Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  Still, the prosecution thought it had a case that could overcome sympathy for Diane Kidwell. The commonwealth’s attorney of Rappahannock County, Douglas Baumgardner, brought in a special prosecutor, because he himself had to testify in a closed hearing concerning a rather bizarre side issue that was not made public until nearly a year later: David Konick, the young lawyer who had been called by the Kidwells on the morning of the shooting and later dismissed, had admitted that, acting on his own, he had wiped the barrel of the Kidwells’ shotgun clean of fingerprints, and he was therefore in danger of being indicted himself. (As it turned out, he was not indicted, but his actions were finally made public at a rather awkward moment—the closing days of what turned out to be an unsuccessful race he ran for commonwealth’s attorney.) The special prosecutor—Steven A. Merril, a former assistant prosecutor in Fairfax County—argued that by Diane Kidwell’s own admission, she had chosen to confront Spellman, she had hidden a shotgun beside her, she had rejected her brother’s plea to return to the house, she had become angrier and angrier as she watched Spellman work, and she had previously seen Spellman reach into his shirt two or three times and come out each time with nothing more dangerous than a cigarette. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the right-of-way argument and whatever the nature of Rance Spellman, Merril said, Diane Kidwell had “absolutely no right to eliminate Rance Spellman from the face of the earth.”

  The defense lawyers said that Pat Saltonstall’s decision to widen the right-of-way to fifty feet was a “spiteful, punitive act,” and that Spellman had confirmed that by beginning his work right in front of the Kidwell house, four hundred yards from where the road began. They called as witnesses four or five people who related experiences that led them to consider Spellman violent and turbulent and pugnacious. The owner of some adjoining land, for instance, testified that a front-end loader being used for work on the edge of his property had once been left a few feet onto Points of View land overnight, and that Rance Spellman waited near the machine the next morning with two guns and demanded fifty dollars before he would release it to its operator. There was testimony that just a week or so before the shooting, Roger Kidwell and his son-in-law had run across Spellman while they were out cutting wood, and Spellman had challenged Kidwell to step out in the right-of-way path and settle the dispute with bare hands. Dowd said that Diane Kidwell had concealed her shotgun because she didn’t want to provoke “this madman on the bulldozer.” She testified that Spellman had threatened to turn over the pickup and that, just before he reached toward his vest, his expression had changed to one of rage. Dowd built an impassioned summation on the theme of why Diane Kidwell had walked from the house to sit in a pickup truck right in front of where Spellman was moving earth around. (“Why does a fireman go into a burning house and pull out a child? Why does a man jump into a cold river and pull a young boy out? Why do men do what they do on the battlefield and save lives, with holes in them? Why? Because they are strong, that’s why.”) He said that Diane Kidwell had indeed been intent on protecting her home (“Nowhere in the laws or Constitution of this country does it say that a citizen on her own property has to submit to the tyranny of a professional bully on a forty-one-thousand-pound bulldozer”), but had fired because she honestly believed that Rance Spellman was about to pull out a pistol and kill her.

  The jury couldn’t reach a verdict, but only because of a single holdout. Everyone else wanted to acquit Diane Kidwell. Shortly after the trial ended, three prominent landowners from around Flint Hill went to the commonwealth’s attorney and suggested that, considering the size of the majority for acquittal and the continued feeling against Spellman in the county, it would be a waste of money to try Diane Kidwell again. Merril, who had decided to hold a second trial, thought about trying for a change of venue, but he concluded that Rappahannock County jurors were the appropriate people to hear the case. “I felt people who lived there had a stake in it,” he has said. “They have to live there, and they have a right to say what they consider criminal activity and what isn’t.” Merril thinks that he presented a better case the second time around. He tried to narrow the issues, avoiding as much as possible ensnarlment in the right-of-way dispute; he was more aggressive in his cross-examination of the accused. This time, there was no holdout. Diane Kidwell was found not guilty.

  The people who watched the trials with some detachment—reporters, courthouse workers, lawyers who dropped in and out of the courtroom—tend to agree that Merril put forward a strong case. Half a dozen of them took a survey among themselves to predict a verdict before the jury came back in the first trial, and the predictions ranged from guilty of manslaughter to guilty of murder. In retrospect, they tend to agree with Merril that a conviction was nearly impossible. “I feel that a typical jury, in addition to analyzing the facts and applying the law, subconsciously takes out a set of scales,” a Rappahannock lawyer with considerable trial experience said after the second trial. “It values the liberty of the accused on one side of the scale, and attaches a certain value or weight to the life of the deceased on the other.” The decision of twenty-three jurors in the death of Rance Spellman could be taken as an indication that they placed considerable value on the freedom of Diane Kidwell, a demure wife and mother and grandmother who had no previous criminal record and was hardly a threat to the community. The other way to look at it, the lawyer went on, was that Rance Spellman’s life was not given great value—that “the community had decided that someone’s life is not worth punishing someone for taking.”

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  That’s the way Patricia Saltonstall interpreted the jurors’ votes. She also saw the case presented by Diane Kidwell’s lawyers in court as an attempt to get someone off the hook by dragging the name of someone else through the mud—someone else who was no longer alive to defend himself. Pat Saltonstall took on that defense herself. She saw her mission as “having his name and his life put in perspective.” In August of 1983, nine months after Rance Spellman died and two months before Diane Kidwell’s second trial, a number of people in Rappahannock County received an invitation from Pat Saltonstall to “come and celebrate the life of Rance Lee Spellman.” The celebration, the invitation said, would include country music, a roast-pig picnic, a dedication of the mountaintop cemetery where he was buried, and the announcement of a living memorial—an agricultural prize to be awarded through a nearby community college. Under Rance Spellman’s name, the invitation listed some of the things he had been—including farmer, horseman, mason, welder, artificial-insemination technician, surveyor. The guests—a couple hundred of them—arrived at Points of View to find that a tent had been erected for the celebration. It was decorated with thirty-six nearly life-size photographs of Rance Spellman, one for every year of his life. “We wish to remember Rance not for the cruelty of his senseless death by one act of human violence,” the invitation said, “but for the glory of one man who left place upon place more beautiful because of his work.”

  One piece of Spellman’s work that Pat Saltonstall intended to finish was the widening of the right-of-way in the Lindgren-Whaley tract. The legal question of whether she had the right to widen the right-of-way to fifty feet—not what her motives were or whether she really needed to but simply whether she had a right to—was not difficult to settle. In December of 1983, two months after Diane Kidwell’s acquittal, a circuit-court judge heard one day of testimony on the Kidwells’ motion for a permanent injunction barring the road widening, and in January of 1984 he handed down a ruling denying the motion, on the ground that the deed’s grant of the fifty-foot right-of-way showed “unambiguous intent.” When the warm weather came, in May, a contractor hired by Points of View farm showed up on the right-of-way to begin the grading at precisely the spot where Spellman had left off. Patricia Saltonstall was also there. In a press release, she said that the work was dedicated to Rance Spellman. “Saltonstall called the new construction ‘a clear statement about who was right and who was wrong that tragic morning,’ ” the
press release said. “ ‘This project had to be completed, not only because we badly need a good farm road up the north side of the mountain…but because such a violent act could not be allowed to be the last word on this project.’ ”

  By then, people in Rappahannock County had begun to wonder whether there was ever going to be a last word. Even before the second trial, Patricia Saltonstall had applied for planning permission to build two-family houses on two of her lots in the Lindgren-Whaley tract—she said she would eventually need them for farmworkers—and the Kidwells protested to the zoning authorities that she should not be given a special-use permit to build two-family houses in an area zoned for single-family dwellings only. The zoning argument involved not only the same disputants but some of the same supporting characters. Douglas Baumgardner, who as commonwealth’s attorney had presided over Diane Kidwell’s indictment, eventually represented Patricia Saltonstall. The zoning administrator of Rappahannock County at the time was David Konick, who had been accused by Roger Kidwell in a letter to the Rappahannock News of using the position to carry on a vendetta against the Kidwell family. As the argument about the new houses was carried through the various levels of appeal, it seemed to blend into the murder trials as part of the endless litigation set in motion by Diane Kidwell’s letter concerning gravel on the right-of-way.

  After the second murder trial, in fact, contention had burst out on several fronts at once. Responding in the Rappahannock News to a letter from a county resident that criticized the verdict, Diane Kidwell managed in the course of defending her own conduct to mention that Rance Spellman’s estate had been inherited not by an elderly black man who had long worked for the Spellman family, as had been reported, but by Patricia Saltonstall herself. That one was answered by a letter from Patricia Saltonstall expressing outrage (“How, in the name of any kind of fairness and decency, does Kidwell see this as her business?”) and then taking issue with Mrs. Kidwell in detail not only about the will but about the facts of the right-of-way dispute. That one was followed by a letter to the paper from Diane Kidwell pointing out that the burial of Rance Spellman on Hickerson Mountain seemed to be contrary to the burial instructions in his will and contrary to the zoning code, which permitted burial on farmland only in the case of family graveyards.

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  Perhaps developing her lots in the Lindgren-Whaley tract makes economic sense for Patricia Saltonstall, but the Kidwells see it as a simple act of harassment. (“There’s no other reason to build those monstrosities,” Diane Kidwell has said.) Perhaps their protest against the houses has been based on the desire to protect their tranquillity and their property values—according to testimony at the zoning hearings, the two houses could generate seventy more automobile trips per day on the right-of-way road—but Patricia Saltonstall sees it as part of a vendetta against her. By now, the disputants can credit each other with only a single motive—the desire to torment. After a couple of letters to the zoning administrator, the Kidwells did not pursue the grave site complaint (“It was a sensitive issue for some people,” Roger Kidwell has said), but that does not keep them from believing that Rance Spellman was buried on Hickerson Mountain so that they would be reminded of him every time they glanced up from their carport. In Roger Kidwell’s view, “The house was harassment, the grave site was harassment. We know there is no end to this thing.” Speaking at the same time of the large memorial advertisements that Patricia Saltonstall has placed in the Rappahannock News each year on the anniversary of Rance Spellman’s death, Diane Kidwell said, “She might be very genuine in her reasoning for doing that, but it’s like she wants to remind me. On the ninth, when I pick up my local paper I see his picture. I see that as harassment. I feel like when I’m sixty-five I’ll pick up my local paper and there he’ll be.”

  It has been common for some time to hear people in Rappahannock County say that Patricia Saltonstall and Diane Kidwell are, despite the differences in their backgrounds, very much alike. Both of them tend to complain about having been singled out for unfair treatment. Patricia Saltonstall often talks about the difficulty of having been the only girl at her boarding school who was completely cut off from family during the war—her family was in Hawaii—and of having spent her first years in Rappahannock County making neighborly gestures that were never returned or even acknowledged. Diane Kidwell has implied at times that pressure from a variety of enemies was the only reason she was indicted. Each of them sees herself as a woman capable of standing up to the considerable forces allied against her. One way to view what has happened, Diane Kidwell has said, is as “the story of a wealthy northern woman who came down here to a small Virginia county and wanted to do everything her own way, and the story of the mother and grandmother who stood in front of a forty-thousand-pound bulldozer simply to protect her own property and was forced to shoot somebody to protect her own life.” Both women tend to describe their own motives in high moral terms. Asked why she would make an issue over where Spellman was buried, Mrs. Kidwell said that the grave site was contrary to the burial instructions in his will, and “we have a kind of sacred feeling in our family about wills.” Patricia Saltonstall has often compared her effort to right what she considers a wrong in Rappahannock County with the efforts of lone black people to right wrongs in the counties of the Deep South. She sometimes says, “I feel like the Rosa Parks of Rappahannock County.”

  In December of 1985, both the house that Patricia Saltonstall had already built on one of her lots and the house she wanted to build on the adjoining lot were given special-use permits as two-family dwellings by the Rappahannock County Board of Zoning Appeals. The decision did not leave the combatants without a court case. The previous month, just before the statute of limitations for civil litigation was reached, Patricia Saltonstall, in her role as an executor of Rance Spellman’s estate, filed a wrongful-death suit against the Kidwells; on her own, she filed a suit claiming three million dollars in damages on the grounds that the Kidwells “have engaged in a persistent course of conduct, commencing before the killing of Rance Spellman and continuing up to the present time, to harass plaintiff, to defame her, to invade her privacy, to interfere with the use of the right-of-way…and to interfere generally with the use of her property and the operation of her farming business and other farming operations.” At around the same time, Diane Kidwell filed a two-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar malpractice suit against David Konick, claiming that his suppression of material evidence and subsequent contraventions of the rules of confidentiality had caused doubts to be cast on her innocence. In the reply that Konick filed, he said that Diane Kidwell had “intentionally and maliciously confronted Spellman” in disregard of his advice, and that if he had, in fact, revealed all the confidential information at his disposal, she “would likely have been convicted of a felony in connection with the homicide of Spellman.” That statement was, of course, of great interest to Patricia Saltonstall. She saw it as an opening to reinvestigate the circumstances of Rance Spellman’s death.

  No one knows how far the latest law cases will be carried, but the feeling in Rappahannock County is that the Kidwell and Saltonstall forces will manage to find one battlefield or another. It is assumed that by now Diane Kidwell and Patricia Saltonstall hope to drive each other away. It is also assumed that both of them are people not easily driven off. A lot of Rappahannock residents find that a cause for regret; they were tired of hearing about the dispute a long time ago. Sympathy for both of the participants has pretty much evaporated. There are people who say that Patricia Saltonstall is not trying to rehabilitate Rance Spellman’s name but working out her own guilt (“Let’s face it: if she had just said, ‘Rance, wait until tomorrow,’ he’d be alive right now”); there are people who think that Diane Kidwell, in her relentless concern with what impinges on her rights or property, somehow seems to have lost track of the fact that she killed someone. (The headline on one letter to a local paper was SHE COULD HAVE SAID SHE WAS SORRY.) Old-time residents of Rappahan
nock County are sensitive to the possibility that talk about the murder-trial verdict—particularly in conjunction with another case, in which a man who tracked down his estranged wife’s lover and killed him was fined a thousand dollars for manslaughter—will rekindle suspicion among outsiders that Rappahannock might still be one of those counties with backwoods notions about crime and punishment. Some newcomers simply hate the publicity and the turmoil caused by the dispute. Many of them, after all, came to Rappahannock County looking for peace.

  Rumors Around Town

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  Emporia, Kansas

  JANUARY 1986

  The first headline in The Junction City Daily Union—EMPORIA MAN FATALLY SHOT—seemed to describe one of those incidents that can cause a peaceful citizen to shake his head and mumble something about how it’s getting so nobody is safe anywhere. The Emporia man was Martin Anderson, a peaceful citizen who had a responsible job and a commission in the Army Reserve and a wife and four little girls. Early on a November evening in 1983, he was murdered by the side of Kansas Highway 177, which cuts south from Manhattan through the rolling cattle-grazing land that people in Kansas call the Flint Hills. According to the newspaper story, the authorities had been told that Anderson was killed during a struggle with an unidentified robber. At the time of the murder, Anderson was on his way back to Emporia from Fort Riley, the infantry base that lies between Junction City and Manhattan. Apparently, the trip had been meant to combine some errands at the fort with an autumn drive through the Flint Hills. His wife was with him, and so were the little girls.