Everyone conceded Lester’s cleverness, even brilliance; no one doubted his knowledge of the law or the thoroughness with which he usually prepared a case. It was his theatrics that offended other members of the bar and some judges. There were those who called him a buffoon. John Y. Brown, Sr., once advised a certain client to plead guilty and accept a sentence of ten years in prison. The client consulted Lester, who asked how much John Y. was charging him. The man said fifteen hundred dollars, and Lester said that that was about fourteen-ninety-nine too much. What did he need a lawyer for? He could go to prison on his own. The man went back to John Y. Brown and fired him, saying he was hiring Lester Burns.
“But—Lester Burns has no finesse!” John Y. protested.
“You tell John Y.,” Lester retorted when he heard this, “that Lester Burns has finessed everything he ever started.”
When Lester purchased the first of his twenty-foot-long motor homes displaying his name across the front and sides, the bar association again took exception. Lester told them that if they didn’t care for this one, he had another bus that lit up in neon with the slogan, “If You Cough, Call Us!” The facetious reference was to his advocacy of black lung disease cases on behalf of miners. He would roll into the coalfields with an entourage of assistants and gofers—some of them former clients paying off debts to him by working for nothing—and open up for business on the spot, doing minor legal work for free and taking black lung cases on a contingency basis. He was a pioneer in this litigation, which did more than anything else to build his reputation and income.
When the government tightened the rules on black lung suits, making it difficult for Lester to turn a wheeze into money, “I could feel the darkness closing in,” he remembers in one of his favorite asides. Quick to adjust, he began to specialize in criminal defense, which occupied about seventy-five percent of his practice, with personal injury and medical malpractice taking up most of the rest. By one means or another, he continued to enhance his reputation as the champion of the little man—or woman. First it had been the injured miner against the corporation; now it was the accused against an oppressive system of justice and a vindictive prosecutor, or, if Lester was himself prosecuting, the victim’s family crying out for retribution. Lester was careful, whatever the economic temptations, never to represent the obviously rich and powerful unless he could somehow cast them in the role of the oppressed. And he continued to do some work for free or for next to nothing. He took on for one dollar, for instance, any case in which a state trooper was charged with any sort of crime—out of warm memories of his days on the force, he said, and because troopers were shamefully underpaid public servants who daily risked their lives for the common good. Whatever his motives, this public-spirited generosity did no harm in terms of publicity and may even, some cynics claimed, possibly have caused troopers called to testify in criminal cases to modify, to soften, perhaps to shape their testimony in Lester’s behalf without, of course, ever stepping over the perilous line of perjury.
As Lester became more and more identified with criminal cases, his flamboyance—the word reporters associated with him more than any other—increased, his sense of drama growing bolder. He had the instincts of a P. T. Barnum or a Mike Todd, that if the public likes what you are giving them, give them more of it.
ATTORNEY LESTER BURNS TURNS THE COURTROOM INTO A STAGE read a front-page headline in the Lexington Herald-Leader, under a three-column photograph of Lester standing grinning beside his bus, dressed in a Western-cut suit, rings flashing, an enormous gold-on-silver belt buckle gleaming. He had discovered that, although Kentucky was hardly the Wild West, Western clothing, including handmade ostrich-, snake-, and turtleskin boots, always played well.
“I would have no quarrel with the word flamboyant,” he said.
“I’ve been known to get down on the floor and I’ve been known to wrap myself in the American flag.” He meant all of this literally.
“But if working to the fullest extent of my abilities for my clients, if wearing expensive clothes and expensive diamonds and giving myself fully to every case I take is being flamboyant, then I plead guilty to being flamboyant.”
His theatrics included high-powered firearms. Explaining his need for bodyguards, automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns, Lester claimed that “the cases I have are not ones that enhance popularity,” a judgment with which most Eastern Kentuckians would have disagreed. “It’s sad, but I have to go heavily armed. When the crooks and killers of this country know you’re packing a gun they won’t be so quick to go out there and shoot people down in the streets.” Here he walked a tightrope, because he was defending crooks and killers at the same time that he presented himself as their enemy. The people saw no contradiction: it was a variation on the mountain philosophy.
To Lester the principle was simple and obvious, that ordinary people, the common people if you like, will always admire and covet what they cannot have and will continue to admire the person having it, as long as he never forgets where he came from and never loses the common touch. He was the millionaire who was still the country boy. He was a Will Rogers figure, tweaking the establishment and, it was true, scorned by it even as he bought up tracts of land and collected rent in six counties. He was a law-and-order man even as the assumption grew, and he began to worry about it, that anyone Lester Burns defended must be guilty, whatever the verdict.
When he tried a murder case at Greenup on the Ohio River, he leased a sternwheel riverboat for himself and his entourage. After all, he said, there were so few motel rooms. Lester Burns deserved adequate accommodations just the same as any rock or country music star; the public expected it. When he drove into a mountain town in his Rolls-Royce, he sat down on the courthouse steps to chat with the folks and a crowd gathered. The sheriff asked if Lester would allow him to open the doors and rope off the car so everyone could examine it without damaging it. “Sure,” Lester said, “but doesn’t anyone want to take a spin?” Several hands went up. Lester tossed the keys to the crowd, and people drove that Rolls around as carefully as if it had been their own.
One old man, however, came up and told Lester that he was worried about him:
“Lester, are you in trouble? Have you lost all your money?”
“What do you mean?” Lester asked.
“That car.”
“Why, that’s a Rolls-Royce. That’s the most expensive car in the world.”
“I don’t care what you’re telling me,” the old man said. “What’s happened to your Cadillac?”
Although he continued to concentrate on the mountains, Lester’s fame brought him cases all over the Commonwealth and into neighboring states. His country-boy tricks played well in all rural areas. On a foray into Ohio, he arranged to be followed by a pickup truck loaded with Kentucky country hams, and he began handing them out as soon as he arrived at the courthouse. When he went to see his client, the jailer, giving Lester a hostile, contemptuous stare, told him that visiting hours were over. He would have to come back tomorrow, like everyone else.
“This is a legal matter,” Lester said. “I am the gentleman’s attorney.”
“I don’t care who you are,” the jailer said.
Lester summoned a gofer and offered the jailer a ham.
“Your wife will love it,” Lester said. “You’ve never tasted anything like it, and there’s enough here for the whole family. They say that a man alone with a Kentucky ham is a definition of eternity.”
The jailer took it but suggested that it might be a good idea to give the sheriff one, too, and a couple of the deputies might like one. Lester obliged and was able to see his client day or night after that. When someone suggested that this was bribery, Lester replied, “When the time comes in America that our great system of justice can be perverted by a country ham, we might as well give in to the Russians.”
It was inevitable that Lester Burns would take a fling at politics. In the mid-sixties he was elected Commonwealth’s Attorney for Clay, Lesl
ie, and Jackson counties, a part-time post that he won in a walk and that permitted him to carry on his private practice while reinforcing his law-and-order image. In 1967 he ran for Attorney General as a Republican populist, attacking “those ruthless, cutthroat, moneystealing politicians in Frankfort,” calling Democratic gubernatorial candidate Henry Ward “a liar, a thief, a rat, and a little weasel,” ex-Governor Bert Combs “Dirty Bert the Little Squirt,” President Johnson “Lightbulb Lyndon,” and Vice President Humphrey “Hubert Heartbeat.” He lost, narrowly, to Democrat John Breckinridge. In a try for the governorship, he enlivened a commercial television spot by grabbing the Stars and Stripes and using it as a shawl, but he failed to gain the Republican nomination.
Lester was too outrageous for statewide office. His popularity in his native and other rural areas was solid; but many educated urban and suburban voters could not take him seriously, and some called him a clown, an embarrassment to Kentucky’s attempts to shake its backwoods reputation. As a Republican who appealed to the working class and sensed that working people resented welfare, high taxation, and the politics of promises and preferred to identify with material success rather than with the poor, Lester was ahead of his time, anticipating the national Republican strategy of the eighties. But as a man who gloried in his hillbilly roots, he seemed an anachronism. And he had stepped on too many establishment toes over the years. He went back to being “the people’s lawyer,” as he had always called himself.
He also left the mountains, although his criminal practice continued to be centered there, where most of the crime was. In 1972 he and his family moved fifty miles west to Somerset, on Lake Cumberland, a gentler landscape and perhaps the most picturesque in Kentucky, soon to become a prospering tourist mecca, much to the enhancement of Lester’s investments in land. There he built a large office with a balcony cantilevered over the lake. He also bought the building next door, leasing it to a psychic, astrologer, and palm reader who was always on time with the rent.
Somerset, the home grounds of the patrician Republican U.S. Senator John Sherman Cooper, was named for the Duke of Somerset and had about it a certain leisureliness and even elegance. Lester built a handsome, four-bedroom house beside the fairways of the Eagle’s Nest Country Club and a stone farmhouse overlooking the lake, where on lush acres he raised Black Angus cattle, fished, shot the breeze and drank a little with his buddies, and drove heavy equipment to let off steam. For his widowed mother, Ruby, he purchased a condominium and dropped by to share with her the latest results from the Kentucky and other state lotteries.
At the Eagle’s Nest house, decorated by Asonia, who had conservative taste and was as shy as he was bold, Lester played the soft-spoken country gentleman in blue blazer, designer jeans, and cordovan loafers. In his garage he tinkered with classic automobiles—"I love knocking them down and putting them back together again screw by screw"—including the first air-conditioned American car, a 1938 Packard that eventually brought nearly two hundred thousand dollars at auction in New York. Not to disappoint his mountain faithful, he had customized to his specifications a “Saturn-bronze” Cadillac Fleetwood 75 limousine with crushed-velvet bronze upholstery and curtains, a bar, refrigerator, television set, and a rear window in the shape of the ace of spades.
“I am going day and night” was his byword. In 1982 he was back in politics as Commonwealth’s Attorney for Pulaski and Rockcastle counties, winning ninety-three percent of the vote in one and eighty-six percent in the other; but even his loyalists thought he took his knack for publicity a bit far when he had himself photographed arresting drunk drivers at gunpoint.
In 1983 he outfitted a new motor home with a satellite dish, burglar-alarm system, charcoal grill, gun racks, sleeping accommodations for five, three computers, a basic law library, and a horn that played Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”
“I’m always raring to go,” he exulted. “Just put me in that starting gate! You have to love life and love humanity, isn’t it the truth? Otherwise, what’s the point? I’m still the boy from Bullskin Creek. What I need is to find more folks in trouble who’re rich enough to pay my fee!”
3
THE MAN TELEPHONING Lester Burns that August evening in 1985 with the news that Roger Epperson needed a lawyer was Hurley “Sonny” Spencer, who lived in the mountains of Perry County in a village called Viper. The Kentucky State Police knew Spencer as an associate of the late Muggs Cummins, a local drug czar whose body had been discovered one day on the side of a hill, the skull bashed in with a two-by-four. The last time Lester had counseled him, Sonny Spencer had been residing in the Clark County jail; he was now out on parole.
Within a few minutes of Spencer’s call, a woman was on the line from Florida. Sounding agitated, she identified herself as Carol Epperson, Roger’s wife. Roger had been arrested that afternoon and was locked up in the Orange County jail. He wanted no one but Lester Burns for his lawyer. She rattled on nonstop, saying that she would be able to pay Lester’s standard fee in a murder case, which Roger had informed her was one hundred thousand dollars.
He did not have a standard fee, Lester advised. He did not believe in them. His fee depended on a number of variables. Knowing nothing about the case and what would be required of him, he could hardly be asked to estimate as yet what he would have to charge. He was not an auto mechanic or a plumber. Murder was a serious matter. He would come down to Orlando tomorrow to see what he could do.
On Friday, August 16, Lester flew out of Lexington, taking with him Ralph Gibson, a recent law school graduate who was working in Lester’s office that summer. The morning papers told of the arrests of Roger Dale Epperson, Benny Lee Hodge, and Donald Terry Bartley, who had apparently been cornered by the FBI on the previous day and taken to the Orange County jail, where they were booked on charges of first-degree burglary, first-degree robbery, attempted murder, and capital murder. They were suspects in the robbery and attempted murder of Dr. Roscoe J. Acker and the murder of his daughter Tammy, a University of Kentucky student, at the doctor’s residence in Fleming-Neon, Letcher County, Kentucky, on August 8. Approximately five hundred thousand dollars in cash and five thousand dollars in jewelry and other valuables had reportedly been taken from the house.
Lester noted that the amount of money supposedly taken had risen by a hundred thousand since the first reports and that most of it was said to be still missing. The papers did not indicate what had led the police to identify these three men as suspects, nor how the FBI had been able to find them down in Florida within a week of the crimes.
At the Orlando airport Lester rented a car and drove downtown to the Best Western Catalina Inn, on 33rd Street near the county jail. He telephoned Carol Epperson, who was also staying at the motel. She said that she would be right over to Lester’s room. She was bringing along a friend of hers, who she said was Benny Hodge’s girlfriend.
Lester took an instant dislike to Carol Epperson. It was obvious to him that she was on drugs—"a full-blown dopehead” was the way he characterized her—as he had already deduced from her mile-a-minute babbling on the phone. This would make negotiating with her and keeping her under control a big headache. She was also untidy, Lester thought—cleanliness was important to him in judging anyone’s character; he noticed what looked like ketchup on her blouse and spots on her tight pants. Another count against her, from his point of view, was that she looked Japanese. “I can never forget or forgive Pearl Harbor,” Lester liked to say, although he had been ten years old at the time of the attack.
Carol introduced her companion as Sherry Wong, which seemed peculiar, as the woman did not appear to be Chinese or Asian in any respect. She was an inch or two taller than Carol, about five-three or -four, and a few years older, maybe in her mid-thirties. Her hazel eyes, magnified behind clear-rimmed glasses, had deep circles underneath. Dressed in pressed jeans and a T-shirt, she seemed as tidy as Carol was unkempt, as steady and cool as Carol was fidgety. When Sherry spoke, the accent was pure hillbilly
.
“How do I know you’re who you say you are?” she asked. “How do I know you’re a lawyer? You could be FBI. Let’s see some I.D.”
Lester showed her his business card. When that didn’t satisfy her, he emptied the contents of his wallet—credit cards, driver’s license, the works. He said that he admired her caution. She was correct, the FBI must be crawling all over the place. After all, some of the money was missing, wasn’t it? Neither woman indicated yes or no.
“This is Ralph Gibson,” Lester said, “a dandy young lawyer who’s here to assist me.”
Carol took this as an invitation to start talking again. She was impossible to follow. Lester thought he heard something about going to college and Patty Hearst.
“Turn off that mouth, Chop,” Sherry Wong said.
“Why don’t you ladies have a seat?” Lester said. “You all must be worn out. It’s a terrible strain, having loved ones locked up. How about a soda or something?”
It was a standard motel room. Carol and Sherry took the chairs. Gibson and Lester perched on the beds.
Sherry wanted to know what they were supposed to do next. She asked about Lester’s fee.
“I understand that I’ve been asked to represent Roger Epperson,” Lester said. “I’ve known Roger for a long time, and his mother and daddy. They must be suffering, with their boy in the clutches of the law and all. Are they coming to town?”
“What is this going to cost?” Sherry said.
“My fee will be a confidential matter between me and my client. I can tell you this much, I’ll require a retainer up front, so I can give Roger all the attention he deserves, right out of the chute. I would say that he is in a mighty precarious position. One wrong move—”
Dark and Bloody Ground Page 3