t any use.”
Ames’s wife may have been more vocal. The weekend before the shooting, when Matthew Coleman phoned Holly Hill Farm to arrange the bull’s pickup, Jeanne Ames said, “Don’t let [Brooks] come up here with you,” according to Ames attorney Benjamin Dick.
Brooks waited for Orlett under the old farm bell that once belonged to his father. At Holly Hill Farm, meanwhile, Jeanne Ames left for Richmond, but John Ames waited. He went to retrieve his mail, Dick said. And he waited some more. Dick said Ames, seeing an unfamiliar vehicle, went down to the barn area to investigate, and that Brooks, when told to put the bull back, “shook his stick” at Ames.
Frances Hurt was sitting in her small ranch house a few fields over at the time. It was spring; the forsythia bushes were blooming, and the air was so sweet that she’d flung open all the windows and doors. She was puzzled when she heard the shots. Hunting season had been over for months. She counted six shots in all, in a distinct pattern: one shot—pop—followed by a pause, and then five more, in quick succession—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
“I thought: What in the world? Who is shooting a gun at 10:15 in the morning?”
Beasley testified later that Ames’s first shot had knocked Brooks to the ground. Ames fired five more times.
Orlett was sitting at the wheel of Brooks’s truck, his grandson beside him. At the shots, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw Brooks curled in a fetal position on the gravel. “I could tell by the way Perry was laying that he was dead,” Orlett said later. “Two tours in the infantry in Vietnam, I’ve seen a lot of dead people.”
When Orlett looked back again, he saw Ames with his gun up beside his ear. “It looked like he was reloading,” Orlett testified. Then he saw Ames using a cell phone.
Beasley was walking slowly back toward the truck, his head in his hands, “moaning and groaning something awful,” Orlett said. Beasley climbed in and asked, “What are we going to do?” Orlett said.
“We’re going to get the hell out of here,” Orlett replied.
Beasley later told police that Ames had shot Brooks once in the face, and then, after Brooks was on the ground, stood, firing down “four or five” more times into Brooks’s right side.
Within minutes, the Rev. Kevin James, minister at Brooks’s church and a volunteer firefighter, got a call from the firehouse about the shooting. He heard the address—Holly Hill Farm, Route 207—and felt only dread. “I just knew. I said, ‘One of those two guys is dead.’”
Kim Brooks, who lives in Oakland, California, would get a call from her sister, Jacqueline. Kim had stayed home from work that day, feeling ill and unsettled. “My sister told me John Ames had shot my father and he hadn’t made it back,” she said.
At Brooks’s wake, the crowd of mourners was larger than expected, and the service, scheduled to end at 9:00 P.M., stretched on until well after ten.
Ames was charged with first-degree murder, which carries a maximum life sentence, and a second felony count of using a firearm in commission of a felony. He hired Cooley, whose recent accomplishments include delivering Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger defendant in the Washington sniper case, from the death penalty.
Ames’s lawyers have called the shooting a case of simple self-defense. Ames, said co-counsel Dick, was in mortal fear for his life. After all, Brooks was trespassing in violation of a court order and had once fired a shotgun in Ames’s direction.
The trial date is set for September 12, in Bowling Green. But Cooley has asked the court for a change of venue, saying he believes it will be hard to find an impartial jury in Caroline County, where most people “have taken sides on this one.” The court has put off a decision until after jury selection begins.
Dick said his client has not had an easy time of it since the shooting. “John is not going around gloating. He has nightmares and sleepless nights,” Dick said, adding that Ames fired reflexively at Brooks when he saw the farmer raise his stick. “All John saw was the anger in [Brooks’s] eyes. John was in the Army for four years, you know, and the Army trains you to shoot if you’re being attacked.”
Evelyn Brooks has been selling off her husband’s farm equipment and remaining livestock, in part to help stave off legal action from one of the lawyers who represented Brooks in the fence lawsuits. Ames has a cattle sale scheduled for next month, and he recently told one associate that he is shopping for a calf for his young granddaughter, to get her started in the cattle business.
Matthew and Wick Coleman retrieved the bull a few days after the shooting. A rumor flew around Bowling Green that the bull had been found with a broken penis, that someone at Holly Hill Farm had swung a hammer at it. With its elements of cruelty and violence, the grisly report seemed to resonate in a community stunned that a disagreement over a fence had ended in death. But Wick Coleman said there was no evidence of any such assault. Rather, the bull’s penis sheath, which runs under more than half of its belly, was badly bruised, consistent, perhaps, with a leap over a partially downed fence. In any case, the bull was taken directly from Holly Hill Farm to the slaughterhouse in Fredericksburg, where it was sold for meat.
MARY BATTIATA is a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. She was a Pulitzer finalist for her coverage of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and also has reported from Poland, Romania, and East Africa for the Post. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Coda
I did not cover the criminal trial of John Ames. I had moved on to another assignment by then, and in any case still felt too close to the story and too drained by it to attend as a spectator. For reasons I still can’t quite understand, this story was as grinding, emotionally and physically, as any I’ve written in my twenty-four years as a reporter at the Washington Post, including years as a war correspondent in East Africa and the former Yugoslavia.
Part of it was simply the usual reporter’s lament: none of the parties wanted to have anything to do with me for months on end, well past my first and then second deadline. Part of it was simple sadness at the sorry details of the feud and the pain it had caused all parties. And another giant stressor was my interviews with a long line of John Ames’s former business associates, who told me they’d been sued by him and warned that he was likely to do the same to me. That never happened, as it turned out. But the case continues to reverberate in my head, and I still get calls about it from all over the country, from people who’ve read the story and want to know how it all turned out. Not surprising, really. Nearly everyone has had problems with
a neighbor at one time or another, and this story of tragedy in a corner of rural paradise, a landscape where we like to think an older, more courteous way of life survives, seemed to strike a particular chord.
The trial lasted a week, and at the outset, the judge turned down Ames’s lawyer’s request to move the proceedings to another county. On Friday, September 16, 2005, almost a year and a half to the day after the feud’s bloody conclusion, a jury in Caroline County, Virginia, found John Ames not guilty in the shooting death of his neighbor, Perry Brooks. After the verdict was read, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ames closed his eyes, then hugged his wife and cried. Some in the courtroom and in the surrounding town of Bowling Green expressed surprise at the verdict, not least Brooks’s oldest daughter, Kim, who said it was as if her father had been unable to see the danger that continuing the feud posed to him, despite warnings from family and friends.
One juror said the jury had been evenly divided between acquittal and a charge of involuntary manslaughter at the start of the trial. But over the next three days, they were persuaded by evidence that undercut the eyewitness account of the Brooks’s family farmhand. The scattered pattern of bullet casings found around Brooks’s body after the shooting seemed to show that Brooks had been moving forward, toward Ames, with his stick raised, when Ames fired. “I started backing away,” Ames said. “He took a swing at me with the stick…I ducked, and as I ducked, I cocked the 9mm [pistol], and I fired and kept firing—there were no conscious thoughts.”
Ames testified that Brooks dropped his stick after being struck by the second or third bullet, but continued to lurch forward in a tackling position. “I wanted to be left in peace,” Ames told the prosecutor on the stand. “I wanted this to stop…I think I saved my own life. He left me with no options.” Ames’s wife, Jeanne, testified that she had been so frightened by Perry Brooks’s occasional verbal threats against her family during the fifteen-year feud that she kept a pistol on her nightstand, and the window blinds drawn. Other farm employees told of being threatened by Brooks as well. The jury evidently was less moved by the prosecutor’s argument that Perry Brooks had not threatened the Ames family directly in many years.
Ames defense attorney, Craig Cooley, argued that Ames’s reaction, when confronted with a three-foot stick about the thickness of a shovel handle, had not been excessive. “People have been killed with billy clubs,” he said. The first sheriff’s deputy to reach Holly Hill Farm on the morning of the shooting testified that Ames declined to make a statement, then pointed to Brooks’s body and said: “He’s over there if you want to try to help him.”
Three months after the verdict, in December 2005, Perry Brooks’s widow, Evelyn, accepted a settlement in her $10 million wrongful death suit against John Ames. The settlement was sealed by the court and the amount was not disclosed. Kim Brooks said afterward that her mother had struggled with the decision of whether to settle or let the case go to trial, where the family had hoped additional facts, more favorable to their father, might emerge.
At the time of the settlement, the $45,001.12 lien that Ames had placed on Brooks’s farm back in 1989, in an attempt to force Brooks to pay for his fence, remained unpaid. With interest, it was estimated to have grown to about $150,000.
I have not been back to Caroline County since the story. But one memory of the reporting has stuck with me. It is from my second visit to Holly Hill Farm, in the fall of 2004. I turned up on the day when a visiting vet was on hand to suction multiple embryos from four cows that had been super-fertilized with hormone treatments and then artificially inseminated. The removal of embryos is an exacting task in the best of circumstances. But this day, nothing seemed to go right—one cow was difficult to suction, another seemed to have no embryos, and a third became restless in the holding chute, jumped, and knocked loose the hypodermic needle that had been planted in her back. “John, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a morning like this,” the vet said.
As they worked, I scanned the fields outside the barn. In the distance, just beyond a row of trees, lay Brooks’s farm, and the dirt track that Perry Brooks had traveled on the morning of his death. Then I turned back to Ames, the vet, and the cows. That’s when I noticed a pure white cat sitting like a sentry on top of a stall post. It was watching us coolly, in the way cats do. And for just a moment, it looked to me like the ghost of Perry Brooks, prowling among us, and watching the difficulties in the barn that day with a certain bleak satisfaction.
Howard Blum and John Connolly
HIT MEN IN BLUE?
FROM Vanity Fair
IF BETTY HYDELL HAD NOT turned on the television that afternoon in 1992, she might never have learned the stranger’s name. But there on the Sally Jessy Raphael show was the bruiser who had knocked on her door six years earlier looking for her son. He had come asking for twenty-eight-year-old Jimmy on the day he disappeared—and, she had no doubt, was murdered. Only, now that she knew the man’s name, justice, she was convinced, was impossible. He was beyond the law.
Six years later, she lost another son. Frank, thirty-one, the younger brother, was found lying between two parked cars in front of a Staten Island strip club with three bullets pumped into his head and chest. Now she needed to talk; and slowly, despite her anxieties, she was growing ready.
Finally, in the fall of 2003, say those who participated in the case, Betty Hydell, then sixty-five, shared her long-held secret. It was a secret that would have momentous consequences. This single name resurrected old suspicions and set in motion a covert eighteen-month investigation that led a team of retired New York cops and Drug Enforcement Administration agents back to the bloody gangland wars of previous decades, and had them hunting through seemingly ice-cold cases and unsolved murders. And at the end of their long investigative journey they uncovered what law-enforcement officials are calling “the worst case of police corruption in the history of New York.”
In March, two retired New York City Police Department detectives, Louis Eppolito, fifty-six, and Stephen Caracappa, sixty-three, were charged with working for the Mob. Even as detailed in the careful sentences of the twenty-seven-page federal indictment, the alleged betrayal, which began in the mid-1980s, was both riveting and complete. On the surface, as many of their astonished fellow cops were quick to point out, the pair had been exemplary police officers. Eppolito, big, beefy, and loud, had been a tough street cop, a head-banger who bragged that he had been in eight shoot-outs and had survived to become the NYPD’s eleventh-most-decorated officer. Caracappa was more cerebral, quiet and ruminative, a cool dandy in the trim black suits he had made in Hong Kong. He, too, had put together an impressive two-decade career, serving on the elite Major Case Squad and winning a promotion to detective first grade.
Yet, according to the indictment, while they had been building their careers and passing themselves off as gung-ho cops, they had been taking orders from the Mob. In dozens of cases, they allegedly gave the Mafia the edge, allowing wiseguys to get away with murder—literally. They revealed the names of individuals who were cooperating with the government, and as a result three informants were killed and one was severely wounded. They shared information about ongoing investigations and pending indictments with the Lucchese crime family, one of New York’s five major Mafia clans. But most shocking of all, and unprecedented in the history of the NYPD, they had acted as paid killers. The two detectives were charged with taking part in at least eight Mob hits—including one where they were the shooters. (The body of a ninth suspected victim was discovered after the indictment.)
Incredibly, allegations about the two detectives were first made more than a decade ago. But officials were never able to get the evidence they needed for an indictment.
“We were only able to make this case,” says one of the key investigators on the task force, “because after years of stonewalling we succeeded in getting the man who paid Eppolito and Caracappa to talk.”
However, unknown to the task force, their star witnes
s had long been an informant for the FBI. And according to dismayed law-enforcement officials, if the FBI had shared this information with the NYPD, the two rogue detectives could have been prosecuted years ago.
Instead, the case of the two “Mafia cops” remained little more than a swirl of suspicions until a mournful and angry Betty Hydell decided to speak.
AFTER TWENTY HECTIC YEARS on the job, Detective Tommy Dades was counting the days until his retirement. He had worked narcotics and then gone up against the Colombo crime family as a hard-charging detective in Brooklyn’s Sixty-eighth Precinct. Now, in September 2003, the detective was finishing his career in a Brooklyn organized-crime intelligence unit. His plan was to draw his pension at age forty-two and move on to what he’d been contemplating for years—running a boxing gym on Staten Island while he was still able to go a couple of rounds himself. He’d nurture some tough kid from the projects who had the heart and skill to be a contender. But before he could begin his new life, Dades, always the dutiful cop, hoped to wrap up some of the unresolved cases in his files.
The April 1998 murder of Frank Hydell, a Mob hanger-on, was a case that, despite several arrests, still gnawed at him. With only small justification, Dades felt responsible: Frankie had been working for him—and the FBI—as an informant. The burst of bullets that knocked Frankie down and left him stretched out flat on the street was, Dades believed, the Mob’s retribution.
Over the years, Dades had made a point of keeping in touch with Frankie’s family. He would visit Frankie’s mother, Betty, at her Staten Island home. Flashing his wide smile, Tommy would chat her up in his easy, affable way, hoping their meandering conversations might unearth some buried clue.