They had come some two hundred miles and had about another twenty minutes to go. They could have taken any of several more direct routes, but these were tortuous roads much of the way, and two of them would have meant cutting directly across Harlan County, where Bartley could easily have been recognized and arrested, or pumped full of lead, or all of those.
From Whitesburg Roger drove along the Virginia border east on 119, then branched off northeast through the twists of an obscure secondary road, paved but splashed with mud and not much wider than a pair of buggies. On all sides the woods grew thick, the hills rose and steamed with damp. As spring advanced, thunderstorms came nearly every afternoon to the mountains, and floods were a threat to isolated houses and villages. People stared at them from the porches of occasional shacks and from the few cars and pickups that passed. A story often told in those mountains captured why traveling back roads was a jittery business. There once was an old man living in a hollow who lay in bed all day staring out a window through a rearview mirror salvaged from some wrecked car. He sprawled there, a finger crooked through the handle of a moonshine jug, watching. When he heard the noise of an unfamiliar engine or spotted a stranger on foot, he grabbed his shotgun, shoved it through the window, and opened fire. It passed the time, he said, between Christmas and the Fourth of July.
Donnie asked Roger if he knew where he was going. The road seemed to be headed nowhere, twisting back on itself, confounding any sense of direction. They ought to have put Kentucky plates on the T-bird. At least they had guns. Donnie did some coke. “Man, where the fuck are we?”
Roger told Donnie to shut up. This was home territory for Roger. He had worked in the vicinity stripping coal, scheming to steal trucks. They were halfway between Whitesburg and Jenkins, was where they were.
They passed through Seco, not much more than a grocery store with a pair of gas pumps but once the headquarters of the South East Coal Company, hence the acronym. Roger made a sharp left onto another narrow road. Suddenly they were in Neon, what was left of it.
A new pinkish-brick bank building, its freestanding sign embedded in petunias, contrasted with the other structures along Main Street—a Super 10 variety store, a Radio Shack outlet, a GE appliance shop, a storefront library, all housed in crumbling brick buildings two and three stories high, images from the Great Depression. Many windows were broken or boarded up. At the intersection, ankle deep in muddy water from a recent flood, Roger turned right, passed over railroad tracks, and was in Fleming. Sometimes called Fleming-Neon, the two dingy towns, with a combined population of under two thousand, shared a post office and police and fire departments. In all of Kentucky there was not a more forlorn place.
Many years ago, the towns had known prosperity. Fleming, named after an Elkhorn Coal Corporation executive, started as a company town, built more or less overnight in 1912 when the Louisville & Nashville Railroad reached that point. It consisted mostly of a line of rickety two-story wooden duplexes stretching all the way to McRoberts, some three miles up the road. These housed two miners’ families, with each allotted half the front porch and covered rear stoop. As long as the men and boys could work, a family could stay; death or permanent disability meant eviction. Lured by steady wages, mountaineers abandoned their log cabins and their independence, which, once lost, could never be recovered. They found themselves better clothed, housed, and fed, for a while, but at an unimagined price.
To guarantee subservience, the corporation issued scrip against future wages, requiring workers to purchase groceries, coal for heat and cooking, and everything else from their employer. This tyranny forced miners into perpetual debt, as Tennessee Ernie Ford sang in “Sixteen Tons,” with its line about owing your soul to the company store. The stranglehold on goods and services gave birth to Neon—like Argon and Krypton, named after the “noble gases"—a merchandising center that sprang up at the end of the L & N tracks as an alternative to Elkhorn Coal’s monopoly. There miners could pay cash for goods at competitive prices and enjoy the forbidden pleasures of liquor and bordellos.
When the price of coal plummeted in 1928, however, both towns sank with it and declined further through the Depression, until World War II brought a new boom that lasted until the late forties. Just after the war, old-timers recalled, Neon was still a bustling, rip-roaring place, where a carton of cigarettes could buy you an hour with a woman. Except for the boomlet of the seventies, it had been going down the tubes ever since, along with Fleming, where the curse of company scrip gave way to food stamps and welfare. The Appalachian balladeer Jean Ritchie mourned the plight of Neon and Fleming when she sang, “The L & N Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.”
It was along that line of miners’ shacks in Fleming that Roger Epperson searched for the doctor’s house. The old duplexes still stood, peeling and rotting, many of them empty, most occupied by old folks or a single struggling family. Here and there the hopeless gazed out from porches strewn with broken furniture, rusting washing machines and refrigerators, bottles and cans. Tires and trash littered the ground. A few of the desolate were blacks, descendants of railroad workers brought up from the Deep South a hundred years ago, John Henrys who had wailed,
Cocaine done drove me crazy,
Morphine done kill’d my baby,
An’ I ain’t a-goin’ to be treated thisaway!
The majority of the tenants were the remnants of white miners’ families, people weakened by economic collapse and welfare checks. Cynical, indifferent, and defeated, they lolled and wasted away. The idea that a miser hoarding anything more valuable than bottle caps might live among them seemed incredible.
But beyond the scruffy field of Fleming-Neon High, around a bend in the narrow road, sat a house unique in the town. Roger slowed as he passed it—one story, ranch-style, sturdily built of thin slices of sandy-colored Crab Orchard stone, with a low-pitched shingled roof and white trim. It was immaculate and had no litter anywhere around it, an island of order in that backwater.
“That’s it,” Roger said. “That’s the doctor’s.”
The house extended from a two-car garage, past a bay window and three dwarf evergreens in square stone planters, a white front door recessed under a porch supported by a pair of wrought-iron posts, and ended in a wing partly concealed by a trimmed hedge. A low wall of matching stone fronted the road and framed the driveway with stout square posts topped by big glass globes. Bland and severe, geometric and antiseptic, it held dominion over slovenly surroundings. On either side of it, the old shacks stood.
Roger continued up the road about a quarter-mile to pause at the doctor’s clinic, a wooden shack set back in a graveled lot. No sign announced its function; only the heavy wire mesh across the windows hinted that there might be something worth stealing inside, but thieves in the know had hit it numerous times. So simple, so modest, the clinic evoked the hard life as the house did not. It was so evocative of depression that location scouts had chosen it for scenes in Coal Miner’s Daughter, the 1980 movie biography of Loretta Lynn, filmed in Letcher County with locals hired as extras.
Roger circled the parking lot in front of the clinic past pickups and cars, some battered and others new and bright, and headed back down the road. He slowed again at the doctor’s house, but the big T-bird, with its Tennessee tags, was too obvious to allow for a thorough, professional reconnaissance. They would return, Roger said, when the time was right. They would work out a plan, and they would need a different car.
The boys lingered for days in the mountains. Roger was at home. With the idea of finding a car likely for FBI or IRS agents, he and Benny visited an auction one evening, leaving Donnie with a girl he had met in a Hazard bar. Cars were Roger’s family’s business; he knew these auctions well. One took place Thursday nights off Highway 80 near London, the center of the used car trade for Eastern Kentucky. In a grassy field full of automobiles—shined up, the tires Armor-Ailed, odometers optimistic—a canny breed of men roamed and haggled. It was no different from the horse fairs
of another century. Knowing many of the dealers since childhood, Roger mingled with them, Benny silently following. No one rushed up to greet Roger. A few returned his hellos. Bobby Morris, from Gray Hawk over in Jackson County, was more or less friendly.
Bobby Morris’s father had traded with Roger’s father for decades. How was his daddy, Roger inquired of Bobby, and did Ed Morris still carry a big fat roll of bills? Old Ed Morris, he’d always had enough on him to buy a Cadillac, Roger said in a jocular way. No, Bobby Morris replied, his father had been sick and didn’t fool much with cars anymore. His mom and dad stuck pretty close to home these days.
Roger did not buy a car that night. He and Benny and Donnie spent the next week visiting Roger’s friends at Isom, where they took in a race at the speedway, and in Hazard, Viper, Vicco, Delphia, and Cumberland, where Donnie also had contacts. Cumberland (pop. 3,172) was just over the Letcher line into Harlan County, about twenty miles from the Virginia border. Donnie decided that it was worth sneaking that far into Harlan because of some information they had to check out. With all of the dope they had been scoring—Benny had brought a set of weights with him and usually worked out while the others snorted, smoked, and drank—they were low on funds and decided they ought to try to do at least one lick before heading back to Tennessee. Cumberland was a place to pick up accurate, inside scuttlebutt because it was the center of gang activity in the area. Men from there ranged into several states, pulling jobs and distributing narcotics, sometimes managing operations of surprising sophistication. It was a gang from Cumberland that had masterminded the burglary of a South Carolina art museum, making off with a Frederic Remington bronze and other works.
Cumberland was also close to Linefork, on the Letcher border, where, Roger had been told by friends in Tennessee, a fence lived whose house was supposed to be a veritable warehouse of hot goods. A Cumberland contact expanded on the rumor and helped plan the job. The only problem was supposed to be a night watchman.
Around midnight on May 13, 1985, Roger, Benny, and Donnie drove to an isolated house near Linefork. They had already cased the place by daylight and conceived of a plan to make entrance easy. The blue light atop the T-bird threw the watchman off guard. Donnie and Benny ran up the drive with guns drawn, took the watchman’s gun, tied him up, and warned him to keep quiet or be dead. Roger, who had been waiting in the car for fear of being recognized, followed them into the house. They roused a husband and wife and their small son, tied them up, and ransacked the house.
It was less than they had hoped. They emptied every drawer, even checked out the refrigerator—and ended up with about four thousand dollars in cash and a number of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. They headed south on 160 through the town of Appalachia, west through Virginia and down to Knoxville, and were home before dawn.
If the victim was actually a fence, he did not behave as if he had anything to hide, because he immediately reported the crime to the police. The watchman stated that the men had at first identified themselves as federal agents, whether IRS or FBI he could not say; nor could he describe their car.
Benny withheld from Sherry any details of the adventure in Kentucky. She knew only that they had done some minor job and that money was running short.
As if resigning herself to a new phase in her life, Sherry had formally discharged herself from the Ridgeview psychiatric clinic while Benny was away. On May 12 she attended a final session. Her clinician on that occasion, a man with a Ph.D. in psychology, noted that Sherry, who gave her last name as Hodge, was terminating treatment of her own volition, for “reasons unknown.” His “Final Formulation” was that the patient was “very emotionally deprived,” unable to break with a harmful relationship, was suffering “terror at the thought of being alone,” and was “impulsive and self-destructive.” “Followup Plans” included only “will await further patient contact.”
When the boys announced that they were heading across state lines again, targeting the Memorial Day weekend for a robbery in Rome, Georgia, Sherry, ever determined to make the best of things, decided that they might as well have some holiday fun along the way. Some of her happiest times with Benny had been spent visiting various tourist attractions around Tennessee, especially Gatlinburg, a resort on the banks of the Little Pigeon River, at the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where they rode quaint, brightly colored trolleys, shopped for handicrafts, and where even Benny had to admit that the country music was great. They had taken Renee and Benny’s daughters there several times. Looking at a map, she saw that Rome was only some fifty miles above Atlanta and Six Flags Over Georgia, a vast amusement park that several of her friends and relatives had raved about. She persuaded everyone that a Sunday spent at Six Flags would make a festive prelude to the robbery, set for Monday.
This particular job was arranged in cahoots with a pair of brothers from Ooltewah, a suburb of Chattanooga near 1-75 and the Georgia border, about seventy-five miles north of Rome. The target was a reputed drug dealer whom the Ooltewah boys had been checking out and following around. They knew his car; they figured that the man would likely be at home on Memorial Day at his house in rural Floyd County, a few miles outside of Rome—a city of thirty thousand souls built on seven hills and notable for its city hall statue of the Capitoline wolf and her sucklings, Romulus and Remus, a gift from Benito Mussolini in 1929. Roger and the others decided that this would be a good opportunity to run a full-scale test of their federal agents scam. They elected to pose as IRS agents, since drug dealers were always paranoid about unpaid taxes on illegitimate income.
May 26 was a sunny Sunday at Six Flags, perfect for the whitewater rafting adventure, the triple-loop roller coaster, banter with a strolling Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, and several rides on Sherry’s favorite, the Octopus, with her and Carol snapping pictures to immortalize the occasion. They gorged on hot dogs and cotton candy; they had so much fun that for a few hours Sherry was able to cast her anxieties aside and giggle like a kid. She showed great form in knocking over six milk bottles with a Softball, winning a cuddly stuffed pink buffalo she named Big Ben.
Donnie had a new girlfriend along, a seventeen-year-old from Oliver Springs whom he had met through his sister. She was Rebecca Jane Hannah, and she had first been attracted to Donnie when, early that May, she had seen him riding a motorcycle on a visit to his mother and sister’s trailer. Her birthday had been on Friday, so the outing at Six Flags was a belated celebration for her. Sherry disliked her immediately, thinking there was something both snotty and stupid about her and ridiculing her when she said proudly that she was related to a governor of Tennessee, without saying which one. Sherry suggested it must have been Ray Blanton, who had gone to jail in 1979 for selling pardons.
Rebecca was not told about Monday’s plans. They sent her home in her own car Sunday night, while the rest of them stayed at the Ooltewah brothers’ house. The next evening Sherry and Carol prepared to wait as the men took off, Roger driving his T-bird with one of the brothers, the other brother in his green Dodge with Benny and Donnie as passengers. Donnie and Benny, who would do the talking, wore suits; Sherry had done her best to make them fit their roles, trimming their hair short and slicking it down, ironing their white shirts. She noted how convincing Benny looked with his muscles hidden by the jacket she had tailored to hang loosely on him.
But she was nervous. It was more than the usual adrenaline. She was not confident of the brothers’ intelligence. As the evening wore on and she watched the clock and fidgeted, she felt like socking Carol, who was driving her batty with chatter—how everyone needed to discover the inner child within herself; how parents could be toxic to their children; something about a female guru in the West who believed that it was all right to murder your husband because you would have a new one in the next life anyway. “Can’t you cool it, Chop, you scatterbrained rumdum?” Sherry pleaded, turning up the volume on the TV. By ten o’clock Carol was Patty Hearst again. Sherry hugged her buffalo and tried to think positively.<
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AT ABOUT NINE O'CLOCK THAT EVENING they found the address in a well-lit subdivision beyond the Rome city limits. Except for bright street lamps, everything looked good. Only one car was in the driveway. Roger switched on the blue police light and stuck it onto the roof of the T-bird. Donnie and Benny piled out of the Dodge and hustled up to the front door and banged on it, Benny shouting, “Open up! This is the IRS!”
A man opened the door a crack. “IRS,” Benny said, flashing his badge—as did Donnie, but as briefly as possible, as his was merely a toy made of tin. When the man hesitated, Benny wedged his foot in the door and, drawing his gun, forced his way in, with Donnie following. “You better be real peaceful,” Benny said. “We’re here to collect back taxes.” Donnie signaled for the others to come on in as the man protested that he did not owe any taxes. Two teenage girls and an older woman clung together on a couch.
“Tie ‘em up,” Roger ordered as he burst in with the brothers. Benny handcuffed the man. The girls and the woman submitted to being tied with rope and gagged with duct tape. Benny demanded that the man show him his stash of drugs and any cash he had in the house. The man insisted that he had nothing and that there must be some mistake. Roger looked at the Ooltewah boys. “Bullshit,” one of them said. “It’s got to be him. He’s lying.”
It was a modest tract house that betrayed no sign of wealth. They went from room to room turning over beds, emptying drawers, hurling clothes from closets and found—nothing. No cocaine, no cash, not so much as a joint. Was it under the house? Buried in the yard? They demanded, threatened—the man pleaded that he had nothing to hide and begged them not to hurt his mother and and daughters.
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