Death Sentence (18 page)

Alice relaxed. If her daddy was talking about oyster stew, he definitely was getting better. It was one of his favorite foods. Velma said she had to run into Lumberton and she would pick up some oysters.

Yet at eight Friday night, Velma called a neighbor and told him Stuart needed an ambulance. The rescue squad was dispatched. John McPherson, who lived nearby and had known Stuart for fifteen years, got to the house within five minutes. He found Stuart on his bed, the sheet marked with feces. Stuart was moaning and flailing, unable even to tell him where he was hurting. Velma had put kitchen chairs around the bed to keep him on it. The rescue squad members had to restrain Stuart’s arms to take his blood pressure. It was dangerously low and falling rapidly. “Let’s go, boys,” McPherson said, “we’ve got to get him to the hospital now!”

They raced to Southeastern Hospital, Velma following in Stuart’s truck.

An hour after they got there, Stuart Taylor was dead.

Stuart’s children were stunned when Dr. Richard Jordan came to the small waiting room where they had gathered with Velma and told them of Stuart’s death. They couldn’t understand how this had happened. Their father had never been sick. He was only fifty-six. He’d always been strong and healthy. Dr. Jordan admitted that he was as puzzled as they were. He suggested an autopsy. The children included Velma in their decision. She told them that if they didn’t do it they’d always wonder, and all agreed.

The telephone beside the bed of Lumberton Police Detective Benson Phillips rang at 5:30 Sunday morning, stirring him from sleep. A woman was on the phone, crying, hysterical. She sounded drunk and at first Phillips couldn’t make out anything she was telling him. He attempted to calm her with little success. He finally got from her that a murder occurred the night before and she knew who did it. He’d heard of no murder, and if one had happened in Lumberton, he would have been called; he investigated all homicides. He tried to get details but failed. “Somebody’s got to stop her,” the woman kept saying. She wouldn’t tell him who she was, wouldn’t say who needed to be stopped, wouldn’t even reveal who had been murdered. Just another crazy, he thought.

But just to be safe, he said, “Look. I’ll be going to the office at eight o’clock. Why don’t you give me a little time to check things out and call me back there.” He gave her the number, thinking he’d never hear from her again.

At the office, he found that no homicides had been reported in town or in the county. Just as he suspected. He was certain that he wouldn’t hear from the woman again.

But at nine o’clock she called. This time she was calmer, more coherent. She still didn’t want to give details, but Phillips gradually coaxed them from her. She revealed that she was calling from South Carolina, but she couldn’t give her name, she said. She didn’t want anybody to know that she had called. The man who was murdered, she said, was the boyfriend of Velma Barfield, and she had killed him just as she had killed her own mother. The name triggered no immediate reaction in Phillips. It would be weeks before he would connect it to the incident he had investigated at Rowan Trailer Park three months earlier.

The caller admitted that she could offer no proof, but she was sure that what she was telling him was true. She was sure, too, that Velma’s boyfriend and mother weren’t the only ones. Too many other people close to Velma had died, she said, including two elderly people Velma had worked for, but she didn’t know their names. When Phillips pressed for evidence, she could offer none.

How did she know about all of this? Phillips asked.

“Because,” she said, “Velma is my sister.”

10

Velma went home from the hospital with Alice after Stuart’s death Friday night. When the family received guests at the funeral home Sunday, Velma stood before the open coffin with her arm around Alice. “He’s in a far better place,” Velma told her, and Alice took comfort from the words. Velma remained at Alice’s house until the funeral on Monday. Ronnie attended the service with his mother, both sitting with the family.

Ronnie had to take off from work for the funeral. “You know, it’s the saddest thing,” he said to a colleague as he was leaving, “but it seems like everybody my mother ever gets close to dies.”

Stuart was buried in the cemetery at Great Marsh Baptist Church, not far from his house. Nearby was the grave of his aunt Dollie, who had introduced him to Velma. Later, Stuart’s friend, Sonny Johnson, would remember looking across the cemetery as he was departing and seeing Velma standing alone by Stuart’s grave, the last to leave.

Stuart’s children were deeply moved by the care that Velma had given their father and the comfort she offered them, despite her own apparent grief. She had prayed with them and for them, and they were especially touched by the wreath she sent, featuring doves flying toward heaven, one for each member of the family.

On the day after the funeral, Velma went to Stuart’s house with his children to get her belongings. The children wanted to begin sorting through their father’s things. Estate matters were looming. As they went through the house, Alice asked Velma if she would like to have anything of Stuart’s.

Just one thing, Velma told her, and a misty look came to her eyes. The wedding ring Stuart had bought with the engagement ring she wore, the ring he now would never get to place on her finger.

The children had no idea where the ring was, but Velma knew. Stuart had had a burglary, had lost his hunting guns and other valuables, and he was wary of thieves. He had hidden the ring on a nail inside the wall behind a closet, and Velma went right to it.

Velma told Stuart’s children that she was planning to set up housekeeping alone again, and they gave her some kitchen appliances and several other items. Later, back at Alice’s house, the children and Stuart’s adopted nephew presented Velma with another gift: $400, $100 from each of them, a token of their affection. Velma cried and hugged each in turn. Such good people, she said. How lucky Stuart had been to have them.

Benson Phillips did not know what to make of the two strange calls he’d received Sunday morning. The charges the caller had made were so vague and uncertain. She might have been somebody with a grudge, telling lies in hopes of creating trouble for Velma Barfield. He had no way of knowing if she actually was Velma’s sister, but even if she was, she could just be paranoid, imagining things, especially considering her condition during the first call.

Still, he was intrigued enough to find out if any deaths actually had occurred over the weekend. He called the hospital and got the name of Stuart Taylor. He had been brought to the emergency room Friday night and had died a little later, apparently of natural causes, Phillips learned. Certainly no indication of murder, but he couldn’t rule it out.

Phillips called the hospital’s pathology department to see if an autopsy had been ordered, and, if not, to alert the medical examiner that one should be considered. An autopsy, he discovered, had been done the day before by Dr. Bob Andrews, the regional medical examiner, who had been a pathologist at the hospital for more than twenty years. The results, however, were not yet complete.

If Taylor had been murdered the autopsy would show it, Phillips figured. And even if somebody had killed him, the case would not be his. He had discovered that Taylor had been brought to the hospital from the countryside near St. Pauls. That would put any investigation under the jurisdiction of the sheriff. He had no responsibility. Still, he made a note to call his old friend Wilbur Lovett at the sheriffs department on Monday to tell him about it. As police chief, Lovett had given Phillips his job.

Lovett, too, was intrigued after talking to Phillips. He couldn’t reach Andrews on Monday, but he left a message requesting the results of the autopsy when it was complete. That was all he could do until he knew whether a crime had in fact been committed.

Although Dr. Andrews had received no word of suspicions about Stuart Taylor’s death, he was also intrigued, because he could find no real cause. The only disorder he found was gastroenteritis, a severe inflammation of the stomach and intestines, but that wasn’t enough to kill an otherwise healthy man of Stuart’s age. Andrews cut out a portion of each of Stuart’s organs and kept them for later examination, hoping for an answer.

When he returned to work on Tuesday, the day after Stuart’s funeral, Andrews began examining the tissue under a microscope. On Wednesday, February 8, he discovered what he thought was an abnormality in a bit of liver tissue. He didn’t know what it was, but he packed all the tissue into five plastic bags and sent it to the office of North Carolina’s chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill with a request for further tests.

A week after her father’s death, Alice Storms called the hospital to find out if the autopsy results were complete yet. The answer was no. Later, she went to the hospital for a copy of the death certificate. In the block marked “cause of death,” three words had been scribbled: “undetermined, pending autopsy.” That first word stuck in Alice’s mind and gnawed at her. What undetermined force had killed her daddy? She wanted an answer and she kept calling the hospital trying to get one. A month after her father’s death she was forwarded to Dr. Andrews, who told her he was still waiting to hear from tests he had ordered.

After talking with Alice, Andrews called Page Hudson, the state’s chief medical examiner, to see if any progress had been made on the tissues he’d sent. The family was pressuring, he noted. Hudson hadn’t heard of the case and asked Andrews about it. Later Hudson would recall that after Andrews had related Taylor’s symptoms, reporting that he’d been brought twice to the emergency room by his girlfriend, Hudson interrupted: “I said, ‘Where’d she get the arsenic, Bob?’”

Hudson had schooled himself in death by arsenic. He’d had to. In the ten years since he had set up the state medical examiner’s office and become its first chief hardly a year had passed when he hadn’t had to deal with at least one arsenic murder. The use of arsenic as a murder weapon was more common in the South than in any other part of the country, Hudson had learned, and probably more common in North Carolina than in any other state. Sixteen arsenic deaths, mostly homicides and suicides, had occurred in the state just since 1971, when records began being kept, six in a single year—and those were just the confirmed cases. Hudson was sure that many others went unsuspected and undiagnosed. Most of North Carolina’s arsenic murders took place in the eastern part of the state, partly because arsenic was so commonly used to control pests and was so easily accessible.

One reason for that was a one-man company run by Fred B. Singletary in Rocky Mount, 125 miles up I-95 from Lumberton. The company produced Singletary’s Rat Poison, a clear, odorless and tasteless liquid, which contained a high concentration of arsenic trioxide, the deadliest form of arsenic. In 1976 the North Carolina Pesticide Control Board had tried to outlaw it, but Singletary, who died later that year, had blocked the effort. The board had succeeded only in passing a regulation that anybody buying Singletary’s had to sign for it, but no identification was required, and any signature would do. Singletary’s was available in almost every country store in eastern North Carolina and had been for many years. In 1977, when the regulation requiring customers to sign for it went into effect, the proprietors of most stores selling it were still unaware of the new rule.

To some, the effort to stop the sale of Singletary’s seemed pointless. After all, Terro, an ant poison, also colorless and tasteless, contained arsenic too, and anybody with sixty cents could walk into almost any drugstore or hardware store in the state and buy enough to kill almost any adult.

After Andrews’ call, Hudson found the tissue he had sent still waiting to be tested. Hudson could tell from a slide of liver tissue whether arsenic was present in appreciable quantities. Arsenic attacks cells, especially in the central nervous system, causing them to weaken and break into nuclei. Hudson looked for those meiotic traces in the liver, where they never should be. He quickly found them in the tissue that Andrews had sent and called to tell him that he was fairly certain that Stuart Taylor had been poisoned. More extensive tests would confirm it, but this was Friday and they couldn’t be done until Monday.

On Monday, March 6, Hudson called back. Stuart definitely had been killed by arsenic.

“What do I tell the family?” Andrews asked.

“Don’t tell them a damn thing. Call the D.A.”

Joe Freeman Britt had never prosecuted a poisoner. After talking with Andrews Monday afternoon, he immediately called Hudson and got a twenty-minute course in arsenic poisoning: where the deadly potion could be purchased, how it killed, how much was required, the symptoms produced. Death by arsenic was torturous, Hudson said, slow, agonizing, extremely painful, horrible to witness. Near the end of their conversation, Hudson told Britt one thing to keep in mind: in perhaps half the cases of arsenic murders he’d examined, the killer had done it before—and that pattern and the ease with which arsenic murders escaped detection left him with little doubt that many of them would do it again.

Britt often padded about his office in his socks, his shirt collar unbuttoned, tie askew. Now he pulled on his shoes and, puffing on an ever present cigar, took the elevator from his second-floor office in the shiny new courthouse to the sheriffs department in the basement. He walked into the office of Malcolm McLeod, who had been sheriff of Robeson County for twenty-seven years and was beginning his last year before retirement.

“Sheriff,” Britt said, “we might have us an arsenic murder.”