Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  Her parents were the sort of people who might have been expected to have an ideal child. As a boy, Leo Cooper had been called “one of the greatest high school basketball players ever developed in Knox County.” He went on to play basketball at East Tennessee State, and he married the homecoming queen, JoAnn Henson. After college, Cooper became a high school basketball coach and teacher and, eventually, an administrator. By the time FaNee turned thirteen, in 1973, he was in his third year as the principal of Gresham Junior High School, in Fountain City—a small Knox County town that had been swallowed up by Knoxville when the suburbs began to move north. A tall man, with curly black hair going on gray, Leo Cooper has an elaborate way of talking (“Unless I’m very badly mistaken, he has never related to me totally the content of his conversation”) and a manner that may come from years of trying to leave errant junior high school students with the impression that a responsible adult is magnanimous, even humble, about invariably being in the right. His wife, a high school art teacher, paints and does batik, and created the name FaNee because she liked the way it looked and sounded—it sounds like “Fawn-ee” when the Coopers say it—but the impression she gives is not of artiness but of soft-spoken small-town gentility. When she found, in the course of cleaning up FaNee’s room, that her ideal thirteen-year-old had been smoking cigarettes, she was, in her words, crushed. “FaNee was such a perfect child before that,” JoAnn Cooper said some time later. “She was angry that we found out. She knew we knew that she had done something we didn’t approve of, and then the rebellion started. I was hurt. I was very hurt. I guess it came through as disappointment.”

  Several months later, FaNee’s grandmother died. FaNee had been devoted to her grandmother. She wrote a poem in her memory—an almost joyous poem, filled with Christian faith in the afterlife (“Please don’t grieve over my happiness/Rejoice with me in the presence of the Angels of Heaven”). She also took some keepsakes from her grandmother’s house, and was apparently mortified when her parents found them and explained that they would have to be returned. By then, the Coopers were aware that FaNee was going to have a difficult time as a teenager. They thought she might be self-conscious about the double affliction of glasses and braces. They thought she might be uncomfortable in the role of the principal’s daughter at Gresham. In ninth grade, she entered Halls High School, where JoAnn Cooper was teaching art. FaNee was a loner at first. Then she fell in with what could only be considered a bad crowd.

  Halls, a few miles to the north of Fountain City, used to be known as Halls Crossroads. It is what Knoxville people call “over the ridge”—on the side of Black Oak Ridge that has always been thought of as rural. When FaNee entered Halls High, the Coopers were already in the process of building a house on several acres of land they had bought in Halls, in a sparsely settled area along Brown Gap Road. Like two or three other houses along the road, it was to be constructed basically of huge logs taken from old buildings—a house that Leo Cooper describes as being, like the name FaNee, “just a little bit different.” Ten years ago, Halls Crossroads was literally a crossroads. Then some of the Knoxville expansion that had swollen Fountain City spilled over the ridge, planting subdivisions here and there on roads that still went for long stretches with nothing but an occasional house with a cow or two next to it. The increase in population did not create a town. Halls has no center. Its commercial area is a series of two or three shopping centers strung together on the Maynardville Highway, the four-lane that leads north into Union County—a place almost synonymous in east Tennessee with mountain poverty. Its restaurant is the Halls Freezo Drive-In. The gathering place for the group FaNee Cooper eventually found herself in was the Maynardville Highway Exxon station.

  At Halls High School, the social poles were represented by the Jocks and the Freaks. FaNee found her friends among the Freaks. “I am truly enlighted upon irregular trains of thought aimed at strange depots of mental wards,” she wrote when she was fifteen. “Yes! Crazed farms for the mental off—Oh! I walked through the halls screams & loud laughter fill my ears—Orderlys try to reason with me—but I am unreasonable! The joys of being a FREAK in a circus of imagination.” The little crowd of eight or ten young people that FaNee joined has been referred to by her mother as “the Union County group.” A couple of the girls were from backgrounds similar to FaNee’s, but all the boys had the characteristics, if not the precise addresses, that Knoxville people associate with the poor whites of Union County. They were the sort of boys who didn’t bother to finish high school, or finished it in a special program for slow learners, or got ejected from it for taking a swing at the principal.

  “I guess you can say they more or less dragged us down to their level with the drugs,” a girl who was in the group—a girl who can be called Marcia—said recently. “And somehow we settled for it. It seems like we had to get ourselves in the pit before we could look out.” People in the group used marijuana and Valium and LSD. They sneered at the Jocks and the “prim and proper little ladies” who went with the Jocks. “We set ourselves aside,” Marcia now says. “We put ourselves above everyone. How we did that I don’t know.” In a Knox County high school, teenagers who want to get themselves in the pit need not mainline heroin. The Jocks they mean to be compared to do not merely show up regularly for classes and practice football and wear clean clothes; they watch their language and preach temperance and go to prayer meetings on Wednesday nights and talk about having a real good Christian witness. Around Knoxville, people who speak of well-behaved high school kids often seem to use words like “perfect,” or even “angels.” For FaNee’s group, the opposite was not difficult to figure out. “We were into wicked things, strange things,” Marcia says. “It was like we were on some kind of devil trip.” FaNee wrote about demons and vultures and rats. “Slithering serpents eat my sanity and bite my ass,” she wrote in an essay called “The Lovely Road of Life,” just after she turned sixteen, “while tornadoes derail and ever so swiftly destroy every car in my train of thought.” She wrote a lot about death.

  FaNee’s girlfriends spoke of her as “super-intelligent.” Her English teacher found some of her writing profound—and disturbing. She was thought to be not just super-intelligent but super-mysterious, and even, at times, super-weird—an introverted girl who stared straight ahead with deep-brown, nearly black eyes and seemed to have thoughts she couldn’t share. Nobody really knew why she had chosen to run with the Freaks—whether it was loneliness or rebellion or simple boredom. Marcia thought it might have had something to do with a feeling that her parents had settled on Kristy as their perfect child. “I guess she figured she couldn’t be the best,” Marcia said recently. “So she decided she might as well be the worst.”

  —

  Toward the spring of FaNee’s junior year at Halls, her problems seemed to deepen. Despite her intelligence, her grades were sliding. She was what her mother called “a mental dropout.” Leo Cooper had to visit Halls twice because of minor suspensions. Once, FaNee had been caught smoking. Once, having ducked out of a required assembly, she was spotted by a favorite teacher, who turned her in. At home, she exchanged little more than short, strained formalities with Kristy, who shared their parents’ opinion of FaNee’s choice of friends. The Coopers had finished their house—a large house, its size accentuated by the huge old logs and a great stone fireplace and outsize “Paul Bunyan”–style furniture—but FaNee spent most of her time there in her own room, sleeping or listening to rock music through earphones. One night, there was a terrible scene when FaNee returned from a concert in a condition that Leo Cooper knew had to be the result of marijuana. JoAnn Cooper, who ordinarily strikes people as too gentle to raise her voice, found herself losing her temper regularly. Finally, Leo Cooper asked a counselor he knew, Jim Griffin, to stop in at Halls High School and have a talk with FaNee—unofficially.

  Griffin—a young man with a warm, informal manner—worked for the Knox County Juvenile Court. He had a reputation for being able to reach teenagers
who wouldn’t talk to their parents or to school administrators. One Friday in March of 1977, he spent an hour and a half talking to FaNee Cooper. As Griffin recalls the interview, FaNee didn’t seem alarmed by his presence. She seemed to him calm and controlled—Griffin thought it was something like talking to another adult—and, unlike most of the teenagers he dealt with, she looked him in the eye the entire time. Griffin, like some of FaNee’s friends, found her eyes unsettling—“the coldest, most distant, but, at the same time, the most knowing eyes I’d ever seen.” She expressed affection for her parents, but she didn’t seem interested in exploring ways of getting along better with them. The impression she gave Griffin was that they were who they were, and she was who she was, and there didn’t happen to be any connection. Several times, she made the same response to Griffin’s suggestions: “It’s too late.”

  —

  That weekend, neither FaNee nor her parents brought up the subject of Griffin’s visit. Leo Cooper has spoken of the weekend as being particularly happy; a friend of FaNee’s who stayed over remembers it as particularly strained. FaNee stayed home from school on Monday because of a bad headache—she often had bad headaches—but felt well enough on Monday evening to drive to the library. She was to be home at nine. When she wasn’t, Mrs. Cooper began to phone her friends. Finally, around ten, Leo Cooper got into his other car and took a swing around Halls—past the teenage hangouts like the Exxon station and the Pizza Hut and the Smoky Mountain Market. Then he took a second swing. At eleven, FaNee was still not home.

  She hadn’t gone to the library. She had picked up two girlfriends and driven to the home of a third, where everyone took five Valium tablets. Then the four girls drove over to the Exxon station, where they met four boys from their crowd. After a while, the group bought some beer and some marijuana and reassembled at Charlie Stevens’s trailer. Charlie Stevens was five or six years older than everyone else in the group—a skinny, slow-thinking young man with long black hair and a sparse beard. He was married and had a child, but he and his wife had separated; she was back in Union County with the baby. Stevens had remained in their trailer—parked in the yard near his mother’s house, in a back-road area of Knox County dominated by decrepit, unpainted sheds and run-down trailers and rusted-out automobiles. Stevens had picked up FaNee at home once or twice—apparently, more as a driver for the group than as a date—and the Coopers, having learned that his unsuitability extended to being married, had asked her not to see him.

  In Charlie’s trailer, which had no heat or electricity, the group drank beer and passed around joints, keeping warm with blankets. By eleven or so, FaNee was what one of her friends has called “super-messed-up.” Her speech was slurred. She was having trouble keeping her balance. She had decided not to go home. She had apparently persuaded herself that her parents intended to send her away to some sort of home for incorrigibles. “It’s too late,” she said to one of her friends. “It’s just too late.” It was decided that one of the boys, David Munsey, who was more or less the leader of the group, would drive the Coopers’ car to FaNee’s house, where FaNee and Charlie Stevens would pick him up in Stevens’s car—a worn Pinto with four bald tires, one light, and a dragging muffler. FaNee wrote a note to her parents and then, perhaps because her handwriting was suffering the effects of beer and marijuana and Valium, asked Stevens to rewrite it on a large piece of paper, which would be left on the seat of the Coopers’ car. The Stevens version was just about the same as FaNee’s, except that Stevens left out a couple of sentences about trying to work things out (“I’m willing to try”) and, not having won any spelling championships himself, he misspelled a few words, like “tomorrow.” The note said, “Dear Mom and Dad. Sorry I’m late. Very late. I left your car because I thought you might need it tomorrow. I love you all, but this is something I just had to do. The man talked to me privately for one and a half hours and I was really scared, so this is something I just had to do, but don’t worry, I’m with a very good friend. Love you all. FaNee. P.S. Please try to understand I love you all very much, really I do. Love me if you have a chance.”

  At eleven-thirty or so, Leo Cooper was sitting in his living room, looking out the window at his driveway—a long gravel road that runs almost four hundred feet from the house to Brown Gap Road. He saw the car that FaNee had been driving pull into the driveway. “She’s home,” he called to his wife, who had just left the room. Cooper walked out on the deck over the garage. The car had stopped at the end of the driveway, and the lights had gone out. He got into his other car and drove to the end of the driveway. David Munsey had already joined Charlie Stevens and FaNee, and the Pinto was just leaving, traveling at a normal rate of speed. Leo Cooper pulled out on the road behind them.

  Stevens turned left on Crippen Road, a road that has a field on one side and two or three small houses on the other, and there Cooper pulled his car in front of the Pinto and stopped, blocking the way. He got out and walked toward the Pinto. Suddenly, Stevens put the car in reverse, backed into a driveway a hundred yards behind him, and sped off. Cooper jumped in his car and gave chase. Stevens raced back to Brown Gap Road, ran a stop sign there, ran another stop sign at Maynardville Highway, turned north, veered off onto the old Andersonville Pike, a nearly abandoned road that runs parallel to the highway, and then crossed back over the highway to the narrow, dark country roads on the other side. Stevens sometimes drove with his lights out. He took some of the corners by suddenly applying his hand brake to make the car swerve around in a ninety-degree turn. He was in familiar territory—he actually passed his trailer—and Cooper had difficulty keeping up. Past the trailer, Stevens swept down a hill into a sharp left turn that took him onto Foust Hollow Road, a winding, hilly road not much wider than one car.

  At a fork, Cooper thought he had lost the Pinto. He started to go right and then saw what seemed to be a spark from Stevens’s dragging muffler off to the left, in the darkness. Cooper took the left fork, down Salem Church Road. He went down a hill and then up a long, curving hill to a crest, where he saw the Stevens car ahead. “I saw the car airborne. Up in the air,” he later testified. “It was up in the air. And then it completely rolled over one more time. It started to make another flip forward, and just as it started to flip to the other side it flipped back this way, and my daughter’s body came out.”

  Cooper slammed on his brakes and skidded to a stop up against the Pinto. “Book!” Stevens shouted—the group’s equivalent of “Scram!” Stevens and Munsey disappeared into the darkness. “It was dark, no one around, and so I started yelling for FaNee,” Cooper has testified. “I thought it was an eternity before I could find her body, wedged under the back end of that car….I tried everything I could, and saw that I couldn’t get her loose. So I ran to a trailer back up to the top of the hill back up there to try to get that lady to call to get me some help, and then apparently she didn’t think that I was serious….I took the jack out of my car and got under, and it was dark, still couldn’t see too much what was going on…and started prying and got her loose, and I don’t know how. And then I dragged her over to the side, and, of course, at the time I felt reasonably assured that she was gone, because her head was completely—on one side just as if you had taken a sledgehammer and just hit it and bashed it in. And I did have the pleasure of one thing. I had the pleasure of listening to her breathe about the last three times she ever breathed in her life.”

  —

  David Munsey did not return to the wreck that night, but Charlie Stevens did. Leo Cooper was kneeling next to his daughter’s body. Cooper insisted that Stevens come close enough to see FaNee. “He was kneeling down next to her,” Stevens later testified. “And he said, ‘Do you know what you’ve done? Do you really know what you’ve done?’ Like that. And I just looked at her, and I said, ‘Yes,’ and just stood there. Because I couldn’t say nothing.” There was, of course, a legal decision to be made about who was responsible for FaNee Cooper’s death. In a deposition, Stevens said he had been flee
ing for his life. He testified that when Leo Cooper blocked Crippen Road, FaNee had said that her father had a gun and intended to hurt them. Stevens was bound over and eventually indicted for involuntary manslaughter. Leo Cooper testified that when he approached the Pinto on Crippen Road, FaNee had a strange expression that he had never seen before. “It wasn’t like FaNee, and I knew something was wrong,” he said. “My concern was to get FaNee out of the car.” The district attorney’s office asked that Cooper be bound over for reckless driving, but the judge declined to do so. “Any father would have done what he did,” the judge said. “I can see no criminal act on the part of Mr. Cooper.”

  Almost two years passed before Charlie Stevens was brought to trial. Part of the problem was ensuring the presence of David Munsey, who had joined the Navy but seemed inclined to assign his own leaves. In the meantime, the Coopers went to court with a civil suit—they had “uninsured-motorist coverage,” which requires their insurance company to cover any defendant who has no insurance of his own—and they won a judgment. There were ways of assigning responsibility, of course, which had nothing to do with the law, civil or criminal. A lot of people in Knoxville thought that Leo Cooper had, in the words of his lawyer, “done what any daddy worth his salt would have done.” There were others who believed that FaNee Cooper had lost her life because Leo Cooper had lost his temper. Leo Cooper was not among those who expressed any doubts about his actions. Unlike his wife, whose eyes filled with tears at almost any mention of FaNee, Cooper seemed able, even eager, to go over the details of the accident again and again. With the help of a school-board security man, he conducted his own investigation. He drove over the route dozens of times. “I’ve thought about it every day, and I guess I will the rest of my life,” he said as he and his lawyer and the prosecuting attorney went over the route again the day before Charlie Stevens’s trial finally began. “But I can’t tell any alternative for a father. I simply wanted her out of that car. I’d have done the same thing again, even at the risk of losing her.”