Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  David wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t an angel, but he was Dee’s and she loved him. And it just wasn’t like him to forget about his wife—for he never thought of her as anything else—knowing she’d be worrying herself silly. If he’d had devious intentions and planned, say, an illicit detour into the woods for sex, common sense and his own well-developed sense of responsibility would dictate that he’d first stop to make a phone call. It would have been so simple to call Winter Garden and make some excuse for being late. That would have been the end of it. Easy. He made no such call. And there were ‘titty factories’, as Jeff called them, right by the works. Why wouldn’t he go there?

  Homosassa was her old stomping ground, and, lying, she told him she lived there. Matter of fact, she had a plan. She always had a plan. She figured that once she and the pick-up fella parted company, she’d trick in Homosassa for a while. She knew some guys there who could put money in her pocket. They ended up on US 19 outside Homosassa, pulling off the road, then driving so deep into the woods that she was afraid his truck might get stuck. She said it was late, maybe even one or two in the morning, when it happened. More than nine hours had passed during which David Spears didn’t make that phone call. Maybe, maybe not.

  Her beer consumption goes without saying. Wherever she was, beer flowed. David liked it, too, and could handle it. It would have taken an awful lot of beer for that to become any kind of reason for not calling home. She never did account for those long, unexplained hours or the curious geography. But they were naked. They’d been ‘screwing around’, getting drunk, she said, when he wanted her to climb in the back of the pick-up where she saw a lead pipe. She says the gentle giant turned vicious. The gentle giant whose three kids knew Daddy would never hurt a fly. The gentle giant who happened to have hundreds of dollars in his pocket for his daughter’s big day, got rough. Suddenly. Well.

  Adrenalin coursing again, she leapt down from the back and made for the passenger door. He jumped out, too, but in a single, almost-fluid move she reached in, retrieved her bag and gun, then with lightning speed, fired. She plugged that first bullet in him right where he stood, by the tailgate.

  He was wounded, but still mobile. Stunned, acting on pure survival instinct, her prey rushed around to the driver’s door and hurried to clamber in. The move brought him closer to his attacker, but the truck seemed his sole refuge when there was no real place to hide. If he escaped her, he could drive away.

  A vain hope. Watching him, she said: ‘What the hell you think you’re doin’, dude … I’m gonna kill you, ’cause you were trying to do whatever you could with me!’

  Blasting off another shot, she aimed right at him across the car seat. Close enough for the gunfire to tilt him back. Oh, she had the drop on him now. He was a big guy, but what could he do, naked and bleeding?

  She was naked also, and barefoot. D’you think she had any intention of tearing up her feet by running through the woods and the briars? No way. What else would you have liked her to do? Hold the gun on him while she got dressed, then walk on out of there? Oh no. What if he—what if any of them—had come after her and run her down? What if they’d had guns, too? They might have had guns. Did you think of that?

  With two bullets racking his body, as David Spears backed away from the truck, staggering, retreating, she shuffled her butt across the seat to the driver’s side, then fired another shot that knocked him clean off his feet, tipping him backwards.

  That was it. At least, that’s how she remembered it.

  Maybe there was a fourth bullet? Just to make sure he’d die. Hard to remember everything.

  Indeed, there was a fourth. And a fifth. Even a sixth. One lodged itself in the back of his collarbone. A few were mercilessly pumped into a dying man’s retreating back.

  Her mind was brimming with other things. Like making sure he was dead. That she could remember. Couldn’t let him live to tell the tale. Satisfied on that score, she drove off in his pickup. But first, she cleaned out his cash. His wages, Deanna’s graduation money, plus the fallback, secret cash-stash he kept tucked in his truck for emergencies. He was a strictly cash kind of guy. No bank account, no credit cards.

  All told, she probably stole between $500 and $700 from the dead man. For she was a robber, too, most assuredly. The money motivated her. And she needed it. Just as she’d always needed it. She was in control. Just let anyone try and mess with her.

  She drove away aimlessly at first, then decided to head over to Burleigh Avenue, unloading those of his tools that she thought she could turn around for a few bucks.

  Ty, who’d worked the 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift at the Casa Del Mar on the day David Spears died, spotted his truck through the window. She thought it was yellow, but she was always a bit off with colours. She didn’t ride in it. Didn’t even step outside to see it. Lee said she’d borrowed it and Ty didn’t question her further. It was gone by the next day.

  Lee drove it a good, long way before dumping it. She went west to I-75, then north to Orange Lake. Finally, she climbed out and ripped off the licence plate with her bare hands. Needing a suitably unobtrusive spot in which to dump it, she laid it in a ditch near the truck, and camouflaged it with grass. She then yanked the radio out of the truck—it was hanging by a wire, all she had to do was pull—and took it with her.

  Drunkenly walking away, she spotted a homeless-type fellow sitting right there in the woods.

  ‘Hey, man, you need a place to crash?’ she called out. ‘Go crash in that truck.’ Suddenly Lady Bountiful.

  Later, what would be endlessly puzzling to Dee was quite how Lee had enticed David away on the day he had Deanna’s graduation on his mind. He can’t have gone willingly.

  She must have enjoyed the killing. If you fired one bullet into somebody, surely seeing the blood would be such a shock that you would throw the gun and start running? You wouldn’t keep going, bullet after bullet.

  Dee was so sure of David that she knew he was dead the very first day he didn’t come home. Later, the lies made it harder for her to move on, to put the loss behind her.

  When David Spears died, the mysteries went with him to his grave.

  20

  Forty-year-old Charles Carskaddon, a sometime road digger and rodeo rider, left his mother’s Missouri home at around 4 p.m. on 31 May. Chuck was a good, considerate son who often paid Mom’s gas or phone bill or set to and mowed her lawn. That Thursday, he was bound for Tampa, Florida, to pick up Peggy, his fiancée. A lover of the ultra-quiet Missouri farmland (he lived in Boonesville), Florida was not his cup of tea. He’d once considered living there if it meant finding work, but luckily didn’t have to. He’d just landed a job as a press operator in Missouri and was bringing Peggy back to join him. He set off alone, persuaded by Mom to leave Muffin, his Sheltie dog, with her rather than cooping him up in the car for the long round-trip. (Ironic. Things might have gone differently if she’d seen a cute dog in the car with him.)

  He cruised 24 south through Paducah, Kentucky, to I-75, caressing the wheel of the 1975 Cadillac he lovingly restored in his spare time. Chuck was handy with tools. No question, he’d stop and help someone with car trouble. A woman in distress? In a second. But no one knew what interrupted his journey.

  Neither Peggy nor anyone else ever saw or heard from him again.

  Darkness had engulfed the pancake-flat countryside by the time Chuck Carskaddon showed up, tooling along in what, missing the beauty he saw in it, she dismissed as ‘a brown, whipped-looking, ugly thing’. Their destinies collided somewhere outside Tampa. He was barely short of his destination and his excited fiancée. So near, and yet so far.

  He’d never be able to dispute her claim that he’d said he was a drug dealer. It wouldn’t have been a sensible announcement, not for anyone with half a brain. Nor a likely one. Maybe a joke, if it was said at all. Whatever. It was, she said, a precursor to them striking a deal for sex and to him wheeling his Cadillac into a suitably deserted spot off Highway 52.

  Chuck Ca
rskaddon faced death in the back seat of his own car. She shot him there more than once. As always, once she began, she kept going. Pulling the trigger again and again and again, until all life had ebbed away.

  When she was through, she searched his car. She found his .45 sitting on the hood. No one disputes he had one. (He had a stun gun, too, and planned to sell the .45 on his trip.)

  Maybe he was planning to blow her brains out? That’s what she thought—after she’d filled him with bullets. Hey! She had almost been hurt! That really pissed her off. Think what might have happened. It pissed her off so bad that she reloaded the .22 and fired a couple more bullets into his body for good measure.

  She was fed up about something else, too. He only had twenty bucks in his wallet. That’s what she said, as if it were a sin on his part that deserved retribution. Assuming it to be true. Even after filling up the car’s huge gas tank, he’d have had close to three hundred dollars in cash. Unless he’d been robbed before he met her. And how much ill can befall a man in one day? Possible, as they put it in courtrooms, but not probable. Chuck’s wallet was never seen again.

  Another unlikely victim, he was younger, stronger, fitter, and faster on his feet, as befitted a rodeo rider. His physical fortitude didn’t help him. Ultimately, by the time she had reloaded her seven-shot revolver, she’d fired nine bullets into his shaking, quivering body. Nine bullets. Nine. What else could you call it but sheer, cold-hearted overkill? Impulsive rage, outweighing rationale.

  When he was safely dead and she’d scooped up all she wanted, she drove the car she found so ugly back to her apartment. She backed it, as she always did her temporary trophies, into her and Ty’s spot, tucked conveniently away beside the house. Later, Ty (who was off work from 31 May until 3 June) took a perfunctory look at it through the window, but it was soon gone again. It seemed to Ty that it was there just a couple of days after the pick-up. In actuality, it was closer to ten days.

  Even Ty’s well-developed, ostrich-like tendencies couldn’t completely block out the brief appearances of these mysteriously acquired vehicles that supposedly came back with Lee from her so-called trips to her pressure-cleaning business in Orlando. The trips, as Ty knew, were a con line anyway. So what did that make the cars? They turned up out of nowhere. Loaned by faceless friends to a woman Ty, of all people, knew to be friendless. Only to vanish in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of Richard Mallory’s Cadillac. In the light of what had gone before, how could Ty not wonder, question and worry about the fates of their owners? Whatever thoughts sputtered through her denial system, though, she shut down. She did nothing. Told no one. Silently complicit.

  By contrast, Ty’s memory would log quite clearly Lee coming home with the .45 automatic. She remembered its pearly-white handle grips and the black, holster-style case that snapped on the side. She’d remember it with good reason. She used it, too.

  Sometimes, after the bullets and the bloodletting, Lee felt guilty about what she’d done. It didn’t last, though. No. Most of the time, she felt good. Like a hero or something. As if she’d done something really useful to benefit society.

  Oh, she guessed she’d done a few crooked things in her life. But she’d only been protecting herself, that was all. That’s why she knew she’d go to heaven.

  Inside her, right inside, she knew she was a good person.

  21

  There is no rule decreeing that someone who finds a body is any kind of hero. Sometimes they become a prime suspect. So it was for the young man named Matthew who on 1 June 1990 spotted a dead body lying in the woods in a clearing amidst the pine trees and palmettos. He’d wandered far off the beaten track, passing an illegal dumping site on Fling Lane and walking down a rutted trail into a deserted wooded area.

  Fling Lane is a dirt road south of Chassahowitzka and runs adjacent to US 19, and just north of the Citrus County/Hernando County line. Had anyone been able to do the impossible and plough through the woods in a straight line from US 19, they’d have found the body not much more than four hundred feet from the main road.

  Alerted by Matthew and called to the scene late that afternoon, Sergeant William Burns and Investigator Wallace Griggs of the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office were confronted with a badly decomposed body, nude except for a camouflage-design ball cap. Nature was far enough along in its course that at first glance they couldn’t determine the sex or age or likely cause of death. It was, however, lying on its back, legs apart, arms outstretched, palms facing skywards. Securing the immediate area, they spotted some beer cans, papers, and assorted items close by, and a number of tyre tracks.

  Sergeant David Strickland and Investigator Fred Johnson also showed up, as did Investigator Jerry Thompson of Citrus County’s CID, a twenty-year law enforcement veteran who’d been summoned by a phone call to his home.

  This Matthew behaved oddly, even for one who had recently had the shocking misfortune to stumble across a corpse. Interviewing him, Sgt Burns thought him evasive, nervous and inconsistent. Not unnaturally, this aroused his suspicions. Did people who committed such crimes ever report them, too? Matthew wanted to know. That didn’t help either. He could know far more than he was letting on. With a word to the wise, Burns turned him over to Griggs who took him back to Citrus’s Operations Center where he and Jerry Thompson would take a crack at questioning him.

  Meanwhile, the dark thunderclouds that had been loitering ominously above the strength-sapping, ninety-degree humidity began to do their worst. Nothing hampers crime scene investigation quite so handily as a heavy downpour. After covering the body with plastic and cordoning off and securing the scene, most of the officers had no choice but to retreat and wait out the rain. Teletypes were circulated, though, feeding into the crowded system their limited description of a John Doe.

  Under Jerry Thompson’s questioning, Matthew stayed close to his original theme about being a surveyor looking for a section line for a friend—but changed other elements of his story a couple of times. Worse, he couldn’t remember the friend’s name. His shifty, downright suspicious behaviour propelled law enforcement down an investigative path that looked as fertile as any other, for the moment. He admitted to owning a .30-30 rifle, which he’d traded a week or so earlier for a .357 pistol. Finally, Thompson’s prodding elicited an embarrassed confession: Matthew had really been looking for a place to masturbate. If true, it went some way towards explaining his curious behaviour. But why venture so deep into the woods? Under full investigation by then, he agreed to give blood, head hair and pubic hair samples.

  The next morning, under kinder meteorological conditions, Fred Johnson took detailed photographs and videotape of the naked body and the damaged trees around it. The trees looked as if a vehicle might have ploughed through them, and might yield further clues. He also photographed a tyre track found on a plywood board (it could mean something, or absolutely nothing) and assorted items lying around the body—cigarette butts, Busch and Budweiser beer cans, an open Trojan condom pack, a used condom and tissue papers.

  Dr Janet Pillow carried out the autopsy on Monday 4 June with Dr Maples, a forensic anthropologist connected with the University of Florida Gainesville, in attendance. The man who weighed 195 pounds in life was reduced to around 40 in death. That’s all that was left of him. Dr Pillow began with an X-ray that revealed six bullets in the torso. All six were recovered that day (although one later went missing somewhere down the evidence chain). At least one or two bullets were fired into Mr Spears from behind, one hitting him in the collarbone, the rest in the torso.

  There might have been more bullets, but the state of the body precluded ever knowing for sure.

  The victim was described as a 6 foot 2 male, over 45, with brown hair, moustache and perhaps a beard. A toxicology report was also impossible; decomposition was too far along for them to retrieve the necessary blood sample. So there was no way of knowing if the victim had ingested alcohol or drugs.

  On 6 June Jerry Thompson called Dottie Young, a detective wit
h the Sarasota Police Department, who had left a message for him in response to Citrus’s BOLO teletype on the victim. Be on the lookout, it meant. Young was. She had a missing person, 6 feet 4 inches tall, 47 years old. David Andrew Spears. Might he be a match?

  Detective Tom Muck, a seventeen-year veteran with Pasco County Sheriff’s Office, also got a call on Wednesday 6 June. Another nude, white, male body had been found in some woods in his jurisdiction. When Muck arrived at the crime scene at around 4.30 p.m., what he saw was a decomposing, naked body covered with a green electric blanket and weeds. At first glance, he could tell it had probably lain there for a few days.

  The medical examiner, Dr Joan Wood, had performed over five thousand autopsies, and was able to pin down the time of death more precisely. Approximately five days before discovery of the body. The cause? No less than nine .22-calibre gunshot wounds, maybe more. One bullet had hit the deceased’s upper left arm, the remaining eight had struck his chest and abdomen. During the autopsy, Joan Wood retrieved eight of those bullets from the torso and labelled them accordingly. She then carefully extricated the bullet fragments from the arm.

  The close grouping of the projectiles led her to deduce that the victim had probably moved very little while his life was being extinguished, and that he and his attacker were facing one another head on.

  Because of the decomposition, it was impossible to determine the mystery man’s height, weight or eye colour. A probable likeness was re-created graphically to help with identification, and what was left of his fingerprints were rolled. For the time being there was no other fate for him: he was another sad John Doe.

  On 7 June, investigators Jerry Thompson and Marvin Padgett collected David Spears’ dental X-rays from his dentist in the town of Ocoee as, simultaneously, Sergeant Strickland and Investigator Johnson picked up his skull. Both were taken to Dr Thomas G. Ford who successfully used them to make a positive identification. David Spears had been found dead, as Dee had supposed all along. And oh, it hurt so bad when she found out later that he’d been taken to pieces like that.