In the view of some people in the area, the real trouble started when Patricia Saltonstall hired Rance Spellman. She had met him during the renovation of her farmhouse; he operated heavy equipment. Spellman came from a family that also had been seeking some space in rural Virginia. His father, who was born and raised and married in Ohio, had gone to Alexandria, Virginia, after the Second World War to work as a heavy-equipment operator, and eventually moved his family out to what the Spellmans had built as a weekend cabin in Culpeper County, only ten or fifteen miles from Points of View. In the meantime, he had managed to create a small heavy-equipment contracting company of his own, despite an inclination to be a lot more comfortable on top of a bulldozer than in front of a ledger book. Rance Spellman worked for that company and took it over after the sudden death of his father. The first time Pat Saltonstall saw him, he was on top of a bulldozer—a bulldozer whose blade had just hit the root of a treasured old ash tree in her front yard. She remembers his courtesy, and the almost delicate way he handled the huge machine, and his blue eyes.
Spellman was interested in what might be done with the top of Hickerson Mountain. “He said he’d like to do the mountain—clear it, stabilize the soil, fence it,” Pat Saltonstall has said. “He was just inspired by it.” She hired him to do the mountain. It was soon obvious to her that he was a prodigious worker—a burly young man, six feet two inches tall, who was meticulous about his equipment and precise in his estimates and annoyed whenever darkness finally forced him to quit for the day. It was also obvious, she later said, that with Rance Spellman’s help “I could do this farm, and it would be fun.” In early 1980, she hired him, on a contract basis, to be her farm manager. Eventually, they also had what Pat Saltonstall usually refers to as “a personal relationship.” A small solar house had been built for the Points of View farm manager, but Spellman moved into the restored farmhouse with Pat Saltonstall.
It was a relationship they didn’t advertise—aware, as Pat Saltonstall says, that in the view of her neighbors, “it was not the sort of thing you did with the help.” Rance Spellman was in his early thirties, nearly twenty years younger than Pat Saltonstall, and his education was in earthmoving and stone masonry and horse training rather than in the sort of subjects taught at Smith. “There was a gap in age and a gap in cultural background,” she has said. “But we had a lot in common. He could stand alone, the way I do.” She saw him as a sort of blond Marlboro man—an independent outdoorsman in jeans and boots who patrolled the property and, like the cowboys of old, always carried a gun. She admired his competence and his almost religious devotion to hard work. He joked about her being his employer, a relationship he expressed in the diminutive: his private name for her was Bossie. Together, they built up a herd of registered Angus cattle. Spellman cleared more fields and built more fences. On the other side of the mountain, they had some lumber cut and hauled out through the right-of-way road to the mill.
After a time, Pat Saltonstall became aware that where she saw a protector—a handsome and basically rather shy protector—some other people saw a bully. She considered that largely a matter of jealousy caused by Spellman’s looks and his “tremendous presence.” In her view, “There’s a kind of handicap that big men have: sometimes other men feel threatened.” In fact, some people in Rappahannock County had found Spellman to be unvaryingly soft-spoken and polite; some knew him for obviously genuine and unselfish acts of kindness toward children or animals. But others saw him as a menacing swaggerer. Nobody had ever seen him actually use his size or his guns to attack anyone, but a number of people seemed afraid that he might. According to his brother, Boyd Spellman, their father, whom Rance had revered, had sometimes seemed too easygoing to be in business, and Rance had been intent on becoming the sort of person nobody took advantage of. Along the way, he had some experiences of the kind that can drain off cheerfulness—two failed marriages, for instance, and the early death of his father, and a stint in Vietnam at a time when most people his age seemed to be going about their business at home. For whatever reasons, Spellman had been in some unpleasant confrontations now and then as a heavy-equipment operator, and as the farm manager of Points of View he seemed to be in more. It got so that the owner of straying cattle had to contend not with a stiff note from Pat Saltonstall, but with the possibility that Rance Spellman would impound the cattle and demand board and feed money before giving them back. “They’d done every kind of thing to everybody there,” William Buntin, who was the sheriff of Rappahannock County at the time, has said. “They had problems with every neighbor that joins them.”
Of course, Patricia Saltonstall might have been right in assuming that some of the ill feeling was brought on by jealousy or prejudice—envy of her money and his appearance and what they had accomplished at Points of View, hatred of the relationship that was suspected between the boss and the farm manager. In the view of a friend of theirs, “They were building a showplace, and I think that people who had always got along with patches resented it.” Some of the neighboring farmers said that people who were seriously interested in farming, as opposed to showing off, would not have given priority to putting a pasture on top of a mountain. It did seem, though, that as farm operators, Pat Saltonstall and Rance Spellman complemented each other perfectly—his skills and heavy machinery and stunning capacity for work, her resources and organizational ability and encouragement. But to some people in the county, their alliance was also what made them particularly threatening. If Rance Spellman was a bully, he was all the more so with Patricia Saltonstall’s money and influence behind him. If Patricia Saltonstall was a willful rich lady, she was all the more so with a huge, intimidating cowboy to back her up.
—
Roger and Diane Kidwell were among those people who kept moving west from the D.C. sprawl to find a little country. They had both been raised in Fairfax County, in the days when it seemed more small-town than suburban; after they were married and began to raise a family, they moved in two or three steps from Alexandria to Amissville, not far from where the Spellman family had gone to find some space. Diane Kidwell was a secretary, and until 1975 she worked at a conference center called the Airlie Foundation, in Warrenton, Virginia, twenty miles to the east. Roger Kidwell also worked there briefly, at the front desk. For the Kidwells, as it turned out, escaping the suburbs did not mean escaping turmoil. In the late seventies, Murdock Head, the executive director of Airlie, was indicted for payment of an illegal gratuity. He was accused of having smoothed the way for the foundation’s contract applications by slipping cash payoffs to Representative Daniel Flood, of Pennsylvania, through Flood’s aide, Stephen Elko, who had become a witness for the government. The payoffs were alleged to have taken place during the time Diane Kidwell worked in Head’s office, first as a secretary and for a time as his administrative assistant. After two trials, Head was convicted and sent to jail. Among those who were or had been connected with the foundation, Mrs. Kidwell, who had been laid off by Airlie before the investigation began, was the only person who appeared as a friendly witness for the prosecution to corroborate Elko’s story—an act that caused great rancor among her former colleagues. The payoff scandal was not the only source of turmoil in the Kidwells’ lives. Apparently, their marriage had been stormy. In 1970, they were legally separated for a while; Diane Kidwell and the children moved into one of the Airlie buildings. Having sold their house in Amissville while they were separated, the Kidwells moved into a rental house after their reconciliation. Roger Kidwell had started selling insurance, and eventually his wife worked with him, in an office in Warrenton. They had their hearts set on building a house of their own—a house on the top of a hill. In the early seventies, they came across Lot A of the Lindgren-Whaley tract. It seemed perfect, Diane Kidwell said later, except for the right-of-way.
The Kidwells built their house on a hill overlooking Route 729. It’s a tidy-looking house that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in one of the subdivisions they left as they moved west—two
stories, with yellow siding and a carport and a basketball goal and an apartment in the basement for Roger Kidwell’s parents. The right-of-way, which existed only in the form of a narrow dirt road coming back toward the mountain from 729, was not a source of disturbance. There was only one house on the lots served by the road—a small weekend cottage that generated little traffic. Eventually, the Kidwells bought a second lot, a twenty-five-acre parcel just across the right-of-way. They had no problems with the Lindgren-Whaley tract’s largest landowner, Patricia Saltonstall, even after she hired Rance Spellman as farm manager. Until the dispute about the right-of-way began, in fact, the Kidwells were not even aware of who Rance Spellman was. Roger and Diane Kidwell, both of whom commuted every day to Warrenton, were not among those who spent a lot of time at the lunch counter or filling station in Flint Hill chewing over questions such as whether beef prices would ever go up or what the relationship between Patricia Saltonstall and Rance Spellman really was. The Kidwells were not well-known in the area except as a family that raised what seemed to be particularly ferocious dogs. (Sheriff Buntin has said that when he canvassed the county for his final election campaign, the Kidwell house was the only place where he decided against getting out of the car.) What little contact there had been between the Kidwells and Pat Saltonstall was cordial. Diane Kidwell’s brother had been given permission to fish in a pond at Points of View. Like Pat Saltonstall, the Kidwells believed strongly in the importance of maintaining one’s property (“We’ve always been interested in our property, and in keeping our property values”) and in the necessity of keeping hunters and other trespassers off the mountain. Although Diane Kidwell and Patricia Saltonstall may not have had the same taste in architecture or the same circle of friends, they had what Pat Saltonstall calls “a fairly normal neighborly acquaintanceship.”
The trouble started in the spring of 1982. The subject of the right-of-way came up when Diane Kidwell wrote to Patricia Saltonstall asking if she would contribute to the cost of putting down some new gravel. After that, a lot of issues were raised. Eventually, lawyers for the two parties were exchanging letters, none of them conciliatory. Paragraphs in the county deed book and statutes in the Virginia code were cited. Questions were raised about a gate that had been placed across the right-of-way back near the mountain. Patricia Saltonstall had, in violation of the deed, put it up without the permission of the other lot owners—she said it was to discourage lumber thieves—and the Kidwells had removed it without the permission of Patricia Saltonstall. There was the question of the Kidwells’ having installed a cattle guard on the road. There was the question of whether the Points of View lumbering crews had left the Kidwells’ gates open. There was the question of whether the Kidwells had been trespassing on the mountain. There was the question of whether Rance Spellman’s excavation work on the mountain had interfered with the Kidwells’ water supply. At the center of the dispute, though, was Pat Saltonstall’s announced intention to exercise her right to make use of a full fifty feet of right-of-way, so that there could be “more frequent and regular use of the road.” Since road improvements would begin shortly, she informed the Kidwells, they should remove any shrubbery or trees or posts that they had within the fifty-foot strip stipulated in the deed. The Kidwells didn’t want to remove their shrubbery and trees and posts; they didn’t want more frequent and regular use of the road. Pat Saltonstall had said that the widening was necessary for keeping a close watch on valuable herds of Angus grazing on the mountain and for putting into effect “other plans I have for one of the lots.” The Kidwells thought it was unnecessary except as a matter of spite. Their lawyer said that anyone who attempted to clear the right-of-way without a court order would be held liable for any property damage. Presumably, the lawyer, a young man named David Konick, intended to file for an injunction; but no injunction had been filed by November 8, when Patricia Saltonstall’s lawyer, unable to reach Konick, left a message on his answering machine saying that work might begin as early as the next afternoon. It was actually early the next morning when Rance Spellman climbed onto a bulldozer, drove over the mountain he had cleared, and came out on the right-of-way to begin his work.
—
Sheriff Buntin and a state policeman arrived at the Kidwells’ together that morning. Diane Kidwell had phoned Buntin’s office to demand that Spellman be stopped, but the sheriff, who had neither the authority nor the inclination to referee a right-of-way dispute, had not hurried out. Diane Kidwell’s brother had phoned the state police and warned them that an armed confrontation might take place. When the two lawmen arrived, Rance Spellman was sitting in the driver’s seat of the bulldozer, which was parked only twenty yards or so from where the Kidwells’ driveway meets the right-of-way. From the appearance of the land around him, he had already done considerable work. He was dressed in his usual outfit of blue jeans and boots and a couple of work shirts and a down vest. He was slumped over. The state trooper climbed up on the bulldozer to have a closer look. Rance Spellman had a small amount of blood coming from his mouth and nose. A volley of shotgun pellets had torn through his down vest. He was dead.
The story that the authorities eventually put together was this: Rance Spellman had begun his work near the Kidwells’ driveway—tearing up trees, pushing over gateposts. When Diane Kidwell’s brother tried to reason with him, he just smiled—sneered, really—and kept working. After a while, Mrs. Kidwell took a shotgun from the house and, holding it in a way that concealed it from Spellman’s view, walked to the family’s pickup. She pulled the pickup into the right-of-way, close to the beginning of her driveway, and sat in the front seat with the shotgun next to her. Her brother pleaded with her to come back to the house and wait for the state police, but she said she had decided to take her stand. Her husband watched from the back door; one of her sons watched from a field above the house. For twenty minutes or so, Diane Kidwell watched the bulldozer, which took several swipes perilously close to the pickup. After one of them, she pointed the shotgun out the window and fired one blast at Spellman—shouting, “Get off! Get off!” She said that she thought he was reaching for a gun and she had therefore been in fear for her life. Spellman was armed, as usual. He had a carbine on the bulldozer and a pistol in his shoulder holster. But the carbine was still in its scabbard and the pistol was buttoned up under one of his shirts and the vest.
The only witnesses alive to testify to what had happened were Diane Kidwell and people related to her, and they had been sequestered in the house by their lawyer, David Konick, long enough to have compared stories. The authorities, though, tended to think that the shooting had taken place pretty much the way the Kidwells said it had. The witnesses had reported, after all, that Diane Kidwell had put herself in the path of the bulldozer, which never left the fifty-foot right-of-way. They had reported that Spellman had been shot with a concealed weapon when his own gun was nowhere in sight. They had reported Diane Kidwell’s shouting not “Help!” or “Don’t shoot!” but “Get off!” If the Kidwells had been trying to concoct a story that would justify the killing of Rance Spellman, it was thought, they would have managed to come up with a better one. The grand jury heard testimony, and four weeks after the shooting Diane Kidwell was indicted for murder.
Rance Spellman’s funeral was at Points of View farm. There was an unconventional service, full of symbolism. Spellman’s horse stood nearby, with a pair of boots reversed in its stirrups, in the traditional symbol of a fallen cavalryman. Then a cortège of four-wheel-drive vehicles moved slowly up the mountain, where Spellman was buried on the mountaintop he had cleared. Spellman’s friends and family were there to mourn him, but it was already apparent that his death had not erased the difference between the view of Rance Spellman held by Patricia Saltonstall and the view of him held by a lot of other people in Rappahannock County. A lot of people were saying, “He had it coming.” A lot of other people were saying of Diane Kidwell, “If she hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”
—
Killings Page 22