by Sally Denton
Lexington’s elite considered Carter and “Peggy” to be decent, hardworking people. Though they came from working stock and were not native Kentuckians—-Carter was from New Jersey and Peggy from
Connecticut—they were accepted as equals by the landed gentry, receiving all the significant social invitations, so respected were they for their perseverance and innate gentility. “They did everything within their means to raise their children right,” said a longtime family friend, “and are some of the nicest people in the world.” After meeting success in the bloodstock business, the Thorntons were invited to join the ranks of Lexington’s blueblood society.
On the surface, Drew seems to have had the benefit of the finest upbringing. His parents were deeply involved with the small St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, where Drew had been an acolyte, and they raised their three children in a traditional upper-middle-class manner. Drew worked with the horses on his father’s farm, and became proficient in his training skills. He knew every nook and cranny of the farm’s rolling hills, hunting rabbits and groundhogs for sport. He spent his summer days at the local Stoner Creek Country Club, where he played golf and tennis, or at the Madden’s famous Hamburg Place, where he learned to play polo. He attended Southside Elementary School in Paris for five years before transferring to the prestigious Sayre School in Lexington—a country day school attended by the children of Lexington’s horsy set.
But all must not have been as idyllic as it seemed, for Drew felt very ambivalent about his family. He confided in close friends that he feared his father, possessed mixed feelings about his mother, and worshiped his maternal grandmother, with whom he had lived as a baby. Some say Drew had always been slightly out of step with his parents, as well as with his brother and sister. He was uncomfortable with his nieces and nephews, sometimes watching them from the other side of a room with a look suggesting he couldn’t fathom the point of having children.
Drew spent his freshman year at Bourbon County High School, where he received good grades with very little effort. When Drew was-n’t challenged, his parents realized, he quickly became bored and stopped trying. One thing Carter Thornton couldn’t abide was a quitter. Worried that the school was not intellectually challenging to Drew, Carter and Peggy decided to send him to the Sewanee Military Academy in Sewanee, Tennessee.
On the morning of September 7, 1959, Andrew Carter Thornton II—fourteen years old—entered the disciplined, regimented world of the cadets. Isolated in the Cumberland Mountains, Sewanee was an episcopal academy affiliated with the University of the South. It was one of a handful of institutes and academies where Southern men of breeding were dispatched to receive their final polish.
The Sewanee curriculum was markedly more diverse and difficult than his hometown high school, and Drew was not an outstanding student in any subject. He nearly failed Latin and chemistry, and received a straight C average in religious studies, English, and history. An uncommitted, dilatory student, he didn’t even excel in the subjects he most enjoyed—rifle and pistol shooting. Finishing sixty-second in a class of seventy-two, Drew’s performance must have been a disappointment to his parents.
With more understatement than could possibly have been intended, one teacher described Drew as “inconsistent.” Faculty members commented on Drew’s laziness, while remarking on his intelligence and good intentions. Perhaps that first year in the sheltered seclusion of Sewanee was the turning point in Drew’s life. It had become painfully clear to him and his parents that Drew was incapable of blending his intellect with his performance. Although he received formal disciplinary action only once—for threatening a younger student—Drew’s legacy at Sewanee was that of a mediocre kid with a bad attitude. Drew thought his parents favored his younger brother, Tim. Tim was everything Carter and Peggy wanted in a son: A smart, obedient, cheerful sort who had won the hearts of his parents.
Whatever was at play in the fertile, young imagination of Drew Thornton, it is clear that the devils in his mind were set loose during the years at Sewanee.
In 1962, when Drew was a senior, America was at the height of its cold war with Russia. The Russians had shot down an American U-2 spy plane and in 1960 a tiny majority had elected John F. Kennedy President, signifying the beginning of a new generation. The Berlin Wall had driven a wedge between Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Fidel Castro had become the leader of Cuba, and in 1961 Kennedy had been deeply embarrassed by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Tension was at an all-time high between the Americans and Russians, and Kennedy had called for a massive military buildup. In a televised speech, Kennedy had announced that the Russians were assisting the Cubans in constructing long-range-missile bases in Cuba and that he was ordering a blockade. Meanwhile, the world’s two nuclear powers were racing each other to conquer space.
Sewanee, with its military history dating back to the Civil War, was a breeding ground for patriotic fervor. Its upper-crust cadets, who were the descendants of the most prosperous Southern families, strutted their conservative heritage proudly. In this highly political and emotional time, anti-communism became the rallying cry, and Drew Thornton’s pulse quickened with a newfound purpose in life. To Drew, the only way was the American way.
Drew personally resented Castro’s unruliness and was offended by his unkempt appearance and anti-American rhetoric. His belief in the superiority of those born to rule, coupled with the perceived threat to America, became his guiding torch. When the Army ROTC personnel instilled “kill, kill, kill” in order to win, a chord was struck in Drew’s heart. At least one Sewanee instructor recognized, and worried about Drew’s gung-ho spirit. While most of the young cadets took their military training with a grain of salt—realizing that in a time of peace one prepares for war—others, like Drew, latched onto the killing instinct at their most impressionable age.
Upon high school graduation, Drew returned to Lexington to attend the University of Kentucky. But he felt like a fish out of water on the quiet, relaxed university campus. He saw himself and his generation on the threshold of a new and exciting frontier. Yet nothing seemed to have changed back home in Lexington. His peers weren’t responding to the same passions that fomented a restlessness and sense of mission in Drew.
After failing most of his classes in the first semester, Drew sought reinforcement for his warrior instincts. One cold February day in 1963, he drove himself to Louisville and enlisted in the regular Army. Asked about any special interests or qualifications, Drew didn’t hesitate before responding: He wanted to join the airborne division. To become an Army paratrooper stirred Drew’s romantic longings. As a skydiver, Drew would finally be able to integrate his brawn with his brains. From that point forward, Drew’s friends thought he was unable to distinguish between peace and war environments, fantasy and real-life situations.
Assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Drew was a member of the invading forces who quashed an insurgency against the ruling dictatorship of the Dominican Republic. He was awarded a Purple Heart and an Oak Leaf Cluster when he was shot in the arm there. This led to an honorable discharge in 1965, and his much-romanticized military career came to a premature end.
When Betty Zaring met Drew he was nursing his wounds, training horses, and thinking of becoming a policeman. A beautiful coed from Shelby County, Betty was the kind of small-town Southern beauty whom boys like Drew were expected to marry. She found his boyish charm, blue eyes and stocky physique to be irresistible. Head over heels in love with him, she watched from the sidelines as Drew searched for ways to recapture the thrill that he was missing in civilian life. She dated him as he recuperated—both physically and emotionally—and she encouraged him to spend his free time parachuting and learning to fly. Eventually he obtained his pilot’s license, and embarked on plans to buy his own plane.
In the middle of one of the country’s most troubled decades, Drew felt caught in the crossfire. The
patriotism that had been epidemic in his youth had given way to widespread domestic turmoil. The hatred and distrust that a short time earlier had been aimed at the Communists had now turned inward. Civil rights disturbances had rocked Birmingham, Savannah, Selma, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Watts. Then, the resumption of bombing raids in North Vietnam had brought massive demonstrations nationwide. By early 1968, the buildup of U.S. forces in Vietnam was at an all-time high, and college students were demonstrating en masse against the war and the draft.
That year, Drew was taking political science courses at the university. He had no tolerance for the vociferous antiwar protestors, and despised his longhaired, blue-jean-clad peers. After the excitement of battle, he felt let down, left out, at a loss. He was a member of the limbo generation—the group who came of age after the Korean War, but before Vietnam. He thought of himself as a war hero, but no one else seemed to have heard of the skirmish in the Caribbean that he took so seriously. He had no clear idea of what he wanted to do, and so, after a year, he was back working for his father, training Thoroughbreds.
Drew and Betty were married in July 1968, and a month later Drew joined the Lexington police. Betty thought he went into the police force so that he could do battle. She knew that he was happiest when he was testing himself—when he was on the cutting edge. Others thought Drew was attracted to the local police force because he could be a big spoke on a little wheel.
Their marriage was strained almost from the start. Betty was much more complacent and self-satisfied than Drew. Described as a “knockdown, gorgeous beauty” by an acquaintance, life came easier to Betty than to Drew. A schoolteacher and pacifist, Betty had a rich inner life that kept her on an even keel. She believed that she had psychic powers, and Drew was fascinated with her uncanny intuition. It was a bittersweet marriage that was doomed to failure. Here was a woman who was at peace with herself, married to a man who was raging around in confusion.
Betty blamed their problems on Drew’s inability to find a niche in modern American society. She accepted his obsession with violence, blaming it on the military. She thought the U.S. Government had taken a tender soul—not a natural killer—and turned him into an efficiently trained warrior. He told Betty and others close to him, that the CIA during these most turbulent of times had secretly recruited him and that being a cop was just a cover. He recounted tales of his participation in military operations in which American assassins were dispatched to kill American prisoners of war in Vietnam who knew too much about
U.S. covert operations. On the one hand, Drew had trouble reconciling the obvious paradoxes of such operations, while on the other hand he lusted for the intrigue. Though Betty and his family believed Drew when he claimed to be a government assassin, they were forced to rely upon his word, for the government would never admit to such acts. I did it for my country would become a catchall phrase Drew would use throughout life to explain his questionable, and often illegal, actions.
As a rookie with the Lexington Police Department, Drew worked long hours and became increasingly secretive about his professional life. He was frequently sent out of town to training seminars, where he learned lock picking and surveillance techniques. Assigned to the Intelligence Unit, Drew worked mostly on the University of Kentucky campus. Guy Mendes, a reporter for an underground newspaper on campus, remembered Drew Thornton as a policeman who was vehemently opposed to college anti-war demonstrators. Rather than work undercover, Drew proudly refused to camouflage his normal militaristic, macho, shorthaired appearance. He made no attempt to hide his right-wing reactionism, and made the campus leftists aware that he was out to get them because of their liberal ideology and activism. Drew quickly gained the reputation of a cop who was to be feared and avoided. He swaggered with his sense of purpose, his mandate to intimidate hippies and counterculture types.
By 1970, political activity on campus was at its peak. Four students had been killed at Kent State in Ohio, and hundreds of universities were on strike to protest military action in Cambodia. Kentucky was no exception. Final exams were canceled due to rallies, marches, and moratoriums, and the National Guard was called in to keep peace. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) threw eggs at Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy because of that school’s alleged involvement with a violent coup in Indonesia.
That year, Drew was assigned to the city’s first narcotics squad, sending a clear message to university pot smokers. “It became common knowledge at that time,” Mendes said, “that Drew Thornton would bust people for dope and then sell what he confiscated.” Drew claimed he had the power and license to do anything he wanted, pointing to his scrape with death in the Dominican Republic as evidence that his life was charmed. Rumors abounded about his physical excesses and brutality against those he arrested. Yet his superiors in the department never disciplined him.
Betty watched, as her husband became more and more a James Bond character. Discarding his eyeglasses for contact lenses, he adopted a new self-confidence. His obsession with physical appearance became absurd, and he started collecting bizarre spy gadgets and instruments. He took to calling himself “ACT II,” which were his initials, and spoke in cryptic parables. Betty found it increasingly difficult to relate to her husband. With time, she found she had more in common with his enemies than with him. In many ways, Drew was a loving, gentle, and supportive husband who was very protective of the people close to him. She knew that he loved her, but he resented having a wife, for the domestic simplicity betrayed his image as the larger than life man against the world. The spy who had to forsake his personal life in order to serve his country. How much was real and how much delusion would never be known.
They were divorced that year—1970. Though Betty and Drew parted friends, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. She had come to believe that Drew would be destined to a life of longing and loneliness.
Drew had been trained in the basics of martial arts in the Army, and in 1970 decided to pursue karate with vigor. As a committed disciple, he became a fanatic about his physical strength and ability. He studied human anatomy—the circulatory and nervous systems—so that he could accurately target his victims’ weaknesses. He became obsessed with the Eastern philosophy behind karate, immersing himself in t’ai chi and meditation techniques. He developed and refined a moral and religious code based upon ancient Chinese and Japanese systems. Intrigued with the oriental secret societies, he perceived himself as a kindred spirit of the ninjas—the spy-assassins who did the bidding of the aristocrats.
He studied the modern ninja techniques of concealment, experimented with smoke bombs and exotic poisons, dwelt on the sect’s superstitious beliefs, and, eventually, believed he was part of the myth. The most brutal of all the martial arts, the ninja training helped Drew justify his own viciousness.
He flaunted his soldier-of-fortune ideology, his professional and political connections, his skydiving exploits, and his love of guns. He took to hanging out at Lexington bars known for their offbeat clientele—gay men and bodybuilders; local TV and radio personalities; druggies and up-and-coming yuppie restaurateurs; the kind of criminal defense attorneys who scrounge up cases by loitering in courthouse corridors. Though he tried to be discreet, he couldn’t resist flexing his muscles and bulging wallet.
Unencumbered by a mundane marriage, in the early 1970s Drew embarked upon a crime spree that would last fifteen years and become infamous for its heinousness. His trademark would be the perverse pleasure he derived from the “overkill” sense of violence that accompanied his acts.
His inseparable friendships with fellow members of the narcotics squad would further shape his character and serve as a lifelong brotherhood. Like-minded in their belief that they were above the law, the bonds between them would become stronger than blood, and their deeds more gruesome with the passage of time.
What better way to utilize his paramilitary skills in everyday American life than to p
ursue a profession of drag smuggling, gunrunning, assassinations, and law enforcement? Such pursuits, it seemed to Drew, went hand in hand.
What he didn’t take into consideration was the threat posed by Ralph Ross.
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time Ralph Ross was eight years old, he had visited Lexington enough times to know that that was where the rich snobs lived. His life, on the other hand, had not been so privileged.
Born in 1933, Ralph was the third of six offspring who were all born at home on the farm. His father raised tobacco, corn, and maize, and bartered his services as a mechanic to neighboring farms. They raised a few horses—work horses, not the pampered thoroughbreds that grazed the bluegrass fields twenty miles to the north. His parents grew up on adjacent farms, near the same dried-up creek where Ralph entered the world. Several generations before them had lived within a mile of those farms, and it was the only life Ralph’s ancestors knew. His mom took care of Ralph and his five siblings, and everything they raised, while his father managed the business end of the farm. She did the canning, made cream and butter, killed all of her own cows and hogs and chickens, and made buttermilk biscuits every day from store-bought flour and sugar, and sewed clothes for her brood. The kids were responsible for milking the cows and feeding the livestock. Ralph was expected to take care of the runts—the baby lambs, piglets, and calves whose mothers ignored them—by inducing them to drink from a baby bottle. Ralph became attached to the orphan calves, the stray lambs, and little pigs the old sows had rejected, and for many years couldn’t bring himself to eat beef. For some reason, he didn’t muster up an abundance of compassion for hogs and chickens, but could be brought to tears by the slaughter of a cow. The big event of every year was when the fanners butchered their pigs. Ralph would watch, and be expected to help, as his father and the neighbor men gutted the big animals and then hung them so the blood drained from their veins.