Almost Midnight (17 page)

For Tom the whole business had been maddening. It wasn’t just the meth that disturbed him but the violence that went with it. During one recent stretch there had been almost a homicide a week on Lloyd’s drug turf. And now this. At least one thing, apparently, had changed—it wasn’t Lloyd’s turf any longer.

Driving down U.S. 160 past Highlandville, entering Ozark country now, Tom couldn’t help thinking of Harley Sparks. It was too bad Harley was back at his office in Kansas City. It would have been nice having him along. Harley was one of a kind. Most DEA agents wanted nothing to do with the Ozarks. It was a tough gig, stamping around in the backwoods, lying out in the brush for days and nights on end doing surveillance, sneaking up on meth labs at remote farmhouses and converted pig barns not knowing if they were booby-trapped with explosives. And the odor—that putrefying, death-and-urine stench that was the surest sign of meth being cooked. While other DEA agents were avoiding the job like the plague, Harley couldn’t seem to get enough of it. For as long as Tom could remember, Harley had been working the Ozarks, spending nights in twelve-dollar motels, living out of a suitcase. Maybe it was the country boy in him (he’d been raised on a farm outside Konawa, Oklahoma), but Harley never complained about the rough going. Tom hated to think where they would have been without him. Practically every week, he and Jack could count on Harley making the drive down from Kansas City eager for another stint in the field. It was a comforting sight, tall and lanky Harley, even-tempered Harley, with glasses and thinning gray-brown hair, showing up at Troop D headquarters on a Monday morning with a fistful of case folders and a shoulder holster bulging with his 9 mm Sig Sauer. Maybe they weren’t winning the meth war, Tom thought, but one thing was for sure: without Harley Sparks they’d have lost it a long time ago.

When Tom arrived, Jack was already on the scene gathering evidence: shell casings, cigarette butts, the usual stuff, flushing bits of brain out of the creek.

“It’s a bad one, Tommy,” he said.

Jack was in his early forties, tall and fit, and an accomplished investigator. He was born in the front room of a farmhouse in Christian County south of Springfield, and he’d been with the Highway Patrol in various capacities since 1970. A deeply religious man, a deacon in his Baptist church in Springfield, he didn’t drink or smoke or gallivant (nor did Tom, for that matter), but he did have a devilish streak in him. Whereas Tom was all business, twelve hours a day, half an hour off for lunch, Jack was an irrepressible prankster. If you hung out with Jack, you’d want to be on your guard; you never knew when he was going to strike next. Just a few months earlier, Jack and Tom had been in Webster County investigating a multiple homicide. A dairy farmer named James Schnick had shot and killed seven family members, including his four young nephews. They were at the Schnick farmhouse in Elkland with Webster County sheriff Eugene Fraker the day after the killings looking for evidence. It was late, coming on midnight, and old Sheriff Fraker was worn slick from all the work and pressure. He lay back on a couch, thinking he’d just stretch out and relax for a couple of minutes, but he was soon fast asleep, snoring with his mouth wide open. Jack snapped a photo of Fraker in this indecorous pose and the next day had it blown up and kiddingly threatened to use it against the sheriff in his reelection campaign.

Tom was the supervisor of the Troop D crime unit, and in most respects a demanding boss, but he didn’t seem to mind Jack’s penchant for practical joking. For one thing, it helped ease the built-in pressures of the job. At the time of the Schnick killings, he and Jack had half a dozen other homicides in their active files. This was nothing unusual—just par for the course. If not for Jack’s occasional pranks, the endless diet of tragedy may have been too tough to take.

Tom wasn’t the kind of cop who stoked up his reputation with big talk and bravado. He didn’t clamor to be noticed. He was also a country boy, raised on a farm in Pulaski County, the third of eight kids, and he’d spent fifteen years working the roads as a trooper before transferring to criminal investigations. He was going on fifty
now but he wore the years well: six feet tall, weighing 180 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair, ruddy complexion, and a country twang to his speech that nicely understated his sharpness of mind. Tom had made his mark in the DDCC through quiet persistence, cultivating informants, chasing down every imaginable lead, refusing to give up even on cases that weeks of intensive investigation hadn’t made a dent in. He was at his best out in the field, interviewing people, digging up information. He could be ornery when the occasion called for it, but usually he took an easy-does-it, hands-in-the-pockets approach. He knew you generally didn’t get very far trying to run over country people with a gun and a badge.

Tom told Jack he’d do some looking around and hook up with him later. He walked from the creek back to the road leading to Lloyd’s cabin. By now there were almost as many newspeople as lawmen on the scene. Dennis Graves, the lead correspondent for KY3 TV, the NBC affiliate in Springfield, had arrived with his crew and was wrapping up an interview with Chuck Keithley. He caught Tom’s eye. Tom liked Dennis, and admired his persistence and resourcefulness. He’d always thought Dennis would have made a terrific criminal investigator. Right now, however, he wasn’t feeling up to facing the cameras. Tom corralled Chip Mason, who was also now on the scene, and they headed off for Rocky Redford’s house at the dead end of County Road 160–10, just half a mile away. Maybe Rocky would be able to give them something solid.

But Rocky wasn’t living there any longer. The new tenant, a man from Kimberling City named Donald Ousley, said he’d never laid eyes on the guy. He’d heard that Rocky had moved out in a big hurry some time ago.

Later on, back at the office, Tom and Jack compared notes. They both had Darrell pegged as a prime suspect, largely because of what Rocky had told Chip and Jim Justus a few months earlier. If Lloyd had been intent on killing Darrell, there was a good chance Darrell would have found out about it and decided to cut Lloyd off at the pass. Another strong possibility was Richard Gerald Williamson, whom Lloyd had ratted out in federal court back in 1984. They’d definitely want to track these guys down for questioning. But there
was no sense at this stage zeroing in on just one or two individuals. Lloyd had moved in violent circles; the shooter could have been almost anyone.

First thing Tuesday morning Tom drove to Shell Knob. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to, so soon after the killings, but he knew he had to touch base with Lloyd’s children.

Buck and David Lawrence lived on farms just outside of town, a quarter mile apart. Buck, at forty, was the older of the two, and the oldest of Lloyd and Frankie’s five children; he was also young Willie’s dad. Tom interviewed the brothers separately but heard pretty much the same things from both. The Lawrence family got along well together—no major conflicts, no festering wounds. Many of them, Buck and David included, were active in the Jehovah’s Witness church over in Cassville. They’d occasionally suspected their father of being involved in some kind of illegal activity, but he’d always denied it. If pressed, he’d insist that he made all his money cockfighting. And Darrell Mease? Well, a short while ago Lloyd had told them that Darrell had ripped him off for a substantial amount of money. He was clearly upset about it. It seemed he intended to kill Darrell, or have someone do it for him. He said that when he found him Darrell would be “alligator bait.”

Tom met with Retha Lawrence, who had discovered the bodies two days before, and then with Retha’s older sister Rita. Rita, thirty-two, lived with her husband on a farm near Lloyd and Frankie’s place. She told Tom that her father had raped her when she was sixteen years old, and that he’d also raped her sister Rosemary, who was a year older. The two sisters had gone to Galena and signed a complaint against Lloyd. He was arrested and tried in Stone County court but wasn’t convicted. Their mother left him when the rape allegations first came to light, but she soon came back and took his side. Since then, Rita said, she’d had only limited contact with her father. She did know, however, that he’d been involved for years with a woman from Crane, Missouri, named Dorothy Mangold. The affair had been an open secret: everyone in the family knew about it but had carried on as if they didn’t.

Tom tracked Rosemary down in Bentonville, Arkansas, where
she was living with her husband, Steven. Yes, it was true, Rosemary said. Their father had raped her and Rita when they were teenagers. She had left home immediately after the incident and hadn’t spoken with him since.

“Do you think your father ever felt sorry for what he did to you?” Tom asked.

“As far as I can tell, he never felt sorry about anything he did.”

“How did your mother feel about what happened?”

“Well, she stayed with him, didn’t she?”

“Did you ever hear anything about your father being involved with illegal drug activity?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was. Nothing would surprise me about him.”

Back at the office, Tom puzzled it through. The Lawrences clearly weren’t the best-adjusted bunch, but he seriously doubted the triple homicide was the work of a family member. It had all the earmarks of an execution-style slaying, which meant it was most likely tied in with local drug interests. Lloyd would have been the primary target; Frankie and Willie just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Darrell remained an obvious suspect but Tom was committed to keeping an open mind. There were plenty of other people he wanted interviewed. Who knew what might show up down the road?

Tom realized he and Jack had a lot of ground to cover in a short while, more than they could probably cover on their own, so he put in a call for assistance to the Highway Patrol’s Troop G detachment in Willow Springs. Doug Loring and Carl Watson worked the crime unit in Troop G, and over the years they’d always been more than happy to lend a helping hand. Doug and Carl were big country boys, offensive-line size, and sharp investigators in their own right. They were also good and decent men, not an ounce of pretension between them. They were responsible for nine rough and scraggly counties in the southern Ozarks. Two of their counties had sheriffs who couldn’t read; all of them were sprouting meth labs like wild-flowers. Helping out from time to time on Tom and Jack’s turf wasn’t much of a stretch.

Doug and Carl started by interviewing Darrell’s first wife, Joyce, who was now working at the Hillbilly One Stop service station on U.S. 160 at Highlandville. Joyce said she thought Darrell “was capable of doing the Lawrence killings” and recounted how he had once sprayed the hood of her car with bullets. She said that her husband, John, believed he’d seen Darrell recently in the Reeds Spring area driving a gray-and-blue Ford Grenada. She also said that she’d gone over to Galena recently and filed a complaint against Darrell for failure to pay child support. He had paid $375 in December but not a penny since. She said that the Stone County authorities had responded to her complaint by issuing a warrant for Darrell’s arrest.

While Doug was at the courthouse in Galena checking on Joyce’s story, Carl went to Crane and met with Dorothy Mangold in her trailer home. Was it true, Carl asked, that she’d been Lloyd’s longtime lover? Yes, Dorothy said, she’d known Lloyd for thirty-two years, since she was nineteen.

“I was a secret. My family knew about Lloyd but Lloyd’s wife and children didn’t know about me.”

She said that Lloyd would come to her place up to three times a week and they’d also make frequent trips to cockfights in Arizona, Oklahoma, and North Carolina. He’d spent the night with her on Friday, May 13, and had left about nine Saturday morning. This was the last time she saw Lloyd alive. She found out about his murder while watching television the next evening.

“Were you aware of Lloyd’s drug dealing?” Carl asked.

“No, this is a complete surprise. But Lloyd never talked business with me.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”

“I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt Lloyd,” Dorothy said. “He was very easygoing. I never heard of him having trouble with anyone.”

Sure, Carl thought. Real believable.

The first week after the murders Tom and his team turned over every imaginable stone. Most of the local bad guys admitted hearing rumors of Lloyd’s meth empire, but that was it: just grapevine stuff, nothing else.

“Sure, I heard things, but I wasn’t involved. What do I know?”

“Hey, I had nothing against Lloyd. Why would I be interested in seeing him dead?”

“Come on, Tom, you know me. I wouldn’t have anything to do with killing Lloyd. Anyway, I was out fishing when this deal went down. You don’t believe me, I’ll come in for a lie detector.”

Some of his closest friends, including Travis Clark, insisted that Lloyd was a prince of a guy, a regular country gentleman, and that he’d been unfairly saddled with a bad reputation. No way was Lloyd involved in any illegal activity. This was just a smear campaign. To know Lloyd was to love him.

Tom and his team contacted Darrell’s dad and younger brother. R.J. said he hadn’t seen Darrell in five months and had no idea how to get in touch with him. It was his understanding Darrell had fled the state in order to avoid paying child support. Larry said he hadn’t seen Darrell since Christmas and sometime before then he’d told him not to come around the house any longer. He didn’t approve of the company Darrell was keeping. Larry knew Lloyd and his cronies; he knew they were dangerous men. If trouble arose between Darrell and Lloyd, he didn’t want his wife and kids getting stuck in the middle of it.

John Prine, the new kid in the Troop D crime unit, tracked down Roger Widner in Oak Grove, Arkansas. Roger admitted that he and Lloyd had barged into Rocky Redford’s house at gunpoint several months back. They’d thought Darrell might be hiding out with Rocky. He said he’d seen Lloyd at the coffee shop in Blue Eye a few days before he was murdered. Lloyd was in good spirits. There was no telling who’d want to kill Lloyd, he said.