We deeply regretted that the public, and especially Mamie Till Mobley, never knew all we learned from reopening the Emmett Till case. But not one of us ever regretted for a moment reopening the case to pursue the truth and make it known. Perhaps the present brief recounting will make it a little better known and help close this chapter of U.S. and Mississippi history.
4
KILLERS AND WANNABES
Introduction
Most murders are not federal crimes. State DAs handle most homicides unless they are committed on federal lands like national parks. Fortunately for prosecutors in our office who get satisfaction from putting killers behind bars for life (like me) north Mississippi is rich in federal enclaves and interstate highways. The Natchez Trace Parkway seems to be the crime scene of choice for federal killings in Faulkner country. Most emotional and unforgettable for me was the locally famous Natchez Trace sniper killing where a paroled rapist used a high-powered rifle to murder a nine-year-old boy returning home from Christmas with his grandparents. That episode is recounted here at length as the final story of this chapter. Such seemingly senseless killings are well explained in a recent book Why They Kill by Richard Rhodes, who covers in depth killers and other violent criminals from Lee Harvey Oswald to Jack Ruby to Mike Tyson in an unusually persuasive way for those, like me, who try to understand such people.
The other major source of federal jurisdiction in murder cases is when the murder affects interstate commerce and is done for money. In a sad commentary on our society, many of those cases involve husbands or wives wanting their spouses killed. In our district, an amateur local hit man will usually do the job for less than $5,000, often for less than $1,000. One positive thing I learned while prosecuting so many of these cases is just how many informants our investigators have. Bartenders, prostitutes, and jilted lovers usually make great informants. After a few drinks, angry spouses tend to ask bartenders to recommend a cheap, reliable hit man to knock off their erstwhile life partner. Over my career, we averted several hired killings by inserting undercover officers to pose as hit men and tape-record the spouse asking for the killing and handing the officer a down payment. We always had to act quickly, before the spouse found someone else to do the job faster or cheaper. There are way too many shooters out there who need money. One of our most successful such cases was where a local judge, outraged at a young lawyer with the famous Farese law firm, tried to hire a hit man to blow up their entire office with them in it. Our key informant refused to testify, but we persuaded the judge not to run again, and nobody was blown up.
One particularly troubling case happened at remote, idyllic Puskus Lake near Oxford where a meth-crazed drifter killed an Ole Miss honor student because the student’s lively black lab had disturbed his fishing. Another sicko beat a gay architect to death with a piece of heavy metal at a rest stop on the Natchez Trace for threatening his manhood by propositioning him, or so he thought. But not all of our cases have been so depressing. Several included here involve laughably incompetent wannabe killers.
My favorite venue for a failed murder-for-hire was a seedy concrete-block bar atop a hill near Mayhew Junction appropriately named the Bloody Bucket Lounge. Jesse Bingham, my good friend and an ace undercover capable of playing multiple personalities, solved that one. Others were solved by an itinerant CI frequently used by FBI agent Wayne Tichenor. The CI, who always refused to tell us his real name, was a former Hell’s Angel with great acting skills. We got him jobs as a maître d’ in a fine restaurant, as a clerk in an expensive men’s store, as a bouncer in a strip club, and as a bartender for several gigs. Our deal with him was that he would only gather information and would never have to testify or be identified in any paperwork such as search warrants. Wayne may have known how to find him, but I never did. We knew him only as “California Jim.” His unique MO was that he took his young son, aged eight through twelve when we knew him, wherever he went. I wonder how that boy turned out.
This chapter begins with two of the most vivid almost-murder cases. The first is the attempted murder of Senator John Stennis by a group of robbers who shot him in front of his Washington, D.C., home while I was working as his legal counsel. Fortunately that case had a happy ending legally. The second case involved Ku Klux Klan leader Dale Walton, who had traveled to Fayette, in the Southern District, and tried to kill civil rights leader Charles Evers, brother of the assassinated NAACP leader Medgar Evers. That plot failed, and we prosecuted Walton in the Northern District for possession of the machine gun he planned to use to kill Evers. Just as prosecutors once got Al Capone using the tax laws, we used the firearms laws to go after Walton.
I have known several serial killers. The worst was Marion Albert “Mad Dog” Pruett, a former protected witness and the killer of another protected witness and several others, whose deposition I took at Parchman one cold day while he was on death row. My worst personal encounter with a killer was with one of the Lampkin brothers from near Starkville. While cross-examining him in a judge’s chambers, the pudgy, fiftyish Cleveland Lampkin, not liking my questions, leapt like a cat across the judge’s conference table and tried to choke me. The marshals easily pulled him off. He was on trial for a minor firearm charge. The rest of that killer’s chilling life history is also recounted here.
My most colorful “lady” killer was Linda Leedom of DeSoto County. She killed her best friend after the friend unwisely made Linda the beneficiary of several life insurance policies. It was a really challenging case, as told in this chapter. Another “lady” killer, Teresa Hutchison, wanted her husband dead both for his life insurance money and so she could “have a better life.” Her case was so colorful it ended up on the Sally Jessy Raphael show, whose proceeds went to help raise her children while she was doing her prison time.
Another incompetent wannabe killer was Bobby “Riverboat” Gaines, who unwittingly hired ace undercover agent Randall Corban to kill an Oxford bootlegger who refused to pay a gambling debt. The most laughably incompetent killers were the Tohill clan of Beaumont, Texas, whose bumbling attempts at professional murder made the Keystone Cops look like pros. My “favorite” unsuccessful killers, if there are such things, were Harold Shaw and his uncle William Shaw, a Parchman inmate already serving life for killing his wife and her lover. William was a cousin of some of the killers of the three young civil rights workers buried under the earthen dam near Philadelphia. His attempt to have his sentencing judge killed, recounted here, featured classic undercover work to save innocent life. It is no doubt impossible to stop all the killing, but as shown here, good investigators can keep it under control.
The Shooting of Senator John Stennis1
Although I had been a lawyer for three years, my first real in-depth experience with a big-time criminal case came, ironically, while I was working as legal counsel and speechwriter to U.S. senator John Stennis. On the evening of January 30, 1973, the senator asked me to drive him from his Senate office to a 6:30 National Guard reception. After an hour, he told me to go home and “have dinner with your young wife,” that he would get someone else to drive him back to the Senate. Little did I imagine what a big impact that simple decision would have on my life.
As Regan and I sat on our screened back porch having dinner, the phone rang. It was Mildred Ward, the senator’s trusted personal secretary, who lived just three blocks from us. Aunt of actress Sela Ward, Mildred was a lovely, dark-haired woman in her 50s, single and fiercely loyal to the senator, who was the center of her life. After twenty years in a high-stress job, few things bothered Mildred. She could tell presidents to hold the line without batting an eye. But that evening she was sobbing. “John, please come right away and drive me to Walter Reed Hospital. The senator has been shot and is not expected to live. I’m too upset to drive.”
As I drove, Mildred gave me details from Miss Coy, the senator’s wife, and Eph Cresswell, his trusted chief of staff. The senator had driven himself home in the brand-new white Buick he’d just bought Miss Coy as a
birthday present. After he parked in front of his house, two young men had robbed him and shot him twice, once in the leg and once in the stomach, meaning to kill him.
As the night wore on at Walter Reed, a dozen or more senators came to check on Senator Stennis, who was not only powerful and respected but also greatly loved by senators of both parties. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas came straight from a fancy party wearing an elegant tuxedo. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, always energetic and talkative, paced the floor for hours as we waited. The TV reporters were less respectful. All of them wanted details, the more gruesome the better. Several were updating the prepared obituaries they already had on film, primed to run when the senator died. They always referred to him as the “powerful” chairman of the armed services committee; as if powerful were his first name. Sam Donaldson, eyebrows twitching frantically as always, asked every three minutes, “Is he still alive? What are his chances? Have they caught the shooters?” It was a spectacle I’ll never forget, and it created in me a disdain for some broadcast media I’ve never really shaken. The print reporters, however, were both somber and respectful, and despite their deadlines, exhibited an attitude of seriousness and sorrow more fitting the occasion.
After midnight, Eph Cresswell came out with lead military surgeon Robert Muir. Dr. Muir said there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the senator had arrived at the perfect time. The top surgeons, all with extensive battlefield experience in Vietnam treating grievous gunshot wounds, were still on duty. Thirty minutes later and most would have been off duty, having their first drink of the evening and thus could not have operated. The team which did the surgery was perhaps more qualified than any team anywhere in the world.
All the other news was bad. The first wound, to the senator’s left leg, had struck the bone, but rather than breaking the bone had itself broken in several pieces. They got the larger ones out but did not get every piece, which would later cause infection. The second bullet, from a .22 caliber pistol, had done extensive damage. A hollow-point “police round” with a copper jacket, it had been manufactured to cause maximum destruction and it had done so. Muir said that if the senator had been a healthy twenty-year-old with that wound found on a battlefield in Vietnam, they would have considered him beyond saving and given him plenty of morphine to decrease the suffering from being gutshot and medivac’d him out to die comfortably in a hospital.
The bullet had passed through the Senator’s stomach and cut completely in two his portal vein, the major vein that brings blood back to the heart from the lower half of the body. Because he was such a public figure and crucial to the military, they had gone to extraordinary lengths to save him, despite his extremely limited chance of survival. With the best equipment in the world, they performed experimental surgery on his portal vein, splicing it with a cow’s vein, which they expected his body would reject. There was no other vein in his own body large enough to use. Despite the odds, Dr. Muir said that because the senator had been in excellent physical condition, there was a chance the experiment might work.
The likely fatal wound, however, was to the senator’s pancreas, a thin, flat organ that produces vital enzymes. His pancreas, freakishly, had been cut cleanly in two pieces by the copper-jacketed hollow-point bullet. The pancreas could not be sewn back together and was secreting enzymes that would inevitably lead to massive internal infections which would inevitably lead within a few days to an agonizing death. In short, Dr. Muir felt that there was virtually no chance that the senator would live.
I drove Mildred home just before sunrise in a somber and depressed mood. It seemed so unfair. A man who had done so much for so many, who had not an enemy in the world that we knew of, was going to die for no good reason. After an hour or two of sleep, I picked up the Washington Post from my doorstep. The front page was all reports and speculation about the shooting of the respected senator. No one speculated that politics were involved, but everyone wondered if the shooters knew their victim was a prominent senator. If so, they certainly found a way to bring down the full weight of the U.S. government on their heads. The shooters would surely be caught and severely punished.
According to the scant details the senator gave his wife and the ambulance driver, he had had no money on his person but had offered them his expensive Swiss gold pocket watch on a gold chain that also held his Phi Beta Kappa key from the University of Virginia Law School. The FBI debated that night whether to keep that detail secret but decided there were so few leads that the watch was the one item that might be sold or pawned and thus lead them back to the shooters.
The veteran agents assigned to the case were eager to interview the senator, show him photographs of known robbers, and ask him to help a police artist make a sketch of the robbers, of whom the Senator had told the police there were two. They also knew that if they did not interview him soon that they might never have the chance since the doctors told them his death was imminent. On the occasions the surgeons let them speak to him, it was apparent that between the pain and the painkillers the senator was in no condition to give a coherent statement. He himself had the presence of mind to tell them he couldn’t think straight enough to help them. Later, the attempts they did make to persuade him to describe his assailants were used against him at trial to impeach his testimony.
Meanwhile we waited. After two or three days, Dr. Muir told us, “He is the toughest old man I’ve ever seen. For some reason, his immune system has resisted all infection. It’s remarkable.” The cow’s vein implant also seemed to be working. In terrible pain, the senator clung to life. After a week had passed, Dr. Muir’s attitude began to change: “It defies medical science, but it appears possible he might make it. For anyone it would be a long shot, but for a man of seventy-two, it will be a miracle.”
The miracle happened. Once it appeared he would make it, a temporary office was set up at the Walter Reed Hospital with several phones to answer all the sympathy calls. It was overwhelming how much good this one old man had done for so many people in his life and how grateful they were to him. The caller who touched me most was Dizzy Dean, the old St. Louis Cardinal pitcher from Wiggins, Mississippi whom I’d watched broadcast every Saturday of my childhood on the Game of the Week. During the seventh-inning stretch, Ole Diz would sing his version of “Wabash Cannonball,” an unforgettable piece of the old America I grew up in. Dizzy Dean would call two or three times a week and never failed to break down and cry during our talks.
After several weeks, the senator was strong enough for the staff to visit him briefly, one at a time. When my moment came, he wasted no time on sympathy or office work: “The men that did this to me, I want them caught and punished—severely. From here on out, your sole and exclusive job will be to work with the police and the FBI and the prosecutors and make sure what they did to me does not go unpunished. I’ve told them all that you’re to have access to everything and everyone. Make sure to contact me with anything you learn that you think I need to know. Don’t try to ‘protect me’ from bad news or problems.”
It was a heavy responsibility because so far there seemed to be no leads at all. But what surprised me most was the vigor of the senator’s desire for revenge. It was deep and primordial, almost Shakespearean. I don’t believe I’d ever seen anyone so furious or determined to get someone. Perhaps it was the secret of his success in politics. He played hard, and he played for keeps. To this day, after over thirty years as a prosecutor, I have yet to see any victim quite as angry as the senator was.
For weeks, the investigation led nowhere. A whole team of the FBI’s best agents worked tirelessly with D.C. detectives. Every informant was questioned, every pawn shop owner was leaned on. The U.S. Senate raised a large reward for information leading to an arrest. Nothing. Then one day, about six weeks after the shooting, while the senator lay in severe pain and the rest of us worked the phones, a break came. An off-duty D.C. sanitation worker called the police and said he had something. John Thomas was a big man, tall and
broad and black, with a long black beard squared-off at the bottom. Twenty-eight years old and a devout Jehovah’s Witness, Thomas called the police not to seek the reward (which he later got anyway) but just as a good citizen. His story had the ring of truth.
The day before, while he was driving near his home on 13th Street NE, a young fair-skinned black woman with orange hair dodged into the street in front of him from between two parked cars. She was bleeding from the head. Having barely avoided hitting her, Thomas made the block and went back to check on her. As he got there, an athletic young man who looked to be in his early twenties hit the woman hard on the head with a stick of wood. Thomas asked her if she was alright. The man interrupted, telling Thomas the woman was his wife and to butt out. To emphasize his point, the man hit the woman on the head again. When Thomas objected, the man angrily told him to go away, then asked him sarcastically, “You ain’t the police, are you?” Thomas replied, “I could be,” thinking it might cool the man down. Instead, it encouraged the woman: “You so damn smart, why don’t you tell him how you shot that senator?” Thomas, who said he was just two or three feet from her when she said the words, asked her to repeat what she said.
Looking at her husband, the orange-haired women repeated it, louder than before: “Why don’t you tell him how you and the other boys were in the Stennis shooting?” This time she actually used the senator’s name. Thomas later insisted he asked her three or four times in all, and each time she said the same thing. The husband dropped his stick but said nothing, then finally yelled at her, “Are you crazy? He might be the police.” As some young people walked by, the husband said to them, “This girl told him I was involved in the senator shooting.” Then he again asked Thomas if he was the police. Thomas drove away without replying and flagged down the first police car he saw.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 32