by Radley Balko
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
While Ernest Eichelberger’s notes included lots of pointers on how to go about investigating a murder—including another mnemonic device that used the letters of the word “homicide”—there were no acronyms to remind him about the constitutional rights of the people he was investigating. Because Courtney Smith appeared to have been sexually abused, Eichelberger’s suspicion naturally turned to the men who had access to her home on the night of her abduction. His method of “investigation” in this case was to arrest them—all of them—and then wait for the truth to come out.
Four days after Courtney Smith’s murder, Eichelberger began making his arrests. The first was William “Slick” Mickens, a frail, forty-four-year-old man who was married to Ruby Smith’s sister Betty—Mickens was Courtney Smith’s great uncle by marriage. A heavy drinker, Mickens had a habit of touching women when he talked to them, which sometimes, intended or not, could be taken as a pass. That night, while Mickens was talking to Ruby Smith, her son William thought he got a bit too physical. William came to his mother’s aid, and he and Mickens exchanged words. William went to a neighbor’s to call the police, but the neighbor wouldn’t let him use the phone. Ruby finally asked Mickens to leave. He agreed, and walked home at around eleven thirty that night. According to his wife, he arrived home about an hour later, still more than an hour before the window in which police believed Courtney Smith was murdered.
For Eichelberger, the fact that Mickens was an alcoholic known to occasionally make unwelcome gestures toward women apparently made him a possible child rapist and murderer. As Mickens was talking to some friends on the street in front of his house on the afternoon of September 19, Eichelberger pulled up and arrested him. Mickens would be the first of many.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
Late in the morning, the Smith family and friends gathered to say good-bye to Courtney at a graveside service at Brooksville Cemetery. They sang a hymn, said a prayer, and read from scripture. Courtney’s mother, Sonya, and her aunt Shamilla each read a poem. Sonya’s was short, poignant, and painful:
Wherever you go
My love is close beside you
Wherever I go
You’re with me
Whoever we are
We’re never far apart
Cause we’re so much a part of each other.
After the burial, the family convened for dinner at the home of Freddie Allen, Courtney’s great-grandfather. That morning, the Jackson-based newspaper Clarion-Ledger reported on Slick Mickens’s arrest. Noxubee County coroner Willie Willie told the paper that Courtney Smith had been raped, struck on the head, and cut near her mouth. The paper reported that Slick also coached Little League, which of course made the accusation all the more awful—the monster who had just raped and killed a three-year-old girl had also had unlimited access to children.
In fact, Mickens coached baseball with Courtney Smith’s grandfather, Johnny Will Smith, who seemed to be in shock about the arrest. His occasionally inappropriate behavior around women notwithstanding, few thought Mickens was capable of this. Later that day Mickens appeared on the evening news, handcuffed and marched into a jail cell, as the reporter described the heinous act for which he’d just been arrested.
William Mickens suffered from seizures, back pain, high blood pressure, and anxiety. He was on disability. Because he couldn’t work, he coached and volunteered. It was a rewarding way to pass the time, and it made him feel useful. Now all of Mississippi had just been told that he had raped and murdered his grandniece.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
Before he became a police officer, Robert Williams spent eighteen years introducing Woody Woodpecker cartoons and sketching whimsical animals. From 1958 to 1976, the children of Mississippi knew the portly, gentle Williams as Uncle Bunky, beloved host of Fun Time, a children’s television show broadcast out of Columbus. The “crazy animals” were Uncle Bunky’s trademark bit. Between episodes of Heckle and Jeckle and Huckleberry Hound, Uncle Bunky would stand in front of a large white pad of paper as children in the studio shouted out fantastically mixed-up creatures for him to draw—a cat’s face on a giraffe’s neck on an elephant’s body with the wings of a sparrow. He once boasted that “every kid who appeared on the show left with a teddy bear and a Bible.” Fun Time hosted both black and white children, reputed the first such television show in Mississippi to do so. When Williams died in the summer of 2015, he was mourned across Mississippi as a beloved icon.
Each Fun Time episode featured about twelve kids, all of whom got to appear on camera. Some grew up to become powerful Mississippians. One of them was Forrest Allgood, the longtime district attorney for the state’s sixteenth judicial district and the man who would prosecute Levon Brooks.
In the late 1980s, Lowndes County got a new sheriff, Ed Prescott, who had also been in children’s entertainment before turning to law enforcement. In fact, for the first few months after Fun Time began in the late 1950s, Prescott played the role of a country bumpkin named Cousin Ed, co-hosting the show with his friend Uncle Bunky. Since Fun Time was canceled in 1976, Williams had been working with local police as a youth counselor, as a sketch artist, and even in narcotics. But Williams’s former cohost and now sheriff suggested a new role. He wanted Williams to interview children who had been victims of or witnesses to violent crimes. “These kids listen to him,” the sheriff would later say in a newspaper profile of Williams. “They’ll open up to him. And the kids won’t talk to just anybody, especially when it comes to something like abuse.”
Williams’s previous career as a beloved children’s entertainer might have made him seem like an ideal figure to console and comfort kids, particularly if it had been in the late 1970s, when many kids were likely to have remembered his TV show. But this new role wasn’t about consoling children; it was about getting information out of them. “It’s like this,” Forrest Allgood said in the same newspaper profile, “if we don’t know anything about it, we can’t do anything about it. We need the kids to say, ‘This man did this to me.’ It’s fundamental in getting any case started.”
As the dozens of wrongful convictions during the “ritual sex abuse panic” of the 1980s and 1990s attest, interviewing children about violent or sexual crimes is a complex undertaking. An interviewer must build rapport with kids, filter fact from fiction, be careful not to introduce known facts, and do it all while protecting the psyche of a traumatized child. A qualified children’s forensic interviewer should have a background in psychiatry or therapy. Williams, apparently, had neither. He wasn’t a forensic psychologist. He was a guy who drew wacky pictures and introduced cartoons. His methods weren’t drawn from years of training or studying academic research, but from seat-of-the-pants intuition. “I’ll sit down with them, draw for them,” he explained to the Tupelo Daily Journal. “And before long, they’re telling me everything—who’s done what to them. It’s amazing sometimes what happens when I sit down and draw a few cartoons.”
Noxubee County officials believed the only witness to Courtney Smith’s abduction was her five-year-old sister Ashley. So on September 21, Williams made the trip from Lowndes County to interview the little girl. His alter ego was still so well known and beloved that even the official department transcript of the interview refers to Williams only as “Uncle Bunky.” No further explanation was necessary.
Ashley Smith’s first interview (she was interviewed again a few days later) was a mess, as one might expect from a confused and frightened five-year-old. She frequently contradicted herself. She said things Williams and other investigators knew to be false. For example, she claimed that her uncle Tony had pulled a knife on her sister’s abductors. She later changed the weapon to a gun. In truth, he had slept through the abduction. She also made fantastical assertions that couldn’t possibly have been true, such as that the man who abducted her sister fled on an airplane.
A skilled interrogator should have concluded from Ashley’s mishmash of contradictions,
almost assuredly false memories, embellishments, and outright fantasies that she wasn’t a reliable witness. Instead, Williams tried to make sense of a traumatized child who was clearly mixing what she may have seen with what she may have heard, all while adding details and enhancements from her own imagination.
It was an understandable inclination. A young girl had been brutally murdered. Perpetrators of such crimes are generally caught quickly, or not at all. It had been nearly a week. As the days went by, Ashley Smith increasingly became the last best chance at catching her sister’s killer.
In his interview with Ashley, Williams appears to have seized on various fragments of her answers he found plausible and ran with them, while disregarding the many implausible or false things she said. At times, he even introduced new facts while attempting to get her to clarify. Those new facts then became a part of the narrative.
One example of this proved particularly damning for Levon Brooks. Ashley said at one point during her initial interview that the man who abducted her sister “had a quarter in his ear.” Williams suggested to Ashley that she was referring to an earring. He pointed to a photo of someone wearing earrings and asked, “Like the earrings there?” Ashley responded, “Yeah, a earring and a quarter.” Later, Ashley would add that Courtney’s abductor “took the quarter out and put it up in my sister’s ear.”
Wearing a quarter in one’s ear is a fad that comes and goes in some black and Latino communities. Perhaps Ashley had seen someone wearing one—“Slick” Mickens sometimes did. Perhaps she was referring to a magic trick she had seen, where a magician pulls a quarter from behind a child’s ear. Wherever she got it, Williams proceeded with the interview as if when Ashley said “quarter,” she really meant “earring.” Levon Brooks was one of the few men in the area who wore an earring. This is almost certainly why local law enforcement officials began to look at him as a suspect.
On another occasion, Williams asked Ashley if the man who took Courtney “had a mustache or whiskers on his face.” She responded, “He had a Halloween thing on his face,” clearly referring to a mask. Williams then asked, “Was it a stocking or a Halloween thing?” Ashley replied, “Stocking.” Ashley had never volunteered that the abductor was wearing a stocking. She only adopted it after Williams introduced it, later adding that the man had taken the stocking off of his face and put it over her sister’s head. Only that last detail—the abductor putting the stocking over Courtney Smith’s head—made it into the summary of the interview that the sheriff’s department then sent to prosecutors. The actual killer—Johnson—wore neither a stocking nor an earring.
Ashley was also wildly inconsistent about the abductor’s identity and about what happened after he took her sister out of the room. Among other things, she first said the abductor was a black man named Shavon. She then changed his name to Travon. She then told Williams that Travon went to college with her mother and had a five-year-old son named Travis who often played with her. Later in the interview, Ashley said Travon had an accomplice. Later still, she claimed there were two accomplices, one black and one white. Toward the end she switched again and said the actual abductor was a white man named Clay. She then contradicted herself again by saying she knew Clay, claiming he was her mother’s boyfriend and had been to her house. She added, “I ain’t saw Travon before,” just minutes after claiming she often played with Travon’s son.
The problem with Williams’s interrogation of Ashley Smith isn’t that a scared and confused five-year-old told stories or had difficulty processing what she had seen. It was that after he was clearly aware that Ashley had a propensity to mix fact with fantasy—to confuse what she saw with what she had heard or made up—he not only was still willing to believe the parts of his interview with her that he wanted to believe, he guided her to confirm parts of her story to fit his conception of the crime. Prosecutors then took it all a step further by adopting only the portions of Williams’s already-selective account of the interview that fit their own narrative.
Even still, it’s notable what Ashley did not say in that first interview with Williams. She did not say the name “Levon” or “Levon Brooks.” In fact, of all of her varied, often conflicting descriptions of her sister’s abductor, none of them fit Levon Brooks. The only similarity between Levon Brooks and what Ashley Smith described in that first interview was that Brooks sometimes wore an earring. But it isn’t at all clear that Ashley ever intended to describe an earring in the first place.
The same day as that initial interview—the day after Courtney’s funeral service—Ernest Eichelberger made a wave of new arrests. He arrested Courtney Smith’s uncles, Tony, Ernest, and William Smith. He arrested William McCarthy, the friend of Ruby’s who had stopped by that night to visit on the porch, and David Harrison, a friend of McCarthy’s who had lent McCarthy his car. He arrested Sonya Smith’s boyfriend, John Hodge; Robert Goodwin, a neighbor; and Lee Harris, a friend of Tony Smith’s. All of these men, all black, were tossed into the Noxubee County jail. Tony, Ernest, and William had just lost a niece—a young girl with whom they shared a house. Eichelberger wrote the same thing on the arrest paperwork for all of them: “Suspicion of murder.”
There was another interview that day as well. Earnest Eichelberger interviewed Sonya Smith. In that interview, he asked her if she knew or had dated any men who wore an earring. She mentioned only one—Levon Brooks. “They call him Ta Tee,” she said. “Who?” Eichelberger asked. “They call him Ta Tee,” she said again.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
When Eichelberger received Uncle Bunky’s report from his interview with Ashley Smith, one could see how he might have been discouraged. Of all the men he had arrested so far, none wore an earring, and none had a name resembling “Travon.” But now Eichelberger knew that Sonya Smith had once been involved with a man named Levon, or Ta Tee, and that man wore an earring. So he sent a deputy to bring Brooks in for questioning.
When Brooks showed up for work at the Santa Barbara that Saturday night, someone told him that the police had come by the club looking for him. They wanted to speak with him about what he might know about Courtney Smith’s murder. Brooks had heard about the child’s death, and felt bad for her and her mother, his ex-girlfriend. But he knew nothing about the murder. He thought the wisest and easiest thing to do would be to drive to the sheriff’s office in Macon and straighten out the misunderstanding. He told his boss not to worry. Once everything was cleared up, he’d come back and work the evening shift as usual.
He’d never see the Santa Barbara Club again.
Eichelberger began questioning Brooks at 8:47 p.m., nearly a week after Courtney Smith was murdered. Brooks waived his right to an attorney and answered Eichelberger’s questions voluntarily. He told Eichelberger that he had briefly dated Sonya Smith several months earlier. She lived with her grandmother at the time. He broke it off because Smith was too “fast” for him—she was seeing other men. He’d occasionally see her and her brothers at the club, and they were all polite and friendly to one another, but he hadn’t been to her home in at least five months. Even when they were dating, he had only been inside her home a few times. They usually met at her cousin’s place instead. He had never even seen the house where she currently lived.
Brooks then told Eichelberger that for the previous three years, he had worked the door, bused, and occasionally cooked at the Santa Barbara. On the night Courtney Smith was murdered, he said he had reported to work for his typical shift: working the door when the club opened at 8:00 p.m., doing odd jobs throughout the night, then cooking a bit as the night wound down. On that particular night, he said he left at around two in the morning. He provided the names of several witnesses who could vouch for him. In fact, those witnesses would say he left closer to three, or even three thirty. Brooks was so forthcoming, he short-changed his own alibi.
But it apparently didn’t persuade Eichelberger. At the conclusion of the interview, he told Brooks he was being detained for Courtney Smith’s murder. Un
der Mississippi law, Eichelberger told Brooks he could hold him for up to seventy-two hours. Brooks would remain behind bars for eighteen years.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
Two days after Robert “Uncle Bunky” Williams first interviewed Ashley Smith, Harry Alderson, chief investigator at the district attorney’s office, asked him to interview her a second time. According to Williams’s subsequent report, shortly before this second interview—which took place in a Comfort Inn motel room—Eichelberger had informed him that Ashley had picked Levon Brooks from a photo array. Williams’s task for the second interview was to confirm the identification and to try to collect more details.
It’s clear from police records that Brooks was now the central focus of Eichelberger’s investigation. Of the six photos Ashley was given, all appear to have been taken recently; the photo of Brooks was old. The men in the other photos had closely cropped hair; Brooks sported an afro.
Other than the earring, there was little reason to suspect Brooks. He had no history of sex crimes. No convictions, arrests, or allegations of abusing children. The suspicion certainly hadn’t come from Sonya Smith. In her interviews with Eichelberger, she said she and Brooks were on good terms, and she gave no indication that she suspected him. In January 1992, she would file an affidavit stating that Brooks had never been to her new home, and that Ashley wouldn’t have known Brooks, much less known his nickname. As far as she knew, Brooks had no meaningful contact with her children, even when the two were dating.
Eichelberger would later say Brooks had always been his prime suspect—even before Courtney Smith’s body was discovered. He claimed to have spoken privately with Ashley Smith the day after her sister went missing, and that during the conversation Ashley identified a man named “Tie-Tee” as her sister’s abductor. As Eichelberger explained it, this is why he gave Ashley a photo lineup that included Levon Brooks.