Murder in Little Egypt (21 page)

She telephoned Uncle Eddie Bell in St. Louis and told him that her marriage was in trouble. She might have to move to St. Louis, but she was not yet sure how to manage it or whether she could convince the boys that it was necessary. She did not tell Uncle Eddie any details—how she had just about been thrown out into the street with her kids, how cold and peculiar Dale was acting—only that she was afraid that she and Dale might have to get a divorce. Uncle Eddie promised to do everything that he could to help. He wished her luck and offered his love. He hoped that things would work out.

At around nine-forty-five on the evening of Thursday, April 8, 1971, four days before Easter, Dale was driving out of Harrisburg on Route 34, heading for his Galatia farm. He drew up behind a Plymouth station wagon. He was alone in a borrowed Chevy El Camino pickup, an open bottle of Scotch whisky beside him on the seat. He swerved into the left lane to pass the station wagon and nearly hit an oncoming pickup, forcing it onto the shoulder to avoid a collision. He dropped back behind the Plymouth and, seconds later, started to pass it again. A coroner’s jury, working from police testimony and eyewitness accounts, pieced together what happened next:

We find that Donald Ray McLaskey (29) and Deidrea Loraine McLaskey (10 months) came to their deaths by reckless homicide in which Dr. Dale Cavaness, going north, approximately three miles north of Harrisburg, first struck the left rear fender of a Plymouth driving north; then the Cavaness truck traveled to the left into the south lane and struck the McLaskey car coming south, hitting it with a strong impact, demolishing the truck and McLaskey’s car, killing McLaskey and Deidrea Loraine McLaskey. The evidence showed that Dr. Cavaness was driving while intoxicated.

Deputy Sheriff Jim Mings, on his way home from Harrisburg to Raleigh, came upon the scene immediately afterward and radioed for help. He saw the crumpled wreck of the McLaskeys’ car sitting in the road with a baby, obviously dead, impaled on the outside mirror. A man lay dead on the pavement. Inside the car a woman, unconscious or dead, was rolled up in a ball on the floor, her head covered in blood.

The deputy ran down the road toward a man, a woman and two children who were huddled together near the remains of their station wagon at the bottom of an embankment. A hundred feet farther along, lodged in some trees beside the road, was an El Camino. The front end and windshield were smashed; the driver still sat behind the wheel. He was talking loudly, nonstop, apparently uninjured but delirious. The deputy approached, smelled liquor.

“Are you hurt?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the man in the El Camino said. “I’ve got plenty of insurance.” He continued babbling.

At Doctors’ Hospital in Harrisburg, Dale was too drunk to sign his name but coherent enough to refuse to take a blood test. His leg was banged up; otherwise he was unscathed, and he kept saying that there was nothing to worry about because he had plenty of insurance. Investigators at the scene had already found the bottle of Cutty Sark Scotch, about one-quarter full. They also recovered a loaded .357 magnum pistol and a shotgun, cased and loaded with the safety off.

Detective Jack T. Nolen of the Illinois Department of Criminal Investigation and State’s Attorney Archie Bob Henderson entered Dale’s hospital room at about fifteen minutes past midnight, two and a half hours after the moment of the accident. Dale was being attended by a doctor and a nurse. Nolen and Henderson demanded that Dale submit to a blood test. They did not tell him that the other two drivers, dead and alive, had been tested.

“What is this?” Dale complained, slurring his speech. “Aren’t we all friends here? Aren’t we supposed to be friends?” He stared at the other doctor.

“Not when death is involved,” the doctor said, inserting the needle. This was the first Dale had been told of the deaths. “Don’t you understand that two people are dead? A father and his baby? The mother is critical. She’s in a coma.”

“Everybody’s got to die sometime,” Dale said.

The doctor and the others withdrew from the room in silence, not looking at one another.

Dale’s blood registered 0.24 alcoholic content, 0.10 being sufficient proof under Illinois law to show that a person was intoxicated, 0.30 considered potentially lethal. Dale had had nearly two and a half hours to sober up before the blood sample was taken. At the time of the accident, he must have had enough Scotch in him to make almost anyone else pass out. He was cited for drunk driving, illegal transportation of liquor, improper overtaking on the left, and unlawful use of weapons.

Two weeks later the Saline County coroner’s jury brought in its double verdict of reckless homicide against Dale. Dorothy McLaskey, the mother of the dead baby girl, emerged from her coma on the Saturday after the accident, but lapsed into unconsciousness again when a nurse told her that her husband and daughter were dead. She was conscious again on Monday, the day after Easter, and she slowly recovered physically.

To the surprise of most of the citizens of Saline County, the grand jury indicted Dr. John Dale Cavaness on two counts of reckless homicide. He faced a prison term, but few people thought he would ever serve a day. He knew too many important folks; and his lawyer, J. C. Mitchell of Marion, was well-connected and clever. No one was surprised when Dale entered a not-guilty plea.

Marian learned of the accident late on the night of the event when Dale’s chief nurse at Pearce Hospital, Emma Lou Mitchell, telephoned her at the trailer.

“Have you heard about Dale? It’s terrible. He’s been in an accident. Two people were killed, maybe three. He’s all right. He’s over at Doctors’ Hospital.”

Marian called the hospital and managed to get through to a doctor she knew there, who told her that Dale was drunk out of his mind. It was a disaster. He seemed to have no idea what he had done.

Emma Lou Mitchell had said nothing about Dale’s being drunk, nothing about his being possibly responsible for the deaths. She had spoken of Dale as if he had been the victim. To Marian, Emma Lou’s attitude was predictable. Marian had once in a moment of desperation asked Emma Lou whether she thought Dale was going off his rocker, and Emma Lou had looked at Marian as if she had blasphemed.

A detailed account of the accident, including a photograph of the McLaskeys’ car and statements by state troopers that Dale had been drunk, carrying liquor in his car and transporting loaded weapons, appeared the next day in the Harrisburg
Daily Register.
The article strongly implied Dale’s culpability. But immediately Dale’s patients began telephoning Marian with their sympathies—not for Marian and the family but for Dale. We all know what a wonderful man he is, they said. Tell him that we stand by him in this. Please tell Dr. Cavaness that he is our doctor and that he will always be our doctor and that we don’t hold this against him.

Marian wondered what it would take to get Dale’s patients to hold anything against him. He was God to them. But surely some patients would defect now? Surely some would have second thoughts once they had time to think?

When Dale showed up at the trailer a few days later, Marian searched for signs of contrition, worry, shock—but he nattered on as usual about cattle and catfish.

“Dale,” Marian said, “do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“Yeah, I know, sure,” he said. “What about it?”

“But Dale. Those poor people. And what about yourself? Do you know what you’re doing to yourself? Do you know what this could mean?”

“As long as I have my little black bag, I’ll be just fine.”

His little black bag. Marian was conscious of standing there with her mouth open. She managed to mumble something about his patients’ losing confidence in him.

“My patients? Are you kidding? You couldn’t drive them away with a stick!”

13

WHAT VIOLENCE, ADULTERY AND NEGLECT HAD FAILED TO accomplish, being forced to live in trailers and having Dale indicted for reckless homicide finally did. Marian had become so beaten down, paralyzed by losing her husband and then her house, that she had begun to wonder whether she would have to live like an unemployed miner’s wife forever, with no decent clothes, her children at loose ends, ashamed to face her friends, waiting for nightfall so she could sit alone in the dark and pray for sleep. Finally she was shocked into action. She made plans to get out of Eldorado as quickly as she could.

She accepted that Dale had no intention of building her and his sons another house. He behaved as if he cared no more for her and his children than for the victims of the accident, and she was frightened. The lack of public reaction against him, the loyalty of his patients, of Pearce Hospital, of the whole town seemed to have added to his sense of omnipotence as the untouchable doctor. He was bound to crash, and Marian did not want herself or her children around to suffer the aftereffects. It occurred to her that Dale might do almost anything, especially when he was drunk. The man was not normal: She did not pretend to know what normal was, but he was not it.

Marian’s anxiety climbed. Alone at night in the trailer with Patrick, she bolted the door and began letters to her brother: “Dear Bill . . . Things have reached a crisis . . . I am worried about Dale . . . I am frightened of him . . . he drives around with loaded guns, drunk all the time . . . I should have known all this years ago . . . if anything should happen to me, please . . .” but she tore the letters up. There was no other way out but to make a complete break. Why alarm her brother, when it was up to her to act?

St. Louis was the natural refuge. She made several trips to the city to scout around for a job and a house. With Eddie Bell’s help she found a beautiful old farmhouse on Conway Road in Chester-field, a suburb with a reputation for excellent public schools; and she landed a job at Barnes Hospital in the Education Department, training new nurses in hospital procedure. The farmhouse was partially furnished, the rent four hundred a month. Her job, which the hospital agreed to hold open for her until September, when the boys would start the new school year, would pay nine dollars an hour. Dale would be forced to fork over some child support, especially if she filed for divorce in St. Louis. She and the boys would survive. They would start a new life.

Marian told the boys that they were leaving in August. They were miserable. Mark would be starting his senior year in high school, Kevin his sophomore year; they did not want to leave their friends, and Kevin’s brief, unpleasant experience at Chaminade had given him a jaundiced view of St. Louis. Sean especially was upset at leaving his father. And what about Grandpa Peck? Who would take them hunting and fishing, and where would they go in the city? Only Patrick was able to see the move as an adventure: He would be starting fresh in kindergarten. Marian’s pep talks about the cultural advantages of St. Louis met with indifference or worse. She tried selling them on St. Louis Cardinals baseball. They grew sullen. She worried that they would blame her for uprooting them, forgetting that it was Dale who had broken up the marriage. Marian chose not to reveal all her reasons for fearing and mistrusting Dale, hoping that the boys would eventually understand.

Dale did nothing to discourage her from leaving, but on the last day he showed up to say good-bye as she was packing their few belongings into the car.

“You’re taking my boys from me,” he said, and he started to cry. Marian could hardly believe it.

“Dale, what are
you
crying for? You’re the one who left. I never wanted this. Stop crying. I don’t want the boys to see you.”

She felt herself wavering, feeling sorry for him; but she was determined not to fall for this show. It was too late. Dale stopped the tears, wiping his eyes.

“Why don’t you leave me two of the boys?” he said. “You take Mark and Kevin. I’ll keep Sean and Pat.”

“What? Are you out of your mind? For God’s sake, Dale, if you want to see Mark through his senior year, that’s one thing. Mark’s the one who probably needs to stay more than any of them. Mark would stay if he could, I think.”

“Oh, no,” Dale said. “Not Mark. You know I’ve never gotten along with Mark. I can’t have Mark stay here. I’d kill him.”

And Dale got into his car and left without saying good-bye to the boys.

You can count on Dale to make things as difficult as possible, Marian thought. But at least he had shown some feeling, mixed-up though it was. He had no idea what he wanted, that was his trouble. He achieved everything and then threw it away. She did feel sorry for him. He had made such a mess of his life. But he would still see the boys, she would make sure of that, on vacations and holidays. Raising boys without a father always led to disaster. Apart from his children, he would appreciate them more. People always did.

Just as they were piling into the car, Peck drove up. The boys rushed toward their grandpa and threw themselves at him. Marian thought it strange but not altogether surprising that Noma had not deigned to see them off. True to form, Marian thought. She probably blames me for everything.

Grandpa Peck broke down. He was too old to endure such a parting, too full of love for ·his boys, for whom he had tried to do so much. He cried uncontrollably, propped against his old Plymouth, his boys around him, hugging him, tugging at him. Marian had to turn away.

“I’ll never see you again,” Grandpa was saying. “Oh, oh, this is terrible. I’ll never see you again before I die.”

“No, Grandpa, no,” Kevin pleaded. “We’ll see you soon. We’ll come back, Grandpa, honest we will.”

Marian filed for divorce in December of 1971. After a hearing later that winter, Dale agreed to pay three hundred dollars a month per child until each was eighteen. Marian did not ask for alimony. She did not wish to be more dependent on Dale than she had to be, and she figured that, with her take-home pay of about twelve hundred a month, she would be able to make it.

And she did, except when Dale’s checks were late or bounced, as often happened, and she would have to write him or try to get him on the phone and borrow money from Eddie Bell or others to see her through the month. He never paid for extras like clothing or books. Four boys ate a lot.