Cracker Town

by WF Ranew

  Randy expressed his doubts that any of the others in his father’s file could have done him wrong. Several had died.

  “If they passed away and my father marked their files as such, I didn’t include them for you to review,” he said. “In fact, I didn’t review any of those.”

  Randy handed the folder to Red, who suggested he have a week or so before their next meeting. He asked Randy to arrange to provide a DNA sample.

  They also discussed Red’s fees and expenses, which Randy agreed to without any questions. He wrote a two-thousand-dollar check to get started. Red gave him a contract to review and sign before they met again, along with a receipt for the initial payment.

  “Don’t know your schedule, but I have to be in Atlanta in ten days. Tuesday, the twelfth of September,” Red said. “Might we meet Thursday or Friday?”

  Randy checked his phone calendar. “Yes, why don’t we meet at my Midtown office on Thursday?” He handed Red a card with the address. “You know the building?”

  “Indeed, I do,” Red said.

  “I’ll see you there at two then,” Randy said.

  Thunder rumbled. Rain started again in earnest.

  They rose from their seats, and Red escorted the husband and wife downstairs. Red handed them his big golf umbrella for the wet walk to their car.

  Savannah’s beautiful summer day had turned into the more typical weather of the season. He’d have to check on the tropical storm developing several hundred miles east of Puerto Rico. A hurricane potentially in the making.

  * * *

  Red settled into his seat after dinner out with his wife, Leigh. They tried a new seafood restaurant in a shopping mall. They swore never to return.

  Besides eating bad food, they got drenched in the storm.

  Now freshly showered and in dry, comfortable clothing, Red looked out the window at the rain falling on the square.

  He opened the file folder with pages from Walter Goings’s counseling days at Central State Hospital and thumbed through the sheets, all brittle and some torn.

  Red looked for links to south Georgia and anything indicating tension between patient and therapist. He found very little about anyone who might want to harm Doctor Goings.

  The fourth file he picked up was code-named Bible Salesman.

  The man spoke a great deal about the agony of growing up in a small, unnamed town somewhere in Georgia. The man described the ups and downs of his education. He told of one teacher who tutored him after school for several years. When she left his life, he gave up on his education and dropped out of school when he was fifteen.

  The notes also described the man’s years in the hospital. There Bible Salesman learned about lunacy boards, which presided over countless criminal suspects and ruled they’d be better off in the state mental hospital than a prison. A judge convened a lunacy board and sent Bible Salesman sent to Milledgeville for treatment after his arrest on suspicion of a young woman’s death.

  The patient didn’t know why the lunacy board in his county sent him there. He just didn’t understand how things like that worked. Walter Goings tried to explain it all to Bible.

  Red scanned the other files. According to Doctor Goings’s notes, one patient had been abused by his mother when he was eight years old. He later killed his older sister.

  Another account described a child’s mutilation by cigarette burns. The man murdered his mother and grandfather for their mistreatment.

  There were serial rapists. A congregant allegedly assaulted his pastor’s wife after she refused to drink battery acid in a North Georgia church service. The notes in this file told a story of sexual abuse, but it was unclear who actually forced themselves upon whom. Did Doctor Goings’s patient assault the woman or had the pastor’s wife herself abused the man as a teenager? Murky waters.

  A lot of accounts raised many questions; few answers came forth.

  It was almost midnight when Red decided to pack it in and start again the next morning.

  As he straightened the files, a torn piece of newsprint fell out of the stack. On it was written a brief note in a shaky hand. “Sorry I mist you Doctor Going. See you soon. Cleet.”

  The bells tolled in a far-off place inside Red’s brain.

  Cracker Town.

  And Cleet.

  Ah yes, Cleet Wrightman.

  Chapter Two

  Randy Goings and Linda sat in silence the first fifty miles heading back to Atlanta.

  Initially, he’d doubted whether to meet with Red Farlow. At the time, he didn’t know Red was working as a private detective and no longer with the state. Besides, could Red find the killer this many years after the crime? When Randy tracked down the investigator, he was surprised at how open Red was to seeing him.

  Back at the time of the family murders, cops appeared to be his enemy. The aggressive interrogation he endured over several days strongly suggested the law officers suspected him.

  That outraged Randy at the time. But back in 1973, other concerns trumped nasty cops, such as mourning his family and attending the funeral for the three of them.

  The questions swirled around his mind about the killer. Who could have done this? Did my family suffer before dying? And, above all the others, why?

  In the years after the tragedy, Randy had considered diving into his father’s files. The pain of the murders stopped him before opening even one of the many boxes stored in his various residences during that time. Finally, ten years ago and thirty-six years after the deaths, he ripped the tape from a box in his Atlanta basement.

  His mission began.

  * * *

  Linda, of course, never met Randy’s parents. Their deaths preceded his meeting her by two years.

  Randy often considered his life immediately after the killings and the funeral. The priority was his education. He carried an A average through high school, so school administrators approved his early graduation request. The principal and academic adviser understood his need to move on with his life. The rest of his class marched without Randy as he moved to another state.

  Three weeks after the funeral, Randy packed up a moving trailer and drove to Ridgecrest, North Carolina. It was the only sane place he knew to live.

  Randy needed mental and emotional healing, and the mountains offered both. He would mold a new life at his grandparents’ cottage and, in the fall, at university.

  His mother’s parents, both Baptist missionaries, retired several years previously to their cottage on the Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly’s grounds. A narrow road curled up the mountain behind the conference center’s dining hall. It was a steep walk, and the grade challenged many cars. But Randy somehow made it up the hill in his VW bug and the loaded trailer he towed.

  The white frame cottage featured a foundation, two chimneys, an entrance arch, and a hearth of local stonework. His grandparents lived on the first floor. They rented the four bedrooms and two baths upstairs to people attending conferences. Rhododendron and mountain laurel grew in abundance around the house. His grandmother’s flower garden flourished in bright colors on the May day he moved in.

  His grandparents attended his family’s funeral, and afterward, at a church reception, they invited him to join them in the mountains. They welcomed their grandson with open arms.

  Upon Randy’s arrival, the three walked into the living room, sat down, and cried together for a long time.

  As they dried their tears, Randy’s grandfather turned to several Bible passages and read them aloud.

  The devotionals his family had every evening would continue.

  * * *

  The meeting with Red stirred much of the past in Randy Goings. He reflected on the days and months after he left Valdosta as a young man in search of himself as he floundered with a muddled head after the deaths.

  His solace driving home from Red’s was in the woman he loved since the moment he met her.

  Linda was a psychology major and, coincidentally, a junior at the University of Virginia when
they met at Ridgecrest. She worked at the conference center, and he was a counselor at the boys’ camp.

  “I remember the first time I saw you,” Randy said in breaking the silence on the drive. “You worked in the guest services office.”

  Linda looked over at him and smiled. She took his right hand into hers.

  “I went in for some brochures to send back to my former church in Milledgeville,” he said. “The youth minister planned to bring a group up.”

  “Oh, I remember,” she said. “You started flirting with me the second you came through the door.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Randy said. “I just couldn’t help it. You were the most beautiful girl I’d seen. Your blonde hair was cut short and curly, the cocky way you answered my questions, and your smile. All of you captivated me the second I saw you. I remember it with such clarity. I was walking through the hotel lobby. As I approached, I looked into the doorway, and there you sat at your desk. I almost stopped to stare at you.”

  Linda squeezed his hand.

  “You impressed me immediately with your confidence,” she said. “But I also knew after speaking with you that something rumbled inside. Something tragic. Do you remember this? You didn’t tell me about your family’s deaths until right before we parted at summer’s end? Although people in my dorm talked about it, I couldn’t bring myself to ask you about the tragedy. I figured you would tell me in time.”

  Randy watched the road ahead as he paused before answering.

  “I couldn’t talk about it at first,” he said. “Back then, the summer in North Carolina was the safe harbor I needed to distance myself from the place where my family died. It was difficult to tell other people what happened. It was as if they might judge me the way the cops did.”

  Linda stroked Randy’s arm as they talked.

  They neared Dublin, Georgia, and decided to stop there for dinner.

  “You know we won’t find anything close to our favorite spots in Atlanta,” Randy said, half-joking, half-serious.

  “Let’s drive into town. People here have to eat out too, and I am sure they have something besides a chain hamburger joint,” Linda said.

  They got off the interstate and drove north into downtown Dublin. They did indeed find a place for dinner and enjoyed their meal.

  * * *

  “Remember the first time you kissed me?” Linda asked as they left Dublin and headed up to Atlanta.

  “That’s not just a yes-no question, my dear,” Randy said. “Of course, I do. In the prayer garden maybe three days after we met.”

  “Second date?”

  “Probably. That’s all it took for me. I wanted to kiss you the minute my eyes fell upon you.”

  “OK. It probably was the second or third date,” Linda said. “We didn’t get a whole lot of time off. You were over the boys’ camp, and I was stuck at the guest desk.”

  Randy smiled in remembering those days. So redolent of his few happy days of young adulthood.

  “Second date. Prayer garden. You wore some mellow perfume,” Randy said.

  Linda laughed. “Chanel. You never could remember.”

  “Which one?”

  “Number Five. Always.”

  Linda stared out the passenger side window at the fields and forest they rushed past.

  Finally, she told Randy about her feelings as their relationship deepened.

  “I’d been ambivalent about getting so serious about someone while I was in college,” Linda said. “I’d just broken up with a boy I dated in Kentucky. He didn’t take it very well. With you, you were different, of course. A real gentleman. But you did mention that word as we sat on the steps.”

  “That word?”

  “Yes. Specifically, love. I thought you felt some things I wasn’t so sure of at that moment.”

  “You began distancing yourself,” Randy said. “It hit me hard.”

  “Yes, I know it did,” Linda said. “When I pulled back, we didn’t seek each other for several days.”

  Randy saw that Linda was upset. Silently, she wiped a tear from her eye but still watched the passing scenery.

  “And just as suddenly, you changed your mind,” Randy said.

  “Yes, I did. A few days later, I saw you in the dining hall with a gorgeous blonde woman. What was her name? Charlotte Westbrook, I think.”

  “Yes,” Randy said. “How could anyone forget Charlotte.”

  Linda turned and smiled, then playfully punched him in the right shoulder.

  “Charlotte and I went horseback riding earlier in the afternoon,” Randy said. “Had a lot of fun. Then I saw you walking toward our table. You came up to me, bent into my left ear, and whispered something about talking later. I said sure we could get together. We set a date for the next afternoon after work. I was certain you’d break up officially.”

  “But I didn’t,” Linda said.

  “No, you didn’t. And here we are.”

  Randy reached over and took her hand.

  They said little else until they got home.

  Chapter Three

  Red fanned through his mental file folders from the past. Knowledge and experience reminded him of how bad people operated, how they committed crimes, and how they maimed and murdered their victims.

  He also kept voluminous information on his computer. Much of it consisted of PDFs of past cases, converted from paper and stored on a private cloud database. Many of the files were photos of crime scenes, victims, suspects, cops, reporters, and other sundry images. Many more were history, as recorded in newspaper clippings and photos.

  He’d stored some under place names. Staring at his laptop screen, Red scrolled down the folders until he found “Damville, Georgia, 1973.”

  The files related primarily to the death of Jamison Elton. But they also went back in time with the subfolder, “Cracker Town, 1955.” These consisted of local newspaper coverage of the Mitsy Elton murder.

  Red soon found the name Cleet Wrightman, who was accused of killing Mitsy.

  The local newspaper at the time veiled the killing, publishing only short accounts with few details. But a nearby large city paper pulled no punches. The reporter described how the woman died and referred to the “severe beating” before her death.

  Red had confirmed the name Cleet as it related to Damville and a heinous crime there.

  He also hit pay dirt in reading an article that touched on the motive of Mitsy’s killing.

  “It is believed that Wrightman went to Mitsy Elton’s home the day before and sold her a family Bible,” the article stated. “He returned the next day to collect payment. It was then, the local prosecutor alleged, that likely Mitsy refused to pay or didn’t have the money. This apparently enraged Wrightman. He attacked the woman and killed her with a meat cleaver. After Wrightman was ruled insane due to his mental incapacity at the time of the killing, the sheriff drove him to Central State Hospital.”

  Red copied the Mitsy murder files and moved them to his laptop in a new folder labeled “Elton Cold Case—Current.”

  But Mitsy’s death wasn’t a cold case. Or was it?

  Back in seventy-three, Red talked to plenty of people who knew Jamison Elton. Many of them remembered his sister, who was killed in the summer of fifty-five. One or two people with real knowledge of the case hinted that Cleet Wrightman might not have killed the young woman, and he took the blame because of his mental disability.

  Red’s thinking ran to two possibilities. If Cleet murdered Mitsy, then the circumstantial evidence also pointed to him as the possible killer of the Goings family and Jamison Elton.

  Cleet was in Valdosta the day the Goings died. He knew Doctor Goings and likely Jamison. Further, people saw Cleet in Damville around the time Mitsy’s brother went missing. Jamison’s body was found two weeks later, not long after Cleet himself vanished.

  The what-ifs expanded beyond Cleet and prompted Red to wonder whether someone else might have committed the murders.

  It was that possibility he had
not been able to flesh out.

  Not yet.

  Still, the note haunted. “Sorry I mist you Doctor Going. See you soon. Cleet.”

  * * *

  Next came the sniffling part. Red climbed the steps into the Chippewa house’s attic. He flipped on the light as he reached the top. The attic floor finished a hundred or so years ago in cypress planking and showed many years of dust and cobwebs, roach eggs, and rat feces.

  Red stepped over to a large steamer trunk, where he kept the most sensational case files in paper form. Number one on the list was the Goings family murders. The second was Jamison Elton’s killing. Those tomes consisted of his investigation notes, copies of newspaper articles, some state reports, and sundry other documents.

  There were other crimes, too, many as horrible as those of Mitsy and Jamison Elton.

  He eased open the trunk’s top and poked around inside. He finally located the pertinent file box, picked it up, closed the trunk lid, and headed downstairs.

  Before he got down to his office, Red started sneezing.

  * * *

  Paging through his old notes, Red discovered several people of interest in the case. There was the husband of Nancy Simmons, Walter Goings’s secretary. Nancy and her boss had a months-long affair.

  Police questioned Nancy’s husband, Lawson, when they learned she was intimate with Goings. Even after he was released, the cops thought he did it.

  Also, at the time of the deaths, police considered Randy Goings a suspect. He found the bodies. While the local cops suspected Randy, Red and his boss eliminated the young man early on.

  Another suspect was someone unknown. Finding that person might have led to other clues and a motive. No such person turned up, but fingerprint analysis from the crime scene indicated someone besides the family was present in the house while they lived there, presumably from the night of the murders.

  Cleet Wrightman was sought for questioning at the time. He had been pardoned and released from the state mental hospital a few days before the murders. He knew Doctor Goings.

  Back in 1973, Red never interviewed the man. Even his cousin in Damville claimed to have no idea what happened to Cleet. Claimed? As Red just discovered, Cleet left a note on Doctor Goings’s office door. Red knew Cleet’s background and still put him high on the suspected killer category. He’d take another look at Cleet as the Goings family murderer.