Trooper Down!

by Marie Bartlett

  In fact, says Jackie, Ray was sensitive and thoughtful, the kind of person who couldn’t say no to anyone in need.

  Active in the community, he was a leading force in establishing a local law enforcement association, served as president of the Methodist Men’s Group, and was often seen cutting the churchyard grass or fixing an elderly neighbor’s roof.

  For relaxation, he’d plant a garden or cut wood on his 100-acre farm in Northampton County. Reading was another favorite pastime—mostly inspirational books like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, or Dale Carnegie’s guide to public speaking. Though not a college graduate, he was a strong advocate of self-improvement and talked of enrolling in classes once he retired from the patrol, just for the pleasure of learning.

  He also liked to cook, whipping up concoctions with no recipe in sight. His weakness was desserts, but he’d try anything once.

  “He made a tomato pudding that nobody would touch,” said Jackie. “He claimed it was good.”

  A homebody by nature, Ray was proud of the spacious, ranch-style house he helped build (he even picked out the draperies and color schemes) and would fuss and fume about keeping it neat.

  “Lots of times, he cleaned up after us instead of the other way around,” Jackie said. “And though he liked animals, he couldn’t stand dogs in the house. He said he had worked hard to have a nice place.”

  Home and family meant a great deal to Ray. An only child, his parents were divorced and he too had gone through an earlier, failed marriage (Jackie was his second wife). When her elderly mother and aunt were no longer able to care for themselves, it was Ray who insisted they move in.

  “He believed that you look out for your folks,” said Jackie. “All the years we were married, he was as good to my family as he was to his own.”

  At the same time, he had a quick temper and a short fuse.

  “My aunt Bernice, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, grew up on a farm and thinks everyone should get up at the crack of dawn,” Jackie said. “One morning after Ray had worked the night shift, she began slamming doors in an effort to get us awake. I knew it wouldn’t be long before Ray would lose his cool and tell her off. Sure enough, after she had slammed the door about a dozen times, Ray hauled out of bed, went stomping down the hallway in his underwear, and told Bernice, ‘Why don’t you slam the door five or six more times? Just leave it open and you can walk back and forth as much as you like. But, dammit, I’ve got to get some sleep!’

  “My aunt is almost deaf, but she heard that, and she never did it again.”

  Still, he had a good sense of humor, even when the joke was on him.

  “One night he stopped this guy,” said Sergeant John Wood, who worked with Ray for more than twenty years, “and the fella got out and ran. Ray went trotting after him and before long an audience had gathered.”

  “Run, Charlie, run!” they yelled. “That fat boy can’t catch you!”

  “Ray got a big kick out of that.”

  What amused him most, however, was aggravating his friends, especially other troopers.

  “If you had a week where you didn’t feel like doing much or there wasn’t much activity, he’d ride your case,” said Ervin Marshmon, a pal and co-worker. “He liked to pick things out of you. He’d call you over to his patrol car and—with a real serious expression—he’d say, ‘Look, you got anything you want to tell me?’ Until I learned that was Ray’s trademark, I wondered what he had on me. Then I found out he’d do it to everybody. He said he was always surprised at the information people spilled until they realized he was pulling their leg.”

  In turn, the officers gave Ray a hard time about his careless habits, like running out of gas or losing his car keys.

  He locked his keys up so often that every time he’d walk into a restaurant, the other troopers on break would automatically ask if he needed a coat hanger.

  No doubt he was preoccupied, for close friends say he was burdened with financial and family problems.

  Yet Smith, one of half a dozen officers Worley trained, called him “sharp and professional.”

  “He knew everybody in the area and had a memory like you wouldn’t believe. He could recall people he had stopped years before and recount every detail about the case. He was rarely challenged in court because he was always well prepared and could relate the facts in a way that people understood.”

  Like other active troopers, he also worked his share of wrecks, car chases, and fights.

  “One night Virginia state troopers chased a guy into North Carolina,” said Smith, “and Ray spotted him. He radioed for me to proceed that way so we could set up running roadblocks. Every few minutes, Ray would call and say, ‘He’s not slowing down, but we’ve got to catch him because he’s running people off the road.’

  “The guy took a curve near Jackson about ninety miles per hour on the wrong side of the road, went into a ditch, came out the other side, and careened down Jackson’s main street. Ray was behind him the whole time, and I was behind Ray. They looked like two race car drivers trying to jockey for position. Finally, the boy’s car swerved, hit Ray, bounced off, and left the road. It came to a stop at the top of the trees, threw the driver out, and landed on top of him. He was killed instantly.

  “I walked over to Ray, who was standing there looking at the scene, and said, ‘Man, I thought you were going to get it a couple of times.’

  “Ray shook his head.

  “‘I hate that boy got killed,’ he said,‘but he needed to be stopped.’”

  In 1971, during another chase, Ray was almost killed himself.

  The driver was speeding on a graveled country road with the trooper close behind. Suddenly Ray rounded a curve, slammed on his brakes, skidded off the shoulder, and hit a tree.

  He was badly hurt, his left leg broken in twenty-one places, his peripheral vision permanently impaired in one eye. The patrol car was so demolished it had to be towed away on a dolly. Doctors told him the only thing that had saved his life was a seat belt.

  At Duke University Hospital in Durham, where he was transferred for treatment, a pair of foreign interns—neither of whom appeared to speak the other’s language—placed him in a body cast and forgot to leave an opening that would allow him to go to the bathroom.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Ray said, examining his mummified torso. “I think my doctor better have a word with you two.”

  Bad luck seemed to trail him like a midday shadow.

  A few months after he returned to the road, he was standing on an icy bridge with two other troopers when a car came sliding into view. All three officers dived over the railing, but it was Ray who looked back, slipped, fell, and dislocated his shoulder.

  “When I opened the back door and saw him propped up by his buddies, no shirt on, and someone’s jacket slung over him,” recalled Jackie, “I said, ‘What have you done now?’”

  Ray was well aware of the risks involved in his job and never failed to caution the men he worked with about being careful. After Giles Harmon was killed in western North Carolina, he told Jackie, “You can’t tell what’s going to happen when you step out of that patrol car.”

  “Well, I don’t think you should be on the midnight shift alone,” she said, referring to the patrol’s policy of having some officers man long stretches of the interstate alone.

  Ray agreed, then dropped the subject. He worried about something happening to other troopers, but not necessarily to himself. After twenty-three years as a trooper, he had fallen prey to complacency, a common but potentially deadly hazard among long-term law enforcement officers.

  “More than 95 percent of the people you stop on patrol are not going to give you any trouble,” explained Trooper Ervin Marshmon. “But the rest—that other 5 percent or so—can hurt you bad. Ray had worked here for years without a major incident and knew everyone in the community. These were people who’d greet him with a smile when he’d stop them. They knew when they were in the wrong and
would pay their ticket and be done with it. So he got into a routine of trusting people, of assuming each stop was just another nice one. That’s how we all become complacent.”

  Others believe that Ray’s apparently lackadaisical attitude toward his own personal safety may have masked a deepening depression, accentuated by the suicide of his fourteen-year-old son, Ray, Jr., in the summer of 1984.

  Though devastasted by the loss, Ray kept his grief to himself, returning to work as soon as possible.

  “He didn’t let it interfere with his job,” said Sergeant John Wood, “but to me, he didn’t seem as cautious as he had been before.”

  The following April, Ray decided to accept a promotion, though it meant moving to another county. Rather than uproot his family he would commute, then transfer back to Northampton. Jackie would stay behind, caring for her aunt and two daughters.

  Everyone agreed that maybe a change—however temporary—might prove therapeutic.

  But no one was prepared for what happened next.

  Monday, May 13, 1985. Ray had worked the midnight shift on Interstate 95 and returned home about 7:00 A.M. He went to bed, slept till noon, then got up and told Jackie he was going to a Methodist Men’s Group meeting to help prepare food for an upcoming fund-raising event.

  About nine o’clock, he came home, tired, but in reasonably good spirits. He was scheduled to work from 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M.

  “I wish I could just curl up and go to sleep,” he told Jackie as he was preparing to leave. “I don’t know why, but I really don’t want to go to work tonight.”

  Nonetheless, he proceeded to Interstate 95 in Halifax County and began patrolling.

  About 5:00 A.M., four men driving two vans got off the interstate and pulled into a service station, looking for gas to siphon. They had stolen the vans, then robbed a Fender County grocery store. Now they were headed north en route to Washington, D.C.

  The station was closed but the owner had a German Shepherd dog on the premises. When the animal carne running towards the men, one of them shot at it with a .22 handgun, scaring it away. Then they took off in the early morning darkness.

  Ray was coming north on Interstate 95 when he saw a white late-model Chevrolet van followed by a burgundy Dodge van, both speeding, no headlights burning on either. Accelerating hard to overtake them, he chased the vehicles for two and a half miles, blue light spinning and siren blaring.

  Just before the 163-mile marker, thirteen miles south of Roanoke Rapids, Ray pulled ahead of the burgundy van. The white one slowed and came to a halt on the right shoulder of the road. What Ray couldn’t see in the darkness was that the passenger inside the front van had tossed the .22 pistol out the window. It bounced against the pavement and came to rest near the guardrail.

  As Ray moved in behind the white van, the burgundy van pulled up behind, sandwiching the cruiser between them.

  Ray reached for the radio. It was 5:11 A.M., Tuesday, May 14.

  “A-147 to Williamston.”

  “A-147, go ahead.”

  “I’m stopping two vans, northbound, just north of 561 right near 163. Both got Maryland plates, one temporary, one permanent. Can’t give you the [license] number just now.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Ray got out of his patrol car, walked to the front of the van, greeted the two young black men inside, and told the driver to come with him to his patrol car. The man’s name was Antonio Worrell; he was twenty-eight years old, from Washington, D.C. His passenger was twenty-seven-year-old Mack Eugene Green. It was Green who had thrown the gun out before Worley pulled them over.

  As Ray was talking to Worrell, the driver in the second van walked up to see what was going on. When he did, Ray told him he needed to see his driver’s license too.

  “My license is in my luggage and I’ll have to go get it,” said Timothy Lanier Allen. Riding with him was his older brother, thirty-four-year-old Alex Allen.

  While Timothy Allen went to retrieve his license, Ray took Worrell to his patrol car and settled him in the rear seat. Then he climbed in front. Though it was early morning and the start of a working day for most, for Ray the hour was late. He had put in a long night and was tired, perhaps too tired to realize that by not monitoring Allen more closely he had just placed himself in a very dangerous position.

  In the shadowy darkness, a figure approached and, as was his custom, Ray reached over to open the front passenger door.

  When he did, Timothy Allen pointed a .38-caliber gun inside the car and fired three shots. One struck Ray on the right side of his head behind his ear, one punctured his hand, and the other hit him in the left middle finger. Immediately all three men—Allen, Worrell, and Green—ran and jumped back into the van with Alex Allen and took off. The abandoned van was left with its motor running.

  As the men were driving away, one of them glanced back and thought he saw the trooper lift the police radio to his ear.

  But all was quiet inside the patrol car. The first bullet had ruptured a major artery in Ray’s neck, leading to a quick death.

  At the Williamston radio center, telecommunicator Linwood Cowan, Jr., was trying desperately to get Worley back on the line. Several minutes had passed since Ray’s transmission informing the station he had stopped two vans. No one had heard from him since.

  After twenty-five or so attempts, with no response, Cowan called the Enfield police department, the closest law enforcement agency to Ray’s location, telling them they needed to check on a trooper. In turn, the Enfield P.D. called the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles on Interstate 95 and asked them to send someone from the weigh station. Don Davenport answered the phone.

  “Normally, we monitor the troopers’ radio broadcasts and would have known what was going on,” he said. “But that night our monitor was broken.”

  The Enfield dispatcher told him that someone from Williamston had been trying to contact Worley for the past thirty minutes, then asked Davenport if he would drive to the spot where Worley had stopped.

  Accompanying Davenport was Cecil Alston, a weigh station employee and former telecommunicator. The two men set off for mile marker 163, ten miles north on Interstate 95. En route, they tried raising Worley on the radio.

  They could see the patrol car well before they reached it, its blue light, four-way flashers, and inside dome light glowing. The white van, engine still idling, was parked in front.

  “There he is,” said Davenport. “It looks tike he’s doing some paperwork.”

  Once again they tried reaching him on the radio. But there was no answer.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Davenport.

  Alston started out of the car and Davenport told him to be careful. For all they knew, the parked van could still be occupied.

  With gun drawn, Davenport walked toward the patrol car on the driver’s side, while Alston approached from the right.

  Shards of glass lay scattered on the pavement and Davenport could see the jagged edges that remained of the driver’s window. Then he saw the blood and Ray’s erect but lifeless form.

  “Oh god! He’s been shot!” he told Alston.

  Alston jerked the passenger door open.

  Davenport reached through the broken window and felt Ray’s neck, looking for a pulse. There was none.

  Alston, overcome by what he’d seen, leaned over the car hood and put his head down on his arms. Then he raised up and looked at Davenport. Both men were badly shaken.

  “I’ll go check the van and you call Williamston,” said Davenport.

  Assuring himself that no one was lurking inside, Davenport walked around the van, while Alston—who had notifed Williamston that Ray was dead at the scene—stood near Davenport’s car, listening for radio traffic.

  Suddenly Alston spotted a small-caliber revolver lying next to the guardrail. Neither man touched the gun, aware that it was a prime piece of evidence.

  With nothing to do now but wait for law enforcement officials to show up, they paced. Alston, dressed in a blue,
short-sleeved summer uniform, tried to keep warm. The sun had not yet risen on that stretch of the interstate and the morning air felt damp and chilly.

  As Davenport walked back and forth in front of the parked cars, his mind churned with questions.

  “What son of a bitch would do something like that?” he fumed. “What happened here? What caused them to do it? And where are they now?”

  Law officers and the ambulance crew arrived almost simultaneously. Detectives from the State Bureau of Investigation confiscated the gun, while the rescue squad checked the trooper for vital signs. Photographs of the crime scene were taken and other bits of evidence collected. As the medical team was removing Ray’s body from the cruiser, a plastic card fell to the ground. Someone picked it up and showed it to a highway patrolman, Sergeant F. W. Horton. It was a driver’s license belonging to Antonio Worrell, Ray’s back seat passenger.

  Now began the process of notifying family members and friends.

  Sergeant John Wood was sleeping soundly when his phone rang at ten minutes till six. It was Alexander Jones, a telecornmunicator from Williamston.

  “Sergeant Wood, bad news.”

  “What’s wrong?” said Wood, still half-asleep.

  “Ray Worley’s been murdered. All we know is that he stopped two vans. Then he quit transmitting. Everyone’s being notified right now.”

  “I’ll be on my way shortly,” said Wood, shocked into silence.

  As he passed Ray’s home, he glanced towards the house and wondered, “Who’s the unlucky person who will have to tell the family?”

  He was more than halfway to Interstate 95 when Williamston radioed him to turn around and go to the Worley residence. It was he who would have to relay the news. And he had no idea what he’d say once he got there.

  Erwin Marshmon was off duty that morning. When the call came at 6:20 A.M., he knew it must be an emergency.

  Like Wood, Marshmon could not, at first, believe what he was hearing. It had been less than a month since he had returned from Giles Harmon’s funeral in western North Carolina.