Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  “So I said, ‘Well, I—’ See, I didn’t say that I didn’t want to do it or anythin’ like that. I’m not wantin’ him to think I’m chicken-livered. He had a habit in the past of sayin’, ‘All you want to do is get the gravy. You don’t want to take any risks.’ Shit like that. That was the air surroundin’ me.

  “And, see, I knew that Ricky and them’s got some things goin’ of their own, so I don’t want to say I ain’t comin’ up here to do this job—not goin’ to go along with this and then want in on somethin’ else. If Ricky thought I was comin’ up here to maybe help him do a hit, then I’d be invited on the next bank job.

  “Ricky said, ‘These things can be done. Let’s go up there and take a look at it. Let’s get on the road. Let’s go do it.’ So I led him to believe, ‘Sure, let’s go do it.’ I was maintainin’ a front. And in my mind I’m thinkin’, ‘Well, hell, if Marshall’s goin’ to pay all that money, somebody’s going to kill his wife for him, so I’ll just introduce him to Ricky.’”

  And so, Ferlin said, he called Myers and told Myers to call Marshall and say he was coming, after all, and would be arriving in Atlantic City on September 6.

  He said he and Dew left Shreveport on the evening of Tuesday, September 4, in Ferlin’s white Cadillac with the Texas plates and the .45 automatic in the glove compartment.

  (Dew, on the other hand, would later tell authorities, and would maintain throughout his trial, that he’d had no involvement in the murder whatsoever, and that he’d never accompanied L’Heureux to New Jersey.)

  Ferlin said they spent the night in a Comfort Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, and then drove straight through, arriving in Atlantic City just after dawn on Thursday, September 6.

  He said he checked into the Airport Motor Inn under the name of Ernie Grandshaw, and, at just about 10 A.M., he called Marshall from the pay phone outside the motel and told him to go out to a pay phone and call him back.

  * * *

  The longer he’d spent in Shreveport in October, the more Bob Gladstone had been told the same thing. It didn’t matter where he was, whom he talked to—the Shreveport police, the detectives, the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s people, even the FBI—they all told him the same thing: Ferlin L’Heureux was not a killer.

  At least not of a sleeping woman, shot in the back.

  Ferlin was a weak man and a greedy man and even a vicious and absolutely immoral man, Gladstone was told, but Ferlin would not shoot a sleeping woman in the back. Not even, most likely, any woman, back or front, asleep or awake. Ferlin might be the one who set it up, and Ferlin might be the one to profit by it, and Ferlin might drive the getaway car, but Ferlin would not be the shooter.

  And so Gladstone had been plagued all fall by the damp, chill fear that the man who’d actually pulled the trigger, the man who had shot and killed Maria Marshall, was somehow escaping their net.

  So now, on December 14, when Ferlin L’Heureux finally reached the part of his story in which he introduced the name of Ricky Dew, it did not come to Bob Gladstone as a total surprise.

  All fall, Gladstone had asked around Shreveport, “If L’Heureux wasn’t the shooter, then who do you think it could be?” He was told there was no shortage of candidates, especially among the bank-robbing crowd that Ferlin was hanging with, but the name that had been mentioned most frequently—and in voices tinged with fear and awe—had been the name of Ricky Dew.

  Ricky had been around Shreveport a long time, Gladstone was told. Since the late 1950s, anyway, when he was a teenager and his father had moved down from South Carolina, looking to make a little money out of the oil fields that were sprouting in northwest Louisiana and east Texas.

  He was a man who kept a low profile, living back deep in the woods, disappearing for months at a time. But in Shreveport, his was a name well known to law enforcement authorities.

  In the late 1960s, Gladstone was told, Dew had started looking at banks. That was also when he’d begun to travel with Ferlin, the sheriff’s deputy who had not yet been dismissed from the force. “Back then,” a Shreveport police official said, “you didn’t get one without the other.”

  It was funny, they told Gladstone, to look at Ricky you’d never figure people had long since stopped counting the number of murders he was supposed to have committed. He was just an average, kind of scruffy, middle-aged, down-home sort of guy. Six feet tall, with red hair, long sideburns, a mustache and a craggy face marked with small, X-shaped scars that supposedly had come from snakebites.

  The one thing about Ricky that stood out was his eyes. They were the kind of eyes, someone once said to Gladstone, that you would sometimes see in Vietnam. Eyes with no feeling behind them. Eyes that never smiled, not even when the mouth appeared to. Eyes as opaque and uncaring as the ocean floor.

  Dew had attracted some attention in November 1977, when his first wife died in a boating accident. She had been fishing with Ricky at the time, and what people told Gladstone in Shreveport was that he had collected quite a bit of money from her pension plan and that, of course, he’d been considered a suspect—the suspect—in her death. But there simply had not been any evidence.

  “Ricky’s a pro, no doubt about that,” Gladstone was told. “He’s a legend around here. What helps him is he don’t have any fuckin’ conscience at all. I don’t think he could cry if he wanted to. And he could wash his hands in your blood.”

  But the story that had caused Gladstone to pay the closest attention, and the story that came back to him now, as Ferlin L’Heureux continued to talk, was the story of Linda Carlisle.

  Like Maria Marshall, she had been blond and attractive, and like Maria Marshall, she had been shot from the rear while seated in a luxury car that had just pulled off a major thoroughfare. Her husband, like Rob Marshall, had been at the scene when the fatal shots were fired. Her husband, like Rob Marshall, stood to benefit financially from her death.

  She’d been killed on Halloween of 1981. Her husband, Steven Carlisle, who had been on the verge of bankruptcy, had pulled off a highway on the outskirts of Shreveport and had parked briefly behind an oak tree in a park.

  She was killed by a blast from a .12-gauge double-barreled shotgun, fired from a distance of only two to three feet into the back of her head. The killer apparently had been waiting for her in the darkness behind the tree.

  Her husband settled several debts, including the mortgage on his home, from the proceeds of her life insurance policies, Gladstone was told, but, for lack of evidence, he was never prosecuted in connection with the murder.

  Her husband had been a friend of Ricky Dew’s.

  Dew wasn’t charged either, although a number of Shreveport law enforcement officials suspected he had done it. Again, the reason was no evidence.

  “Thing about Ricky,” Gladstone was told, “is that there’s never any evidence. Ricky don’t leave traces behind.”

  All of this was much on Bob Gladstone’s mind as Ferlin, in his narrative, began to re-create what had happened on the morning of September 6.

  The story he told (which, of course, was contradicted in many particulars by Ricky Dew) was as follows:

  At 10:07, using the coin box outside the 7-Eleven on East Washington Street, Rob called L’Heureux at the coin box outside the Airport Motor Inn. Their conversation lasted three minutes and twenty-three seconds. Rob told L’Heureux that he’d be bringing Maria back to Harrah’s that night to get the job done, but that he wanted to meet L’Heureux in an hour at the Roy Rogers rest area on the parkway just below Toms River so the two of them could go scouting locations. Rob said he had some good ones in mind.

  Sometime between 11 A.M. and noon, L’Heureux pulled into the Roy Rogers parking lot, which was officially known as the Forked River Rest Area at mile marker 76. L’Heureux had told Rob to park at the north end of the lot. L’Heureux parked at the south end, left Dew sitting in the car, and walked to the north end to meet Rob, who was standing in the parking lot next to his Cadillac Eldorado.

  Rob, as usu
al, was dressed in blue blazer, rep tie, and chinos. The day was sunny but unseasonably cool for that early in September. L’Heureux wore sunglasses and a leather car coat. At 250 pounds, he knew he cut a conspicuous figure standing there next to an ivory Eldorado in broad daylight in a busy parking lot just off such a heavily traveled highway, only ten miles from the town of Toms River, in which the man who was now smiling at him and shaking his hand was such a big shot.

  L’Heureux looked around at all the busyness. He didn’t like it. This guy could kill his wife without me even knowing about it and frame my fucking ass, he thought. “Say, Marshall,” he said, “how about we get in the goddamned car.”

  Once they did, L’Heureux asked for the “extra fifteen” that had been promised. It was only three days after Labor Day and here he was and he wanted his money. Rob said he didn’t have it with him then but would give it to L’Heureux at the casino that night. What he wanted to do now—and he didn’t have much time because he was running a little late—was to select a site where the job could unquestionably be accomplished that night.

  He pulled out of the parking lot at high speed, heading south along the parkway. (This would have been at just about the time Roby Marshall was waking up on Crest Ridge Drive and his mother was asking him if he wanted to join her and his father for lunch at the club.)

  “He was drivin’ eighty, ninety miles an hour,” L’Heureux said. “Checkin’ his watch the whole way. I said, ‘Hey, Marshall, let’s not get stopped.’”

  They drove through two toll plazas and shortly beyond the second Rob made a U-turn across the median strip and pulled to a stop at the side of the road just where it made a slight bend.

  “This is good,” he said. “I could pull over here on our way back tonight and in a matter of minutes you could have it done and be gone.”

  “Marshall, you’re crazy!” L’Heureux said. “Man, this is right out here in the daylight.”

  “But tonight,” Rob said, “it will be dark. Late at night sometimes there are three or four minutes between cars.”

  “No way,” L’Heureux said. “It’s right out in the open, which is fine for you because when they start askin’ you questions you can say, ‘Listen, there’s no way I’m gonna have my wife killed right out here in the open. But it ain’t fine for me. Keep drivin’.”

  Rob continued north a few miles further until he came to a picnic area along the median strip. He pulled in and said, “How about this?”

  L’Heureux did not like this site either. “The trees had been all trimmed up. You could see all the way through to the other side. I said, ‘That won’t do.’”

  So they drove further north until they came to the thickly wooded Oyster Creek picnic area. Rob pulled in there and L’Heureux said, “This looks fine.”

  From there, it was less than four miles to the Roy Rogers where L’Heureux’s Cadillac was parked. When they pulled in, L’Heureux could see Ricky Dew sitting on the front steps of the restaurant, taking the noonday sun. (Back on Crest Ridge Drive Roby was asking Maria why his father was late and where he was and she was saying, “God knows where your father is these days.”)

  L’Heureux told Rob to keep driving to the north end of the parking lot. He did not want to introduce Rob to Ricky Dew. If anything ever went wrong, he figured, the fewer people who knew one another the better. He told Rob to meet him outside the back door of Harrah’s, by the marina, at 9 P.M., just as they’d done in July. He told Rob to be sure to have the extra fifteen with him. He said the Oyster Creek picnic area looked like the right place, but he wanted to do a little further checking and he’d give Rob final instructions that night.

  “We drove back down the parkway,” Ferlin said, “so I could show Ricky the place I’d picked out. We stopped there for a bit, in fact we even took a leak in the bushes. I told him, ‘This seems to be the only place to do it. The other places he showed me weren’t worth shit.’ And he said, ‘This’ll be all right. But let’s get out of here now, we’ll talk in the car.’”

  On the trip back to Atlantic City, Ferlin said, Ricky explained how he wanted the scene arranged. He said L’Heureux should drop him off in the picnic area before the Marshall car arrived. That way, in the unlikely event that another vehicle—such as, perhaps, a state police patrol car, or a passenger car containing potential witnesses—pulled in before Marshall and was still present when Rob entered the site, Dew could just sit silently in the bushes and permit the Marshalls to leave without incident.

  Should that happen, Rob was to continue north to the Roy Rogers parking lot. After L’Heureux retrieved Dew from the bushes, they could make a second attempt there, if the lot were sufficiently vacant.

  “Then you tell him,” Dew continued, “if we don’t get her at Roy Rogers he should just drive on up and when he gets to Toms River, just ease slowly into his regular off-ramp and we can pull up alongside and try her there. If that don’t go, tell him to go home, you’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

  “He ain’t gonna be happy with ‘tomorrow.’ He’s been hearin’ that all summer long.”

  “Well, he ain’t likely gonna hear it tonight. What I’m tellin’ you’s just in case. We’ll get the job done right there at that picnic spot. But you tell him once he pulls in there to get the hell out of the car. Make like he’s got engine trouble or tire trouble or something. I don’t want her sittin’ in his lap.”

  “He don’t either, from what I can tell.”

  “Then, of course, I’m gonna have to shoot him, too.”

  “What?” L’Heureux said.

  “Not to kill him, just to wound him up a little bit. Got to make it look good, you know. Like a robbery.”

  “Ricky, I can tell you right now, he ain’t gonna like that part.”

  “Fuckin’ difference does it make what he likes? We’re the ones that’s doin’ the job.”

  “I’ll tell him, all right. It’s just that he don’t strike me as bein’ too keen on personal discomfort.”

  “I’ll make it a flesh wound. No kneecaps or nothin’ like that.”

  When they reached Atlantic City, Ferlin said, they went back to the Airport Motor Inn and took a nap. (Ricky Dew would later insist that L’Heureux’s story, insofar as it involved him, was a total fabrication.)

  “I met Marshall there,” Ferlin said, “just outside the casino, out back by the marina part, at nine o’clock. I thought the man had done come apart. He said, ‘I just don’t know how much longer I can stand it.’ He was takin’ his hanky out, you know, and wipin’ his forehead. Said, ‘I don’t know how much longer I can go on.’

  “But the first thing I said was, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the fifteen?’ He said he didn’t have it but he’d be drawin’ it from this casino credit line he kept talkin’ about and he’d definitely have it on him by the time he got to Oyster Creek.

  “So I told him, ‘All right. You stay here gamblin’ until about eleven thirty, quarter to twelve. Then you just drive on up to Oyster Creek there, like we done this mornin’, and when you pull in, pull way in, make that second left that goes down the lane there and then stop the car and get out. That’s real important. Get out of the car.

  “‘Go to the rear,’ I told him, ‘like you’re checkin’ a tire. Somebody will be there. He’ll shoot you, but not too bad. Then he’ll take care of your wife and I’ll pull in and pick him up and we’ll be gone. You give it a minute or two and then go out on the parkway—the northbound parkway, ’cause we’ll be goin’ south—and flag down a car and ask for help. All’s you know is you’ve been shot and you’ve been robbed. And that’ll be true, ’cause you be sure to have that fifteen thousand in your pants pocket. We’ll take it off you there.’

  “But I notice that Marshall’s turnin’ whiter and sweatin’ more. He’s got that hanky goin’ a mile a minute, moppin’ himself, but the sweat is just pourin’ off him. He says, ‘He can’t shoot me. I’m not the one who gets shot.’ And I says, ‘Well, damn, we got to make this look like a robbery,
we can’t just leave you sittin’ there listenin’ to the Hit Parade while your wife is bleedin’ all over your lap.’ But he says, ‘You’ll have to think of somethin’ else. I don’t want to be shot.’ And he’s still sweatin’. Fact, I thought the man was gonna faint right there at my feet.

  “So I says, ‘All right, but he’s at least gonna have to hit you on the head.’ And he says, ‘But not too hard. Make sure you tell him not too hard. I don’t want to wind up as a idiot. I don’t want to be a idiot the rest of my life.’

  “I told him, ‘Don’t you worry, you just kneel down by your tire there. We’ll give it the professional touch.’”

  Ferlin said he and Ricky then left the casino and stopped by a True Value hardware store and he went in and bought Ricky a pair of rubber gloves. Then they drove up the parkway to Oyster Creek.

  At some point close to midnight, Ferlin said, he dropped Ricky off, giving him the gloves and the Colt .45 from his glove compartment. Then he pulled out of the picnic area and headed south.

  But he was nervous, he said, he was edgy. He had never really thought it would come to this. He went through the toll plaza just below the picnic area and then left the parkway at the first available exit. He got on again, heading north, and went through the toll plaza again. He pulled to the shoulder of the road by a bank of pay phones. Five minutes later, he started up again and continued north, driving past the picnic area in which Dew was waiting. He got as far as the Roy Rogers where he’d met Rob that morning. He swung through the Roy Rogers parking lot and headed back south. He passed the picnic area one more time and thought of pulling in to ask Ricky if maybe they shouldn’t just forget the whole thing. Then he figured, shit, I’m the first car in there, he’ll probably shoot me. And there wasn’t likely to be much other traffic, what with big signs at all entrances saying “Closed After Dark.”

  He drove through the toll plaza again—he had plenty of quarters, so he could use exact change every time—and once more exited the parkway and reentered northbound. This time, when he came through the toll plaza northbound, he pulled to the shoulder by the pay phones and just waited. Waited for whatever would happen next. He really hadn’t wanted things to get to this point. She was such a pretty woman, after all, and it wasn’t like she’d done any harm to anyone. All he’d been in it for was however many thousand he could squeeze out of her husband. He hadn’t figured that the man would have connections. He hadn’t figured on a contract out on his life. But now it didn’t matter what he figured. It was too late to do a goddamned thing. Just sit there by the pay phones and watch the tollbooths, waiting for that ivory Eldorado to come through. It was just one goddamned hell of a shame, though. And those three boys of hers—they were just bound to miss her like hell.