Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

“I know what you’re going through,” Mark said sympathetically, thinking how nice it was to actually have a textbook example of what they taught in the academy about how to usher a wavering suspect into a confession:

  You aren’t the typical criminal. You seem like a man under terrible pressure. Nobody is perfect—if the perfect person walks into this conference room, we will both get down on our knees. This is probably the first time you have done something like this. You can stop with this. Did you know that eighty-five percent of people who deal with merchandise steal something at some point? You seem to be basically an honest man, a man like you said, with a wife and kid that you obviously love. You’ve probably been dealt a pretty bad hand. I’ve always been curious about what motivates a person to do something they do not feel is right. What caused you to do something so dumb? You’re an intelligent man, you got in a jam. But could you put your arm around your kid right now and feel right? You can make this right. Ever since the pencil was invented there have been erasers on it.

  Tito started crying.

  Mark looked at him with disgust that slowly curled inward as he thought, I’m busting this guy’s ass for some lousy computers. Who the hell am I? I killed somebody. There’s a body out there with the bugs and snakes and whatever else is in those hills. There are two kids who don’t know where their mother is because of me.

  “Tito, get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to see you again,” Mark said abruptly, standing up.

  Tito was stunned. “What do you mean, man?”

  “Tito, go home. I don’t give a shit what you do. Just leave me the hell alone.”

  Tito’s feet found the floor. He backed out of the office like a court attendant and practically ran to his car in the lot.

  Later that day, an agent Mark passed in the hall said by way of greeting, “How you behaving, Mark?”

  “Above reproach,” he said quietly.

  Each day he awoke more secure in his assumption that the body had not been found, and despising himself more for his cowardice. The diarrhea persisted. His urine had blood in it. He was haggard and sour. This could not go on, and yet it did.

  One morning, Kathy heard him muttering in the bathroom. She called from the bedroom, “What did you say, honey?”

  Standing at the mirror, he replied, “I said, ‘Good morning, killer.’”

  12

  No one looking for Susan Smith could have anticipated how many tiny threads of her life she had left tangled.

  One of the first calls Richard Ray made when he began his investigation was to the man who was the source of the mysterious phone message for Susan at the Landmark. This man was not in fact the drug contact from Cicero that she had been telling Mark and Poole about. It was another one, an old contact, a man from Milwaukee.

  No, he told the detective, he had not met Susan the weekend after she disappeared. In fact, she never returned his phone call. The man said that Kenneth had called him the next week, looking for her. Then an FBI man also called.

  Ray ventured a guess. “Poole? Ron Poole?”

  “Yeah, something like that. FBI.”

  “Not Putnam?”

  “No, the other one you said. Poole.”

  This should have been an indication that the FBI was investigating, but like everything else in this case, the answers were ambiguous. The FBI generally declines to confirm or deny whether it is investigating, but Ray had determined informally that there was no “active” investigation into the case.

  What then was Poole doing? The way Shelby told it, Mark Putnam’s ex-partner was persistent and involved. She told Ray that she had been talking to Poole almost every day. She said Poole told her that while Susan was at the motel, he took her with him one day to serve warrants. Shelby also said that Susan had mentioned that she might be spending a day with Mark in Virginia, also serving warrants.

  And then there was Susan’s brother, Bo, who appeared to be running his own independent investigation, questioning people who knew Susan, even trailing people he thought looked suspicious across the Tug into West Virginia. Bo wasn’t sure what had happened. When pressed, he couldn’t even say for sure that there had been a sexual relationship between his sister and Mark.

  “They would keep it secret,” he would later explain to authorities. “She was coming out here in front and calling him, and he was meeting her out back at the parking lot. And they would go and stay gone for two or three hours at a time.”

  What, Ray had to wonder, was Bo up to?

  Ray worked quietly and moved easily among a great range of ordinary people: motel clerks, librarians, secretaries, truckers, drifters, outlaws behaving themselves between felonies—all felt comfortable with him because he didn’t come on like a cop or a reporter: Gossiping with people outside a lunch counter, usually saying little himself, he kept track of the social undercurrents of the Peter Creek communities. Usually, he could get a fairly good line on current events.

  Susan Smith was a tough one, though, because there were so many conflicting opinions about her. Everyone in Freeburn knew that she’d fight at the drop of a hat, that she was a heavy drug user, that she had a mouth on her, that she did outrageous things such as the time she went over to the car lot and mooned Bert and his friends. He also heard about the time she’d gone to the federal courthouse and lifted up her shirt to flash her boobs at the boys in the marshal’s office.

  But there was another side to this woman that took a little more patience and trouble to find. She seemed also to be someone who always picked up a phone and called when she was away. Up the hollow at Barrenshee, Susan’s mother, Tracy, said that Susan never forgot to send a birthday card, Christmas card, Mother’s Day card—“no matter where she was living.” In Phelps, the high school principal, Beth Compton, had known Susan since she was in sixth grade at the old Freeburn school. She described her as “a young girl who fought her way through life. She had to struggle for everything she ever had in a world where a girl’s greatest ambition was to get married and have children.” But she also recalled a transformation in Susan when she came back home after those years living in the city. Then, she said, “Susie had suddenly developed into a strikingly attractive young woman who projected poise.” And, at least when Compton saw her with her two children, Susan appeared to be “an interested and concerned mother.”

  Something was not adding up.

  The rumor mill of Peter Creek, which had ground along chronically malfunctioning since the days of the Hatfield–McCoy feud, also made it difficult to sort out information. Every time it appeared as if Susan Smith was indeed missing, and possibly dead, another rumor seemed to pop up to throw the theory out of whack. Almost weekly, Ray drove out Peter Creek to check out the latest hearsay. Much of it was difficult to evaluate. Among the things he heard, from Shelby and others, was Susan’s apocryphal tale of the Putnams’ parrot. Ray also had to consider Shelby’s wide-ranging speculations. Perhaps, Shelby had once mused, Susan had followed Mark down to Florida and was simply lying low waiting for him to leave his family and come to her. Or maybe she was temporarily and safely ensconced in the federal witness protection program, and could not reach out to anyone at home. Or maybe she had gone off to hide out with another sister, who lived in Texas.

  A man in Turkey Creek named David Blankenship, whose deceased brother had been married to that sister, said that he, too, thought that might be where Susan was “because she was close to her sister and missed her.” But he also reported that Kenneth had informed him that Susan “took off with a detective.” Moreover, Blankenship said, he had heard that Susan recently went up to Cicero to get drugs and came home bragging that “she could sell all the drugs she wanted and not get busted” because the FBI was protecting her.

  On August 8, Ray had called Shelby to get an update on the case, and she told him that a Phelps man named Johnny Stump had gotten a phone call from Susan. But when Ray drove out
to see the man, that turned out not to have been the case. Stump explained Susan had once bought a 1979 Ford LTD from him and had not made the payments. He had filed a judgment against her, and she had failed to appear in court when the case came up two weeks, earlier. He complained about her, but he said he hadn’t told anybody he’d heard from her.

  Meanwhile, Shelby’s husband, Ike, said that he had heard Susan say, on the night Ron Poole picked her up to take her to the Landmark, that she was actually going to stay for a few days at the house of a former sister-in-law, though he believed this to be another of Susan’s stories.

  Bewildered, Ray decided that Shelby ought to take a polygraph test, “to see if it was some kind of plot, if she knew where her sister was at.” Shelby was insulted, but she complied. On August 22, she took the test and passed. The results showed that she didn’t know where Susan was and that she was “very concerned, very worried about her.” Moreover, she insisted that the people they ought to be strapping to the polygraph machine were Kenneth, Smith, and Mark Putnam.

  This proved to be no easy chore. Ray and Paul Maynard went to Capt. Gary Rose, the commander of the Pikeville state police post, who in turn called Terry Hulse, Mark’s former supervisor in Covington. But word came back that while the FBI would of course cooperate in any investigation to the extent it saw necessary, it saw no reason to involve an agent. “Polygraph the ex-­husband,” Captain Rose said he was told. “Maybe he had something to do with it.”

  The difficulties in tracking down Susan were compounded by the reports that she was involved with a drug gang. However, aside from Susan’s own apparent exaggerations as she tried to get herself reactivated as an FBI informant after Mark was transferred, even if it meant she had to work with Poole, there was no indication that she was involved in anything much grander than petty local drug deals. “She was a known drug user and would on occasion sell drugs to support her own habit,” Maynard said.

  Meanwhile, Ray would later recall, “The FBI people just kept putting us off.” Apparently they had talked to Mark about the investigation and had come to believe that “this is a plot by the people up there to discredit him, to cause him trouble.” What Ray did not know was that in Miami, Mark Putnam had already approached his superiors and volunteered to take a lie detector test to clear up the matter, and they had told him he was being silly.

  Kenneth Smith, who Susan had claimed had actually caused physical harm to her in the past, turned up in custody—his own. In October, Kenneth was sentenced to thirty days in jail for a series of motor vehicle violations. Because he was the sole guardian of the two children, seven-year-old Miranda and four-year-old Brady, the judge allowed him to serve an alternate ninety-day incarceration at his place in Freeburn. With an electronic device strapped to his leg to monitor his movements, Kenneth wasn’t available to come to Pikeville to be polygraphed until January.

  By then, Kenneth declared that he was making an effort to straighten himself out and provide a decent home for the children. He had a job as a night watchman at a strip-mining company. On January 12, Ray and Bert Hatfield called on Kenneth, who told them what they already knew, that he had been married to Susan for three and a half years until they were divorced six years ago, and that they had lived together off and on since then for the sake of the kids. According to Ray’s notes, Kenneth said that Susan had been going to Pikeville frequently to see Mark and also, at times, to buy drugs.

  Kenneth said that Susan “told me that she loved Mark and he loved her. I called Mark’s wife and told her about it. Susan said she hoped Kathy would find out so she would leave Mark.” In early June, he went on, “Susan spent a night with me and the kids. The next night she was at Shelby’s, and around midnight, the FBI came and got her. I have not seen her since . . . Susan told me she was pregnant about three weeks before she left. She said she had discussed it with Mark and that he had agreed to help keep the baby up.”

  Asked if he had any idea where Susan was, Kenneth replied, “I think she is in Florida with Mark Putnam.”

  Ray suggested to Kenneth that he accompany them to Pikeville to take a lie detector test, and Kenneth readily agreed. Actually administering it successfully proved problematic, however. On January 16, Kenneth took the first polygraph test at the state police post in Pikeville. The operator, Charles Hines, believed that Kenneth was telling the truth when he said he knew nothing about what had happened to Susan, but it was difficult to get a good reading because of the chemicals in Kenneth’s system.

  “He’s pretty bad hooked on drugs and we had a hard time,” Ray reported afterward. After two inconclusive tests on successive days, Kenneth was kept overnight in a Pikeville motel under state police guard, “to try to straighten him up” for the next day’s test. That test was not much more conclusive. Finally, Ray concluded what the machine could not. Kenneth apparently didn’t have a clue.

  And then it seemed again that Susan Smith had surfaced. In January, Shelby phoned Captain Rose at the state police barracks and said happily, “You can stop looking for Susan now.

  “What do you mean?” said Rose.

  “Josie Thorpe has gotten a call from her,” Shelby declared. Thorpe was a fifty-two-year-old distant cousin whose rusted trailer sat on a wedge of land hacked into the low ridge on the road into Freeburn. Susan occasionally went to visit her and bring clothes.

  Ray hurried out to Peter Creek, as Shelby was spreading the happy word that Susan had turned up after all. As usual, the detective stopped by Bert Hatfield’s little car lot, and Bert went with him to talk to Josie. The door was open, though it was the dead of winter. When they rattled the screen door, which was missing one of its hinges, there was a muffled commotion just inside, followed by silence, and then the unmistakable click of a shotgun. Ray looked at Bert and thought, Someone is going to shoot me.

  Hastily they called out, identifying themselves. A voice responded, inviting them in. As they edged inside the doorway, a younger woman in a housedress tore past them and ran down the hill toward the road shrieking, “The law! The law!”

  Inside, an older woman put down a shotgun and eyed the intruders warily from the couch. “Well, what do you want?” she said evenly.

  Bert introduced Ray to Josie and started to explain their business. As he did, Ray glanced curiously at the cast-iron stove that was radiating a wall of heat from the corner. He was wondering about the dark yellow smoke that seeped from under the lid when something inside the stove exploded with a great boom that caused both men to experience something akin to cardiac arrest.

  “Damn girl!” their hostess yelped. While the smoke cleared, she apologized for the cherry bomb someone had popped into the stove.

  The ice having been broken, they persuaded Josie to describe her telephone contact with Susan Smith. Shelby had said that Josie told her she had in fact received two or three calls from Susan, and that she was all right. Josie quickly confirmed the report.

  But Ray’s relief dissipated like the yellow smoke from the stove when Josie added, “At least, she said she was her. Now, I had never talked to her by phone before, but it sounded like her. She would only talk a couple of minutes and hang up. She said she had left a sweater and fingernail polish at Shelby’s and that I could have them.”

  Josie looked at them sweetly and jabbered on, describing how Susan, or whoever it was on the phone, she wasn’t at all sure now, told her to be sure to take her medicine. “It could have been a tape recording or a prank,” Josie said with a frown. “I take a lot of medicine and am not well. I don’t know why she would call me, and I don’t remember her saying she was Susie Smith. Besides, my number is unlisted.”

  The two officers looked at each other and got up, thanking the woman for her time.

  Poole, Ray discovered, had already supplied Josie Thorpe with a tape recorder to record future phone calls from Susan, but Josie did not report any further contact, real or imagined.

  Not
long afterward, Ray tracked down Charlie Trotter at his home in McRoberts, far up in the hills of Letcher County. Charlie confirmed that he had stayed at the Landmark, on the FBI tab, for nearly five months, including the week Susan and Mark were there in June. After testifying successfully in the chop-shop trial, the nervous star witness had checked out in August. Soon afterward, he got his final payment of $30,000 from the FBI.

  Charlie said that he hadn’t seen anything at the motel to indicate any problem between Mark and Susan Smith. He said that Mark was usually gone most of the day during that week, not getting back till late at night. He seemed perfectly normal, Charlie said, other than complaining that the US Attorney’s office was “jerking him around” in Lexington all day when he really needed to spend more time preparing his witness to testify. Charlie didn’t think Mark saw Susan for more than a few minutes during that week.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, I saw her come out on the balcony a couple of times looking for Mark. He would park in the lot under the balcony. She gave me the impression that she was coming on to Mark, and he would hide in his car and try to dodge her, like she was after him or something. I don’t think Mark was fooling with her.”

  How did he learn that Susan was missing?

  “Ron Poole told me about the girl being gone,” said Charlie. “I never saw anyone talk to her except Mark Putnam and Ron Poole.”

  Charlie also said, “She was rougher looking than the picture you showed me.”

  By January, Richard Ray figured he had chased every goose and run down every lead. The holidays were past, and Susan hadn’t contacted a soul since the day she disappeared. He went to his boss Lieutenant Maynard and told him it was time to get tough with the FBI. Assuming something untoward had happened to Susan Smith—and that was precisely what he was assuming by now—there was at least one easy-to-find suspect who hadn’t been eliminated yet. It was time, Ray said, to demand that the FBI have a talk with its agent Mark Putnam, preferably with a polygraph machine strapped to his arm.