Led away after her reunion with Benny, Laurel County jail, 1987. She would not see him for three years. (Courtesy Alice Cornett.)
Sherry Sheets at work at Rockwood Sportswear, Tennessee, 1991, sewing a jacket, (Courtesy Suzanne O’Brien.)
Sherry Sheets Hodge doing time at Lexington Federal Correctional Institution, 1989. (Courtesy Sherry Sheets.)
On Monday morning Jerry Morris, who at forty was the youngest of four children, went to check on his parents before going off to work at the family’s used car lot. His father was sixty-three and had lost fifteen pounds over the past three weeks, suffering from what the doctors called walking pneumonia; his mother was sixty-nine, had had cancer, and was not strong, although she still cooked three meals a day and ironed his father’s shirts and did her quilting. Jerry’s daily routine was to pay an early call on his oldest brother, Bobby, who ran the family gas station and post office, before making sure that their parents next door were all right
That morning, which was bright and turning warm, Bobby told Jerry that he had heard something peculiar the night before. He had gone out back, it must have been around eleven o’clock or so, to get a breath of fresh air and look at the stars. It was such a beautiful night, he had never seen such a sky, not a cloud in it, the stars so bright they seemed to hang there close enough to touch. He had heard something odd—four or five popping noises that sounded like firecrackers. It must have been somebody getting ready for the Fourth of July. The noises had sounded as if they were coming from the direction of their parents’ house—but that could not have been, unless there had been kids roaming around.
Jerry had better see to Mom and Dad, Bobby said. By that time of the morning, nearly half past eight, you could usually see Bessie Morris through the glass of the sun porch, cooking breakfast in her bathrobe. But she had not even opened the kitchen door yet. Bobby hoped his father had not taken a turn for the worse, the poor old guy.
Jerry strolled over from the gas station, whistling through the morning air, which was fresh with the smell of newly mown grass. He was about to knock on the outside door to the sun porch when, to his surprise, he saw that it was open a crack—strange, because his mother fretted about burglars, even though Gray Hawk, with only a hundred or so souls living in it, had not known any sort of crime for years and years. He entered.
It was many months before Jerry could bear to talk about what happened next. Even then, he could hardly get the words out:
“The light was on in the sun room, what we call the sun room, it’s got glass, an enclosed room, but the kitchen door hadn’t been opened and a lot of times Mother and Daddy would get up and eat in their nightclothes, you know, but when that kitchen door was opened you knowed it was all right to go in and I waited till about twenty or twenty-five minutes after eight and it had never opened up and I told my brother Bobby, I said Bobby I am going to go over and check on them because I’ve got to go to work and so I walked over to the sun room and I always when I got hold of the kitchen door I would always say ‘Mother, it’s Jerry, don’t let me scare you.’ Well I got hold of the door and I said ‘Mother, don’t let me—’ “ Jerry had to pause for a while, he was crying so hard.
“And I saw Daddy’s feet laying on the kitchen floor—they were tied up. Then I stepped on in and he laid on the floor all tied up and looked like his face was—oh, Lord.” He had to stop again. “So I knew from looking he was dead, the blood and his face and all, but I got down over him and sort of shook him like you would shake a baby, you know, and I laid my hand on him and I thought Lord where is Mommy at and where Daddy was laying you could see down the hall to the bedroom.” He had to pause and take a breath. “So I run down the hall to the bedroom and there was Mother laid across the foot of the bed, her hands been tied up and her feet was tied up, they was blood all over and I knew she was dead, too, but I got down over Mother and I thought Lord, Lord, how am I going to tell Bobby and the next thing I knew I was outside, and then I hollered at Bobby, I said Lord God help me somebody has killed Mommy and Daddy and Bobby run over there and I thought Lord keep him from seeing them and I got hold of him and after that I really don’t know what happened.”
They abandoned the campsite in a hurry that morning. They left the equipment by the lake, hitched up the trailer, and on the way out of the forest asked Harold Clontz to retrieve his tent and to save the stuff that was theirs, they would be back eventually to pick it up.
For once Roger did not seem to know what to do or where to go. He drove north on I-75, turned around and headed back into London, kept going on to Corbin, turned around again, exited at London, and instructed Carol to check them into the Ramada Inn. They occupied three rooms.
They gathered over pizza that night in Roger and Carol’s room. He was not forgetting the doctor, Roger said, but it would be wise to get out of Kentucky for the time being. He had been on the phone to a friend in Florida; everything was set for them there. Carol seemed delighted.
Sherry asked no questions, believing that she was better off not knowing what had happened to send them running again, glad at least to be sleeping in a bed. Not that she thought that she would learn much if she asked. Benny included, the men were treating her as no better than a camp follower; for now, she accepted that role. She telephoned Renee and told her that Mom was enjoying her holiday and would be home soon.
Investigators from the Kentucky State Police were in Gray Hawk by nine o’clock and found that Ed and Bessie Morris had been shot to death. The bedroom where Mrs. Morris lay had been turned upside down, drawers emptied, clothes strewn everywhere. On the floor beside the bed officers found an open Bible, its pages sprinkled with pressed four-leaf clovers. More clovers dotted the carpet, some of them soaked with blood. His mother had had cancer in one eye, Bobby Morris said, “but she could find every four-leaf clover there was.”
Mr. Morris lay with his pockets turned out. His father usually kept a fair amount of cash on hand, Bobby said, enough to buy a used car and to cash checks for neighbors when the banks were closed. Ed Morris had loved to trade. You could often find him at the weekly auto auctions around London.
Investigators photographed and videotaped the bodies and the entire house inside and out. Both victims had been tied with electrical wire, Bessie Morris with a cord ripped from an alarm clock that was stopped at ten forty-three. The gunman or gunmen had tried to muffle the sounds of the shots: a pillow with a large, singed hole in it covered Ed Morris’s head; another holed pillow lay propped against Bessie. In all, five bullets of two different calibers were recovered: two in the crawlspace under the kitchen floor, one in the box springs of the bed, one in Ed Morris’s head, and one in Bessie’s left breast.
At the autopsies, which were given highest priority and performed at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington under the supervision of Associate Chief Medical Examiner and Professor of Pathology Dr. John C. Hunsacker III, it was determined that Ed Morris had been severely beaten before being shot twice, one bullet grazing his forehead, nicking a kitchen cabinet and penetrating the floor, the other lodging at the base of his skull. The top of his right ear was blown off where the fatal bullet had entered. A pistol’s muzzle had caused two fractures of the skull before death.
Someone had jammed a wool man’s sock into Ed Morris’s mouth and tied a stocking airtight around his head and face, blocking his nasal passages; he would have suffocated to death had a bullet not done the job first. The amount of blood escaped from the wound through his ear showed that his heart had been pumping when he was shot. The bullet found in his head was thirty-eight caliber, fired from either a .38 special or a .357 Magnum pistol, the ammunition for these weapons being interchangeable. The two bullets found under the house beneath the body had come from a different gun: they were nine-millimeter slugs.
Bessie Morris had been shot twice in the back, once with the same .38 special that had killed her husband, once with the same nine-millimeter gun that had fired the two bullets through the kitc
hen floor. Either shot would have been fatal; which had been fired first could not be determined. One had entered near the spine, passed through the lung, and exited just above the nipple of the left breast, then passed through the bed, hitting the carpet and bouncing back up into the springs; the other had gone through the spine, the aorta, the sac around the heart, and the heart itself, penetrating the front ribs before coming to rest in the breast. She had been lying on her stomach across the bed when she was shot.
Unless one person had used two different guns on both victims, an unlikely hypothesis, both had been shot by two separate gunmen. Why such overkill had been thought necessary was not apparent; perhaps the killers enjoyed their work or for obscure reasons felt it advisable to share the guilt. The old couple—Mrs. Morris toothless and one-eyed, her husband of forty-eight years grown feeble from illness—could hardly have offered much resistance.
Bobby Morris told the police that his father had kept a .38 pistol on top of the refrigerator; what make it had been, Bobby could not recall, but it was missing. Whether it had been one of the two murder weapons—both of which had probably been manufactured by Smith & Wesson, as forensic analysis of the rifling on the bullets indicated—was anyone’s guess. It seemed more likely that the killers, who were experienced enough criminals not to believe in leaving witnesses, would dispose of the murder weapons and keep the stolen gun, if any—but that much was guesswork. As for the possible identity of the gunmen, no one had a guess.
* * *
On Tuesday, June 18, leaving the others at the Ramada Inn, Roger and Carol made the rounds of several car lots. At Earl Bowles’s place on Main Street in London they spotted something that looked to them like the sort of vehicle the FBI might favor, a dark blue 1978 Oldsmobile Delta 88 four-door sedan, as staid and anonymous a car as they could find, and one fitted with the all-important Kentucky plates. Roger peeled off twenty-four hundred-dollar bills; Carol signed the invoice as Malone.
With Carol following, Roger drove the T-bird north to Mount Vernon and left it with a couple whom he had known for many years and felt he could trust. He asked them not to tell anyone that they had seen him.
That afternoon they slapped four new tires on the Olds and headed south. They stopped in Lake City to fence some jewelry and score some dope and at Carol’s house in Clinton, which was owned by her father, to leave some belongings. They dropped the trailer in Atlanta and sped on to Florida.
The double funeral drew nearly every member of the church and friends of Ed and Bessie Morris from all over Eastern Kentucky. Among the mourners, none seemed more grief-stricken than one of the honorary pallbearers, who dabbed at his tears throughout the service. He had driven over from Hazard with his wife, his daughter, his sister, and two of his three sons. His name was Eb Epperson, and he had called Ed Morris the best friend he had in the world. Of “Bug” Epperson’s immediate family, only his eldest child, Roger, was not in attendance.
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ROGER'S FLORIDA RESOURCES WERE CLUSTERED in the Daytona Beach area, most of them former Kentuckians; Carol had once been close to a Clinton businessman and dope dealer who was now a resident of West Palm Beach; Sherry’s friend Pat Mason was living in Hallandale, a suburb of Miami, working for an automobile broker—so they were not without contacts that far from home. During the drive down, Roger announced that the general plan of operations would be to establish headquarters around Daytona for the time being, to do a few jobs to build up some capital, finally to close in on the Letcher County doc, and to leave the country.
He had in mind fleeing to Bimini, an island less than fifty miles from Miami that Roger said had no extradition treaty with the U.S. While the others were not precisely sure what extradition meant, and were not aware that Roger was mistaken about the absence of a treaty, they found his scheme seductive. They would buy a fast boat like the ones featured on “Miami Vice” and run dope into the coast and live it up lolling in the sun wearing pastel clothes and sipping rum.
In the meanwhile they checked into the Sands Motel on the beach in Daytona. Neither Sherry nor Benny had ever seen the ocean before; they spent their first afternoon frolicking in the surf, Benny showing off his muscles and thirty-inch waist, Sherry demure in a one-piece she bought down the street. When the others joined them, Carol turned heads in a white bikini that complemented her tawny skin and black hair. Sherry caught Benny staring and told him that if he didn’t watch himself, she would kill him.
Roger had the habit of hiding money in his athletic shoes, which he left on the sand while he went in for a swim. Puppylike, Donnie romped in after him, presenting a complex and colorful picture in bathing trunks, his body adorned with nine tattoos—including a star on his right wrist, a duck with the word “love” superimposed on his left upper arm, “Donnie” on his upper right back, and a spider and a butterfly on his right calf. Sherry called him Sandwich Board. When Carol decided she wanted a drink, she took Roger’s money from his shoe and picked her sexy way up to the motel.
Roger and Donnie left the water before Carol returned. Drying himself off, Roger bent down to check inside his shoes. He shook one and then the other and began yelling at Bartley, accusing him of stealing and threatening to twist his head off. Sherry told him to leave Donnie alone.
“Dragon Lady kyped your roll. She went to buy a drink, is all.”
“Is that right? She did that? Well, that is going to be one sorry bitch.”
When Carol came back with her margarita, she handed Roger the change. He told her through clenched teeth to put down her drink, they were going in the water. She did not want to go in, Carol said. It was late and getting cool. They were the only people left on the beach.
“Put that shit down. We’re going in the water.”
Carol obeyed. Roger took her by the hand and led her roughly into the surf. The slope of the sand was gradual. He pulled her out farther until the waves were breaking against her breasts and into her face and she had to keep hopping not to drink in saltwater. The others watched her trying to get free of him, flailing with one arm, thrashing like a gaffed fish. Roger’s shoulders were still above the water.
He let go of her hand suddenly and grabbed her with both hands around her throat. His screaming—"Bitch! Fucking lying bitch!"—drifted in to the beach over the noise of the surf. He shoved her under and yanked her up by the throat above his head, screaming into her face, and pushed her under, again and again, jerking her up and plunging her down as if she were no more than a kitten.
By the time Sherry and Donnie and Benny could struggle through the waves to reach them and pry Roger loose and carry Carol to the beach, she was turning blue and passing out. Sherry rolled her onto her stomach and pounded on her back. Seawater trickled from her mouth. She began to breathe, cough, at last to cry.
“She’ll never do that again,” Roger said. “Nobody takes my money.”
By morning the marks of Roger’s fingers were visible on her throat. He advised her to get some sun.
It took them a few days to locate a suitable apartment. One night the others talked Sherry into accompanying them to a nightclub a few blocks from the Sands. She put aside her aversion to clubs and bars, lured by the promise of live country music. She had never heard of the band or the singer, but maybe they would cheer her up. Looking at herself in the mirror, she thought she had aged ten years in the past month.
It was called Castaways: bamboo and wicker tables and chairs on different levels around the dance floor and stage, red and green running lights, the walls and ceiling draped with fishing nets, waitresses in coconut-shell bras. The band was adequate, the singer a pert brunette from Nashville, or so she claimed, doing okay versions of classic Patsy Cline. The only thing that bugged Sherry was their waitress, a blonde flirt who rang a cowbell hung around her neck every time Benny gave her a tip and bent way over scooping up the money so Benny could gawk at her coconuts. Every waitress had to wear a cowbell, and they were clanging all over the room. It drove Sherry nuts. She broke tra
ining to order a double strawberry daquiri, then another and another.
At tables pushed together behind them sat a large party, four or five couples, including a mother and two daughters and a man who looked like Willie Nelson, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, a red bandana around his head, an earring, and braids. Donnie, always a menace on his own, started chatting up one of the daughters, even asking her to dance, right in front of her date, who told him to bug off. Trying to head off trouble, Sherry led Donnie onto the dance floor and did her best to wear him out, but he was so coked up he could have done the Cotton-eyed Joe to Miami.
When they returned to the table Roger and Carol—she had been mixing cocaine and Valium all day—had managed to get into an argument with the party behind them. It was at the shouting stage. One of the women called Roger a hick and a bum and a big slob. He smashed the neck of his beer bottle against the edge of the table and jabbed the jagged thing through the air, snarling and demanding who was ready to get cut first. Carol told the woman not to talk to Roger like that. The woman sprang forward and dumped Carol over in her chair and started stomping on her with high heels. Another woman fell on Carol and tore at her blouse.
“You take Chop on one at a time or forget it!” Sherry shouted.
She grabbed both women by the hair and yanked them up. One of them called Sherry a bitch. Sherry shoved her back and Benny slapped the woman’s face.
It was a free-for-all after that, glasses and bottles flying, women clawing at each other, men wrestling and tumbling on the floor, tables overturned. The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” to no effect. In the middle of it all Sherry heard the waitress screaming that someone had stolen her cowbell. “You did it! You’ve got my cowbell! Give it back!” She came at Sherry.
“Here’s your cowbell,” Sherry said, and busted her right in the chops. She cratered.
Dark and Bloody Ground Page 19