Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Two hundred million years ago, the Cumberland Plateau of eastern Kentucky was a plain that had risen from the floor of an inland sea. The earth cracked, leaving a jagged fault, pushing up mountains of limestone and slate, seldom more than three thousand feet high, that ripple like a rug bunched against the northern watershed of the Appalachians. As the ancient sea receded, it left a vast trough of peat that would ultimately curse the land and its people when the overlying mountains compressed it into what regional historian Harry M. Caudill called “a mineral the steel age would esteem more highly than rubies”—coal.

  Timber had been hauled out chiefly by push boats and steamboats along the swift currents of the Tug and Levisa forks to the Big Sandy River, and thence to the thousand-mile sweep of the Ohio River. The railroad arrived in 1881 in Louisa, where the two forks meet, ushering in a new era of exploitation. This time the prize was the region’s vast resources of high-quality, low-ash bituminous coal that lay in fat four- and six-foot seams. Gangs of immigrant construction workers, whose prowess would become embodied by mythical steel-driving men such as John Henry, slashed rights-of-way through ridges and laid bridges between cliffs as the railroad pushed inexorably up the valley, crisscrossing the hills with an intricate web of spurs and short lines. With the railroad came the speculators, agents of Wall Street and the mineral companies. These “foreign lawyers,” as they were called, were expert at providing slick legal documentation, often certified at the courthouse in Pikeville, to lay claim to tenuously deeded property.

  The greatest entrepreneur of them all was one John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo, a Pikeville prospector. After studying the newly completed federal geological surveys and obtaining financial backing from banks, he tramped the hills securing claims from gullible—and naturally hospitable—hillbillies with an innovative contract that acquired mineral rights independently of surface land rights. Such deeds, thousands of which remained in existence well into the 1980s, gave to the developers broad rights to all minerals in the land—including the perpetual right to make roads, knock down trees, buildings, and even cemeteries, pollute water supplies, or do anything else “necessary or convenient” to exploit the minerals, without liability. A standard rule of thumb among the speculators was that fifteen thousand tons of coal could be gouged out of an acre of such land. On many of his forays shortly after the turn of the century, Mayo was accompanied by his wife, Alice, who had dresses specially made with pockets for $20 gold pieces, which she ceremoniously dropped into the hands of hillbillies, who sold their rights for as little as fifty cents an acre. To attract Eastern capital, Mayo even arranged “safaris” into the hills of the Tug Valley for parties of bankers and developers, who were outfitted in khaki and pith helmets, with meals on the trail whipped up by the world-famous New York chef Oscar of the Waldorf.

  From Mayo’s expeditions, which within ten years would lay claim to mineral rights on more than 90 percent of the land in Kentucky counties such as Pike, Floyd, Harlan, and Letcher, sprang scores of coal-company camp towns—some well-­maintained, many others squalid, all featuring rows of houses arranged in monotonous similarity—with names like Jennings, Neon-Fleming, Happy, Sassafras, McRoberts, and Freeburn. In these vast regions of what became known as the Thacker Coalfield, the coal camps sprang up independently of normal migratory patterns, in the isolation of the hills and backwaters. Their economies were based on company issued “scrip,” currency usable only in the company store, with sharp social distinctions between the miners and their families in their squat company houses, and the “big bosses,” the executives and foremen, who lived in comfortable and sometimes luxurious residences, typically built on higher ground with a commanding view of the dust-covered shacks, coal tipples, and slag heaps below.

  Freeburn, by the time Susan Smith was born, had long since been abandoned by a succession of coal companies that had maintained it until machine-driven strip-mining revolutionized the industry in the 1950s. But there were still a few old-timers in town who could remember the days when patriotism and company loyalty were inseparable, when coal miners, their wives, and children would leave their company houses in town and gather at the company auditorium, known to all as simply “The Building,” where in unison they would recite the Freeburn Creed:

  I believe in Freeburn, its splendid traditions, its present greatness as a mining prospect, its magnificent prospects for the future.

  I believe in the Portsmouth By-Product Coke Company, its high ideals in matters of relations between the employer and the employed, its earnest and just consideration for the happiness and welfare of its workmen, the policy of its officials to deal foursquare with everyone.

  I believe in the people of Freeburn as among the best created.

  I therefore believe it is my duty to my own town to love it, to support it, to respect it, to boost it, and to defend it.

  The Building and the company store had burned down before Susan was born. Even the union, which had transformed miners’ lives in the Depression, was barely a factor now. By the 1980s, the United States was producing more coal than ever—85 percent of it going to produce cheap electricity in the United States, Japan, and Europe. But coal prices dropped by more than a third in the first half of the eighties, and unemployment in the region sometimes exceeded 40 percent. Federal relief funds that had poured in with the Great Society programs of the 1960s—most of that spending actually went to build roads—had virtually dried up in the Reagan era. The pace quickened to mine what was left. Coal trucks thundered down mountain roads, overloaded by as much as fifty thousand pounds, with drivers speeding to make two trips a day, getting $1.30 a ton to haul coal to the Ohio River port at Catlettsburg. Ironically, in the urban areas of America where the cheap electricity provided by low-priced coal was being devoured, it cost as much as $100 a ton at this time to haul garbage.

  Throughout Susan’s lifetime in the Appalachian Mountains, creeks and streams flowed red with toxic runoff from strip mines. Mudslides, on hills now denuded of topsoil and trees, routinely roared down in heavy rains to cut off populated hollows for days. Impoverished mountain hamlets, which themselves had no trash-removal services, were inundated with applications from outside companies who wanted to use the land for dumps, incinerators, and nuclear waste disposal.

  Even the land itself had become unstable. Mountains gutted for coal sometimes settle like sand castles; fissures tear open like earthquake faults; there are stories about hunters who have lost good dogs into a sudden break in the earth. The noise of settling mountains, frightening even to those who are used to it, is a hellish, primordial cracking of rock.

  Such places breed a certain wariness and even resentment of outsiders. In 1992, for example, two unrelated columns appeared on the same feature page of the Floyd County Times. One defended the area against a central-Kentucky newspaper account “about how we barefooted, nasal-whining, whiskey-drinking, cock-fighting, illiterate, illegitimate scumbags have become full-fledged dope addicts.” Another excoriated a two-year-old TV network news report on Appalachia that focused on a local town: “Pretty much everybody else in the country thinks we’re nothing more than toothless hicks playing the banjo on the front porch of our shacks while we stare out at our front yards filled with rusted-out car bodies, old washing machines and outhouses with half-moons crudely carved into the doors.” One local wag, however, took exception to at least one aspect of that and commented in a letter, “That cannot be true because we all know that anybody that could play the banjo got the heck out of here.”

  But facts tend to feed the stereotypes. Not long afterward, a Mingo County, West Virginia, newspaper reported on a shootout between two local families that left one dead and nine others wounded. The argument was over a woman who had dated a member of the rival family.

  A woman of Susan’s age who grew up on the Barrenshee Hollow remembered sharing a room with four sisters in two beds, and fetching water on winter mornings from a well whose chain was
caked with ice. Clothes were laundered outside in the butter-churn and hung on long lines up the hill like battleship flags in the wind. She recalled school days hiding from the truant officer because she had no shoes; breakfasts of biscuits and gravy for the week after check day; bread and milk the rest of the month. She remembered her father trudging home across the mountain from the mine in Majestic at night, his face black with soot. Like many of the old miners, he died of black lung disease, an oxygen tank by his bed.

  A child who grew up in such circumstances learned early about physical, natural, and economic and social hazards. By the summer of 1987, Susan had already lived a hard fifteen years since she had announced at the end of seventh grade that she had “better things to do” and dropped out of school. If she’d gone on to eighth grade, she would have had to ride a school bus each day along Peter Creek and around the mountain to Phelps, a settlement somewhat more lively than decrepit old Freeburn. She had already been in a couple of physical altercations with girls in elementary school; Susan fought readily and ferociously enough to be ostracized among her better-mannered classmates. In a household where a smack across the face was a routine response to even minor transgression, in a social world where a young girl with a fast mouth sometimes had to defend herself with her fists, Susan had reached adolescence with physical threats already firmly established in her life.

  She was poor—her family was on welfare nearly all of her life, and she was ashamed of it. Susan had grown up the fifth of nine children of a chronically unemployed coal miner, Sid Daniels, and his long-suffering wife, Tracy Eldridge Daniels. The children shared clothes and even shoes, in a drafty house high up Barrenshee Hollow in Freeburn, a gloomy mountain gulch that some locals called, more pungently, “Lonesome Holler.”

  It was a place where trouble never was far away. Susan started school in 1966, at a time when cheap oil was flooding the country and the Appalachian coal industry, already battered by unemployment caused by the growth of efficient strip-mining, sank into one of its cyclical severe depressions. At that time, only one in four students in Pike County finished high school; the majority had already dropped out by ninth grade. In back country areas like the one where she grew up, the high school graduation rate was as low as 7 percent. Dropping out of school came naturally to Susan, a smart girl who had already ascertained that the only way to escape the hard times was to pounce on any opportunity she came across—or simply flee. In 1960, the population of Pike County was 81,154; ten years later, it would be 61,059.

  Natural peril intensified a child’s sense of fatalism in a mountain hollow, in a place where mine disasters were a routine part of life, and spring rains often unleashed great mud-banks of strip-mine debris and boulders from eroded mountaintops. Catastrophic floods devastated the Tug Valley twice during her youth, in 1963, and again in 1977, when she was fifteen. That year the river, swollen by fifteen inches of rain that fell on still-frozen ground, crested at fifty feet and swept away hundreds of homes in the Valley.

  In Freeburn, few of the four hundred or so residents even had telephones during Susan’s childhood years—but many acquired television sets, at a time when the initial business of regional cable TV companies was to provide service to rural places. When she was a little girl, Susan decided that she wanted to be a secretary like the ones she saw on television shows. Well-heeled men respected secretaries. Secretaries dressed beautifully and lived fashionably in cities. Secretaries were helpers, and Susan, when she was at her best, was a helper. When some of her siblings got into a jam, Susan was the one they turned to for help.

  Like most out-of-work miners, her father drank hard. Like most women in the hollow, her mother remained in the background. Susan had few friends. “She was like a stray kitten with a temper,” one woman who grew up with her would later recall sadly. “A girl with fancy ideas and an attitude and a temper to boot don’t make a lot of friends.”

  Instead, Susan nourished what were referred to as “notions.” The highlight of Susan’s grade-school years was her belonging to the Patriotettes, the school’s all-girl drill team. No one in town knew the history well enough to enlighten her, but that drill team had actually been organized early in the century by the Portsmouth-­Solvay Coke Company, the firm that had built the squat rows of miners’ houses along the Tug Fork and named the town Freeburn, after the valued properties of the indigenous bituminous coal. The little girl from Barrenshee Hollow loved her red-and-white Patriotettes uniform and wore it proudly in ragtag holiday parades. In her seventh-grade yearbook, Susan’s picture stands out among those of her classmates with pigtails and scrubbed faces. She is the only one wearing a beret.

  In 1977, the year of the big flood, fifteen-year-old Susan saw her first opportunity to get out. She met twenty-two-year-old Kenneth Smith, a good-looking local boy who could be charming when he wanted something—the kind of young rogue a girl’s father warns her about, if the father is paying attention. When Kenneth spotted her in town and whistled, Susan hopped on the back of his motorcycle and rode off with him to a trailer he rented on the far side of the mountain, in another old coal company town called Majestic.

  Kenneth, who fancied himself a successful gambler, actually earned his money by selling drugs. Like most dealers, he visited big cities from time to time. Susan resolved to go with him, and he was smart enough to realize that she was an asset, since she had a good memory, an affinity for numbers, and the kind of engaging personality that was useful in sealing deals. She helped him with small-time transactions of cocaine, marijuana, acid, and bootleg prescription depressants and stimulants, known locally as “nerve pills.” In time, she began referring to herself as Kenneth’s “executive assistant,” a phrase she had picked up from television. Another favorite term she began using was “charming,” a word that none of Kenneth’s friends had heard anyone actually utter in real life before.

  For the first time in her life, Susan was able to go up to Matewan, the nearest town with stores, and buy the clothes she liked—not only for herself, but also for friends and relatives, because Susan was always generous. But the prosperity didn’t continue. When Susan was seventeen, Kenneth was arrested for drug possession, jumped bail, and fled, sending her on to Louisiana to stay with one of his brothers and his wife. While there, broke and miserable, she worked for a time in a fast-food restaurant. When that didn’t pay enough, she turned to occasional prostitution on an as-needed basis.

  In time, Kenneth came back to her. They later moved to Indiana, where they married and had a daughter, Miranda. Thrilled at being parents, they tried to settle into respectability. Kenneth, promising to straighten himself out, took a job as a carpenter’s assistant. They were living in a trailer, but Susan worked hard to decorate it with frilly curtains, throw rugs, and pillows. She liked good restaurants; he hated them, suspecting, correctly, that waiters looked down on his crude manners. As the novelty of parenthood passed into drudgery, they again turned to drugs for recreation and then, after Kenneth lost his job, they began fighting. Kenneth would beat her and vow in the morning to reform. It was a pattern from which Susan never managed to break.

  From Indiana, they moved for a while to a cheap apartment in Cicero, Illinois, a run-down suburb just outside of Chicago, where the gangster Al Capone once had his business headquarters. In the Chicago area their small-town drug-dealing expertise acquired some big-city sophistication as they established contacts that would later keep them supplied down in the Tug Valley. Among their friends in Cicero were some men who held up a bank. Susan had been fascinated listening to them planning the robbery at her kitchen table. It was like something she had seen on television.

  By the time she was twenty-four, Susan and Kenneth had run out their string up north and were back in the Tug, in a life once more squeezed between looming mountains. Facing trial on the old drug charge, Kenneth pleaded guilty and got probation. At home, the fighting got so bad that Susan ran away from her husband and daughter to live wit
h a sister in West Virginia. From there, she wandered for months, staying with friends and relatives who would sometimes find her curled up on their couch in the morning like a child.

  During this time, she began showing up regularly at a raucous country and western bar that attracted a spirited crowd on Route 23, the main highway through Pikeville, across from a road called Harmons Branch. The owner, who was also the featured singer, was a burly man named Marlow Tackett, who had hopes of making it as a star in Nashville. Borrowing clothes from her sister, Susan sat at a table night after night and pined for Marlow as he wailed his sad country songs. Once he gave her an autographed publicity picture of him in his cowboy costume, and she cherished it. She told people that she was planning to become his manager and help take him to the big time. Years later, when asked about her, Marlow would barely remember the girl from Freeburn.

  Miserable and destitute, Susan finally returned to Kenneth. A second child, Brady, was born in 1985. She and Kenneth formally divorced soon afterward, which enabled her to get better welfare benefits, but they were still living unhappily together in the rented house beside the river in 1987—which was when Mark Putnam came into Susan’s life, and she saw some sign of hope. Mark was a novelty, a handsome, motivated, polished, polite young man who was interested in her as someone who had something to offer. With no special effort, he treated her like a lady, and once she got over her initial suspicion, she responded like a woman in love.