Bitter Blood (12 page)

At one point, Nobles went to Louisville and talked with a long-time homicide detective about the case. “That family has a dark cloud in it somewhere,” the detective said. “Find that cloud and you’ve found your killer.” Nobles eagerly repeated the quote to Davidson.

Faced with no new leads, Davidson called Tom and asked him to increase by $5,000 the $10,000 reward he’d already offered. Tom agreed, and Davidson began running ads in Louisville newspapers.

The new reward provoked only a couple of crank calls. One man insisted that TV evangelists Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart were behind the murders. A woman said that Delores’s dogs should identify any suspects, and Davidson tried to picture himself going to court with two neurotic Yorkshire terriers as his chief witnesses, only one capable of talking and it with a grand vocabulary of one word—
mama.

By early December, Davidson was seeking help from the press. DOUBLE MURDER LEAVES POLICE FRUSTRATED, read the headline in the
Courier-Journal
on December 5.

“Our biggest problem in solving this case is that there is no definite motive,” Davidson was quoted. “I feel that there’s someone out there who can help us. I believe there is someone who can give us enough information to lead us in the right direction that just hasn’t come forward yet.”

He concluded with this: “We never forget a murder case. We never shelve it. It’s always there, especially this one, where we’ve got two people. We’re going to find out who did this if it takes forever.”

The story brought no new information, and Davidson began looking to other sources. He prepared a synopsis for a nationwide bulletin over the police information network to see if similar cases had occurred elsewhere. He checked into a case in Illinois in which a woman had been shot dead at her garage door.

Six days before Christmas, Nobles and Childers put the whole case together and delivered it to the FBI in the hope that a psychological profile of the killer could be compiled. But that, too, proved futile, because their information was insufficient.

Christmas passed with no new developments, and the new year brought only more frustration.

“It’s disgusting,” Childers told a
Louisville Times
reporter in late January.

“About the only thing we haven’t done in this case is recruit the efforts of some psychics,” Davidson said. He had little faith in psychics, but he had done some research and was ready with records and recommendations if Tom or higher officials wanted one.

Davidson was more than frustrated. His preoccupation with the Lynch murders bordered on obsession. The case had grown to two fat books, each nearly a foot thick, and he spent hours poring through them, reading and rereading reports. At night as he lay in bed, scenarios marched through his brain, preventing sleep. When he did sleep, he was frequently jolted awake by a forgotten theory, a new possibility, and he would climb from bed, careful not to awaken his wife, and go to the living room to make notes. His stomach was in such advanced rebellion that the antacid and Tagamet tablets he regularly gobbled no longer could quell it.

February brought another blow to the case. Childers slipped on ice, broke his ankle, and was out of work for three months. He felt that he was letting Davidson down, especially now that Nobles was regularly being pulled away to work burglaries and other cases for his hard-pressed department.

Davidson was desperate for new leads. His detectives had spent many fruitless hours checking reports from prisoners hoping to curry favor by implicating other inmates or ex-inmates in the killings, but Davidson thought a former prisoner might have done it, and he requested a computer printout of all inmates released from Kentucky prisons for two years preceding the murders and began studying it for suspects. He also assigned an ambitious young trooper, Rick Yetter, to a month of special duty interviewing service people who had been to the Lynch house, as well as Janie’s dental school patients.

He even entertained a theory that he thought outlandish. Knowing how much Delores hated her husband and all the humiliations she had heaped upon him, could Chuck have executed a postdeath contract on her, perhaps with a Chicago hit man, so that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the fruits of his long and productive labors?

The last day of February brought a new break from an anonymous caller. Jason King either killed the Lynch women or knew who did, the caller said. Lennie Nobles recognized the name immediately. A week after the murders a Louisville detective had called Oldham County police to say that King should be checked, but Nobles dismissed the tip after learning King was in custody on other charges.

Now Nobles discovered that King had escaped from a juvenile detention center on Friday, July 20, two days before the murders, and hadn’t been returned to custody until July 24, the day the bodies were discovered. Moreover, Delores’s friends from the Little Colonel Players remembered that she spoke of trying to help a troubled young man named Jason
,
whom she’d met at the Actors Theater in Louisville.

Troubled
was hardly the word for Jason King. He had an above-average IQ, a hatred of women and authority figures, and a fascination with cruelty and violence. He had been in trouble with police since childhood. “A worthless little terror,” Nobles called him.

By the time he was in high school, King and his closest friend, Calvin Richards, had formed a gang of twelve boys and two girls, all from affluent families, Nobles was told. The gang met for occult rituals involving alcohol and drugs including LSD, as well as animal sacrifices. They boasted of slitting a cow’s throat and holding an orgy in its blood.

The gang played a game called Invasion. They broke into upper-class homes and rearranged the furniture without taking anything, leaving the gang’s symbol spray-painted on a wall as a reminder of vulnerability. The group also occasionally rounded up neighborhood pets and buried them alive with their heads protruding so that King and Richards could run power lawn mowers over them.

Nobles discovered that King had several weapons at different times, including an M16 assault rifle, the same type of weapon used in the Lynch murders, as well as Ping-Pong ball explosives and diagrams for more elaborate bombs. King had also boasted to friends of earlier killings, although they had not believed him.

On March 16, Nobles found one of the gang’s hideouts, a cavelike rock overhang just off Interstate Highway 71 north of Louisville, only six miles from the Lynch house. Jason King’s name and the gang’s symbol were scratched into the rock. Nobles had hoped to find evidence there, perhaps a spent bullet that could be matched to the one that killed Janie, but he turned up only the remains of a fire, some garbage, and a couple of soft drink cans riddled with bullet holes.

Nonetheless, Nobles was confident that he was on the way to fulfilling Delores’s demand that haunted his dreams. Even Davidson was warily optimistic.

When King refused to be interviewed, Nobles and Davidson subpoenaed his juvenile and psychiatric records. With the help of Detective Les Simpson, Nobles questioned people who had interrogated King as well as his friends and gang members.

King, the detectives learned, had escaped with the idea of freeing his friend Richards from a detention center in Louisville, but after being picked up by police following the attempt, he had written a letter saying he couldn’t tell what happened that weekend because it could get him in big trouble.

The center from which King escaped was in south-central Kentucky, and King didn’t make his way back to Louisville until late Saturday. He’d spent that night at the home of a female friend. She told Nobles that he’d left about 10 Sunday morning—less than an hour before the murders—unarmed and on foot, with plans to meet a friend. The friend said he’d picked up Jason at a subdivision on U.S. Highway 42 between 11 and 11:30, and had taken him to the Central Kentucky Treatment Center northeast of Louisville, where they had failed to make contact with Richards. King was neither armed nor bloodied, nor was he acting as if he’d just killed somebody, when he was picked up, the friend said.

The spot where the friend had picked up King was 7.6 miles from Delores’s house. Nobles drove the route over and over, timing himself. The fastest he made it was ten minutes, thirty-three seconds. The first shots at the Lynch house came at 10:47. King couldn’t have gotten there and back on foot. He barely could have done it with a car. Did he hitchhike? If so, where did he get the weapon? Who would give him a ride carrying an M16? And what had he done with the gun afterward? Did he have an accomplice? If so, King’s friends had no idea who it might be, and Nobles couldn’t find any such person.

Beyond that, King had mentioned nothing about the Lynch killings to anybody. If he had done it, Nobles thought he would have bragged. Reluctantly, after a month of hard work, Nobles concluded that King and his gang were not involved. It was the lowest point in the investigation not only for him but for Dan Davidson. Then, on March 28, something happened that took them even lower.

When Ruby Bickers, the city clerk of Carrollton, failed to show up for work, and telephone calls to her house went unanswered, the town’s police chief went to see what was wrong. He found the front door of the middle-class brick house open, and stepped inside to a startling scene. Blood was everywhere—on the walls, the floors the ceilings—and Ruby Bickers was lying in the hallway, her body hacked repeatedly with a hatchet. In a utility room at the back of the house lay her husband, Roy, also hacked to death.

Carrollton, an Ohio River town about thirty miles north of State Police Post Five at La Grange, is within the post’s jurisdiction, and when state police were called into the investigation, responsibility fell to Dan Davidson. Never before had he had two double murders at one time, and he called Steve Nobles, chief of the Oldham County police, and told him that the new case would have to take priority.

Davidson suspected no link between the cases. The Lynch murders were cool and professional, but the Bickerses had been slaughtered in a savage frenzy, perhaps by somebody on drugs, Davidson thought. Many items were missing from the Bickers house.

Davidson felt no stirring of juices over these new homicides, only depression.

“I thought, goddamn, I’m going to wind up going out of the state police with two double murders not solved,” he recalled.

“After that, nobody had to ask was he retiring,” said his wife, Karen. “They knew he wouldn’t until those two cases were solved.”

As the new investigation stretched on, Davidson couldn’t shake his obsession with the Lynch case. So frustrated was he with his inability to penetrate its mysteries that not even the trusted and dependable waters of Kentucky State Reformatory Lake, still drawing him irresistibly, offered much comfort and hope. In early May 1985, he assembled the reports from the case along with Delores’s private files and took them home to go through again at night. Surely, somewhere in that huge mound of material was something he had overlooked, something that would give him a new direction, and he intended to find it.

Part Two

Murder in the Family

11

The tobacco cycle dominates life in Reidsville, a town of 13,000 near the Virginia border in north-central North Carolina.

In late winter, fabric-covered plant beds sprout in the red-dirt countryside, nurturing tobacco seeds to an early start. After last frost, the fragile plants are set in the hilly fields, and by midsummer they are head high and richly green, and the farmers and their families can barely be seen as they prowl the rows, snapping off the white blossoms to encourage new growth. Late summer brings the harvest. The heavy leaves are stripped from the stalks a few at a time from the bottom up—“priming,” the farmers call this—and taken to barns for curing. Early fall sees the golden leaves hauled into town in huge, burlap-wrapped bundles on the back of tail-drooping pickup trucks. For weeks, the pungent, dusty air of the cavernous warehouses rings with the traditional singsong chants of the auctioneers as the overall-clad farmers anxiously wait to see if their labors were profitable.

The aroma of tobacco—the smell of money, the townspeople call it—clings to Reidsville year-round, wafting from the old red-brick buildings of the American Tobacco Company with its huge smokestacks proclaiming the town the home of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Lucky City, Reidsville once called itself.

Reidsville grew from a settlement around a tobacco plantation on Little Troublesome Creek in Rockingham County. The first tobacco factory opened in 1858, fifteen years before the town was incorporated. By the end of the century, the number of tobacco factories had burgeoned to eleven, and Reidsville’s production of smoking tobacco was second highest in the state. One of those factories was opened by F. R. Penn, who came from Patrick County, Virginia, in 1874. The Penn factory soon grew to be the biggest in town. In 1911, it was bought by James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, who created a tobacco monopoly with his American Tobacco Trust. That same year, the federal government forced the dissolution of Duke’s monopoly, but the Penn Company remained part of American Tobacco under the direction of C. R. Penn—Mr. Charlie, he was called around town—the founder’s eldest son. Two years later, Mr. Charlie was made a vice president of American Tobacco and assigned to company headquarters in New York, where he was said to have perfected the blend for a new cigarette. That cigarette was given the name of one of the earliest commercial chewing tobaccos, Lucky Strike, a throwback to the gold rush days and an apt description for the prosperity it would bring Reidsville for decades to come.