From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  If there is ever a Spillers Defendants Hall of Fame—and there should be—among its first honorees should be the infamous Tohill clan of Beaumont, Texas. In Mississippi, we normally think of Cajuns as fun-loving party people, the only Americans who write nearly as many country songs about food as they do about broken hearts. But the Tohill clan was different. They must have taken a wrong turn somewhere in Sicily because if there was ever a mob family, it was the Tohills.

  Undisputed leader of the clan was Jessie Tohill Sr., who would be called a warlord if he lived in Afghanistan. With his sons, Jessie Jr., Freddie, and John Paul, he ran a drug distribution network from Beaumont through Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York. After months of dogged investigative work, Charlie Spillers built a powerful drug conspiracy case against the family. In the first Tohill indictment, which charged Jessie Sr. as kingpin and godfather, the ten named defendants attracted such attorneys as Mississippi bar president Jack Dunbar and future U.S. senator Roger Wicker, not to mention veteran Oxford criminal defense attorneys Dave Bell, Grady Tollison, Will Ford, Bill Duke, Sonny Mason, David Calder, and Peggy Jones. Attorney Paul Buchanan of Beaumont was the only outlier.

  With his usual thoroughness, Charlie Spillers began contacting attorneys for lesser defendants in the indictment as well as Tohill cronies not yet indicted. Charlie had most of them served with federal grand jury subpoenas. When Jessie Tohill heard the Feds were making offers to people to testify against him, he decided some folks needed to get killed to slow down Charlie’s momentum. To get the ball rolling, Tohill told Michael Haskett to find and kill two potential witnesses. Jessie Sr. told Haskett his codefendant Maye Haney, an older lady known to the group as “Aunt Maye,” would go with Haskett to Mississippi and help them locate the witnesses for killing. Before they left, however, Jessie Sr. learned that Aunt Maye herself had received a subpoena. She had refused to testify, but Jessie Sr. did not know that. He therefore told Haskett and his son Freddie to kill Aunt Maye herself after she’d led them to the other witnesses. They were then to kill Aunt Maye’s son and codefendant, Kevin Larue Haney and his wife Wanda and their two children, just to be sure everybody got the message.

  The Tohills first planned to kill the Haneys by injecting them with massive overdoses of cocaine. That plan sounded too complicated, so in June 1989, Jessie Sr. told Haskett to just go ahead and shoot Aunt Maye instead, using his .38 revolver to do it. On June 9, Jessie Jr. and Freddie and Haskett went target shooting in front of witnesses so they would have an explanation if police found gunpowder residue on their hands. After midnight Freddie Tohill took Haskett to an after-hours bar where Haskett would be seen by people and supposedly have an alibi. At around 4:30 A.M. on June 10, Freddie gave Haskett his dad’s old .38 and told him to “make sure no one saw him” kill Aunt Maye.

  Later that morning, Haskett reported to Jessie Sr. that he had shot and killed Aunt Maye. Little did they suspect the mistakes Haskett had made. Satisfied with his work, Jessie Sr. drove Haskett to Lake Charles and gave him $150 and a bus ticket to Indianapolis and told him to stay there for a while. It was a pretty low-budget operation. Jessie Sr. later wired Haskett money for a bus ticket to return to Beaumont. Upon his return, Haskett showed Jessie Sr. and John Paul where he had tossed the murder weapon into a drainage ditch. They discussed whether they should try to retrieve it, but decided not to, since no one had seen Haskett and the police would never know where to look for the gun.

  Then out of the blue their whole world came down on them. Jessie Sr. and Michael Haskett were arrested in Texas on a federal indictment from Oxford, Mississippi, for the murder of Maye Haney, a subpoenaed witness in their drug case. Jessie Sr. wondered how in the world the Feds had figured it out. It seemed like such a perfectly executed crime. Jessie Sr. should have questioned Haskett better. At first, things had gone well. Haskett drove to Aunt Maye’s trailer and when she locked the front door against him, he kicked it in. He heard her hiding in the bathroom begging for mercy, swearing she was not a witness, which was true. But Haskett had his orders. He shot Aunt Maye through the door, then pushed her body back using the door and finished her off with a shot to the head. Feeling proud of himself, Haskett drove back toward the bar where they would pretend he’d been all evening.

  Then their perfect plan began to unravel. En route, Haskett ran out of gas. Luckily, he thought, he rolled up to a gas station just as his car stalled out. Reaching in his pocket, he realized he’d forgotten to bring any money to buy gas. No problem. He at least had thought to bring the number of the bar with him. With the only money he had on him, one quarter, Haskett tried to call the bar from a pay phone. Unfortunately for him, he misdialed the number. His last quarter gone, there was nothing left to do but hitchhike to the bar. Leaving his car at the station, Haskett began thumbing a ride. Again he felt himself lucky. Streams of cars came out of nearby factories whose shifts had just changed. Scores of drivers passed Haskett before one kind-hearted soul stopped and picked him up. Haskett was surprised that the driver was black because few blacks lived in that area or worked at those factories, but was grateful and didn’t think about it further. The guys at the service station saw him being picked up. The driver dropped Haskett at the bar. Everything once again seemed copacetic. The next morning, the Tohills took Haskett back to the station to pick up his car.

  When Charlie Spillers heard of the shooting of Maye Haney, he immediately suspected the Tohill clan. He also felt remorseful, wondering if his subpoena had triggered them to suspect she was a witness when she wasn’t. Taking Tom Dawson with him, Spillers headed for Texas. At the Orange County Sheriff’s office, they told the detectives of their suspicions about who had killed Aunt Maye. The detectives began regaling them with Tohill stories. One involved a local guy who once went to Jessie Sr.’s back door to pick up some dope. On the porch was a dead body. Jessie said not to worry, they were going to move him later. The customer left quickly without the dope and never came back.

  As Spillers and Dawson looked at Tohill files, a local detective came by with an interesting find he had made that morning. While driving to work near Maye Haney’s house, he had spotted something that looked like a gun barrel sticking up out of the mud on the far side of the ditch along the road. The detective jumped the ditch, retrieved the gun, and brought it to the office. Everyone was looking at it because of its unusual appearance. It was a .38 revolver, but instead of the usual round barrel, someone had replaced it with the square-shaped barrel of an automatic. They test-fired it and, somewhat surprisingly, it fired perfectly.

  In the kind of coincidence that only happens to Charlie Spillers, just at that moment one of the detectives who had worked on Charlie’s Tohill case walked in. He had been on the team that searched Jessie Sr.’s residence when he was arrested. He said, “Hey, I know that gun. That’s Jessie Tohill’s. There’s not another weird gun like that anywhere.” An intense series of neighborhood interviews began in the area between where Maye was killed and where the gun was found. It turned up service station employees who remembered the guy who ran out of gas and started hitchhiking after trying to call the bar, which the detectives knew as the bar where the Tohills usually hung out. The detectives got a list of the workers whose shift had ended when Haskett was hitchhiking. Officers soon found the Good Samaritan who’d given Haskett a ride. They showed him a photo spread of Tohill associates. Without hesitating, he positively identified a photo of Haskett as the man he picked up and dropped off at the Tohill “alibi bar.” All their clever planning had been for naught.

  Ballistics matched Tohill’s gun to the slugs in Maye Haney’s body. Confronted, Haskett confessed and agreed to testify against the others. As Charlie was preparing Haskett to testify before the grand jury, I was sickened at how cold-blooded Haskett was. His sense of humor, if he had one, was macabre. He laughed at how, when he shot her, the elderly lady’s false teeth flew out of her mouth and landed in the bathtub. In an effort to humanize him a little before
he faced the grand jury, I thought I’d shame him by asking him a question that would allow him to say how sorry he was about killing the old lady. I naively asked him if there was anything he’d do differently. As he thought, he slowly began to look even dumber, then suddenly seemed to brighten up as if he’d just understood the question. “Oh yeah. Next time I’d plan it better.” So much for provoking him to remorse.

  The wording of the murder indictment sent a chill of fear through the defendants’ camp, even if it created no remorse. Every Tohill pled guilty to everything, and no one had to testify. A few months later Charlie received a phone call from the mother of one of the witnesses he hadn’t needed. She said Charlie had promised her son that in return for his testimony Charlie would help her son if he ever needed it. Charlie said he remembered it. As the mother talked, Charlie typed in the name on an inmate locator on his laptop.

  Charlie asked the mother if her son had ever been convicted in connection with his dealings with the Tohills. He had been. Charlie then asked if he was doing a sentence for drugs. “Oh, no, sir, it was for a murder,” she said in a heavy Cajun accent. “Who did he kill?” Charlie asked. “A witness,” she said. “Why did he do that? Did the Tohills put him up to it?” She responded indirectly. “Well, you might say that. He didn’t want to do it, but Jessie made him. He did it out of scaredness and afraidness of Jessie.”

  Charlie wanted to laugh, but the mother put an end to that, explaining that her son was so scared of the Tohills that after he shot the guy he ran away. Then he remembered that Jessie had told him to get rid of the body and he decided to go back. Charlie asked one final question: “So did they find the body?” Her answer guaranteed her son would get no help. “Well, sir, that boy of mine was so scared of Jessie and them that he went back to the guy’s trailer and took a butcher knife and cut the body in pieces and threw them all in the bayou. But they still found a few pieces. Can you help him?” Charlie said with finality, “No ma’am, I’m very sorry. You see, the help I promised him was strictly limited to drug charges.” And that was true.

  Murder by Moonlight: The Natchez Trace Sniper14

  Of all the hundreds of cases I’ve tried, one stands out in my memory most starkly: a nine-year-old boy killed by a high-powered rifle on Christmas Night on the Natchez Trace Parkway while returning home from visiting his grandparents. The case came to me via telephone from FBI agent Jerry Marsh. I was playing with my daughter under our Christmas tree when my wife said grumpily, “It’s the FBI calling. Got to talk to you. Don’t they know it’s Christmas?”

  Jerry apologized at once and said he knew I’d understand once I heard what happened. A little boy had been shot the previous night and had just died of his wounds. Since it was on the Natchez Trace, the case was federal. Jerry said he had at least waited till morning to call me. His own Christmas had been ruined by a call to his home from the first park ranger on the scene, Jerry’s own cousin, who had the unusual name of Urbane Breeland. His cousin told Jerry the basic facts. Just after midnight, Kenneth Brinkley was driving south on the Trace from Tupelo toward Jackson with his fiancée, Linda Johnson, beside him. Her two children were asleep on the backseat. Kenneth was telling Linda about an accident he’d had a year earlier when he slid off the narrow two-lane road during heavy rain and hit a tree near the Ballard Creek rest stop. They were paying close attention, looking for “his tree” as he called it.

  It was a clear night with a bright nearly full moon, making the trees look particularly beautiful as they arched over the highway, sometimes forming almost a tunnel. It was as peaceful as the previous century when the Trace had been the major south-to-north road for returning travelers who’d floated by boat down the Mississippi. Abe Lincoln’s father once took the Trace back home to Kentucky. Andrew Jackson rode it back north to Nashville from the Battle of New Orleans. As they passed the Ballard Creek rest stop, Linda and Kenneth saw a maroon Ford pickup parked there with no driver in sight. Seconds later, there was a huge explosion inside the car. Brinkley knew it was too loud for a blown tire. The children immediately started screaming. Linda’s twelve year-old daughter, Lachelle, who was sitting in the middle, said her leg hurt, and they saw blood on her hip. Her nine-year-old brother, Terrell, who was sitting on her right, was wide-eyed and shaking violently. Blood was spurting from both his legs.

  Realizing they had been shot, Kenneth sped up to get away from the shooter and head for the nearest hospital. Linda climbed over the seat and pressed on Terrell’s wounds to stop the bleeding. Kenneth took the exit for the nearby town of Mathiston and stopped at the police station to report the shooting and get directions to the hospital. Terrell’s teeth were chattering and his face was already pale from the loss of blood. His wounds were the size of golf balls. He still hadn’t spoken. Police officer Roger Miller directed them to the hospital and headed for Ballard Creek with two other officers. He also called county sheriff Hays Mills. The officers looked around the Ballard Creek area for clues, trying not to disturb the scene.

  Sheriff Mills, an experienced hunter, found a suspicious area behind a pair of twin-oak trees. He described it to me later as a “wallowed-out place,” four inches deep, where the thick carpet of dead leaves had been deliberately scraped back. There were four deep indentations in the soft earth which looked to Mills like what he and other hunters would make when prone while lying in wait for a deer. The indentations were consistent with where a hunter’s elbows and knees would have been, but that was of course speculation.

  The other officers looked for spent shells and other evidence but found only a freshly broken whiskey bottle. As they searched, a two-tone maroon pickup slowly approached at thirty miles an hour. As it passed, Miller recognized the driver as Ronald Glen Shaw, a convict just paroled from Parchman following his second rape conviction. Both rapes had been committed the same way. Shaw had entered a women’s restroom at a strip club and raped a stripper using a carpet-cutting knife as a weapon.

  The officers pulled out and turned on their blue lights to question Shaw, who took off with the officers in pursuit, reaching speeds in excess of 110 miles per hour. When they finally forced him off the road, Shaw got out with his hands up. They arrested him for speeding and, after smelling him, for DUI. He asked them, “What have I done?” Through the open door of his pickup, officers saw in plain view five live rifle rounds on the driver’s side floor. One officer pulled the driver’s seat forward and shone his flashlight into the backseat, where he saw a .35-caliber lever-action deer rifle, which he seized.

  The officers read Shaw his Miranda rights but did not ask him for a statement, and he volunteered none. They drove him to the sheriff’s office at Ackerman and read him his rights again. This time he said he’d like to tell them what happened. He said he’d been driving around drinking and stopped at a “pull-off place” to throw up. He claimed he had not fired his deer rifle since early that afternoon. Sheriff Mills knew Miller and Breeland had felt and smelled the rifle when they seized it and said it was “fresh fired.” The next morning, December 26, FBI agents Jerry Marsh and Don Greene went to the jail and again advised Shaw of his rights. He repeated his story that he had not fired his rifle since early afternoon. The agents told Shaw that Terrell Johnson had just died of his wounds.

  That night, a hospital janitor, while mopping out the operating room, found among Lachelle’s discarded clothes the bloody slug that killed Terrell. The agents returned to the jail the next afternoon, December 27, and readvised and requestioned Shaw about his story. Marsh showed Shaw the slug and told him it would be flown that day to the FBI lab and Marsh thought it would match Shaw’s rifle. At that point, Shaw said he would answer no further questions without an attorney present. The agents told his parents, who were present for the interview even though Shaw was already twenty-nine years old and intelligent, that they expected a ballistics report by Monday morning December 29, an unusually short turnaround for any crime lab.

  A Mississippi FBI agent personally flew the slug to the
FBI crime lab in Washington. The Jackson agent in charge personally called the FBI director to get the ballistics exam expedited. The case was assigned to the same expert who had examined the bullets taken from President Ronald Reagan when he was shot by John Hinckley. The .35 slug was in good condition with plenty of identifiable riflings. It matched perfectly Shaw’s rifle, which the Mississippi agent had also carried with him to the FBI lab, where it was test-fired.

  At 10:30 A.M. on Monday, Shaw’s parents called the FBI agents, saying their son had changed his mind and now wanted to talk to them without an attorney. The agents declined, saying FBI rules would not allow it since he had asked for an attorney. The parents insisted. An agent called me and asked for legal advice. I told them to go ahead but only after getting a written waiver and to tape record both the waiver and the interview and their talks with the parents. Otherwise he’d claim later he tried to tell us the truth, but we wouldn’t listen. The agents said FBI regulations did not allow taped interviews because they created too much paperwork. I told them to go ahead without the tape, even though I knew their stupid policy would later cause us credibility problems if we went to court.

  Shaw dramatically changed his story. This time he said that because he was on parole he had not wanted to admit he possessed a gun and was headlighting deer on the Trace at the Pigeon Roost rest stop. This time he claimed that while walking in the woods along the Trace with his truck lights on to blind any deer that might come along, he slipped and fell, causing his gun to discharge accidentally toward the Trace. He claimed to have seen a car go by just then and at first he feared he’d hit it, but when the car did not brake or slow down, he figured he’d missed it. He said he sat in his truck for several minutes, then drove on toward Ballard Creek, where the officers stopped him.