Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  But Mark’s long workdays left Kathy largely on her own to establish their home in a place where many things about her, not least her flat Connecticut accent, marked her as an outsider. She worked gamely at it. Thanks largely to her skills at managing money, they had had enough saved up to make the down payment on an $89,000 two-story colonial on Honeysuckle Lane, the sole street in a small development called Cedar Creek that had been built within a narrow valley between two mountains at the northern edge of town, accessible across a sway bridge over the Levisa Fork. The house, which had been on the market for over a year, was of “modular” construction; that is, large sections had been trucked in and assembled on site. Kathy’s father, a building contractor in Connecticut, had inspected it with an experienced eye and pronounced the house solid and well-built when her parents came to visit for a week not long after they arrived—but a neighbor soon set her straight. “The reason the house was a bargain is, if a house isn’t ‘stick-built,’ people think it’s like a glorified trailer,” Kathy was told. Their new neighbors—dentists, small-business people, accountants, and faculty members at the tiny Christian college in town—had, in fact, filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to block construction of the house years before. Later, seeing rusted trailers sagging precariously against mountain roads in the desolate hollows of the hills, Kathy understood the cultural prejudice.

  Kathy, however, loved that house. “We could never have afforded a place like that in Connecticut,” she said. “It had seven rooms, with hand-embroidered curtains, a nice kitchen, two full baths, nice appliances, lots of room, nice landscaping. It seemed perfect for a small family like ours.”

  Mark’s only objection, which Kathy soon came to understand, was the mountain that loomed over the backyard. Kathy remembered him the day they moved in, standing at the sliding glass door and staring at the great muddy hulk that left the house in a cold, damp shadow for most of the afternoon. She felt a chill as she watched him.

  Mark had little time to brood because he started in on his first case a few days after he reported to work. Several months earlier, a roadside bank had been robbed in a tiny mountain town on Johns Creek called Meta. The robber got away with $18,000 in cash. Since the days of Dillinger, bank robbery had been classified as a federal crime.

  “We got a call from this lady who believes the guy she lives with did the robbery,” his new partner Brennan told him. It looked like a break had arrived in the case. The two agents took the car and bumped along mountain roads to the trailer where the woman lived. She invited them inside. Brennan took out his notebook.

  “Why do you think it was him?”

  “Well, he come home that day with a potful of money.”

  “How much money?”

  “It must of been over ten thousand dollars.”

  “Why are you telling on him?”

  “The dirty son of a bitch won’t share none of it. He’s been going out, drinking it away. I need a new dress and he won’t get me one. I’m mad at him, is why.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I ain’t seen him in three days. He done took off, and he took all the money I had saved up, too.”

  Mark listened, thinking back to his training: the strategy of interviewing, the criminal mind, the psychology of informants. He plunged in:

  “Ma’am, I’m kind of confused about something. What exactly is your relationship with this guy?”

  For the first time the woman regarded him.

  “I think I’m married to him, is what,” she said a bit defensively.

  “What do you mean, you think you are?”

  “Well, we was talking about getting married, and he wrote out a piece of paper that he was going to be bringing down to the courthouse in Pikeville with twenty-five dollars that he borrowed from me. And he went down there and come back later that day and said we was married. I still have the note here with the writing on it.”

  She went to a drawer, withdrew a wrinkled sheet of paper, and showed it to Mark. “I don’t read,” she said casually, as if she were declining milk and sugar with her coffee.

  The scrawled note said: “By this hereby, advices that these two are legally married,” and below that both names were handwritten.

  Mark surmised that they had their robber, but Brennan warned him not to jump to conclusions.

  In a few days, they discovered that the man had a different story. He said he had gone into town to file for divorce against his actual wife, and he needed the $25 as a filing fee. He volunteered to take a lie detector test and passed it without any problem. The woman in the trailer had named him as a bank robber only in retaliation for his reneging on a marriage promise. To a young agent who still studied his notebooks from the academy at night, it was a small but important lesson in gratuitous deceit, banal revenge, hidden agendas, and the perils of easy assumptions.

  Without supervision, desperate to assimilate and learn, Mark soon found a way to get into the hills during the day without reliable availability of a car. He surprised some local law enforcement officers, who tended to resent the FBI for its haughtiness and its preoccupation with its image, by asking to tag along on their patrols. At the academy, the value of good relationships with the local cops had been stressed. Mark’s purpose was to see and be seen—he wanted to cover eastern Kentucky like a Bible salesman. It amused him that the cops who befriended him from the beginning were actually named Hatfield and McCoy. Paul Hatfield, Fred McCoy, and Bert Hatfield, all of the Pike County sheriff’s office, let him ride with them and introduced him to the old coal towns and hill settlements. Bert, a tall, laconic young sheriff’s deputy who also sold used cars from a small lot in Freeburn, an old coal company town on the bank of the Tug across from West Virginia—“three mountains away from Pikeville,” as he called it—became a particularly good ally.

  Bert was endlessly amused by the young FBI man’s driving skills, or lack of them. “That the way they teach you to drive up in Connecticut?” he joked one afternoon as Mark cautiously maneuvered the sheriff’s car around a blind curve on a narrow asphalt road cut into a sharp ridge high above the treetops. On the way back to town, Bert took the wheel and showed him how it was done in the mountains, racing around the switchbacks with tires squealing. “This is the way us hillbillies drive,” he said. Still, Bert was pleased to see that Mark Putnam learned fast.

  Before long, Bert and Mark had forged a friendship working together on bank robberies and other cases in the rural mountain belt around Pikeville. Bert was amazed that the new FBI man was often without transportation.

  “We’d use my car. I’d even drive into Pikeville and pick him up, which was pretty sad, if you ask me,” Bert recalled many years later. “I liked working with the guy. He wasn’t standoffish like other FBI can be in dealing with local police. He was a natural law-­enforcement officer, but green. I’d say he had knowledge and instincts, but no skill at first. That boy came out here when he’d never had a single day’s experience, but he sure did work hard. Very fast, he learned how and how not. He was ready and he was gung-ho.”

  Bert added, “One thing about some law enforcement guys is they’re lazier than shit, and they’re always looking at the clock. But not me and him. We’d go till all hours. We never said, hell it’s quitting time.”

  Yet as he got to know local cops, Mark found that the lines of his dealings with them could get just as tangled as they had been in the trailer of the woman who reported the bank robber. Once, deep in the coalfields to serve a federal fugitive warrant he was approached by a local police officer.

  “I hear you’re looking for this boy.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Well, can you kind of leave him alone?”

  “What do you mean, leave him alone?”

  “Well, he’s my second cousin. He’s a real good boy.”

  “Hey, man, I got a warrant for him. I can’t do that!”

&
nbsp; “Hell, sure you can.”

  When he didn’t, word got around.

  Money talks, as cops know, but its voice carried particular resonance in eastern Kentucky, where information has long been a commodity. All law enforcement agencies, including the county sheriff’s office that Bert worked for, paid for information, but the FBI had especially deep pockets. Money was readily available for most criminal investigations. All an agent had to do was recruit a potential informant and, once that recruit provided information that proved to be valuable, make a request to the central office to designate that person as a working informant. Then the agent would fill out a voucher with the amount and a few sentences describing the new information likely to be yielded. Within a week a check for $500 or $1,000 would come from Louisville, and the agent would be expected to hand that money over to the informant.

  Later, Mark would recall his amazement at discovering how the system worked. “I’d go to an informant, ‘I’ve got something for you.’ And then the guy would be just awe-struck that I was actually giving him the whole five hundred or thousand dollars and not holding out like two hundred dollars of it for myself. It was incredible how fast the word got around that I was good for the money. People would actually call the office offering information for sale. After a while, I didn’t have to go out anymore and drum up business—it just came to me.”

  By summer, Mark felt a long way from the academy. While his rookie classmates were still processing paperwork or working routine details under the supervision of senior agents in Chicago, Miami, or Denver, Mark had already set up a network of informants and, he thought, established himself as a streetwise crime-fighter who was living the life that he had always dreamed about.

  One sultry morning while he was at his desk, gazing out at Main Street, he heard the crackle of gunfire, and a federal probation officer burst in from the hall shouting, “Boys, there’s bodies on the ground!”

  Gun drawn, heart pounding, Mark tumbled outside with Brennan, who ordered, “Watch the buildings, Putnam—snipers! I’m going up to the bank.” The bank was a block away.

  Mark scampered across the street where two women lay on the sidewalk. Outside the bank, Brennan was crouched over the body of a man.

  The older woman was dead, but the younger one was still alive, bleeding heavily with gunshot wounds to the neck and shoulder. “Don’t let me die . . . help me,” she gasped as Mark crawled to her side. He reached her and said, “It’ll be okay. Look at my face. Hold on to my hand.”

  She grabbed his hand tightly. She was still alive when the paramedics came.

  When they took her away, the agents pieced together the story with help from state police officers who arrived on the scene. The gunman was the young woman’s husband. He had shot her and her mother as they were on their way to the county courthouse to file for a restraining order against him. Then he had turned the gun on himself.

  “Family feud,” one of the state cops said with a shrug. “We see a lot of it.”

  2

  To a bank robber, eastern Kentucky offers unusual challenges and unusual opportunities. In some ways, it is not an ideal place to rob a bank. For one thing, the region has an FBI office charged with investigating bank robberies. For another, robbing a bank is usually a daylight pursuit requiring the capacity to get away in a car—not an easy task in a place where narrow roads run up one side of a mountain and wind down the other, and the nearest interstate was two hours of bad road away.

  But on the other hand, in the 1980s, before big national banks swallowed up nearly all of the local ones, most banks in the eastern Kentucky coal regions were independently owned, sometimes as mom-and-pop operations. In many impoverished towns where business and real-estate activities were minimal, the main purposes of the tiny local banks were to act as a check-cashing agency for welfare, coal miners’ union pension, and Social Security disability insurance payments, and to accept cash deposits. By the 1980s, drug dealers were also depending on local banks to stash their cash. In any case, independent banks in isolated mountain settlements tend to be guarded with about as much fortification as a hot dog stand.

  Such banks, naturally, drew freelance opportunists in the form of robbers wanting money in a hurry but who haven’t always clearly thought through their plans—such as the robber who hid on a bank roof to pounce on the driver for the Piggly-Wiggly store making his night deposit—and missed, knocking himself out cold in the parking lot. Or the hapless gang who held up a bank on Peter Creek, found themselves stranded when the getaway driver got lost en route, politely borrowed a teller’s car keys, and then ran out of gas a half mile down the road.

  This atmosphere, however, underwent a change during the late spring and summer of 1987 in the hill towns of the Tug Valley when there was an unusual spurt of bank robberies. Small banks in the mountain towns on both the Kentucky and West Virginia sides of the Tug were being knocked off, not only efficiently, but in a similar manner, by a robber using a sawed-off shotgun, with accomplices wearing ski-masks with crudely cut holes for their eyes. The modus operandi was familiar enough to local cops like Bert Hatfield, who guessed that their suspect was a well-known hometown rogue, Carl Edward “Cat Eyes” Lockhart. Cat Eyes was recently released from prison and on probation for robbing banks; he’d apparently gone back to his line of work, probation be damned.

  As bank robbers go, Cat Eyes was an unusual case. He had much of the audacity of John Dillinger, only a little of the skill, and absolutely none of the discretion. A proud man, when he got out of prison, Cat Eyes Lockhart had announced his return to work in the Tug Valley to virtually everyone he knew. What’s more, Cat Eyes was spending his loot freely, on things like a used Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with the classic gold “Screaming Chicken” stenciled on the hood, much like the one Burt Reynolds drove in the 1977 movie Smokey and the Bandit. If Cat Eyes had $5,000 in cash to spend on a flashy used car when he was only a few weeks out of prison, Hatfield had a pretty good idea where that money came from.

  Cat Eyes had savoir faire, definitely. He was a soft-spoken, dark-haired young man with luminous green eyes that provided him with his nickname and helped establish his amiable reputation. From childhood on, his stated goal in life had been to be a bank robber. Having achieved that, he had just been released from a Virginia penitentiary after serving seven years of an eighteen-­year sentence for a brazen robbery in 1980. In that case, he had gotten away with $300,000 from a bank in Grundy, Virginia, a small town at a crossroads near the corner of the Appalachians where the borders of Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia touch.

  Cat Eyes was a legend in the Tug Valley, mostly for having spent that $300,000—all of it—in a wild three-month spree driving through several Southern states in a white Cadillac El Dorado with a friend. The desperadoes’ odyssey had culminated in a truly epic week of debauchery and gambling in Nashville, where the boys dropped their last $50,000 before turning up, frazzled and broke, back home. There they were promptly arrested.

  Cat’s favorite haunt was the small wood-frame house just across the Tug Fork River in Vulcan, West Virginia, where Kenneth and Susie Smith lived. The house sat next to a little bridge that crossed the Tug to Freeburn on the Kentucky side. Beside that bridge was Bert Hatfield’s car lot. Cat Eyes even had the courtesy to wave when he drove past in his Pontiac Firebird.

  In June, Bert called up his new friend Mark Putnam and told him he thought he knew who was behind the latest spurt of bank robberies.

  “Who’s that?” Mark said.

  “A fella named Lockhart. Cat Eyes Lockhart.” Bert described the man.

  “How do you know it’s him?”

  “Well, all of a sudden, he’s rich. One thing about the guy, he spends it.” Bert explained that all the reports mentioned the robber’s bulky coveralls and ski mask, Cat Eyes’s favored disguise.

  “Any ideas on how we catch him?”

  Bert had a good
one. He offered to introduce Mark to Kenneth Smith, Cat Eyes’s boyhood friend, unabashed admirer and, it now appeared, host.

  Cat Eyes’s chief virtues were gregariousness, loquaciousness, and generosity—qualities admirable in law-abiding citizens, but problematic in bank robbers. Cat was so likable that many people would hide him when he required sanctuary, but he was also so gracious that he made it a point to publicly acknowledge the hospitality. Cat liked to think of himself as Robin Hood, without considering the fact that the ancient English outlaw stayed out of custody by hiding in a forest. Cat preferred a more public role. When Cat had money, his friends prospered. He would not only share booze, cocaine, and cash, but also make other gestures certain to gain both admiration and attention, such as buying sneakers and clothing for their wives and children.

  After Cat was paroled, Kenneth Smith—himself on probation for drug possession—had graciously invited Cat and his girlfriend, Sherri Justice, to move out of the tent where they had been living in Cat’s mother’s backyard in Kentucky and come to stay awhile. Kenneth had been married to a Freeburn girl from Barrenshee Hollow, Susie Daniels, for five years, and though they’d divorced a few years earlier, they still lived together, off and on. Susie claimed that it was for the sake of the two children, although people close to her knew that the drugs Kenneth usually managed to get were part of the allure. Kenneth liked cocaine and booze. Susan preferred pills, which were readily available in the region, where many doctors ran “pain management” clinics catering to patients on welfare, disability, Medicaid, and Medicare. The four-room bungalow just across the river where Susan, Kenneth, and the two children lived had long been a social center for the disaffiliated, a place to drop by, borrow clothes, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, or snort cocaine at the kitchen table, and, for those so inclined, crash for the night on the couch.