Bloodville (23 page)

Wilcoxson had coffee with Dwayne Madison at the FBI office on Monday morning. Madison said didn't think there would any problem in getting Billy Ray White placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List.

Billy Ray White traveled a rough and rugged, one-way road into a life of crime. He became an accomplished criminal before he grew old enough to understand what a criminal act was. At twenty-five years of age, in 1968, he'd spent more than one third of his life in either a juvenile reformatory or in one of a half dozen federal prisons.

Born midway through World War II in 1943, Billy Ray's mother died in 1950. The boy had just passed his seventh birthday. His whiskey-sodden, draft-dodging, father inadvertently and unwillingly took on the task of raising the boy. The old man's idea of child rearing was limited to violence as a way of maintaining order. He administered belt-beatings for any infraction of an indistinct and unstated set of rules. The old man could always find a rule to justify a beating.

Late the year his mother died, Billy Ray played alone one day in the hard-packed dirt yard in front of his father's small, old, unpainted and dilapidated clapboard house on the rural outskirts of New Orleans. A little neighbor girl—four or five years old—passed by riding a tricycle with a loose front wheel. Billy thought it funny at first, the way the wheel wobbled uncertainly, then it collapsed entirely and the girl fell onto the gravel at the side of the road, scraping her knee and elbow on the rough edge of the pavement. She screeched loudly, as hurt children do, and Billy Ray, more from curiosity than anything else, went to where she sat on the ground bawling. He simply stood there at first, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his tattered denims. Then he knelt down and took the little girl‘s hand in his own, but she would not be consoled. Billy Ray's old man heard the commotion and ran into the yard, shirtless, shoeless, unshaven and bleary-eyed. He assumed that young Billy‘d caused the little girl's pain and the crying that stirred him from a drunken stupor. He bloodied the boy's nose and lips with his fist then dragged him into the house by the hair and beat him with a three-foot length of garden hose. The elder White forgot about the little girl and left her to her own devices as he slammed Billy into a tiny closet and locked the door behind him. He took a drink of whiskey and went back to bed, secure in the knowledge that his son would not bother him further, at least that afternoon.

For a few years after that, Billy Ray managed to avoid seeing his father most of the time. When the old man was home, Billy took himself away somewhere. When the old man would leave, the little boy would creep into the house and sleep for a few hours on an old army surplus cot covered with a never-washed coarse wool blanket. He ate whatever happened to be in the icebox—it never contained ice—often nothing more than moldy cheese and warm, skunky beer. The old man didn't seem to mind the arrangement and ignored truancy notices from the local elementary school. Billy soon became a shoplifter, sneak-thief, and burglar. His diet improved to potato chips, Baby Ruth candy bars and Coca Cola. Arrested at age twelve, for the tenth time, authorities committed him to the New Orleans Boys Reformatory.

Freed at fifteen, he returned to his father's house because he knew of no where else to go. Juvenile authorities really didn't care where he went as long as it was somewhere away from the reformatory. Billy Ray, from his first day of confinement, would not comply with any rule or regulation established by the reformatory administration and enforced by corrections officers. A notation at the bottom of his file read:

Comments: Subject White Billy Ray unable/unwilling to adapt to requirements and discipline required in institutional life. Subject demonstrates sociopathic characteristics and may have unspecified psychological disorder. Recommend release to closely supervised probation.

The prison bureaucracy thus passed their problem along to the probation/parole bureaucracy. To the relief of the latter, the young criminal never once reported his whereabouts to his probation officer.

Billy Ray found his father's house abandoned and badly vandalized. He never saw the old man again and resumed a life of thievery. He hitchhiked around the south and Midwest, from Miami, Florida, to St. Louis, Missouri. A dozen arrests followed in a dozen towns: petty larceny, vagrancy, or breaking and entering. Authorities treated the charges lightly as first juvenile offenses and dismissed them. By age eighteen, Billy was back in New Orleans with a strong taste for whiskey, marijuana, and women. His abilities as a burglar and thief improved with experience. He made an adequate living as a criminal until the night in 1959 when a military policeman arrested him as he attempted to steal a two and a half ton truck, loaded with automatic weapons, from the Army Reserve Training Center in St. John the Baptist Parish, north of New Orleans.

Sentenced to five years in prison in October, 1961, Billy Ray spent his first six months at the Federal Correctional Institution near Ashland, Kentucky, after which authorities transferred him a few miles north to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio. Authorities there were happy to see Billy Ray transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Texarkana, Texas, a year later and a year after that he moved on to the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana. No prison held him beyond the time required by regulations. Each moved him along on the day he was eligible for transfer. Billy Ray earned not one minute of time off his sentence for good behavior.

In 1964, at age 21, he and another young inmate named Jimmy Claire attempted escape from the Terre Haute Federal Prison. Badly planned and poorly executed, the effort failed and Billy Ray assaulted and battered a corrections officer who caught him and Claire before they got off the prison grounds. Authorities tacked a year onto his sentence and transferred him again, to the maximum security federal prison at Marion, Illinois. Billy Ray considered his fourteen months of lock-down at Marion his first-class Eagle Award for the hard-ass convict merit badge. He finaled out his time at USP Leavenworth, Kansas, from October, 1966 to June, 1967, four months of which he spent in solitary confinement. Billy didn't mind much. The inter-prison drug distribution network at Leavenworth had a well-developed supply system for those in solitary confinement.

Billy gained an advanced education in crime and criminals as he grew from a boy into a man. He learned about the use of aliases as an effective way to cover tracks. ―That way,‖ an old con said to him one day, ―they got to have your prints or your mug on file. Most Podunk cops ain't got neither one. They got to prove you ain't who you say you are and most of the time they can't do it. They‘ll screw up investigations more times than not. Cops ain't too smart. They don‘t pay ‗em enough to be smart. Remember that.‖
Billy Ray learned that burglary was for two-bit punks or for walking-around money until bigger and better crimes could produce major bucks. ―Ain't no risk to burglary, but there ain't much profit, neither,‖ the old con said. ―You got to weigh time for the crime. Money comes from the end of a gun. Armed robberies. Big armed robberies, is the only way to go. Willie Sutton stole more than a million bucks, and he only ever did fifteen, twenty robberies. Hell, he'll be out in a couple years. Think of the money he's gonna have. Willie's the one that always said he robbed banks because they kept the money in there. Go where the money is, sonny-boy, and take a big gun, but don't shoot nobody. Armed robberies come and go. No big thing to the coppers. But you rob and murder someone and they'll be on your ass until J. Edgar Hoover's dead and gone and then his ghost‘ll haunt you right into a seat on Old Sparky. Murder is mighty bad business and good robbers don‘t fool with it.‖

Billy became acquainted with criminals from all over the United States. One of them told him that Albuquerque, New Mexico, was a good stopover city for a few weeks and a few jobs before moving on. He said that so many people passed through Albuquerque on Route 66—east and west—and U. S. 85—north and south—and so many tourists visited the Indian villages and mountain resorts that strange faces were the usual thing. Two military bases also added hundreds of strangers to the mix every year. A guy could hit town, do a couple jobs and be gone before the cops knew he'd been there. The con even said that a fence named Bob Drymaple was a good place to start, and the Liberty Bar on Central Avenue was a good place to drink.

By February, 1968, Billy Ray lived in the St. Louis/East St. Louis, Missouri/Illinois area. He ran with his old prison pal, Jimmy Claire, and a young car booster named Lyle Bromer. He used the name Eric Lee Kendrick. He'd used the name before, but he didn't recall using it at any time when he'd been arrested. In the eight months since his release from Leavenworth for his first excursion into life outside the walls as an adult, Billy Ray‘d learned a difficult lesson: being a full time, professional, criminal wasn‘t easy. Many of his robberies didn't produce much money, often little more than an honest week's wages. Back in prison he was fed three times a day and while the food was bland and uninteresting, it was always there when he was hungry. He paid no rent, bought no clothing. Sex provided by prison punks wasn't completely satisfying but the sissies didn't charge much, either. Jailhouse brewed raisinjack and potato peel whiskey tasted terrible but had the desired effect and Billy Ray observed no shortage of drugs in the years he spent in prison. The two things he missed most while serving time were women's breasts and the freedom to come and go as he pleased.

Even when a robbery was successful, the money seemed to soon disappear. The jewelry store armed robbery in Gretna, Louisiana, in December produced more than three thousand dollars from gems fenced in New Orleans. Less than a month later, a hungover Billy Ray woke up one morning on a sofa in the lobby of Dago Rose's whorehouse in East St. Louis, Illinois, without enough money in his pocket to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Billy borrowed a car from a heavy-set whore—with very large breasts—who called herself Lady Lydia. He picked up Jimmy Claire and drove across the Mississippi River to Florissant, Missouri. Billy Ray robbed a storefront savings and loan company while Jimmy kept the car running. A small, bespectacled, middle-aged man—a plaque on his desk read MANAGER—became catatonic when Billy Ray pointed his nine-millimeter pistol at him. No amount of cursing or threatening made the man move from wide-eyed immobility. He sat as if strapped down like a condemned man in an electric chair. Billy located a cash drawer built into the counter and he quickly broke off the hasp and lock with his gun butt. He found less than three hundred dollars in paper and coin inside. He ripped the telephone cord out of the wall before he left but he need not have bothered. The manager spent five minutes regaining enough composure to call for help. Company higher-ups subsequently fired him for his timidity.

Billy Ray‘d hoped to do better. Three hundred wasn't much. On the way back to East St. Louis, he and Jimmy stopped in Overland, Missouri, and Billy robbed an auto parts store. The counter clerk—a large, muscular, black man with ―Bubba‖ etched in red thread above his blue shirt pocket—held a temperament opposite that of the S & L manager. He wanted to fight the robber and didn't seem impressed by a gun pointed in his direction. He raced around the counter and ran at Billy with his head down, like a bull charging, but he was a big man, and slow. Billy Ray danced sideways and pistol-whipped him unconscious and then took two hundred dollars, and change, out of the cash register. Billy and Jimmy made it safely back to the whorehouse.

Billy Ray understood the precarious nature of his existence. While he'd picked up four hundred dollars in a couple of hours—he paid Jimmy a hundred bucks for driving the car—he knew that if captured he faced twenty years in the slammer: ten years for each armed robbery. That would make the combined robberies worth twenty dollars a year. From time to time he thought about reforming but it was too late and he knew it. In his entire life he'd never done anything that required him to appear at a certain place at a given time to do specific labor for eight or nine hours each day. He possessed no skills, had no aptitude for work, and, most important, had no interest in learning. Prison offered educational opportunities and vocational training, but taking advantage of such programs meant cooperating with The Man, and Billy Ray would not do that. He was a criminal's kind of criminal. His only ambition in life was to do exactly what he wanted to do, and he couldn't even do that. He didn't really want to continue doing armed robberies. He didn't enjoy them at all. But money had to come from somewhere.

Billy Ray and Jimmy paid fifty dollars each for the services of Lady Lydia and another whore for the night and they took the girls out of the whorehouse to McDonald's for hamburgers and milkshakes. They picked up a quart of Four Roses whiskey and the four of them went back to Lydia's crib and drank most of it as they all screwed each other and laughed and giggled so loudly that the whorehouse pimp knocked on the door and ordered them to hold the noise down. Billy Ray jerked the door open and hit the little rat-faced panderer in the chest, flat-handed, and knocked him into the opposite wall. White stepped quickly across the hallway and hit the man, twice, with jolting blows to the solar plexus and then a sharp left cross to the jaw. The pimp went down hard. Billy picked him up by the belt and shirt collar and carried him to the stairway where he dropped him and kicked his unconscious body down the stairs. Battered and bruised, the pimp was smart enough to let Billy and Jimmy stay the night, but the next morning he returned with a pair of riverfront goons. Billy and Jimmy left the whorehouse unbloodied because neither of the thugs wanted to argue with the pistols they displayed. Billy moved into an upstairs apartment in a converted farmhouse outside of Wood River, Illinois, north of East St. Louis. Lady Lydia moved with him and soon three of her friends moved out of the whorehouse, too. Billy Ray found himself with a short string of whores and he decided pimping for a living was better than armed robbery. He grew a goatee and hired Jimmy Claire as his muscle.