American Honor Killings

by David McConnell

  He forced Billy into the rear well of the hatchback. It doesn’t make any difference, of course, but he points out to me that it wasn’t the “trunk” that was reported everywhere. There was “just a flap cover. That car was very small. Not much bigger than a bed,” he says, choosing an odd metaphor. They headed back to Cedar Creek Circle where Mullins had some things prepared. He tells me, “Billy came to and pleaded for his life” from the hatchback well. “He said, ‘Come on, I won’t tell anybody.’ I said, ‘You won’t tell nobody you got your throat slit ear to ear? Hah. I gotta kill you. You’re gonna die.’ After that he got quiet.”

  In fact, Steve and Charlesy thought Billy Jack was probably dead by the time they got to Cedar Creek Circle and loaded up the car with what they needed. I ask Mullins about his preparations. He says old tires, kerosene, and matches just happened to be at the trailer, but he’d bought an ax handle specially. He recalls he also had a cooler with phone cord in it, and maybe some duct tape, in case they had to tie Billy up.

  They took a shortcut locals call One-Minute Road down to Talladega Springs. They turned away from Sylacauga on the main road. Just over the line in Coosa County, they crossed a small river, Peckerwood Creek, and took a sharp left onto a dirt road running along the river and into the woods. They drove to a junk-strewn turnaround next to the concrete footing of an older bridge, long gone.

  While Charlesy dragged the tires ten feet away and got them burning, Steve began to wrestle Billy Jack from the car. He turned away for a moment and felt himself pushed from behind. He tripped forward over the riverbank, falling ten feet into the water. He let the splash go quiet. Wet from head to toe, he found his footing and stood in the knee-deep water. Atop the bank he could hear a car door open, the awkward bumping of the ax handle against metal and—a bit farther off—leafy thudding: Charlesy was high-tailing it away through the woods. Steve scrambled up the riverbank.

  Billy Jack had crawled into the front seat of the car and was clutching the ax handle. “I told him he wasn’t going nowhere cause I had the keys in my pocket.” Wet, angry, Steve yanked Billy Jack from the car and jerked the ax handle from his hand. He brought it down on Billy’s head or face with all his strength. He brought the ax handle down again. He continued with chorelike regularity. Finally, he called Charlesy back.

  Together the boys dragged the body onto the tires. They doused it with kerosene and the flames leaped up. They lobbed the red jug, the ax handle, and Steve’s white sweatshirt onto the fire. Then they waited till they were sure the body was burning, about five minutes. It was fire enough to fulfill Mullins’s fantasy. They returned to Cedar Creek Circle. After borrowing Randall Jones’s car and burning Billy’s, after cleaning up and going for a final beer together at Southern Station on Route 280, Steve dropped Charlesy off at Ricks Lane around three a.m. Charlesy immediately woke Charles Sr. and said, “We killed a guy.” He wept. “Daddy, we kicked a queer’s ass.”

  * * *

  On Monday, the first day of March, Charlesy Butler was picked up. His daddy had told his own friend, Joey Breedlove, about the killing. After the Gaithers held Billy’s funeral, Breedlove went to the police. Steve was soon arrested. In a statement to the Coosa County sheriff he confessed in calm, inarticulate detail. He’d killed Billy Jack because Billy was gay and for his money. He said he and Charlesy had plotted “getting rid” of Billy for a couple of weeks, ever since Billy had insulted Steve by asking to give him a blow job. He’d conspired with Charlesy, because he knew Charlesy also hated queers. He thought he could trust the younger boy. To me, Mullins has added the unverifiable detail that Charlesy once said he’d been abused by a member of his own family. It was why he hated queers so much. I’ve written Charlesy in prison and gotten no response.

  The news spread quickly. The story was picked up in the Atlanta paper, and the New York Times sent a reporter, David Firestone, to Sylacauga. This was that boom year for hate murder, 1998–1999. Less than five months earlier Matthew Shepard had been killed. Then there’d been James Byrd Jr., whom newspapers reflexively described as “the black man who was dragged to his death in Texas.” Billy Jack was lumped together with the other two. It was done without malice but with the same attention-grabbing logic that sold the Three Tenors to people who cared nothing about opera.

  Locals hated how their perfectly modern small city came off sounding like an evil Mayberry RFD. Reporters pronounced the words “small town” ghoulishly on air. TV producers loved shots of the weedy Norfolk Southern tracks. A train whistle would moan behind the voice-over, “Sylacauga is the kind of place where every family keeps at least a few chickens.” Hardly. The Firestone article appeared Saturday, March 6, two weeks after the murder. It reported that “[t]he murder is being called another signpost of hate, like the deaths of Matthew Shepard, killed in Wyoming last year because he was gay, and James Byrd Jr., the black man dragged to his death behind a truck last year in Jasper, Texas.”

  The previous day the Clinton White House published a presidential statement about the murder, and two ministers and an Episcopal layman from Boston trudged out to the bridge footing by Peckerwood Creek with several reporters in tow. The ministers prayed and laid four daffodils on the spot where Billy’s body had been burned. Members of Fred Phelps’s despicable family-run Westboro Baptist Church came from Topeka, Kansas, to protest against a candlelight vigil held in Sylacauga on March 8. Phelps’s daughter Rebekah, then eleven, held a sign reading, Gaither in Hell.

  In news lingo the big “get” was Mullins. The prize went to Connie Chung of the ABC News program 20/20. Her interview wasn’t broadcast till December, well after Steve and Charlesy had both been imprisoned for life. That gave her short piece a nice sense of closure.

  Chung narrates with tabloid gusto: “. . . They left the scene of their evil inferno . . .” Then Steve is shown coming through a Kilby prison hallway, clean-shaven now, wearing an orange jumpsuit. His forearms are chained to a restraint around his waist, his wrists handcuffed for good measure. The camera zooms in on the SS tattoo on his hand.

  Chung dominates the interview. Perhaps her combative, feeling manner is an effective interview technique precisely because it’s so unsettling. She gets Mullins to cry cinematic tears, to which she reacts with an almost imperceptible, righteous shaking of her head and pursing of her lips. She’s undoubtedly correct when she narrates, “The tears [he and Charlesy] shed are not for their victim but for their own bleak futures.” Chung’s garish personality all but eclipses Steve’s hollow voice and Yes, ma’ams.

  Steve tries to explain that while he was beating Billy Jack to death, “It wasn’t me. It was like it was another person. Someone else inside me.”

  Chung shoots back: “How can you say it was someone else? Because in fact you were thinking about it and you were intending to kill him . . . It’s obvious . . . You were a skinhead and you were a neo-Nazi and that is all about you. So that’s who you were.”

  “Guess so.”

  When asked if he felt remorse, Steve says, “Yes, for a couple days. Then I took my Bible and I prayed and asked for forgiveness.” Rigidly Steve claims that God has forgiven him, but that Billy is in hell because he was homosexual. “It’s in the New Testament. I could show you where if I had a Bible.”

  “Why would God forgive you?” Chung asks incredulously. She seems more aggravated than intrigued by Steve’s self-protective stubbornness.

  Steve stopped giving interviews after that. (I wondered if it hadn’t been the tears—thinking that he came off weak. But he’s told me he never saw the show and that he stopped talking “mostly” because he’d promised the producer an exclusive.) The PBS show Frontline was also preparing a documentary and had to borrow some of ABC’s footage when Steve wouldn’t speak to them.

  Before hearing his oddly credible claim about keeping the promise of an exclusive, I’d also wondered whether Mullins stopped talking because he didn’t want to be asked about a piece of the story that ABC omitted. Mullins had been to a “gay
party” in nearby Anniston once. He’d attended with someone named Jimmy Lynn who claimed he’d performed oral sex on the future murderer. This came out at trial. Did the case involve another gay secret agent, another Darrell Madden ten years before the fact? It doesn’t seem possible that ABC missed this (the “gay” testimony was given four months before their episode of 20/20, “Murder Out of Hate,” was broadcast), so one assumes they found the information too complicated to explain briefly, too charged for their audience, liable to reflect badly on Billy or to weaken their punchy gay-martyr plotline. Or simply distasteful.

  Even the admirable Frontline couldn’t resist using the information for shock effect. After the whole awful story has been told, Forrest Sawyer intones, “But Steve Mullins had a secret homosexual sex life.”

  Charlesy is interviewed by Sawyer. Crying freely, his red hair shorn, puffy (Medication? I wonder), he suggests that the lie about the Anniston party means Steve is less trustworthy than he, Charlesy, is. This is important because Charlesy and Steve don’t agree about what happened the night Billy was murdered.

  First, Charlesy claims there was no plan. He says he had no idea what was going to happen ahead of time. Steve and he never talked about “getting rid” of Billy. Nothing was said about murder that night or before. Nothing was said about luring Billy with a promise of sex. Charlesy himself, in a sense, was lured up there. In short, Steve was lying about everything.

  According to Charlesy, Billy Jack first suggested a three-way at the boat launch by Lake Victoria. Insulted, he, Charlesy, kicked Billy to the ground. He kicked him several more times for good measure. His panicky anger assuaged, he walked off and took a leak. When he came back Steve had cut Billy’s throat and stabbed him. Charlesy says he doesn’t know why Steve did it, but in light of Steve’s lies . . . He trails off and lets us do the imagining. Charlesy has an air of tragic candidness. His life really has been ruined. The fact that Steve had gotten a blow job and might secretly be gay may strike Charlesy as a betrayal in retrospect. With what sounds like a straight guy’s—or an inmate’s—brutal Mountain Man view of homosexuality, Charlesy mumbles, “[Billy] didn’t have no respect. It’s not like I’m some gay tramp waiting to be cornholed by some prick.” He pleads with Forrest Sawyer, “Would you like for a gay man to hit on you?”

  Earnestly Sawyer replies, “I don’t think I’d kick him.”

  Frontline seemed to find Charlesy’s version plausible, but it’s probably fiction.

  Even if you’re inclined to buy a panic story, a glance at the legal maneuvers surrounding his trial hints that Charlesy is lying. On March 4, the two boys were indicted. On June 4, Mullins pled guilty in return for life without parole. On August 2, Charlesy refused the same deal. He wanted to go ahead with a trial. On August 3, his trial began. His lawyer painted him as a foolish, volatile kid who came under the influence of a lying thug and secret homosexual—Mullins. Witnesses testified that Mullins went to a “gay party” and had oral sex with a man. But the story didn’t sell. Or else Charlesy’s actions immediately after the murder—helping to burn the body—were too unmitigating. On August 5, he was found guilty. Since the devout Gaither family opposed the death penalty, the prosecutor took that option off the table as he had with Mullins, and Charlesy Butler got life.

  It’s hard not to feel sorry for the kid, though he understands nothing. The gleeful punch line that he’s probably getting fucked in prison—and deserves it—is about as funny as a gay murder by a creek named Peckerwood. With wilting discretion the Frontline website mentions that Charlesy talked of having to deal now with “prison sexuality.” They leave it at that.

  But sexuality is exactly what makes this story so interesting and so confusing. Billy Jack was a gay man passing for straight. Charlesy was a small, straight kid with, for lack of a better term, a pretty mouth. He may have been abused when he was younger. What about Mullins? I asked him. He told me he was “bisexual.” He prefers women but lacking one will have sex with an effeminate man. He described the first time he had sex in prison in 1995 (four years before the murder). He leafed through Hustler magazine while someone gave him a blow job under a table. The second time—the only time outside of prison—was with Jimmy Lynn. Once. The Anniston party was mostly lesbians and he was there with a girl. It doesn’t sound like a secret homosexual life. (Mullins is certain Billy Jack had never heard anything about Jimmy Lynn or the Anniston party.)

  With his stress on effeminacy, I have an intuition Mullins is talking about bisexual behavior, not desire, so I ask about fantasies with guys. No. Was there any attraction to Charlesy? No. To Billy Jack? No. And I consult with a gay man from out of state who’s befriended him since he was locked up and who agrees that Mullins seems basically straight. Our beliefs about innate sexuality don’t trump everything, though. Mullin’s description of himself is a reminder that opportunistic, or even chosen, sexuality is also real.

  Mullins says he’s had a lot of sex over the years since the killing. “It has to be with someone feminine. And some sort of attraction. I had a (black) prison wife whom I love and loved very much. He is now at home. He was the last person I was with a year ago.” These days, if someone offers Mullins a blow job—he relates this to me lightly, apparently forgetting it was the original motive for murder—he begs off, saying he’s retired. I ask an amazed question, and he specifies that every guy he’s ever had sex with was black. That physical revulsion he experienced when younger takes on a stranger aspect. The “toppish,” racist, mountain man Mullins is a far more convoluted being than our culture—at least in the persons of Connie Chung and Forrest Sawyer—wants to allow.

  Earlier, I mentioned that the Oklahoma City killer, Darrell Madden, bore some racist or backwoods cultural resemblance to Steve Mullins. Madden’s gang affiliation was the other standout aspect of his story. He kept calling the murder of Steve Domer “a mission.” His word choice recalls the war-minded, militaristic Ben Williams. But where Williams’s “mission” was social purification, Madden’s involved gang initiation. Williams’s object was religious/political, Madden’s brotherly.

  I went to the other side of the country, to Baltimore, to look at gang violence from another angle. This was a case of organized violence without the erotically charged subtext that Madden’s personality gave his story. In a less tragic world, this case would have been an episode of school violence, a pantsing, literally, with everybody feeling ashamed and miserable afterward, but no more than that.

  6

  PARRISH, RAWLINGS, HOLLIS, AND FLYTHE, 2008

  Randallstown, Maryland is one of those well-maintained middle-class suburbs, like Gary, Indiana, that over the past decades, without any fuss, has become almost entirely African American—more than eighty percent at last count. Regulation plastic garbage cans are left atilt at the curb in front of modest single-family houses. The cars are mostly Toyotas, though there’s an Infiniti in one driveway and the occasional beater or Harley. Unmowed lawns are rare. The air of conformity is standard-issue suburban.

  Older people might mistake the town for an enclave of Polish autoworkers, because, frankly, it looks like the kind of place blue-collar racists tried to keep black people out of in the bad old days. Instead, no one has to think about integration here at all. As if bookending a whites-only past, nearly every face you see is brown—an even higher percentage of African Americans than in Baltimore next door.7

  Many of the families in Randallstown came here to get out of crime-ridden Baltimore. Shrinking since 1950, Baltimore is now hardly more than a borough of the Boston-to-Washington megalopolis I-95 ties together. Thirty thousand old houses are abandoned and boarded up. The reputations of Edgar Allan Poe and Frederick Douglass have faded equally. The city’s new mythology has come from the TV show The Wire. To a visiting New Yorker (me), the crime-consciousness feels like a throwback to the 1970s. The local, alternative, free City Paper runs a roundup column called “Murder Ink.” A recent issue’s headline tally was, “Murders This Week: 6; This Y
ear: 109.”

  Randallstown has little in common with The Wire’s gangsta paradise of Section 8 housing, trashed row houses, and hyperalert but stoned-acting loiterers giving the four-fingers-down signal of dope dealers. In Randallstown the kids are good, though they mostly go to the not-so-good Randallstown High School. That sprawling brick pile couldn’t be more suburban, set amid acres of parking lots and tennis courts and basketball courts and playing fields. Almost hiding the entrance, a windowless, modernist Martello tower juts out toward a parking lot. Against the tower’s mass of brick, a banner of the school’s mascot ram is almost lost. A corner of the banner has come away and flutters briskly to the shouting of a thousand kids.

  At the end of the school day the buses have lined up in front of the school. Most kids mill around waiting for their ride, but a lot walk home: a threesome of fat girls, an undersized, bespectacled loner with an oversized backpack, a knot of seniors with a student-comedian shuffling backward on the sidewalk in front of them telling jokes. Within an hour or so, like a wave into sand, the shrilling crowd disappears completely into the suddenly quiet suburb.

  Sometimes Michelle Parrish, in every way an ordinary mother, would come to this school to pick up her son Steven and his best friend Steven Hollis. She’d drive them to her place and the two Stevens would have a sleepover. Or else the boys would walk from school several blocks to the Hollis home on Bengal Road, and they’d spend the night there. They were pretty much inseparable best friends.

  Parrish more was more handsome and gregarious. His nickname was “Scooby.” Hollis’s academic problems were somehow reflected in his face—he was an odd-looking kid. His nose, cheeks, and jaw jutted forward. The top part of his head was smaller and narrower. Attractive eyes receded under a strange, sharply V-shaped brow, a permanent frown that made him appear both uncomprehending and on the verge of anger. He’d had a blood disorder when he was born and was diagnosed with ADHD as a seven-year-old, but neither would account for that scarily tragic expression. Maybe it was why they called him “Loco.”