Benny spoke with clarity and precision, as he was capable of doing when the occasion demanded. Donnie chimed in from time to time but for the most part let Benny carry the ball. Meanwhile, huddled on the floor of the Olds, Roger heard the rise and fall of voices through the air.
Would Dr. Acker be prepared to sign a statement to the effect that he had no present dealings with Roe Adkins and had not done any business with him for several years? Of course he would, Dr. Acker said. He would make out a statement right then and there.
“The light’s pretty dim,” Benny said. “Is there somewhere we could go that has better light?”
“We can go over to my office. I can sit at my desk.”
“We don’t need to waste that much of your time.”
“All right. Come into the kitchen.”
They followed Dr. Acker into the house. From somewhere down the hall they could hear the strains of a piano, some light, romantic melody, unaccompanied. Donnie closed the door behind them. In the kitchen, which was to the right of the front hall, Donnie removed from the briefcase the official-looking sheet of paper and placed it on the table. Dr. Acker sat down and began to write.
“We’ll need a witness,” Benny said. “Is there someone who can act as a witness to this?”
“My daughter can. That’s her, playing. Tammy,” he called, “Tammy, can you come in here?” The music stopped.
Tammy Acker came from her bedroom down the hall and into the kitchen. She was twenty-three and tiny, just over five feet, wearing a blue tank top and matching shorts. With her bright hazel-green eyes and her shining dark-brown hair that touched her shoulders, she was poised between girlhood and maturity—small-featured, full-figured, radiant, beautiful. She went to her father and balanced on one foot to kiss his cheek as he sat at the table.
Donnie grabbed her from behind as Benny snatched a revolver from his shoulder holster and poked the muzzle at Dr. Acker’s head. Tammy screamed. Donnie covered her mouth with his hand and warned her to shut up or else.
“Where’s the safe?” Benny demanded, crumpling up the sheet of paper and stuffing it into his pocket.
“I don’t have one,” Dr. Acker said.
“Get her out of here,” Benny said. “Tie her up.”
Donnie slung Tammy over his hip and carried her back to her bedroom. It was a large room, decorated with girlish mementoes—a purple-and-white PIRATES pennant on the wall above the upright piano; a poster of Prince, the rock star, above the fireplace; dozens of records and tapes stacked beneath the stereo. As Donnie dropped her to the floor and began tying her up with anything he could find—scarves, a sheet ripped from her bed—Tammy pleaded, “Please don’t hurt my dad! Please don’t! He’s suffered so much! My mother’s just died and it almost killed him!”
“Don’t you worry none, honey. Ain’t nobody going to be hurt.
You just lie here and it’ll be all over in a few minutes and we’ll be gone.” He gagged her tight.
Donnie returned to the kitchen, where Benny had the doctor on the floor with the gun to his head, and he told Donnie to tie the old man up. As Donnie did so, Benny kept demanding the location of the safe, but Dr. Acker refused to say.
Donnie removed the radio from the briefcase: “General, this is Sergeant. Come in, General.”
“Sergeant, this is General. I hear you.” Roger had stayed out of sight for fear that the doctor might recognize him and spoil the FBI ruse. He had not actually met Dr. Acker, but he had spent so much time in the area working with Roe Adkins and others that there was no sense taking chances.
They decided to search for the safe rather than trying to beat its whereabouts out of the doctor, whom they would need to tell them the combination; he was too frail, it appeared, to withstand much punishment. Benny removed Dr. Acker’s eyeglasses and threw a sheet over his head as Roger entered and, saying nothing, distributed the gloves for everyone to put on.
They decided on the bedrooms first. That was where most people kept a safe. Donnie took Tammy’s room. In minutes he made chaos out of order, tearing the place apart in a frenzy, emptying the closets, overturning boxes of new clothes that had been stacked in a corner. There were so many clothes, and so many of them brand new, that it was obviously a rich girl’s room, and the opulence made Donnie salivate. Contemptuously he tossed a bikini top across the nape of her neck as she lay facedown on the carpet. Along with the Rolex and a gold bracelet he had already removed from her wrists, he slipped a black pearl necklace into his pocket.
He had gone through every drawer, sent shoes and handbags flying from shelves, when from the room across the hall he heard a shout.
“Sergeant!”
They had discovered the safe at the back of a closet in the doctor’s bedroom. It was about three feet high and eighteen inches deep, solid steel, bolted to the floor. They considered trying to shoot it open but doubted that would work and worried about the noise. They would have to get the doctor to tell them the combination.
Dr. Acker capitulated. Donnie wrote the numbers down on a pad from the kitchen counter and they returned to the bedroom to try the lock.
Benny went through the combination as Donnie scoured the rest of the house and piled valuables, including numerous rifles, pistols, and shotguns, in a heap by the front door.
Benny failed to crack the safe; Roger had a go at it. No luck.
Back to the kitchen. Roger kicked the doctor in the ribs as Benny accused Dr. Acker of having lied. Dr. Acker swore that the numbers were correct.
Benny untied him, helped him to his feet, gave him back his glasses, and led him by the elbow down the hall. The three of them watched as Dr. Acker, sweat dripping off his chin and nose, having to pause to wipe his glasses, hands trembling, the gun at his head, knelt before the safe and spun the dial back and forth. Finally the tumblers clicked.
“It’s open,” the doctor said.
“Then open it,” Benny said.
Dr. Acker plunged the handle downward and swung open the door. Simultaneously the three onlookers emitted noises of appreciation.
“Holy shit!” Donnie squealed. “Holy fucking shit! It’s plumb full!”
The safe was stuffed with cash. It was stacked from bottom nearly to top with bills, most of them neatly wrapped, some of them loose.
“All right, boys,” Dr. Acker said. “You’ve hit the jackpot, leave some for me.”
19
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY THAT NIGHT the dispatcher at the Fleming-Neon police station received a telephone call. Over the wire came the halting voice of an old man:
“This ... is... Dr. Acker. I’ve been robbed.... My daughter ...”
“Dr. Acker? Hello?”
The dispatcher reached Officer Cobran Phillips, who was sitting in his squad car at the Chevron station, chatting through the window with Tom Haynes, an Emergency Medical Technician who was manning the fire department ambulance that night.
“Dr. Acker’s house,” Phillips told Haynes, who said he would follow right along.
Within five minutes Officer Phillips was knocking on Dr. Acker’s door. He knocked several times, he banged with his fist, he rang the bell, but there was no answer, and the door was locked. He could hear the siren of the approaching ambulance and was about to radio for additional help when the door of the house opened and Dr. Acker stood there, staggering, grabbing hold of the doorframe.
The doctor’s face was smeared with blood; blood trickled from his nose and mouth. An orange appliance of some sort, a soldering or a curling iron, dangled from around his neck.
“Tammy ... Tammy ...” Dr. Acker mumbled, blinking his bloody eyes, coughing up blood. Officer Phillips helped him loosen the electrical cord.
“Where is she? Doc? Where’s Tammy?”
“In here. Back there,” he motioned, and stepped to one side.
Phillips ran down the hall. He entered Tammy’s bedroom.
He nearly stumbled over her. She lay on her side on the floor, her body parallel to her bed, her head ne
arly touching a wicker chest on which a lamp stood lit. The glare showed everything, more than enough—the room a shambles, clothes everywhere, shoes, hangars, open handbags, dresser drawers pulled out, boxes thrown about, the bed stripped. And Tammy. She was covered with so much blood, the surrounding carpet drenched with blood and urine, that Phillips had to force himself to look. Her knees drawn up, her bare legs bound with a bloody sheet, her hands tied behind her back, her mouth gagged with a blue scarf, her eyes wide open, she looked like a human sacrifice. Sticking out of her back was the handle of a knife that had been plunged in up to the hilt—and this was not the only wound. Her bloodsoaked shirt back showed many other two- or three-inch nearly vertical tears above, below, and on either side of the knife.
Phillips bent down to take her pulse at her throat. He felt none. That close to her, he understood the savagery of the attack and was nearly overcome by horror and terror.
He hurried out to radio for the state police and the coroner as Tom Haynes arrived in the ambulance.
“Too late,” Phillips said. “Tammy Acker’s been stabbed to death. You won’t believe it. You might better check on the doc. He’s alive somehow.”
Dr. Acker, who was seventy-seven, began to recover when policemen walked him over to the next-door neighbors, who helped him off with his clothes and into a shower. His assailants had tried and failed to strangle him; he had passed out and it was difficult to guess how long he had lain there before crawling to the phone. As the hours he kept at his work attested, he was a vigorous man who clung to life.
After reaching the police dispatcher, he had managed to telephone his older daughter, his one remaining close family member. Tawny Rose Acker, who lived in Lexington, was now on her way to the scene. Washing and tidying himself, Dr. Acker drew on strengths that had his neighbors and everyone else amazed.
Numerous local and state officials arrived within the hour. Kentucky State Police Lieutenant Danny Webb, who had been asleep at home, was there by midnight along with KSP detectives Lon Maggard and Frank Fleming. While Fleming, whose special interest was physical evidence, took Polaroid photographs, Lt. Webb made the unusual decision to telephone the KSP Crime Laboratory in Frankfort, some two hundred miles away, to ask that a team of experts be sent immediately to Fleming-Neon. Webb decided that the brutality and magnitude of the crime, which involved a prominent local citizen, required the most sophisticated analysis the Commonwealth could provide. He ordered that nothing but the body itself be touched until the team from the lab arrived.
James Wiley Craft, the Commonwealth’s Attorney, who had a policy of trying to view a major crime scene as soon as possible after the event, stood mesmerized before the body. There must have been fifteen people in the house, but they were padding about so quietly, talking in whispers from shock and respect, that the silence, Craft thought, was as disturbing as the wrecked bedroom and the body. The sharp smells of urine and blood, the sight of her pitiful little curled-up form, the shredded soaked shirt, the soaked blue shorts—Craft struggled with nausea and outrage. James Wiley, as he was popularly known, knew the Ackers well. A brief look was all he could take—he hurried into the night air and, standing in the driveway, told Danny Webb that anyone who could see what some son of a bitch had done to Tammy and not believe in the death penalty must be some fucking raving idiot. How could any human being subject another to such indignity! My God, my God, Craft kept muttering as he wandered toward the road trying to catch his breath.
When David Polis, the coroner, who also had known Tammy well and remembered the family’s grief at the mother’s death such a short few months before, saw the body, he nearly passed out. Frank Fleming stood beside him and steadied him. Polis knew that it was going to be his job to get Tammy into a body bag and into his hearse for transportation to Pikeville, where the autopsy would be performed. What were they going to do about that knife that was sticking out of her? Polis whispered to Fleming. Polis’s family owned the Banks Funeral Home; he had had more experience with embalming than with crime scenes, being fairly new at this job and never having dealt with anything so grotesque as this. And it was not just a body, it was Tammy, wonderful Tammy. “God help us all,” he said, and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
The knife handle looked to be five or six inches long. What was he to do? Put poor Tammy on her face in the car? Try to slip a bag over that thing? He looked at Fleming. “What do we do?” Fleming said he would telephone the county pathologist for advice.
Fleming reported to Polis that the doctor said the knife had to be removed, now. Fleming offered his handkerchief, to protect fingerprints that might be on the handle. He held out the cloth, but Polis stood there immobile, hands at his sides, staring at the ceiling. He could not act.
Frank Fleming, not sure that it was proper but sensing that someone had to do it, forced himself into the room and planted his feet on either side of Tammy’s folded legs. He wondered how much strength this would take. His hands shook as if palsied. He wrapped his right hand with the handkerchief and made himself seize the handle. He took a breath through his mouth and began to pull. After a slight tug to release the point, which was stuck in the floor, the blade started coming out. It was easier than he had feared. It was like pulling a knife slowly through water, except that he felt bone and cartilage passing along the blade, causing it to tremble slightly. The blade was much bigger than he had imagined, a steel triangle some ten inches long, razor-sharp and pointed. The thing looked as if it could go through a wall. He held it up for Polis to see, but the coroner had gone into the hall and had his back turned.
Fleming, as methodically as he could, bagged the weapon and brought it to Danny Webb, who told him to label it and place it on the kitchen table. Fleming did so. Then he hurried outside and to the highway, vomited, and buried his mouth in the crook of his arm to stifle the sobs.
At ten minutes to one that morning, Detective Lon Maggard went next door to see if Dr. Acker was able to make a statement. Maggard found the doctor sitting up in a chair, wrapped in a blanket, in shock but not clinically so: he appeared to be lucid. He agreed to try to recount the evening’s terror, sipping at a cup of coffee as he talked.
“About nine P.M.,” Dr. Acker began, “the doorbell rang. And Tammy answered the intercom. They said they were two men from the FBI and wanted to talk to me about Roe Adkins.” Dr. Acker’s speech bore traces of his native Boston. He had come to Appalachia as a young physician more than forty years before. He described a husky man, about six feet tall, with blond hair and a mustache, who showed him a badge:
“He asked me if I would write him a statement about Roe Adkins. I told them I knew Roe about eight or ten years ago, that we were going to mine some coal together but he dropped out.... We walked into the kitchen and the blond-haired one pulled what looked like a snub-nose thirty-eight. The other one, who was short, about five-eight and a slender build with black hair, was also dressed very nice in a suit, he grabbed Tammy and took her into the other room. The tall one was holding the gun and told me to do what he told me and no one would get hurt. He was dressed in a dark suit, I think.”
Dr. Acker described being tied up and hearing the men ransacking the house for about thirty minutes. He told of giving them the combination to the safe and seeing one of them write it down.
“They could not open it and came and untied me and took me to the safe and made me open it. After this, they took me back to the kitchen and tied me and gagged me again. They put the rope around my neck and tightened it up and I passed out.
“I think it was about eleven o’clock when I came to. After a while I got loose and I couldn’t find my glasses. I yelled for Tammy and started looking for her. I found her in the other room.”
Here Dr. Acker had to pause to compose himself. He continued:
“She had a sheet over her head and was tied up with her hands behind her lying on the floor. I went to her and bent down and removed the sheet and started to talk to her. I started to roll her over and un
tie her and I saw the kitchen knife in her back. I felt for a pulse and she had none. I called the sheriff’s office.”
Dr. Acker’s account squared with the condition of the house and the body. What he referred to as rope was obviously the cord from the Windmere curling iron Officer Phillips had noticed hanging from the doctor’s neck; he had been bound with neckties and gagged with a T-shirt, wet with his own blood and other fluids that had come from his nose and mouth, that he had dropped on the kitchen floor after regaining consciousness.
When Lt. Webb heard that the killers had posed as FBI agents, he connected the crimes with another that had occurred earlier that summer at a house on the Letcher-Harlan county line. The previous victims, who as Webb recalled had not been physically harmed, had also said that the thieves had identified themselves as government agents of some kind.
It was now nearing two A.M. Webb telephoned the supervisor of the FBI office in London, Special Agent Rod Kincaid, who was at home asleep in Somerset, to the west in Pulaski County. Kincaid remembered the earlier case, and not only that one. The FBI had been searching for months, Kincaid said, for suspects who had been posing as FBI or IRS agents. The Bureau already had warrants on file for at least two men, as Kincaid recalled, charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in a case involving Georgia or possibly Tennessee. He would get back to Webb with the details.
At four-thirty that morning the laboratory crew from Frankfort arrived and began to process the house. Dr. Acker identified firearms and other objects left by the door as his but said that at least two or three pistols, including a pearl-handled .45 automatic, as well as Tammy’s Rolex, bracelet, and a black pearl necklace, were missing. As for the stolen cash, he estimated it as between four and five hundred thousand dollars, some of it in old bills, in mixed denominations of twenties, fifties, and hundreds. He was a frugal man, he said, and had saved back a few thousand each year from his practice. Although he did have bank accounts and had once been part-owner of a Whitesburg bank, he had been through the Great Depression and knew enough not to believe that his money was absolutely safe in anyone else’s hands. He had purchased the safe recently; before that he had kept his money in a trunk on the back porch.
Dark and Bloody Ground Page 22