Lester was already scheduled to go on trial in October on the various counts against him from Project Leviticus, to all of which he was pleading not guilty. That procedure would have to be postponed. On August 28, he appeared in U.S. District Court in Lexington for his arraignment. On the surface he had regained some of his bravado, although his demeanor before the magistrate was meek, and he kept repeating “thank you very kindly.” Dressed in full Western regalia, he entered a plea of not guilty and posted a fifty-thousand-dollar bond.
Outside the courtroom Lester faced a squad of reporters shouting questions and shoving microphones at him. Swaggering a little, shoulders pulled back, cocking his head, every inch the cattle baron, he said that he had no doubts that he would be vindicated. To this day he did not know whether his fee had come from stolen money or not.
“You are asking the wrong person,” Lester advised, referring to Sherry Hodge and Carol Epperson, both of whom were being held in the Fayette County Correction Center. Carol had been unable to make bond; Sherry had been denied bond, on evidence that she had the means to leave the country. Lester suggested that Carol, if she did not get out of detention within a few days, would probably make a statement. As for him, he was confident.
“Lester Burns,” he declared, his voice rising, his hand sweeping the horizon, “will ride the ship of truth! The ship of justice will speed me to the shores of freedom!”
Carol, accompanied by her father, had surrendered to the FBI at the Clinton Police Department on the day the indictment was issued. That night Sherry learned that she, too, had been charged, when Dale Mitchell telephoned her to say that he would not be representing amyone in this matter, because of conflict of interest.
The next morning, Sherry was on the phone with Benny when Louise, who was alone in the house with her, said that three men dressed in suits were walking up to the front door.
“Let them in,” Sherry said. “It’s the Feds. I told you they’d be coming sooner or later.” She asked Benny to hold on and peered out the window. It was Burl Cloninger, Scott Nowinski, and an agent she did not recognize. Cloninger she liked better than any other law officer she had ever met. He was straight but fair, had never lied to her, and, for an FBI guy, was almost kindly. Nowinski she despised. During a previous encounter with him, Nowinski, in front of Louise, had referred to Benny as a son of a bitch. Sherry had blown up, screaming, “He ain’t done nothing to you, you dumb Polack! You don’t call the man I love a son of a bitch to my face!”
Louise ran into the kitchen. Sherry opened the door.
“Sherry,” Burl Cloninger said, “we’ve come to arrest you.”
“You got a warrant?”
“No, but we can get one.”
“Wait here a minute. I’m on the phone.”
The agents stood in the doorway as Sherry, in the kitchen, picked up the receiver again. She told Benny what was up and asked him if she should cooperate.
“Get off the phone!” Cloninger called to her.
“I’ll get off when I’m done talking!”
“Get off now!”
Benny advised her to do what the agents said. She said that she’d be in touch with him when she could.
Sherry told the agents to come in. Cloninger advised her that she was charged with conspiracy to transport money across state lines.
“What money?” Sherry said.
“Sherry, the best thing you can do is just come along and stop being a smart aleck.”
“I ain’t no smart aleck. I ain’t got no money, I ain’t had no money, and I ain’t done nothing.”
Cloninger read her her rights and asked her to sign an “Interrogation, Advice of Rights” form, but she refused, saying she would not be making any statements right then.
“Do you live in all this house?” Cloninger asked.
“How big do you think I am?”
“Which room do you sleep in?”
“My bedroom. What do you all think?”
“Well, where is your bedroom?”
“Yonder.” She pointed upstairs. Cloninger asked if she would agree to sign a “Consent to Search” form for her bedroom and her car. She agreed, on condition that the agents disturb nothing else in the house. “It’s bad enough, you all coming here like this upsetting my mom. You all ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Cloninger sat with her and Louise in the kitchen while the other agents searched her room and confiscated several items as evidence. These included letters from Benny; seven cashier’s checks from five separate banks payable to Dale Mitchell, totaling thirty-five thousand dollars; pages of figures that looked like code; a gold pendant in the shape of a lion’s head; and ninety-eight microcassette tapes.
Downstairs, Louise was crying.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Sherry said. “I knew for a year this was going to happen. I told you I was going to jail.”
“So you knew you were going to jail, did you?” Cloninger asked.
“I figured you all was going to come after me.”
“Well, what have you done?”
“I ain’t done nothing. I just knew how you people works.”
After more than an hour, the agents came down and presented Sherry with an inventory of the items they were taking away. Sherry examined the list.
“Looks like you boys come up with a whole lot of nothing,” she said. “How come you didn’t take my dolls? Some might talk.”
“Sherry,” Cloninger said, rising to his feet, “we’re going to have to take you in.”
“You ain’t taking me nowhere till I wash my hair and put on some clothes.”
Cloninger smiled. He reached for her arm. She shrank back. They stood there staring at each other, hunter and hunted.
“No, Sherry,” Cloninger said.
“You say no, I say yes. I do not wear shorts in public and I am not going out with dirty hair. Tell those boys of yourn to fetch me a pair of fresh jeans and a T-shirt. And tell them to turn their heads, or I’ll undress in front of them. I ain’t going to no jail in no shorts.”
The anonymous agent, who looked like a rookie, brought her clothes, and he and Nowinski went to search her car. Cloninger sat down again and chatted with Louise as Sherry washed her hair in the kitchen sink and descended partway down the back steps for privacy to get dressed.
Louise was sitting with her head in her arms at the kitchen table. Sherry went to her, put hands on her shoulders, and kissed the top of her head.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Cloninger asked. “Look at what you’ve done to your mom and dad.”
Sherry burst into tears, grabbing a dishcloth to cover her face. “Please leave my mom and dad out of this,” she sobbed. “They ain’t done nothing. ... They ain’t responsible for nothing I’ve done or been accused of doing ...”
“You should’ve thought of that,” Cloninger said.
“You should’ve ought’ve learnt you some manners. Leave me alone. I got to go to the bathroom.”
Cloninger asked Louise to go into the bathroom with her. He must think I’m going to kill myself, Sherry thought. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
When she came out, Cloninger produced handcuffs. Sherry begged him not to cuff her in front of her mom. He did not. She hugged Louise and asked her to call her brothers and not to tell E. L. while he was at work. Better to break the news to him that evening.
Cloninger ushered Sherry out the door and down the steps. “Don’t put her in the back seat with that Polack,” Louise called. “She’ll beat on him.”
The house sat on the side of a wooded hill overlooking the Clinch River, which meandered into a wide arc at that point on its way to meet the Tennessee. There was no bridge. A little ferryboat that crossed every twenty minutes to the opposite shore was the quickest way to the highway to Knoxville. Handcuffed now, Sherry waited in the car as the ferry, a chugging, rusty old thing that held only five cars, approached. She tried to make light again of the belongings seized from her bedroom and car and said
she hoped she would get one item back. The lion’s head had been a present for one of Benny’s birthdays. She had spent seven hundred dollars for it and would hate to lose it.
“Nice day,” the ferryman said as he collected the toll.
Theirs was the only car on the ferry’s eastward crossing. Sherry sat in the back beside the rookie. Cloninger opened all the windows to let in a breeze. As the ferry gurgled slowly away, Nowinski turned around and looked down at Sherry’s hands:
“You think you can swim with those cuffs on?”
“No,” Sherry said. “I can’t even swim with them off.”
“Hey,” Cloninger said, “I can’t swim either.”
Sherry stared out at the dark, swirling water, at the tangled bank ahead.
30
THE FBI LEFT HER AT THE KNOX COUNTY JAIL. At four that afternoon she was arraigned; the judge told her that he was refusing bail because she had access to over a million dollars and had rented a boat in Florida, something that was news to her, although she assumed Roger Epperson had done so a year ago. Asked whether she could prove indigence, Sherry took the Fifth to that, as to all questions. That night, still in Knoxville, she found herself in a cell opposite Carol’s.
All of her animosities against Carol surfaced. She accused her of ratting on her, being an ingrate—hadn’t she given Carol eight hundred dollars only the day before?—and a no-good snitch from day one who deserved to go to the chair just as much as Roger did. In the middle of that night Sherry awoke to find a matron fixing a deadbolt lock to the cell door. The inmate across the way, the matron said, was afraid Sherry would escape and kill her.
But when the state marshals came to get them at five the next morning, guards chained Sherry and Carol together for the ride up to a truckstop at Corbin. Truckers gawked and whistled as Kentucky marshals transferred them to another van and drove them to the detention center at Lexington. They were permitted to keep their own underwear; otherwise they wore issued blue jumpsuits and shower shoes. On the way to her cell, Sherry noticed a hand-lettered sign on the wall outside the Head Matron’s office:
EPPERSON AND HODGE NOT TO BE TOGETHER.
Immediately after Carol’s arrest, Roger Epperson began telephoning the FBI, who accepted his collect calls, first to Cloninger, who referred him to Rod Kincaid. Carol would talk, Roger said, if only a call could be arranged between him and her. He too was willing to turn state’s evidence and to become a prosecution witness in the Jackson County double homicide for which he, Benny Hodge, and Donnie Bartley had now been indicted. He told Kincaid that Lester Burns had received more than two hundred thousand of the stolen money and that he was firing Burns, who was in enough trouble himself. Kincaid advised him during this and several other calls over the next few days that the FBI was not in a position to help him, but Roger kept supplying information, and Kincaid listened. Benny Hodge had told him that Dale Mitchell had signed a receipt for money Sherry gave him and that Sherry still had possession of it. Roger telephoned Kincaid at least eleven times between August 25 and the end of September. He mentioned each time that he feared for Carol’s safety because of retribution from Sherry, especially once she figured out that he and Carol were cooperating with the FBI. Sherry had the money to pay another inmate to kill Carol, Roger insisted.
In fact, as Sherry had suspected after the judge refused her bail, Carol had started cooperating with the FBI the moment she was arrested. By the time Burl Cloninger arrested Sherry, he had already interviewed Carol for more than two hours, during which Carol among many other assertions blamed Donnie Bartley for the Moon Mullins murder and said that she had been receiving regular payments of cash from Sherry ever since the Florida arrests. Subsequently Rod Kincaid conducted several lengthy interviews with her at the detention center in Lexington, where she lost no opportunity to suggest that Sherry controlled whatever was left of the money—an amount Kincaid, deducting all known and estimated expenditures, estimated must be somewhere between four and five hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. Since the amount originally stolen could never be determined for sure, what was left would always be guesswork; but it had to be plenty.
On September 19, Carol was moved from Lexington to the Laurel County jail, “for safekeeping,” Big John Bowling said. The press reported that “another Lexington inmate” had been planning to kill her. Rod Kincaid continued to talk to her, extracting more and more information, especially about Lester Burns’s fee. Finally, having agreed to testify against both Lester and Sherry at their trials, Carol changed her plea to guilty on the conspiracy charges, in return for which the original facilitation charge against her was dropped. She entered her plea on October 4 and in federal court told U.S. District Judge Eugene Siler that she had paid Lester Burns out of stolen money and that the attorney knew—was explicitly informed by Roger Epperson—that the money was stolen. It made all the papers.
Sentencing would come later for Carol. In the meanwhile, even though her court-appointed attorney was from Lexington, she asked to be permitted to stay on at the Laurel County jail, and the judge granted this request on the grounds of the prisoner’s safety. It would be up to Big John Bowling to keep her apart from Donnie Bartley, who was still being held there, waiting to testify about the Gray Hawk murders.
At Lester’s farm, a brilliant yellow sun beat down on all the colors of a Kentucky autumn. On a knoll above the farmhouse, under a huge old oak gaudy with saffron and crimson, Lester Burns stood on top of a picnic table delivering a harangue to Rod Kincaid, who looked up at him from a seat on one of the table’s benches. This unlikely pair had come together to try to work something out. More specifically, Kincaid was there to persuade Lester that the legal situation for the Commonwealth’s most famous attorney was hopeless. They had already been talking for three or four hours. At first, when Kincaid had arrived, impressed by the beauty and grandeur of the scene, the sprawling house of hand-chipped Tennessee redstone, the fat black cattle, the lake below, Lester had been surrounded by three pals of his wearing sidearms. Kincaid was not afraid of them, or of Lester, whom he knew was a showman, not a gangster. Soon Lester sent his goons—really just local boys, two farmers and a school superintendent whom Lester had rescued from one mess or another—away, saying that he needed to confer with “my friend from the FBI” alone. Alternately sitting and standing on the table top, while Kincaid, who spent half his life listening, kept to his inferior position on the bench, Lester seized the advantage in height and would not surrender it. But Kincaid had all the marbles.
Kincaid’s difficulty was in getting a word in edgewise. He would bring up this or that piece of damning evidence—something from the one hundred and seven Comer–McNeal tapes, for instance—and Lester, after a disquisition on state and federal statutes relating to entrapment, would launch into some anecdote from his triumphant past. As the shadows lengthened and a chill wind began to blow in from the lake, Lester told Kincaid about a famous victory, the time he had defended a woman who had shot her husband to death.
“I thought she had a pretty good chance of getting off on self-defense,” Lester said, lowering his voice to convey his personal disgust at the brutality of the husband. “He beat her black and blue. The trouble was, he was the second husband. She’d killed the first one, too. Knifed him to death. But I made sure when I made my closing argument that she brought her baby into court. At just the right moment, I snatched that infant from her arms and held it up in front of the jury. ‘Take a good look at this child!’ I was shouting, right into the baby’s ear. ‘If you send this woman to prison, you’ll be condemning this baby to life without a mother!’ I was hoping that baby would start bawling, but it didn’t make a peep. I thought it was going to sleep. So I just slipped my hand under its diaper, like this, and gave it a pinch on its bottom. It let out a wail and a shriek like you never heard, and I shouted over it, ‘Are you going to rip this child from its mama’s arms?’
“I knew I’d won when the jury brought out their handkerchiefs. The woman
walked, God bless her, and she hasn’t killed another husband since!”
By twilight Kincaid had managed to convey to Lester most of what the government wanted him to know, offering no deals but implying without promising that, in return for an admission of some guilt, Lester might possibly avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars. Unstated was the assumption that he would be willing to testify against Dale Mitchell and Sherry Hodge. Kincaid declined Lester’s invitation to dinner but agreed to meet him for breakfast at Jerry’s Restaurant.
There were many meetings between the two. At one in Kincaid’s London office, he was taking a phone call when he saw Lester’s hand reach slowly toward a document that was lying on the desk. Kincaid grabbed it. Lester grinned as if to say, “I was just testing you.” The man would not give up. He began telephoning Kincaid at home, even dropping by the agent’s house—just to chat, he said, feeling lonely and, well, rather worried about his future. Kincaid enjoyed hearing Lester talk so much that he didn’t really mind, but he had to cut him off at last. After all, this was the FBI, and Lester would have to make a decision, finally, on his own.
On November 10 Lester went before Judge Siler and entered guilty pleas on two of the nineteen counts against him. He admitted conspiring with Dr. Billy Davis to defraud two insurance companies by faking an automobile accident; and he pleaded guilty to knowingly receiving stolen money and transporting it to Kentucky. On the second count he asked that the record show that in no way was he pleading guilty to having known beforehand of the plans for the Acker murder and robbery. The judge accepted this, and agreed to the U.S. attorney’s motion that all other charges against the defendant, including that he had conspired with a since-convicted judge to stage a car theft, be dropped. He was guilty of nothing other than what he had admitted, Lester said.
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