The Kudzu Kid
Page 27
Over the years, Bailey had also orchestrated a couple of hunting accidents.
With Sam Bishop, it was crucial to do it right. If there was any question about the Randolph supervisor’s death, the other two landfill supporters would balk.
The most difficult part of staging a hunting accident, Bailey knew, was marksmanship. A killing shot at close range would never work, because the target would be too visible to justify a shooting by mistake. Bailey preferred to operate from as far as one hundred yards out, so that the bullet appeared to be random. And, obviously, he had only one shot to work with—no hunter accidentally shoots another several times.
He had followed Bishop at a safe distance on the first day of deer rifle season the previous Friday and discovered that the supervisor liked to hunt from a tree stand. Bishop’s weapon of choice was a pump-action shotgun, so he needed to wait until the game drew relatively close to his perch.
Bailey saw Bishop’s truck parked next to the path leading into the woods near the little community of Poplar View and made sure to leave his own vehicle about a quarter mile away. The path was a winding switchback leading mostly uphill, and Bailey took it slow, peering around every steep turn for other hunters, trying to minimize the noise of the dried leaves crackling under his boots. It was chilly in the early morning, and his breath formed a plume in front of him as he walked.
It took about twenty minutes for Bishop’s deer stand to come into view, a random, rickety, hodgepodge of boards and planks nailed together about fifteen feet up in an oak tree. Bishop was already sitting there when Bailey cleared the last loop in the trail, suddenly close enough to see coffee steaming from Bishop’s thermos.
Moving behind a convenient line of evergreens that shielded him from view, Bailey maneuvered himself up onto a ridgeline that looked down on the stand. The sun was just coming up, its rays fractured into light and dark patterns by the pines and the few remaining hardwood leaves.
With his blaze orange jacket and stationary position, Bishop made a tempting target, so still that Bailey thought at first that he might be asleep. The hit man sat down cross-legged in front of a mossy tree stump and sighted his Winchester rifle across it, zeroing in on Bishop’s left ear. It was an older gun, a .30-30, lightweight and dependable, and Bailey had used it to collect more than his share of deer meat.
Two crows flew by, complaining loudly, and Bishop moved his head to follow them. His aim disrupted, Bailey took a deep breath and sat patiently until his target resumed his former position. Then he sighted the rifle again, counted slowly down to ten, and squeezed the trigger.
At that precise moment, Bailey’s long-cherished luck turned bad. Just as the unseen finger tightened up above him, Bishop noticed an untied shoelace and dipped his head to address the problem. Instead of killing him, the bullet flew over his head, so close that it slightly dented the soft cloth of his hat.
“Hey, what the hell?!” Bishop yelled, his head swiveling as he searched the woods for the source of the bullet.
Whitt Scruggs was also in those woods, continuing his ultimate quest for a trophy deer head. As Bailey’s now-soured luck would have it, Scruggs crested an adjoining ridge just in time to see Scruggs firing at Bishop across a small, steep valley. He also shouted at Bailey, the two outraged voices almost in harmony.
Badly flustered, his quick twitch reflexes on overload, Bailey swung the rifle away from Bishop and toward Scruggs. Again he pulled the trigger, and this bullet chewed a chunk of pine from a tree next to Scruggs, spraying him with toothpick-sized fragments.
More than one hundred thirty years earlier, Union and Confederate soldiers had skirmished through these same woods, maybe even along the same ridgeline. Whitt Scruggs, who had a Confederate flag sewn to the back on his camouflage-colored jumpsuit and lived a second life as a re-enactor, was instantly transported back to the Battle of Saylor’s Creek. He felt his heart pumping furiously, and he slid seamlessly back into 1865.
Falling to one knee behind a big pine and wrapping his torso around it, Scruggs snapped off a barely aimed shot with his shotgun, hoping only to scare Bailey away. He was as surprised as his adversary when the slug reached its mark, gouging a shallow trench across Bailey’s upper thigh and bringing out a yelp of pain.
But Whitt wasn’t stupid. As his heartbeat slowed, he remained behind the pine tree and watched as Bailey limped down the ridge and was gone. He knew his shotgun was no match for the other man’s Winchester.
At that point, still a Confederate in his mind, Scruggs tipped back his head and let out a sound that was part mountain lion squall and part banshee wail, a fierce Yee-hah! loud enough to shake the pine trees.
A rebel yell.
EPILOGUE
DEAD MAN LINKED TO BISHOP CASE
By Edward Fogarty
The Southside Echo
A man found dead in the back of his pickup truck over the weekend has been linked to a possible attack on Randolph County Board of Supervisors, Sam Bishop.
Whitney Scruggs, who said he chased away a man who took a shot at Bishop in the woods on November 27th, identified the deceased—40-year-old Wyatt John Bailey of Danville—as the shooter. There was also a wound on Bailey’s left leg where Scruggs said a shotgun slug he fired had grazed him.
Bishop was hunting at the time, and reported that a single bullet narrowly missed his head as he sat in his deer stand around 9 a.m. The shooter then fired at Scruggs, who was hunting nearby, before fleeing after being wounded.
“If he (Scruggs) hadn’t come along, I would have been in big trouble,” Bishop said. “I don’t think this was an accident.”
Bailey’s truck was found parked on an access road off VA 124 in the Conway section of Randolph County. It had been there several days before Bailey’s body was discovered concealed beneath a tarp. According to county sheriff W. W. Inge, Bailey sustained a bullet wound in the back of the head.
“Obviously, he’s not going to tell us anything,” Inge said of Bailey, “but this isn’t something we’re going to drop. If there were other people involved in this thing, we’re going to find out who they were.”
Inge said Bailey had some minor violations on his record, “but mostly just traffic.” A search by the Echo also turned up a breaking and entering charge from 1980. The sheriff declined to comment on whether the shooting had anything to do with the upcoming vote by the Board of Supervisors on the Thaxton-Klein landfill proposal.
Danville police said Bailey was not on their radar as a habitual criminal. The dead man had no identification on him, and no weapon was found. He was divorced and had no immediate family in Virginia.
THAXTON-KLEIN BACKS OUT OF LANDFILL DEAL
By Edward Fogarty
The Southside Echo
The Philadelphia-based Thaxton-Klein Environmental Services Company said Tuesday that it decided not to go ahead with plans to construct a new landfill in the Bonifay section of Randolph County.
“The primary factor,” said company spokesperson Ellen Hunig in a written statement, “was that there was no guarantee we could purchase enough land to keep the facility viable for more than a few years. With regulations on out-of-state shipments tightening in Virginia, we needed a longer period to fulfill our commitment.
“In addition, we felt there was not enough support for this project among the local legislators. Despite our efforts to explain in detail what we planned to do, there were still rumors and innuendos that made us concerned about possible vandalism and intimidation had we opened in Randolph County.
“Nevertheless, we were looking forward to serving the people there, and wish them the best in getting their landfill problem resolved.”
The county’s existing landfill, located southeast of Jefferson Springs, has less than 18 months to operate before it will be declared full by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Several efforts by the Board of Supervisors to find alternative sites were stymied by strong public resistance, culminating in some contentious public hearings.
>
Meanwhile, Thaxton-Klein had quietly purchased an 80-acre tract in Bonifay from Richmond resident Roland Winfree, the absentee landowner, and had hoped to acquire two other parcels on either side of the Winfree plot. According to company officials, less than half of the Winfree property had soil suitable for their purpose.
The Thaxton-Klein proposal to the county was described by supervisor Prentice Dixon as “sweet and sour.” On the sweet side, the company offered to install, run and maintain the landfill at no cost to the county. The catch was, they wanted the county to rewrite its local landfill ordinance to allow the new facility to accept out-of-state waste.
This offer fractured the board along a 3-2 fault line, with Thaxton-Klein opponents Dixon and Sam Bishop holding out against supporters Archie Edmonds, H. T. Booker and Clinton Apperson.
Last September, Apperson removed himself from a scheduled final vote on the proposal, citing business dealings with Thaxton-Klein that could be perceived as affecting his objectivity. But before the remaining four supervisors could cast that vote in early December, Bishop was nearly struck by a random bullet while deer hunting—an incident that Sheriff W. W. Inge called “highly suspicious.”
The vote was postponed pending a further investigation, and Thaxton-Klein then pulled the plug.
“We just couldn’t go ahead with a vote after the incident with Sam,” said board chairman Booker. “I’m not drawing any conclusions—it could have been a coincidence—but it needed to be investigated.”
A man found dead in his pickup truck last weekend was identified by local resident Whitney Scruggs as having fired at both Bishop and Scruggs in the woods near Poplar View on November 27th. Identified as Wyatt John Bailey of Danville, the victim died from a gunshot wound to the head.
“It’s what the mob does,” Bishop said. “They hire a hit man, and then they kill the hit man so there is nothing to link them to the crime. It’s what happened with John Kennedy.”
If Bishop had been unable to vote, the margin would most likely have been 2-1 in favor of the landfill. Hunig did not return phone calls from the Echo.
FOGARTY TO LEAVE ECHO POSITION
By Tucker Daniel
The Southside Echo
Edward Fogarty, editor of the Southside Echo since June of 1985, has accepted a position with The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk.
A native of Bucks County, PA, and Syracuse University graduate, Fogarty worked at the Jersey Progress before coming south. While in Randolph County, he presided over a re-organization of the newspaper’s content and general appearance and an increased role in community affairs.
In March, Fogarty accepted the D. Lathan Mims Award from the Virginia Press Association for “Editorial service to the community” for our coverage of the Thaxton-Klein landfill story.
Jefferson Springs native Zoe Vaden, a reporter with the Echo since last December, will succeed Fogarty as Echo editor. She will also continue his weekly column, although the name will be changed to The Kudzu Queen.
Meanwhile, Whitney Scruggs returns as a general assignment reporter.
SO LONG, RANDOLPH COUNTY
By Edward Fogarty
The Southside Echo
To the Echo readers:
I’ll be honest—for two years now, I’ve dreamed about taking another job at a larger newspaper.
What I didn’t know was how hard it would be.
When I came to Jefferson Springs in June of 1985, it was with the intention of teaching the locals a few things. I was, after all, a veteran investigative reporter with a dozen awards to my credit, and this was a weekly unknown to most folks outside of Southside Virginia. For me, Jefferson Springs was just a place to rest for awhile I was at a career crossroads.
Funny thing, though. It actually worked the other way around, with you teaching me.
For instance, I learned that small towns have their stories, just like big towns, and that people can’t be defined by the size of the community that surrounds them.
I learned how difficult it was to write negative things about someone you might meet on the street or in the Speedy Mart or Sugar’s the next day. I learned how much the printed word can sting.
I learned about line dancing and moonshine and church socials and coon hunting and tractor pulls and grits. And, of course, about kudzu.
Despite my initial arrogance, most of you accepted me for who I was and went out of your way to make me feel welcome. I couldn’t have filled even half our newspaper every week without all the article ideas you provided for me.
Finally, I realized when I began covering the Thaxton-Klein landfill story that I was no longer doing this to earn an award of some kind, but because I had become to love this community and wanted to protect it. That’s really what journalism is about.
Sadly, though, I am not a small town guy. After living here for two years, I wish I was. But I have no roots here, and I can’t see spending the rest of my life covering the Board of Supervisors (no offense, Archie). The good news is, Zoe Vaden will bring a lot to the table as my successor, and she knows Randolph County in a way I never could.
There are no plans to change this newspaper’s motto, Nearly Everybody’s Community Newspaper, and soon I’ll be included in that “nearly everybody.” I’ve already paid for a subscription.
Sincerely,
The Kudzu Kid
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This was the kind of novel that needed to be true to life, and that meant considerable research and a lot of help from others in the newspaper profession. There are too many to mention without leaving someone out, but I have to give special thanks to editor Mike Salster and publisher Ann Salster of the Amelia (VA) Bulletin-Monitor, who shared with me their own landfill controversy and helped connect me with small-town Virginia culture. I’m grateful also to Dan Smith, Joe Coccaro, and Lynda Gorniewicz, who edited this book before and after it was finished.