Billy and Reedy were alone in the bar for about ninety minutes. Reedy said Billy did most of the talking.
“He was still hurting about his mother, but he wasn’t completely down because he was also looking forward to the next year,” Reedy said. “He then was talking about how he couldn’t wait for spring training to start. He held his glass up and toasted: ‘Two months to Fort Lauderdale, pard.’”
The sun was setting when Billy and Reedy finally pushed back from the bar to head home. A light snow in a swirling wind had begun to fall about an hour earlier.
“Who’s driving?” Dunlop asked.
Reedy held up his hand with the keys to the Ford pickup and shook them. Dunlop was relieved. Reedy, he thought, seemed sober enough to drive. Billy did not.
For years afterward, there has been uncertainty about who actually drove home that evening because at the crash scene Reedy admitted he was driving, then recanted his story about five hours later. Reedy said that initially he was covering for his friend, knowing that a drunk driving conviction would be devastating to Billy’s image and upcoming managerial prospects. Besides, Reedy felt he could pass a Breathalyzer test. (Police officials would disagree.)
Later, facing possible vehicular manslaughter charges, Reedy changed his story and insisted he was now telling the truth.
There were two court cases in subsequent years that were meant to unequivocally establish whether Reedy was driving. Testimony went on for weeks, reams of forensic evidence was presented, and lawyers for and against Reedy argued before judges and juries. At stake was not only Reedy’s criminal culpability in the accident, but later, a large monetary award to Jill Martin in a wrongful death civil claim against Reedy’s insurance company, the Ford Leasing Company, and the town of Fenton for improperly maintaining the road.
Unfortunately, the investigation into the accident was bungled, and some pertinent evidence was never gathered. Presaging the O. J. Simpson murder trial, which happened about five years later, there was even a mysterious glove left at the scene that could have been pivotal but never factored into the case. In the end, there is room for debate on both sides.
But after a lengthy trial with lawyers sparring for and against Reedy, a jury of eight men and women found that Reedy was the driver—and that he was impaired with a blood alcohol level of .10, which was the minimum necessary for a drunken driving arrest at the time in New York State. He was fined $350 and his license was suspended. Other charges were not pursued.
That verdict was crucial to finding Reedy liable for the crash in the succeeding civil case. Again, forensic evidence could be construed to put Billy in the passenger seat or the driver’s seat—it depended on your interpretation (or motivations). But the fact is that a second court found that Billy was a passenger.
Billy was known to be stubborn about not yielding his keys—“I saw him bowlegged shitfaced drunk and refuse to give me the keys,” said Eddie Sapir—but other friends, family, and associates said there were cases when Billy did let others drive.
And he had already been driven home from Front Street bars at least twice. One regular Front Street bar patron said in 1990 that he had run into Reedy during one of his court cases that year and that Reedy had admitted that he was driving. Billy had fallen asleep for parts of the drive home, Reedy said.
Many of those closest to Billy—Sapir, Mickey Mantle, Billy Joe Martin—believed that Reedy was the passenger. They came to that opinion principally because of their faith in Bill Reedy’s reliability, character, and integrity. Reedy was well liked by most everyone who knew him, a round-faced man who put everyone at ease.
“If Bill Reedy said he wasn’t driving, then I believe him,” Billy Joe said.
But those are the rare voices that put the steering wheel in Billy’s hands that evening. Overwhelmingly, the bulk of the evidence, most notably the position of the bodies after the crash—Reedy closest to the steering wheel, Billy against the passenger-side door—seems to indicate that Reedy was the driver.
It is by far the more likely conclusion—and why a jury thought so, too. It is a conclusion supported by Reedy’s admission at the scene, which he made repeatedly over several hours to emergency workers, police, and doctors at the hospital. It is supported by most of the testimony. And it is supported by the most convincing and indisputable proof of the evening: Reedy had the keys in his hand as he left Morey’s. He could not have gained possession of those keys unless Billy handed them to him or agreed that he should take them.
The path of the truck after exiting Morey’s parking lot also suggests the driver was not overly familiar with the route. Because one known truth is that Billy’s Ford pickup truck missed the first exit off the highway that would have brought the two men home on the most direct and safest route. But, instead of leaving the highway at exit 3, which would have led the pickup truck up Ballyhack Road and to the foot of Potter Hill Road, the pickup sped through the blowing snow to exit 4.
There was a pivotal difference in the routes. From exit 3, the usual route, the truck would have climbed the precipitous grade of Potter Hill Road, and because of that mile-long, uphill path, the truck would have had to slow to almost a stop before making a left turn into the driveway of the farmhouse. From exit 4, the truck was forced to follow a path that eventually brought the truck to the opposite end of Potter Hill Road—arriving at the peak of a treacherous rise. That required the truck to make a sharp, downhill, ninety-degree left turn and, after about a hundred feet, a quick right turn into the driveway.
Exit 4 off Interstate 88 first led Billy’s pickup truck to Pleasant Hill Road, which then feeds into Hunt Hill Road. Unlit and barely two lanes, Hunt Hill Road travels northward and uphill for almost its entire length. Its four miles traverse dips and hollows as Hunt Hill Road passes hundreds of acres of farmland, rows of massive pine trees, wide-open fields, and the occasional horse farm. Running parallel to the road is a drainage ditch—five feet deep in some sections. At various points along the road, the drop from the paved road to the grassy ditch is guarded by guardrails.
Finally, at the top of Hunt Hill Road, the treeline recedes to reveal a striking vista to the west. At roughly 5:45 p.m. on December 25, 1989, the view was obscured by night and the landscape had become both dark and forbidding with snow gusting across the glazed road. The left turn onto Potter Hill Road was tricky even in good weather. The pavement at that section of the road slants dramatically to the right, pulling any moving object away from a left-hand turn. The slope of the road is by design; it helps water run into the drainage ditch.
As Billy’s neighbor Betty Jenks said, “We’ve had a lot of people’s cars in that ditch by the corner. We call the police and they come fish ’em out.”
There had been periodic calls for the town to fill the ditch at the bend of Potter Hill Road with gravel, soil, or some other material. But the ditch remained as it had been for decades.
As police reconstructed the accident later from skid marks and tire tracks, the truck was moving about thirty miles an hour, which was generally thought to be too fast for the icy, slick conditions. As the truck slid sideways and failed to negotiate the turn, the passenger side of the vehicle plunged into the ditch. But the truck apparently did not slow down, perhaps because Reedy tried to get back onto the road by turning the steering wheel to the left and stepping on the accelerator.
But instead of climbing the steep embankment, the truck lurched violently forward for about fifty feet, then slammed into the immovable concrete culvert and a four-foot-thick metal drainage pipe that spanned the ditch and formed the beginning of the farmhouse driveway.
The hood of the pickup truck buckled on impact. The windshield was smashed and propelled toward the front bumper by the blunt force of Billy’s head striking it. The engine, now partially exposed, stopped but remained warm, the falling snow melting on contact with it. Billy had recoiled from the impact with the windshield and was slumped against the passenger-side door, motionless and silent. His neck w
as awkwardly tilted forward. Reedy was lying on top of him, his hip broken and his legs wedged under the misshapen dashboard. Neither man had been wearing a seat belt. Grabbing the steering wheel with his left hand, Reedy pulled himself partially off his friend.
“Billy, you OK?” Reedy called out. “Billy!”
There was no response.
“Billy,” Reedy said, “if you can get up, I can push you out the window.”
There was silence. Shortly thereafter, Peter Piech, a neighbor, drove past and saw the wreck. When he approached the truck, Reedy asked him to pull him up so that he was no longer leaning on Billy. Opening the driver’s-side door, Piech grabbed the heavyset Reedy by the lapels of his jacket and yanked him toward him.
When the members of the Port Crane Volunteer Fire Department arrived minutes later—a neighbor had heard the crash and called—Chief John Eldred said he thought Billy looked dead. Reedy was pinned in the truck, but another fireman said he thought he felt a pulse for Billy.
Through the passenger-side door, Eldred grabbed Billy in a bear hug and pulled him out of the truck before passing him to another firefighter, who passed Billy to another fireman who laid Billy on a long, straight board on the ground. It was not exactly the safest way to extricate a passenger suspected of a head or neck injury.
An ambulance was minutes from the scene when another Port Crane fireman pushed the intercom button next to the iron gates at the foot of the driveway.
“The intercom was set up so that my phone would ring,” Jill said.
She was upstairs in the master suite and had been in and out of bed all day, still recovering from the flu. There was a turkey in the oven. Something was wrong with the heating system and the house was colder than normal. Jill was under the covers of her bed. Carol Reedy was in the guest bedroom down the hall.
“It was a bitter cold day outside and it was kind of cold inside the house,” Jill said. “It was dark and nasty outside. It had all the elements.”
Until an interview for this book, Jill has never publicly talked in extensive detail about the accident and the immediate aftermath. Seated in a gazebo at her horse farm in the summer of 2013, when asked about the accident and her memories of it, she answered with a five-minute monologue. Rarely pausing, she explained the scene, her words tumbling forward from one recollection to the next in chronological order. Her tone was mournful but detached, perhaps a byproduct of the nearly twenty-five years that had passed.
“I was reading in our bedroom upstairs, a mystery book,” she said. “There had been an accident in the book and someone in the book had to go get help and that’s when my phone rang. I’ve always thought that was so odd, just a premonition.
“On the phone, someone said to me that there was an accident out front by the driveway and that I needed to come out right away. I threw on a pair of sweats and drove our other Ford vehicle down the driveway and it was just flashing lights and people scurrying around. It was dark and hard to see. This big burly guy, a fire department guy, said I couldn’t go down where the accident was.”
Jill could see the smashed front end of Billy’s pickup truck. She screamed and cursed at the fireman, pushing past him as she ran through the iron gates.
“I saw Billy lying there and I knelt down in the snow next to him and tried to communicate with him,” Jill said. “I held his head in my hands. His eyes were kind of in the back of his head. He wasn’t responding but I told him I loved him and that we had so much more to live for. I wanted him to hold on. I said, ‘Billy, stay here, don’t go. There’s a world out there for us to live. You have everything to live for.’”
Billy was limp and lifeless. Carol Reedy, who had hustled down the driveway, thought he looked like he was asleep. The wind was whipping as she ran to the truck where she saw her husband under a blanket still trapped by the dashboard.
The situation was harrowing with emergency workers trying to revive Billy, eager to get a response of any kind.
“But that wasn’t happening,” Jill said. “It was looking pretty bleak.”
The snow was falling more heavily.
“We were obviously losing Billy,” Jill said. “The ambulance was getting ready to take Billy to the hospital. But suddenly, they got a pulse so he was still alive.”
Soon, Jill was in the back of the ambulance with Billy heading for the Wilson Memorial Hospital in nearby Johnson City, New York.
“They had to pull over a couple times to get his heart started again,” Jill said. “There was a lot going on in the back of the ambulance. They were doing a lot of different things and looked worried. When we arrived at the hospital, they told me to wait in the ambulance and to not come in right away. And I told them I wasn’t going to wait in the ambulance.
“Someone directed me into a private room, where I waited and I waited and I waited. At one point, I picked up the phone to use it. The line that I got, it was someone from the press asking point-blank questions of someone. And they weren’t saying anything. I hung up and waited some more.”
Reedy was pulled from the truck and driven to the emergency room as well. Doctors were concerned about nerve and vascular damage in his broken hip and prepared to transfer him to a trauma center in Syracuse, about seventy miles to the north. Local reporters had arrived in the emergency room waiting area pleading for information. Doctors were dashing in and out of the area, looking both harried and uneasy.
No one as famous had ever been seriously injured in the Binghamton region. The mayor was alerted and began to drive to the hospital. The police chief, the fire chief, and several Catholic priests were contacted, startled on an otherwise sleepy Christmas night by the news that Billy Martin was lying unconscious in Wilson Memorial Hospital.
Jill remained alone in a noiseless room. She paced.
Then, a doctor, whose name Jill never ascertained, entered the room. Jill spoke first:
“Are you coming in here to tell me my husband has died?”
The doctor replied, “Yes, I am.”
Jill said she was then asked if she wanted to talk to the reporters who were waiting in the lobby. She declined. She instead asked to see Billy and was led to a bay of the emergency room. She went alongside the gurney and reached for Billy’s hand.
“I had a few minutes with Billy and I talked to him,” she said. “I felt the blood and the warmth rush away from his hand. I stayed for another few minutes, just talking. I told him I loved him and I told him that I would take care of everything and that I wouldn’t let him down.”
Jill returned to the private room where she had been waiting minutes earlier. On the way, she asked how she could get an outside phone line to make some calls. Then she called, in order, Billy Joe, Kelly Ann, and George Steinbrenner.
In the waiting room, Michael Doll, a hospital spokesman, told reporters that Billy had been pronounced dead of head and neck injuries and severe internal injuries at 6:56 p.m. Dr. Patrick Ruddy, the county coroner, added that Billy had “basically died of a broken neck.” Billy also had a compressed spinal column.
Within minutes, the Associated Press and United Press International filed dispatches labeled URGENT, a designation reserved for major breaking news. The headline was YANKEES MANAGER BILLY MARTIN DIES IN AUTO ACCIDENT, which was a revealing slip-up because Billy was not the Yankees manager at the time.
The news filtered into newsrooms across the country. The timing meant that many evening television newscasts were interrupted with a bulletin: “Billy Martin dead at sixty-one.” Around the nation, it was the most common way people learned of the accident. Since Billy was still the best-known baseball manager in America, it was weighty, substantial news. It was delivered by a dinnertime news program as a holiday was winding down.
“I was at home and having fun because Christmas is also my birthday,” said Rickey Henderson. “There were people over and we were laughing and having a good time. But then the TV said Billy was dead. I ran over and I listened. The room went quiet and I fell to my knees. I co
uldn’t believe that he could be gone. How could that happen?
“I got up and sat in a chair but I didn’t eat or drink anything for probably a day. I just sat there crying or staring at the TV. Everyone went away and just left me sitting there.”
Jill reached Kelly Ann’s home but she was not there. Jill instead told the news to Kelly Ann’s mother and Billy’s first wife, Lois. The news spread in California, where there was haunting disbelief. Less than two weeks earlier, Billy had been shoulder to shoulder with his family and friends burying Jenny Downey. Some expected to see him again in a few days.
Jill left a voice mail at Billy Joe’s house, but he was at his mother Gretchen’s house on Christmas night. Then a friend of Gretchen’s called with the news, having been alerted to it on her television.
“I started crying hysterically,” Gretchen said. “And I remember saying, ‘I’ll never talk to him again.’ I was so overcome I think it traumatized my son to the point where he did not shed a tear.
“It stunned him until he was in shock. He just said, ‘I have to get to New York right now.’ But the grief—our grief, his grief—was all-consuming.”
Billy Joe went to his home where friends began to arrive.
“I may have been stoic at my mom’s but when I got home I was a mess,” Billy Joe said.
In Tampa, Steinbrenner talked with Jill and promised to take care of all the funeral and burial arrangements. Then he started calling various Yankees.
In a 1990 interview, Steinbrenner said he was at a loss for several moments.
“It wasn’t just my sorrow; I didn’t know who to call first,” George said. “Billy meant so much to so many people. And how many people do I call? I couldn’t figure out what to do. Billy touched so many people. Where do I start? There were so many calls to make.”
One of those he called was Ron Guidry.
“I told Mr. Steinbrenner that it was an end of an era,” Guidry said. “We’d move on but not quite the same. The Yankees would be different; baseball would be different. And part of that was because of what Billy had taught us all. He had that much impact.”
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