“So you don’t know how the killings were done or who killed which victim?” Kincaid asked calmly.
Back at the Laurel Lake campground, Bartley said, Benny Hodge had described the murders to him. Roger had clubbed the old man on the head with a gun, with the gun going off twice; Benny had finished the job by firing his gun through a pillow into the man’s head. Benny then went into the bedroom to find that Roger had already shot the woman with a 9-mm pistol. When Benny said, “She’s still moving,” Roger shot her again, and she was dead. Benny had carried a .38 into the house. When he came out he had two .38s with him. They had disposed of all three weapons.
They had left for Florida a day or two after that, where the condominium became headquarters for the remainder of the summer until their arrest.
“Did you commit any serious crimes in Florida?” Kincaid asked.
Bartley stated that the next big job was the Moon Mullins robbery. Carol Epperson had known Moon Mullins in Tennessee and knew where he was living in the Fort Lauderdale area. Bartley, Epperson, and Hodge used FBI cards on this occasion to gain entrance to Mullins’s house, saying that they were looking for Terry Phillips, a mutual acquaintance of Carol’s and Mullins’s. Hodge pointed a .44 Magnum at Mullins and Bartley tied him up; but when Epperson came in, he said, “This one is mine.” Epperson asked Bartley to bring a knife from the kitchen. Roger wanted to cut Mullins’s throat, but when Bartley handed him the knife, Roger said, “It wouldn’t cut hot butter.”
Bartley and Hodge watched as Epperson choked Mullins with an extension cord and finished strangling him with a pair of pantyhose tied around his neck, a technique Roger said he had learned in Vietnam. He appeared to enjoy strangling Mullins. There was no blood, as far as Bartley could remember.
This robbery amounted to about ten thousand in cash, plus some cocaine.
Kincaid suggested a coffee break. Bartley left to go to the bathroom. Kincaid tried to evaluate Bartley’s credibility. Obviously his motivation in confessing at the eleventh hour had to do with his hope of escaping the death penalty. Except for his claiming that he had been conveniently outside during the Morris murders—not an implausible circumstance, since it was likely that someone would have had to play lookout, and it had to have been either Bartley or Hodge, because Roger was the one who knew the victims on what one could call a friendly basis—everything he had said so far squared more or less with the known evidence. Much of the rest could be checked out. On the whole, Kincaid believed, Bartley must be telling the truth. As so often happened, the threat of the death penalty was proving useful.
As for Bartley’s manner and tone of voice, they were not those of a typical psychopathic killer. He looked Kincaid in the eye, for the most part, and seemed to be making a genuine effort to remember details. He was agitated, smoking cigarette after cigarette, if not remorseful. And he could not have been coached by his attorney, since he was no longer on speaking terms with him. Everything depended on what he was about to say about what had happened in Dr. Acker’s house that night, because that trial was imminent, and other convictions hinged on it.
As Kincaid had expected, Bartley did not deny that he had been inside Dr. Acker’s house. How could he, when his fingerprint had been found there? His account of how he and Hodge had gained entrance squared with the doctor’s recollections that night and in a later deposition. That Bartley had summoned Epperson with a “handy-talkie” radio was new information corroborated by physical evidence found in Florida.
Bartley admitted having carried Tammy Acker back to her room and tying her up. He had not, however, harmed her, he insisted. When he left her, she was alive and well.
Bartley described how they had forced the doctor at gunpoint to open the safe and had stuffed the money into pillowcases. With the doctor tied up again, Epperson told Bartley, “This one is yours.” The message was that, as Bartley had not participated in killing the Morrises, he had to kill the doctor so that he would be in as deep as the others and they could not rat on one another.
Bartley said that he began choking Dr. Acker with the cord from a curling iron, but the cord pulled up around the doctor’s mouth. Exasperated, Epperson jerked it down around the victim’s throat, saying, “Now do it right, dumbass.” At this point, the telephone started ringing, they became frightened, gathered up the pillowcases, and left.
Kincaid asked about the girl.
Bartley said that before he had started choking Dr. Acker, Benny Hodge had said, “I’ll take care of the girl.” Epperson had handed, tossed, or thrown—Bartley could not be sure of the exact gesture—a knife to Hodge. The knife had come from a kitchen drawer. He saw Hodge walk back toward the bedroom where the girl was tied up, but he had not been present when Hodge stabbed her.
In the getaway car Hodge told Bartley that he knew the girl was dead because he felt the knife “go all the way to the floor.” Epperson had stated that he was sure the doctor was dead because he had seen his face turn blue. Bartley told Kincaid that he had not known whether Dr. Acker was dead or not but that he had hoped he was still alive.
When he, Epperson, Hodge, Becky, Sherry, and Carol had counted the money, they found that it amounted to one million nine hundred thousand dollars. Bartley believed that Sherry Hodge, who became the banker because she was “the smartest,” had ended up with more than her and Benny’s share and had invested some of it in a house for her parents, a steak house, and an automobile dealership and possibly other properties through Pat Mason. Mason would not admit this, Bartley claimed, because she was Sherry’s friend.
Bartley provided details of one other crime, the robbery of the family on the Harlan–Letcher line earlier that same summer. He also warned that Epperson and Hodge were trying to escape from the Letcher County jail and were bribing somebody to make this possible. The interview concluded near five o’clock, having lasted more than three hours.
At the FBI office, Kincaid telephoned Letcher County authorities to let them know the gist of what Bartley had said. Then he dictated a summary based on notes of what he had heard and sat back to weigh the truth of it. The window of his office looked out over London’s Main Street toward the peaceful-looking countryside, where a few lights were coming on as it grew darker. Only a few miles from there, the gang had camped out before the Morris murders. Kincaid rehearsed Bartley’s long narrative, for the most part stunning in its detail, down to the version of events at Dr. Acker’s house. Had Hodge actually done the stabbing? Any one of the three men could have done it. But Kincaid concluded that Bartley was the least likely, because from a criminal point of view, he was weak. He had failed to kill the doctor; he had run from arrest like a scared rabbit; he had become the first to crack.
What if Bartley were lying about being the one to have botched the job on Dr. Acker? Could Epperson have been the one who failed at that task? Most unlikely. From what Kincaid had gathered, Carol’s previous relationship with Moon Mullins gave Roger a motive for strangling the drug dealer, and Epperson had managed that job with grim efficiency. As for Hodge, surely someone of his physical strength could not have failed to have strangled an old man. The hypothesis that Bartley had chickened out of killing the doctor or perhaps, as Bartley would prefer to have everyone believe, had not really wanted to kill him, but had also stabbed Tammy Acker eleven times was absurd. If you believed Bartley was the one who had attempted to murder the doctor, you could not believe that Bartley killed Tammy.
Kincaid compared Bartley’s demeanor during the interview with that of the many other copouts he had witnessed during nearly twenty years with the Bureau. He believed that by this time he knew when he was being conned. Probably, he concluded, he would never be absolutely certain about who had stabbed Tammy. His gut feeling, however, made him think that yes, Bartley should be believed. Benny Hodge had done it.
25
AT ELEVEN O'CLOCK ON THE NIGHT OF MAY 9, Only a few hours after Bartley had unburdened himself, Danny Webb climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Letcher
County Courthouse, a two-story glass-and-steel structure in the center of Whitesburg, and told the jailer to open up the cellblock. The lieutenant was accompanied by five troopers, a deputy U.S. marshal, and James Wiley Craft.
The search party found Epperson and Hodge in their cells but not suffering. Benny was chatting on a portable phone that he quickly clicked off. Epperson was watching a cop show. The cells looked like the aftermath of a teenage house party—littered with boxes from local pizza and chicken restaurants, peanuts, cheese dip, chips and crackers and other goodies. Each cell contained a TV, a VCR, videotapes, and audio recorders and tapes. Carpets covered the floors.
Webb and his men uncovered several items hidden inside the VCRs and taped under beds: four pieces of hacksaw blades, two jeweler’s strings capable of cutting through steel bars, a spoon with its handle sharpened to a fine point, and a makeshift key fashioned from a bucket handle that, when tried on the cellblock door, opened it.
At a press conference the next morning, James Wiley Craft stated that as Commonwealth’s Attorney his responsibilities did not extend to running the jail, but conditions there spoke for themselves. He was asking the grand jury to investigate how Epperson and Hodge had received the contraband items and whether jail personnel might be involved. He said that he believed that visitors—he did not say who they might be—had smuggled in the hacksaw blades and jeweler’s strings inside the VCRs. Possibly they had been delivered by unwitting local rental outfits with the saws already hidden in them, since the prisoners appeared to have been ordering the machines by specific serial numbers. Craft also believed that Epperson and Hodge had been communicating with the third defendant by means of audiotapes carried back and forth by visitors from Whitesburg to London.
“They were just like motel rooms,” Craft said, “only smaller. Very pleasant. Maybe we should rent them out to tourists.”
In response to a question from a Mountain Eagle reporter, Craft said that he was not at liberty to disclose the source of the information that had led to the raid, other than that it had resulted from a tip supplied by the FBI.
The Mountain Eagle—which came out every Wednesday, had a circulation of eight thousand (five times the population of Whitesburg), and had won more national honors, including the John Peter Zenger and Elijah P. Lovejoy awards, than any other small-town paper in America—published a six-by-four inch photograph of the hacksaw blades and other devices, devoting its entire front page to the story in its issue of May 14. By that date, the Acker trial was the single biggest story across the state now that the Derby had been run. The Courier-Journal, the Lexington Herald-Leader, and many other papers, as well as the wire services and television stations, sent reporters and photographers to Whitesburg for the duration, filling motels as far away as Hazard and Pikeville. The story—a miser and his beautiful daughter in their mountain fastness, rapacious invaders from afar—had the qualities of a nightmarish fairy tale. When it became known that girlfriends, too, may have been involved in the crimes, few reporters could resist analogies to Bonnie and Clyde. And there was Lester Burns, who was always news and had been for thirty years, now more than ever with the indictments and other suspicions hanging over him. But with all the reporters on hand, some with rich and powerful resources behind them, the Mountain Eagle consistently provided the most thorough coverage and, time and again, scooped everyone else. When James Wiley Craft released the transcript of Donnie Bartley’s second confession, the Eagle printed it in its entirety, all six thousand words of it. It made sensational reading.
This confession was recorded three days after the first, untaped statement Bartley had made to Rod Kincaid. Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Caudill asked the questions, with Danny Webb and Frank Fleming in attendance, at the Laurel County jail. The interview lasted only half an hour, because it concerned only events directly related to the Acker trial.
Bartley told the same story that he had given Kincaid, with the key, or at least the most sensational, element being that Benny Hodge had done the stabbing. He was more detailed about where he thought much of the money had gone, saying that he and the others had left more than a hundred thousand dollars with Pat Mason and that he believed that Mason’s Las Vegas miracle was part of a laundering scheme: “I think it was a setup, where she won that money.” He had been in jail, however, and admitted he knew nothing about Mason’s possible role for sure. He also said that Epperson had told him that Lester Burns had received some four hundred thousand of the money, plus the ‘63 Corvette.
The Eagle asked Lester to comment. “Bartley is a young man trying to save his hide,” Lester said. “I think you could find a great amount of his statement in a barnyard. And testimony by an alleged accessory to a crime is totally unreliable.” Was there anything Bartley had said that might be correct? “His name was correct,” Lester replied, adding, “I’ll tell you this. Bartley may be the murderer.”
What the Eagle did not print, because even with all of its inside sources the paper was not informed of it, was that there was disagreement between Caudill and Webb on the one hand and Frank Fleming on the other as to whether Bartley should be believed. Caudill and Webb agreed with Rod Kincaid that Bartley was credible. Fleming, who remained unshaken in his belief that Epperson had told the truth off the record during the drive from Florida months before, thought Bartley was lying about who had done the stabbing. “Besides,” Fleming argued, “show me a killing like that and nine times out of ten it’s a little guy who did it. It’s just what an insecure pint-sized coked-up little runt would do under the circumstances if a girl refused him. Hodge is a big old stud. He might kill a woman, but not like that.
He’s got nothing to prove. Bartley is out to save his own ass, is all. He’s copped out before. He’s a snitch and a chickenshit, is all he is. He couldn’t kill anybody in cold blood, but he could go berserk. He was on coke. He’s a pipsqueak and a liar.”
Danny Webb, with Mike Caudill concurring, said that there was no more reason to believe Epperson than Bartley. As for Hodge, his size and strength alone were the strongest argument that he had stabbed Tammy. Didn’t Frank remember? The knife’s point had gone through the body, out the breast, through the carpet, and into the floor. That was a stone floor! That part of the Acker house must have been built on the foundation of one of the old miner’s duplexes. The floor beneath the carpet was like cobblestone, actually stones laid together and filled in with mud for mortar. The knife had been jammed between stones and into that hardened mud. Nobody but a tremendously strong man could have done that. It had to have been Hodge.
The number of wounds, all of which could have been inflicted in under a minute, could be explained by the panic they were in to get out of there. The telephone had rung. Hodge was trying to make sure he did the job right, like the good criminal he was. Bartley had botched his, just as he did when he left the briefcase. Bartley did nothing right.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Fleming said. “What a jury believes is what matters. But I’m not convinced.”
Word came to Rod Kincaid that Benny Hodge, reacting to Bartley’s allegations when they were made public, was ready to talk in return for leniency. Kincaid refused the overture, saying he would not be a party to any deal with the man he believed was the killer.
For Sherry the news that Bartley had fingered Benny and would do so at the trial was crushing. She took little satisfaction in remembering that she had warned Benny from the start not to have anything to do with him. Staying by herself in a motel near the jail, she was not surprised when she read in the Mountain Eagle that Bartley’s confession had surprised few people in Harlan who had known him since childhood. What old acquaintances revealed about Donnie only confirmed to Sherry what she believed she had always instinctively known. Some old-timers interviewed around the Harlan County Courthouse claimed that they had predicted that Bartley would tell authorities that he had taken part in the crime but did not commit the murder:
“We were all saying that Donn
ie would say he did some of it, and that he didn’t have a thing to do with the rest of it.”
Bartley was remembered as a boy who was a charmer but could not stay out of trouble. A high school classmate recalled that Donnie had been in trouble since his first day in school: “Everybody knew that if they got into a fight with him, he had a knife.” Confessing to crimes was nothing new with him. In the seventies he had taken advantage of plea-bargaining agreements by implicating co-defendants in other cases. In 1983 he had been one of five men indicted on several burglary charges. Pleading guilty, he had claimed that his only role had been to stand watch, while others testified that it had been he who had done the planning and the actual breaking and entering.
“He always gets to telling that someone else did something,” someone identified as “a long-time Harlan County courtroom observer” said. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve never known Donald Bartley to tell the truth,” the classmate said. “You name it and I think the boy’s done it.”
A deputy circuit court clerk remembered Bartley as a little boy, coming in to pick up his mother’s child support check. “He was the sweetest and most polite person,” she recalled, “and good looking, too. I almost cried the first time he got in trouble.” When he was testifying in the burglary trial, he had remembered her and said, “’Hello, you look so nice.’ He handed me that same line, just like nothing in the world had ever happened. And he was just as pretty as he ever was, too.”
Pretty Boy, Sherry thought bitterly.
Once the trial began, on Monday, June 2, she was forbidden to enter the courtroom because she was under subpoena as a witness, barred from hearing others’ testimony, although she had every intention of refusing to testify and had notified the court that she would cite the marital exclusion rule and, if necessary, take the Fifth. She considered being kept outside a cruel ploy on the part of James Wiley Craft, who everyone said fully lived up to his name, to influence the jury into thinking that Benny Hodge was so evil that not even his wife would stand by him. She could only visit Benny in the jail, under strict observation, since certain implements had been discovered in his cell. She tried to comfort him, but Benny was despondent. He was sure the FBI had put Bartley up to his statement and was doing everything it could to see him fry.
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