Time's Witness (36 page)

Laura: “Mom, would you just
listen?
If I don’t have four big green sheets of poster board by tomorrow, I can’t do my science project, and I’ll flunk
out.
”

Nora: “They’re in a bag in the hall closet, sweetheart. Maybe Cuddy could help you with your project this evening. I bet he was
very good at science. Cuddy, would you? Oh, Isaac, I’m not sure about making too big a deal of defense's failure to object to state's introduction of prior criminal record. What do you think? I think we should drop it. Too many precedents for exceptions. Look here, for example,
N.C. vs. McClain
two forty (nineteen fifty-four).”

Brian: “No books at the table, Mommy. You
said!
Cuddy, she says we can never ever bring
our
books to the table.”

Isaac: “Nora, where's that transcript of the voir dire?”

Yep, general conversation didn’t have a chance. My hostess and host talked shop, read shop, wrote shop, and pretty much ate shop. The budding firm of Rosethorn and Howard must have had to ship its appeal briefs to Raleigh in a tractor trailer. Those briefs were longer than the United States Constitution on which their favorite points were based. But in the end, as Isaac had predicted, when the court finally set aside the first verdict against George Hall and granted a new trial, it was not because his Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law had been violated by a biased judge and an all-white jury, nor because his Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment had been violated by his receiving a death penalty conviction for a homicide that was not of an “unusually heinous nature,” that was devoid of “malice aforethought” or “cool deliberation,” and that resulted from “a situation of mutual combat” (regarding which, Isaac and Nora listed four precedents of similar cases in which the charge was not first-, but second-degree murder; fifteen precedents in which the charge was not even homicide, but manslaughter—most involving black victims of black assailants; six precedents in which the defendant was found not guilty by reason of self-defense—white assailants, white victims; and two in which the charges were simply dropped—white assailants, black victims). All these heavy-duty arguments failed to elicit much comment from the justices one way or another.

No, George appears to have gotten a new trial because N.C. General Statute 9:6-1 had been violated in his old trial: that's the law that says everybody has a right to a jury who can hear what's going on. And Isaac was able to demonstrate that juror number nine, one Darwin Wheelwright (perhaps out of the same pride that
had kept him from admitting he was deaf until after he lost his job, got hit by a motorcycle, and sued his ENT surgeon), juror number nine had answered falsely when he replied no to the question of whether or not he had any physical impairment that might handicap him from well and truly trying the case. In Mr. Wheelwright's defense, maybe he hadn’t meant to perjure himself, but had just misheard the question.

So Isaac got his new trial. And his new judge. He got Judge Shirley Hilliardson (it's a male name in these parts, and Shirley Hilliardson was definitely male, though less definitely human, for his cold-eyed face resembled a falcon's, and his thin elongated frame, a crane's). Most lawyers I knew hated Hilliardson, but Isaac claimed to be pleased, and would rub his hands together so fast and long you’d start waiting for spontaneous combustion to incinerate them as he crowed, “If I have to have a judge with a missing organ, I prefer it to be the heart, not the brain. Shirley Hilliardson has a brain. He knows his law. Ah, Slim, I can smell it! The heat and dust of battle is in my nostrils!”

Despite this eager snuffling of war, as soon as a date was set for the opening of the trial, Rosethorn launched another marathon paper drive to have it postponed. He won that skirmish too. In his request for a continuance, I was one of the culprits. The state of Delaware was another one, for taking so long to decide if they’d lend him Arthur “Moonfoot” Butler for the day, so he could put him on the witness stand. I was presumably among the law enforcement officials who had failed so far to locate one Winston Russell so that Isaac could subpoena him. I was more concerned that I hadn’t been able to serve Russell with warrants for his arrest on two counts of first-degree murder. I wanted Russell more than Isaac did, and Isaac was the least of all the reasons why I wanted him. I wanted him for the Halls, for Jordan West, for Carl Yarborough. I wanted him for me, and maybe most of all, I wanted him for, well, I guess you could call it the reputation of the Hillston Police Department.

In January, in conjunction with the FBI and the Justice Department, HPD went public with part of our case: we charged Russell and Purley Newsome both with extortion, robbery, the sale of stolen goods, felonious use of the interstate highway system, the
murder of William Slidell, and conspiracy to deprive Cooper Hall of his civil rights by bringing about his death. We also charged them both with attempting to murder me.

By now, we’d made a fairly good reconstruction of the two men's last day in Hillston. On the morning of December 26, Officer DiMallo had mentioned to Purley that homicide had pulled a murder victim out of the Shocco River. On the evening of the twenty-sixth, Purley had been visiting his brother Otis's office on the second floor of the municipal building; he then had waltzed into HPD, cleared out his locker (Officer Titus Baker: “I didn’t think much about it, figured he was cleaning it up”), then had stolen Titus's patrolman hat. He must have left by way of the parking garage. Probably Winston was with him. Nobody noticed them hanging around, but cops don’t look at cops, and it turns out they were both wearing uniforms. They must have thrown the circuit breaker, then waited down there in the garage to see if they’d be lucky and I’d be dumb enough to walk alone in the dark to the far end where I kept my car. They were lucky.

Next they dropped by the Trinity Episcopal soup kitchen (where Purley asked three of the regulars if they knew where Billy Gilchrist was, and where Winston made himself memorable by knocking down a black panhandler who was leaning against the side door of his car—or rather, Purley's car, a new red Fiero). By this time the bulletin had gone out to all squad cars to bring Russell and Newsome in. Nobody did.

Near midnight on December 26, the new red Fiero—with two big light-haired men in it, not in uniform now—stopped for gas at a Texaco station on the 28 bypass, then headed east. The car was not seen again until it was found abandoned in a shopping mall parking lot near Spartanburg, South Carolina, on February 8. By then, of course, we’d offered a reward for information, and people were seeing the wanted killers everywhere: two men fitting our suspects’ descriptions held up an armored car outside a Winn-Dixie in Atlanta. The same day two men fitting their description held up a 7-Eleven in Danbury, Virginia, and molested the female clerk before robbing her. Neither lead worked out, and when the actual Danbury robbers were apprehended, and I saw their pictures,
they looked as much like my two guys as Justin and Zeke do. They were next “seen” simultaneously in Houston and Baltimore.

But finally the calls slowed down. Then silence. Purley didn’t show at his brother Otis's funeral, didn’t get in touch with his relatives or friends, didn’t use his credit cards, didn’t go to a hospital. He just disappeared. Sometimes I decided Winston had long since killed Purley the same way he (or they) had killed Willie Slidell. I even sent a search party back out to the Shocco. After three weeks, we dredged up one giant, largely disintegrated roll of Fanshaw paper, ten feet down-stream from where Wally had found the Ford Fairlane. Well, I could explain that paper now: Slidell had hidden the paper in his barn and filled the empty containers with whatever stolen goodies (guns, cigarettes) his partners had come up with for him to ship to their buyers. I could explain a lot of things, but I couldn’t find two men, themselves trained in surveillance, who didn’t want to be found. Just as anybody can kill a stranger without getting caught, anybody can hide among strangers without being seen. And the world is full of strangers.

Finally, even Mayor Yarborough grew hoarse with explaining that I was doing my best, that
I
hadn’t hired either of the suspects (one of whom had been thrown off the force five years ago anyhow), and that two rotten apples didn’t mean we should throw out the whole barrel. Finally, even the
Hillston Star
got tired of screaming KILLER COPS STILL AT LARGE, and even Carol Cathy Cane at Action News lost interest in leaping out at me with her microphone and demanding that I “produce the criminals who’ve shown the Hillston Police Department to be rife with corruption, racism, and brutality.”

Sad but true, Winston Russell and Purley Newsome were former Hillston police officers. Sad but true, I had not produced them. By late March, when Isaac's continuance expired and Hall's retrial finally began, I was under pressure from not only the D.A., but from his boss, the attorney general, and from
his
boss, the governor, to shut down the case until somebody somewhere else (a highway patrolman, an FBI field agent, an airline security guard, a good citizen) called up and said, “Hey, I just saw those two guys you’re after.” It wasn’t going to be somebody in Hillston, because I’d torn
Hillston apart looking. I’d also torn apart Willie Slidell's farm and its five square miles of surrounding woods. I wasn’t the first one to do it either. When Etham had gone back to check fingerprints, he’d found the place in shambles. Obviously, Russell and Newsome had slipped back in and gone through the house in a hurry, trying to find something. I didn’t know if they’d found it or not. Things you might have thought they’d be interested in they’d uncovered, but left. For example, loose floorboards had been pulled up in the back of the barn, and still lying exposed under them were twelve single-gauge shotguns, six .45 automatics, and two 9mm machine guns. We found traces of cocaine in a can of talcum powder in the open medicine cabinet, and a whole packet of it taped inside the toilet tank.

In the process of searching Slidell's house, we’d also come across a library of Ku Klux Klan literature, several newspaper clippings about George and Cooper Hall, quite a collection of smutty magazines, a lot of video camera equipment along with some smutty videotapes (one homemade, with two hookers whom I recognized). We’d found a sock with the Dollard Prison laundry marker on it, and in an old telephone directory, the underlined home number of the dead Fanshaw salesman Clark Koontz. In the fireplace, we’d found minute fragments of burnt cloth that had blood on them; we’d found a bloodstain in the crack of the woodwork on the kitchen wall, probably where Willie had slid down to the floor after he was shot. And in the drawer of a bureau, we’d found Polaroid photographs of the former Mrs. Slidell, taken in the nude in the days before she’d given up on Willie the Wimp. (They were in a cardboard box with the marriage license, the divorce papers, and three postcards she’d sent him from Myrtle Beach.) We staked out the farm in case Winston and Purley came back to look some more for whatever they were after. They didn’t.

I’d kept Russell's and Newsome's faces on the local news so much, they were as familiar as Johnny Carson to anybody in the area who’d ever owned a TV set. Both were big men, tall and bulky, but Winston's bulk was harder and tighter. Both were fair; Purley wore his yellowish blond hair long, and invariably hid his soft stupid blue eyes behind aviator sunglasses. Winston kept his reddish hair cropped short. He had almost no eyebrows, and the dead unblinking
eyes of a shark. I dreamed about them both.

Slidell's sister, Lana, the former Mrs. Bobby Pym, had been brought in for questioning so often her lawyer got a court order to enjoin HPD from “undue harassment.” She also wanted us to give her back Willie's tan station wagon, which we’d impounded when we found it abandoned near Pine Hills Lake. In the car was a packed suitcase, and in that, two wrapped Christmas presents, which made us think maybe Slidell really had planned to go try to patch things up with his ex-wife—one gift was a red lace nightgown and robe, the other was a Jane Fonda Workout videotape.

Justin had spent so many hours consoling the bewildered widow Mrs. Otis Newsome about her husband's suicide while trying to pry information from her about Purley's whereabouts that he’d gained three pounds from the carrot cake she always served him as she asked over and over, “Why didn’t Otis leave me a note, something to explain why? I can’t understand why he would do it, even if Purley is guilty of the things you’re saying. Why didn’t Otis talk to somebody, to
me?
” Justin decided that Mrs. Newsome was telling the truth. He still thought the widow Pym was lying about not knowing what her husband and brother had been up to with Russell.

We planted an article in the papers that a Mr. Billy Gilchrist was wanted for questioning about a suitcase said to have been stolen from a Raleigh bus station locker; then we sent Billy out on the street as bait, just in case Russell was still lurking around. Nothing happened except two former drinking buddies of Billy's tried to turn him in for a reward. I had the Georgia police doing surveillance in Russell's hometown, to the indignation of his relatives, who protested that they’d struck his name from the family Bible twenty years ago, hadn’t heard from him since, and hoped they never did hear from him. I had inquiries out along selected Fanshaw truck routes for possible buyers on the receiving end of those stolen shipments. Ten HPD officers had logged 1,205 hours of interviews with anybody they could find who’d ever met either of the suspects. We turned up nothing.

Well, that's not true. We found out more about Winston Russell and Purley Newsome than people generally get to know about each
other; enough to discourage those with any faith in human nature from ever wanting to pry into their neighbors’ secrets. We heard from people they’d bullied for sex and kickbacks, or just for the fun of it. We heard that they’d been known to socialize with members of the KKK. We learned that when Purley had closed out his bank account on the twenty-sixth, he’d had a little too much in it for a man living on a cop's salary. We learned there was riverbank mud still caught in the ridged soles of the shoes he’d washed, then tossed damp to the rear of his closet. We knew that when Winston was in Dollard Prison, he’d had fifteen visits from Purley, and that he’d bragged there that he had “a shitload of money” stashed waiting for him when he got out. (He also boasted that as soon as he was released, he was going to kill me for sending him up.) All we didn’t unearth, poking at the worms turned up under the rocks of Russell and Newsome's pasts, was their whereabouts. That, and their place in the puzzle.