Trooper Down!

by Marie Bartlett

  Marshmon dressed quickly and went outside to start his patrol car. Almost immediately, he saw a black man of medium build walking north on the highway directly in front of his house. Turning on the patrol radio, he caught a portion of a broadcast giving a description of a possible suspect in the shooting—a black male carrying a brown bag, wearing dark pants and a light shirt.

  Marshmon stared at the man walking along the highway, then picked up his radio.

  “Would you repeat that description?” he said.

  When the information was relayed again, Marshmon ran back into the house, grabbed his service revolver, and called his sergeant.

  “I just saw a man fitting the description of one of the suspects,” he said. “He’s walking right in front of my house!”

  “Get him!” said the sergeant. “But be careful. He’s armed.”

  Marshmon pulled out of the driveway, tapping the horn to get the man’s attention. The suspect turned around, looked at the trooper, but kept walking.

  “Stop! I need to talk to you,” Marshmon called. But Alex Allen continued on.

  Marshmon positioned his cruiser between himself and the man so he would have some protection in case he was fired upon. Then he got out of the car, his .357 Magnum in his hand.

  When Marshmon pulled the hammer on the gun, Allen stopped.

  “Turn around,” instructed the trooper. “Face me and get down on the ground.”

  Allen did as he was told, but placed the bag he was carrying in front of him, so that he could lie on top of it.

  “Why is he doing that?” thought Marshmon. “What’s in there? What’s he hiding?”

  Marshmon approached cautiously, grabbed Allen and placed handcuffs on both his wrists. Then he searched him.

  “What are you stoppin’ me for, man? I ain’t done nothing,” Allen snapped.

  “We just had a trooper killed and you’re a suspect,” said Marshmon.

  “Man, I was just walking up the road.”

  “Sure,” said Marshmon, patting him down for weapons. His hand struck a hard metal object tucked inside Allen’s belt. Marshmon yanked it forward: a .38 revolver with two spent cartridges and one live round.

  “I’m taking you into custody,” said Marshmon.

  Once inside the patrol car, Allen began cursing the trooper and demanding to know why he’d been arrested.

  “What are you messing with me for?” he said. “I was just hitchhiking. What the hell did you stop me for anyway?”

  The litany went on and on. Finally, Marshmon—still reeling from the news of Ray’s death—could no longer tolerate Allen’s presence.

  “I was upset, crying, angry, and hurt,” he recalled. “Knowing Ray had just gotten killed and knowing that I could be holding the weapon that did it, then having to listen to this guy, made me feel very uncomfortable about having him in my patrol car. I knew I was about to lose my temper. So I did what I thought was best. I called another trooper and asked him to transport the suspect to jail.”

  Marshmon followed them to the county jail, returned home to pull himself together, then drove to the crime scene. As he stood at the spot where his friend had been killed, his only thought was, “Did he suffer?”

  When the four men in the stolen van had left the scene and watched Ray lift the radio to his ear, they were convinced he was alerting authorities. Afraid they’d be seen on the interstate, they took the first exit they approached, turned right, and headed down a rural, two-lane highway towards the small town of Enfield, where Trooper Marshmon lived.

  Coming upon a graveled driveway that led to an open field, they turned, drove the van into a secluded pull-off, parked it, and took off running. Deciding his chances were better if he went alone, and knowing he had the weapon that killed Worley, Alex Allen headed down Highway 301. The others ran towards the Seaboard System railroad tracks in an attempt to make connections north.

  All four had been spotted by a farmer coming to check on his crops in the field close to where the van had been ditched. Realizing that something wasn’t right, the farmer stopped at a nearby store and told the owner he’d seen four black men fleeing from a van parked in the bushes on his property, one carrying a brown bag and wearing dark pants and a light shirt.

  Local authorities were notified and the perimeter tightened around the Enfield area, east of Interstate 95.

  By 9:15 A.M., four hours after Ray was killed, police helicopters had spotted the fugitives at the railroad tracks and law enforcement officers moved in for the capture. The men surrendered with no resistance.

  Indicted by a Halifax County grand jury, they were charged with two counts each of possession of stolen property. Timothy Lanier Allen was charged with first degree murder. The other three men were charged with being accessories after the fact.

  Ray Worley was buried in Northampton County in the family cemetery behind his home.

  Throughout the trial, held six months after the slaying, Timothy Allen showed little emotion or remorse for his actions.

  Jackie Worley, Ray’s widow, attended the proceedings every day. There were painful moments—especially when Ray’s blood-soaked shirt was passed around for evidence—but she had a purpose in being there.

  “I went because there were things I wanted to be sure of, questions that needed answers. I had to know they had the right person because at the time it happened, no one knew who did what.

  “I didn’t take my eyes off Allen. At times, I tried to stare a hole right through him. But he would not look at me. His attitude was, ‘I’m here, but I really didn’t do anything.’ Did that make me angry? Yes. Even now I get mad. I’m still coping with it.”

  After four weeks of listening to evidence and more than a dozen witnesses, the jury convicted Timothy Allen of first degree murder. He received the death sentence (now on appeal). His brother, Alex Allen, received sixteen years’ imprisonment; Mack Green, fifteen years; Antonio Worrell, seventeen years.

  Most troopers felt the sentencing—particularly capital punishment for Timothy Allen—was fair. Some believe, however, that Worrell, Green, and Alex Allen should be serving more time.

  For officers who knew and respected Ray Worley, the shooting left its mark in one way or another.

  Sergeant John Wood, who notified the Worley family that Ray was dead, said that for months he woke up every morning at ten till six—the exact time he was told of Ray’s death.

  “Everyone in our district kind of walked around in a daze for a while,” he said. “It was so hard to believe it could happen here, happen to one of us. The new survival training we’ve gotten from the patrol since then has helped a lot. But we all realize now—it’s easy to get killed on this job.”

  For Erwin Marshmon, another of Ray’s close friends, and the trooper who captured Alex Allen, the murder left a strong sense of misgiving about his fellow man.

  “For a long time afterwards, I had trouble trusting people,” he said. “At one point, I became paranoid about stopping anyone. When I did, I could ‘see’ them pulling a gun.

  “I don’t carry on a lot of conversation with people I stop anymore. I watch their hands, watch everything they do. I don’t perceive anything as routine because I know that no one is your friend when you stop them on the road. Instead, they pose a potential threat.”

  Despite such well-founded cynicism, most troopers—like most people—still assume that terrible things will happen to others, but not to them.

  And when you are young and confident that life has only good things to offer, the odds against tragedy striking home seem even greater.

  Then something happens that proves you wrong.

  III

  Bobby Lee Coggins was one of those self-driven people who always accomplish what they set out to do.

  And what he wanted to do most in 1984, at the age of twenty-six, was to join the highway patrol. Actually, he wanted to join the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI), but he saw the patrol as the best place to start, a sort of stepping-stone
to his future goal.

  Even as a kid he knew what he did and didn’t want.

  He once walked home from a camping trip at three in the morning because the crowd he was with had been smoking marijuana.

  “When he came in the house,” recalled his father, “he woke us up and told us what had happened. ‘That’s their business,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want any part of it.’”

  An honor student through high school and college, he was academic by nature, yet athletic too, winning awards for many of his sports achievements. Other interests were fast cars, motorcycles, photography, and weight lifting.

  “Dad wanted us to lift weights from the time we were little,” said Barry, four years younger than Bobby. “It seems like we started right after we were born because I can’t remember not doing it. Bobby didn’t mind at all—he’d lift for an hour or more every day until he was sweating like crazy.

  “But I hated it. When it was my turn, I’d go in the room, close the door, and watch TV. Then I’d splash a little water on my face to make it appear that I’d been sweating too.”

  Bobby was on to him from the start.

  “Yeah, Barry,” he’d say, grinning, “you had a real good workout, didn’t you?”

  The boys grew up in a contemporary, rock-front house on a corner lot in Bryson City, North Carolina. A middle-class neighborhood, it was quiet and safe, a good place to live and rear children.

  The Cogginses were a close-knit, traditional family. James Coggins, a sales representative for Kraft Company and chairman of the Swain County Board of Commissioners, had firm ideas about how to raise boys, but he was a loving father who genuinely enjoyed his sons. Whenever Bobby took jobs that kept him out driving at night, James would often accompany him so the two could ride around together and talk.

  Frances, a small woman with a soft, gentle manner, was the nurturing force, the kind of mother who placed her home and family far above a career.

  Growing up, the boys seldom disagreed, despite some real differences in temperament. Bobby was quiet and deliberate, much like Frances. Barry was loud, impulsive, rambunctious. Bobby had straightforward goals and went after them, while Barry tended to drift from one get-rich-quick scheme to another. Both were bright, but Bobby was seen as “the brain,” Barry the gutsier, more street-smart of the two.

  Throughout his life, Bobby trusted his younger brother’s instincts and relied heavily on his judgment in making decisions—even when it wasn’t in Bobby’s best interests.

  One day Bobby was watching television when eight-year-old Barry came to the door, motioning him to come outside. What had started as an argument with some neighborhood boys was about to escalate into a knock-down drag-out fight.

  “I want you to choke this boy till his tongue hangs out,” Barry instructed his big brother, “while I stomp those two over there.”

  “Okay,” said Bobby, walking calmly into the fray.

  Fully grown, he stood only five feet eight, but was muscular and well-formed, with deep brown eyes and a shock of thick, black hair.

  Though he neither smoked nor drank, he was a junk-food addict who had to work hard to stay in shape. He’d run five to ten miles a day, come home and down half a gallon of milk at one sitting, then indulge himself in pizzas and Cokes. Sometimes Barry followed him on his workouts, cruising comfortably in his car while Bobby ran alongside, calling him names.

  After graduating from college, where he majored in biology and chemistry, Bobby took a job with the U.S. Forest Service as a park ranger. It was his first taste of law enforcement and he loved it.

  So he applied to the highway patrol. And waited. Got up at four every morning to run. And waited. Lifted weights every day. And waited. Toured New York City as a student photographer. And waited to hear from the North Carolina Highway Patrol.

  One morning he lay sprawled on the living room floor with his head on a cushion, deep in thought.

  “You know,” he finally said, “I’ve got all this education, all these degrees, and I can do just about anything physically. Why can’t I get in?”

  He was nearly in tears.

  A few weeks later, he was notified that he had been accepted into the highway patrol.

  James and Frances were supportive—whatever Bobby wanted was fine with them. But Barry was opposed to the idea right from the start. He thought the work dangerous and ill-advised for someone with Bobby’s educational background.

  “You don’t need to do that,” he told Bobby. “Be a chemist or a biologist.”

  But Bobby, who could dig in his heels when the occasion warranted, had made up his mind. Not even Barry could dissuade him.

  Once enrolled in patrol school, Bobby found it “no big deal,” mostly because of his prior academic achievements and his excellent physical conditioning.

  From the beginning, he was not the “gung ho” type. Neither the flashy patrol car nor the uniform especially impressed him. Nor was his every waking hour focused on the highway patrol. He seldom talked about his work, preferring not to involve anyone outside the patrol in day-to-day incidents on the job.

  When he received his first assignment, he looked it up on the map, and was relieved to learn it was in western North Carolina. Then he went to check it out.

  “Oh god,” he told Barry, “wait till you see this place.”

  Buried in the mountains more than sixty miles northeast of Bobby’s home, Hot Springs, in Madison County, still has no stoplights, fast-food joints, shopping malls, or theaters. Little more than a village, its largest industry—Whitewater rafting—is seasonal, dependent on the mood of the French Broad River that flows through town.

  Once a tourist mecca, it flourished during the 1800s by attracting invalids who came seeking cures at the warm natural springs boiling up from the mountains.

  By the turn of the century, when doctors were no longer convinced such “cures” were valid, Hot Springs had lost its appeal and because of its isolation had rapidly declined.

  The few businesses still remaining have a sad, deserted look, as though time had peeked in, shook its head, and left. A small bank stands on Main Street along with a hardware store, a park ranger station, a few general shops, and an old-fashioned cafe with a handwritten sign stating plainly, NO CREDIT. PLEASE DON’T ASK NO ONE.

  Surrounding Hot Springs is country that is pure “back-of-beyond,” with ridges so steep and valleys so remote “that even God gets lost without a map,” said one native.

  Understandably, Bobby Coggins’s presence in town—as the first trooper stationed in Hot Springs in more than a decade—was a major event.

  What initiated the assignment was a citizen’s complaint that troopers in Madison County, whose job it was to patrol the entire region, were spending too much time in one area, leaving large parts of the county unattended. Captain Charles Long, now retired from the patrol, met with local residents to hear them out and at the end of the meeting agreed to do something about it.

  “I discussed the situation with the patrol commander,” said Long, “and he agreed we should pick the best cadets we could find and send them to places that didn’t have a trooper.”

  “Bobby was the first officer we chose. We thought he was sharp, neat, well-educated, a good person to represent us in the area. And it turned out we were right. He did an excellent job.”

  His first two weeks in town, he caught the eye of a teenage girl who had never seen a patrol car, much less met a trooper.

  Her name was Linda Jo Justice and her parents ran the Carolina Grocery and Video store on Main Street.

  She remembers the first time she saw Bobby and the immediate crush that followed.

  “I was working behind the counter one day and he came in dressed in his uniform. I thought he was the best thing that ever happened to Hot Springs.”

  Two days later he stopped by again, struck up a conversation with Virginia Justice, Linda’s mother, but could not remember Linda’s name.

  Undaunted, she whispered to her mother, �
��Ask him to come for supper.”

  “You ask him yourself,” she replied.

  Bobby accepted the invitation, and before long he and Linda were a twosome.

  No doubt he was smitten by her beauty. Considered one of the best-looking girls in Hot Springs—if not the prettiest—Linda Jo had a mass of honey-blonde hair, big blue eyes, and the kind of figure that could turn a man’s head. Dressed up, she easily passed for twenty-one, instead of sixteen.

  “Mom didn’t really approve of us dating because of our age difference,” said Linda. “But she didn’t say much. She knew I wasn’t going to let her talk me out of it.”

  Bobby—who in the past had tended to date older, more sophisticated women—took some ribbing from fellow officers.

  “Need a baby-sitter for your girlfriend?”

  But Bobby would laugh, not really caring what they thought.

  He told her about his desire to go into the SBI and that he thought it was a safer job with more conventional hours than the highway patrol.

  By now, he’d gotten over his initial unhappiness with Hot Springs and began to relax and enjoy his new assignment. He found most of the locals pleasant and receptive to the idea of having a patrolman in town.

  “A few of the rednecks were scared of him,” said Linda. “They had gotten out of hand over the years because the law never came down here. But they learned to respect him,”

  He spent his first six weeks on the job with training officer Jerry Tapp.

  “He fit right into the community,” said Tapp, “because he could talk with anybody. And he was easy to train, open-minded, good about listening to what I told him. The only problem we had was that he was too talkative. I finally said to him, ‘Give me a break. I’d like to ride around in silence once in a while.’”

  The one question Bobby asked that Tapp had never been asked before was, “How long do I fight before I have to shoot someone?”

  What Tapp didn’t know was that before joining the highway patrol, Bobby had never handled, much less fired, a gun. Guns were not allowed in the Coggins home and Bobby had never expressed a desire to have one. Even after joining the patrol, he felt uncomfortable with a sidearm (though he scored high in marksmanship at cadet school), and would remove it as soon as he got home.