Almost Midnight (22 page)

D’Agostino walked over to the Olds, flashlight in hand, and tapped on the driver’s window. Darrell and Mary were jolted awake. They sat up, blinking, groggy from sleep. D’Agostino asked them if they were all right.
Uh-huh
, they said. He asked them to get out of the car and give him their names. Mary, hugging a blanket, gave her real name. Darrell said his was Kyle Hamlin. They said that they were sleeping out in the desert because they didn’t have enough money for a room.

D’Agostino asked for Darrell’s social security number. Darrell knew by heart the bogus number he’d been using as Kyle Hamlin. Standing out there in the January chill, he could actually visualize it, all nine digits, almost as if it were printed on a screen before his eyes. The problem was, he could visualize his real number just as readily, and in his state of disorientation, he gave D’Agostino the real one.

The social security gaffe probably didn’t matter much anyway. D’Agostino returned to his unit and radioed in the rear plate of the Olds. He got back information that the vehicle had been flagged with a possible occupant (“Caution: Armed and Dangerous”) matching Darrell’s description. He was also advised that the same subject (“Darrell Jay Mease of Missouri”) was wanted on two felony warrants: child support and carrying a concealed weapon.

By this time D’Agostino’s backup, Mike McGhee, fresh out of the academy, had arrived on the scene. “How do we know for sure it’s him?” McGhee asked.

“Let me try something,” D’Agostino said.

“Hey, Darrell,” he called out, standing behind the open door of his unit.

“Yeah,” Darrell answered. Just like it was dinnertime.

“Why didn’t you give me your real name the first time?” D’Agostino asked.

“I’ve had some problems with police before.”

“There’s warrants out on you, one of them for something big.”

Darrell just stood there, saying nothing.

The two deputies cuffed him and placed him under arrest. A brisk search of the station wagon turned up two revolvers and a machete. They decided they’d put the weapons into property at the trailer before taking Darrell to Mesa for booking. Mary followed them in the Olds and told the deputies outside the trailer that she was broke and had no place to stay. D’Agostino gave her the address of a shelter on West Madison in downtown Phoenix.

Driving to Mesa, D’Agostino tried engaging Darrell in small talk, but nothing doing. Maybe Darrell was busy contemplating the irony of the situation. He’d just been arrested in the desert outside Phoenix, no more than a ten-minute drive from where he and Mary had purchased the Benelli the previous March. Thousands of rollicking miles across the vast American countryside, and this, of all places, was where the journey had ended.

When D’Agostino pulled into the sally port of the station in Mesa, five detention officers were waiting to meet him.

“Radio wants you to call,” they told him.

He called up and the dispatcher said, “Gary, are you all right? This guy’s wanted for a triple homicide back in Missouri.”

“You’re kidding me,” he said.

Just before his shift ended, homicide detectives from the sheriff’s office contacted him wanting to know where Mary was.

“You might want to check the shelter on West Madison,” he said.

M
ARY WASN’T AT
the shelter. After Darrell had been hauled off, remembering that she still had twenty-nine dollars left, she drove back into Phoenix and looked for a motel. She settled on the Desert Inn, the last of a string of cut-rate motels along Van Buren leading west out of downtown. The last and the sorriest. The coffee shop in
front was boarded up, the blue-painted doors along the side were battered and bruised, and the swimming pool by the parking lot looked like it hadn’t seen clean water for a decade or more. She checked in at the bulletproof window of an office facing 10th Avenue and went up to her room with Gretchen Louise. Grimy beige carpet, brown dust-streaked drapes, tiny bathroom with pink floor tiles, and a dirt-encrusted window crisscrossed with iron bars: the shelter mightn’t have been such a bad idea after all.

At nine that evening homicide detectives found Mary at the motel and told her she was under arrest.

She asked what for.

Hindering prosecution, they said. A fresh warrant out of Taney County, Missouri.

D
ARRELL AND MARY
were arrested on Wednesday, January 11, 1989. Chip Mason and Jack Merritt flew to Phoenix the same day and at eight-forty Thursday morning they visited Mary. She was in a holding tank with a dozen other women on the ground floor of the Madison Street Jail, a twelve-story concrete facility located directly across from the Central Court Building. She recognized Chip right away and seemed relieved to see him, a familiar and friendly face from back home. Any doubt she may have had about the purpose of the visit was immediately dispelled when she noticed that Chip was carrying a folder clearly marked “Lawrence Homicides.” Chip chatted with her for a while, talked about her parents and how worried they were. Jack stood back, giving it time, Mary striking him as “a scared kid in a bad situation.” The two men then advised her of her rights and Mary signed a waiver consenting to be interviewed without benefit of a lawyer present.

The interview was conducted in a private conference room in the main offices of the sheriff’s department across the street. Speaking softly and slowly, occasionally punctuating her answers with a nervous laugh, not always straight on the precise chronology of events, Mary told Jack and Chip everything they needed to know. She recounted
her and Darrell’s conflicts with Lloyd (“He was so evil,” she said), their initial flight from Missouri, their fateful return in May, and their subsequent wanderings as fugitives. Jack and Chip pressed her on certain details—the weapons Darrell was carrying when she dropped him off at Bear Creek Road, the jewelry he took from Lloyd, the pawnshop where they disposed of the Benelli—and then they plugged in a tape recorder and walked her through the entire story again. Mary signed a “consent to search” for the Olds station wagon and Chip told her that someone would be down from Missouri in a day or two to bring her home.

Back at the jail Mary phoned her mom. She said that she’d spoken with Chip and was scared and hungry. Barbara told her not to talk to anyone else until she got home.

Jack and Chip rummaged through the station wagon, which was still parked at the Desert Inn Motel: an assortment of knives, a jar of ammunition, a poncho, and two camouflage head covers. They retrieved the Benelli from Central Pawnbrokers in north Phoenix and, after lunch, Chip phoned Jim Justus back in Forsyth with a progress report. At one-thirty they returned to the Madison Street jail and checked on Darrell.

Darrell wasn’t in the friendliest of moods. He was worried about Mary and also immensely frustrated about being in jail. His mood didn’t improve much when Chip told him that he’d been arrested for the weapons violation up by Rocky’s place a year and a half ago. The weapons violation? The .38 Special under the seat? But this made no sense. He’d paid a fine on that rinky-dink deal at the courthouse in Forsyth the very next day. As far as he knew, that should have spelled the end of it. So what was going on here? There had to be more to this business than met the eye. It didn’t take much straining to imagine what it might be.

“No way,” he said to Chip, fighting back anger. “That deal was done with when I anted up the seventy-three bucks. You’ve got nothing on me there.”

“No sense arguing about it,” Jack cut in. “We’re here to question you about the Lawrence homicides.”

Yeah. Out in the open now. This wasn’t about a penny-ante weapons rap. It was about Lloyd and Frankie and Willie. The arrest warrant had just been an excuse for trapping him. Darrell had already guessed as much but he was determined not to lose his cool. Better than even money they didn’t have anything solid linking him to the Lawrence killings. He invoked his right to an attorney, refusing to answer any questions, but agreed to sign a waiver of extradition. If Chip and Jack wanted to bring him back to Missouri on the old weapons charge, they were welcome to it. The two lawmen said they’d pick him up the next day. While they were getting ready to leave, Darrell asked if they had any word on Mary. Chip said that she’d been arrested and would be transported home before the end of the week.

They flew out of Phoenix early Friday and switched planes in Dallas. On the second leg of the trip Darrell sat beside the window, Chip right next to him, and Jack immediately across the aisle. Jack spent the greater part of the flight writing case notes on a yellow legal pad. At one point he crossed his legs with the pad resting on his knee and Darrell was able to make out some of the writing. He caught references to “two diamond rings” and “ten-by-ten plastic bags filled with crank.”

Darrell didn’t know whether Jack had put the notes in his view inadvertently, or whether he’d done it on purpose and was trying to rattle him. It didn’t matter. Right then there was one thing he did know for sure: Mary had talked. No one else could have given Jack and Chip that information. Chances were she had broken down and told them everything.

Just thinking about it now was churning him up. Imagine the interrogation she must have been subjected to. And imagine her emotional state. For Mary to talk, and talk so soon after she’d been arrested—she was probably on the verge of a complete meltdown. Darrell thought back to all her tough times on the road the past year: the constant pressure, the squalor, the gnawing desperation. The whole business must have finally caught up with her.

Once again, he asked Jack and Chip about Mary, how she seemed to be doing when they saw her at the jail in Phoenix.

Chip looked over and noticed that Darrell’s eyes were brimming with tears. He said that Mary seemed to be doing okay.

Darrell would later claim that Jack added something at this point, something he’d been hinting at off and on since Phoenix.

“Your life is probably over in this world, Darrell, but Mary is young and she can go on.”

This is what Darrell would claim Jack said.

Jack would deny ever making the comment.

The arrest was big news back in Springfield. When the American Eagle flight landed, reporters and camera crews were lying in wait. Darrell, wearing a faded plaid shirt and brown corduroy pants, his hands shackled in front of him, couldn’t believe it. Going through the terminal, he felt like a sideshow freak on public display. People were snapping pictures, jockeying for position, trying to provoke him into a reaction. He hated to think of Mary having to run the same gauntlet when she returned home.

Outside the terminal, while he was being escorted to a waiting patrol car, some guy strode up and stuck a camera right in his face. Darrell was so enraged by now that he tried to step on the guy’s foot. He had visions of walking up his leg and torso, all the way onto his head. He missed. The guy jumped away.
Dang, how’d I miss?
Darrell said to himself.

Patrolmen Wayne Murphy and Lee Stephens had been given the assignment of transporting Darrell to the courthouse in Forsyth for his arraignment. Stephens sat in back with Darrell, lighting cigarettes for him, while Murphy drove at a good clip, sixty-five most of the way. It was as pleasant a trip as anybody could have hoped for, under the circumstances. Darrell had always held the Highway Patrol in high regard. He had two cousins who were state troopers, and riding with Murphy and Stephens, good ole country boys in their own right, seemed to put him at ease. Every few miles he’d tearfully bring Mary up, talk about how much he loved her and how he regretted getting her involved with this mess. But then he’d brighten for a bit and tell amusing stories about his experiences in the local hill country. A few times he had the troopers almost in stitches. He told them how he once
took a pistol and shot a deer behind the Holiday Inn down in Branson. And how once, over by Reeds Spring, a couple of guys who knew him only by reputation asked for his help sighting in a .357 they’d recently picked up secondhand. He threw a rock into the air, busted it with one shot, and handed the .357 back to them, saying, “It shoots about a half inch high and an eighth of an inch to the left.” “That’s just what we thought,” one of the guys said.

Darrell and Stephens hit it off especially well. Sitting there in the backseat, they were like long-lost buddies, swapping tales about their bad marriages and congratulating each other on having finally struck gold with a good woman. Stephens would later recall that he found Darrell “a real witty individual” and “enjoyed talking to him.”

At one point he asked Darrell if he’d hired an attorney.

“No, but I guess I’ll have to get one,” Darrell said.

“Have you given a statement?” Stephens asked.

“No, I’m going to sleep on it, then I may.”

At four in the afternoon Darrell was arraigned before Judge Joe Chowning in Forsyth on three counts of murder and three counts of armed criminal action. Twenty minutes later he was back on the road with Murphy and Stephens. Sheriff Chuck Keithley had already reserved a cell for Mary in the Taney County jail and he’d decided (“for security reasons”) that he didn’t want the two of them housed in the same facility. So he’d asked the troopers to return Darrell to Springfield and deposit him for the time being in the county jail there.

On the drive back the three men chatted just as amiably as they had on the way down. Half an hour into the trip Murphy and Stephens received instructions over the radio to bring Darrell by Troop D headquarters on Kearney Street in Springfield for processing. A bit later Darrell asked if there was anything Stephens could do “to help keep Mary out of this.” Stephens said he didn’t think so: that was something Darrell would have to take up with the appropriate authorities in Taney County.

Waiting for the stoplight on the Kearney exit ramp off U.S. 65, Darrell said to Stephens: “The only thing I hate about this is Willie.”

“Why Willie?”

“Willie would have recognized me. I had to do him, too.”

“Would you like to make a statement, Darrell?” Stephens asked.