Dark and Bloody Ground (34 page)

That night the gang headed down the coast. When Roger bought the MR2 for Carol, Sherry ventured to inquire whether he wasn’t acting sort of impulsive. But he was too drunk and stoned to listen or care. On Monday, August 12, he paid Pat Mason another eleven thousand-plus for a 1985 Dodge van that he said his partner in the dry-walling business would pick up later that week. He gave Mason another two thousand to install a mobile phone and engage an answering service.

The trouble with the other van, Roger said, was that the sound system in it was lousy. He decided that the men should make a run back up to Ormond Beach to get a new one installed and to close up the condo. Sherry accused them of wanting to do nothing more than party away from their women and warned that they were taking too much of a chance going back; but they shouted her down, and she agreed to wait for them with Carol and Becky in Miami. They were about to leave when Donnie discovered that he had left his case of money under the bed at the Tiki Motel in Hallandale. At this, Sherry managed to convince everyone to let her, the only one with a clear head, take charge of most of the rest of the cash, lest they lose it or spend it. Sheepish for once, they agreed to trust her. “You so cool,” Donnie said, “you ain’t even human.”

On her own, Sherry deposited the three pilot’s cases in a locker at a Hallandale ministorage located behind the Ramada Inn. She told no one of the location, keeping the key in her jeans, and did not mention that she had skimmed about twelve thousand from Roger and Carol’s
share—fair payment for services rendered, she figured, and for putting up with their aggravation.

At Hollywood, just north of Hallandale, the Triumph broke down and had to be towed to a garage, where no one could make it work.

“Fucking English,” Roger said, climbing into the van for the rest of the trip. “From now on I’m buying American, or Jap.”

He did not wait long. On the outskirts of Daytona he spotted a 1963 Corvette parked at a body shop. “That’s it,” he said. “That baby’s been waiting for me.” He still had the attaché case full of cash. The car needed some work, so he put eleven thousand down and agreed to pay the six-thousand-dollar balance when he picked it up.

It must have been just about the time that Donnie remembered that he had left his money under a bed that, a thousand miles or so away in Kentucky, investigators at the laboratory in Frankfort discovered the importance of something else he had forgotten. The lab technicians had been working day and night since Friday, processing hundreds of fingerprints taken from the Acker house. None had matched those of any of the three suspects; the murder weapon had yielded no prints at all. The technicians had paid special attention to the black attaché case supposedly left behind, but had found nothing on it, nor on the plastic card found inside.

A new “superglue” technique, however, finally yielded two promising prints from the plastic baggie inside the briefcase. Comparison with the prints on record of the suspects determined that those from the baggie matched the right thumb and right ring finger of Donald Terry Bartley.

“Not that we had any doubts,” Lt. Webb commented when he examined the prints, “but it was real thoughtful of those fellows to leave us some solid evidence, wasn’t it? Now all we got to do is find the bastards.” He informed Rod Kincaid; the FBI issued arrest warrants and in its internal memos and bulletins gave the case the code name ACKMUR.

As head of the London FBI station, a suite of offices in a bank building on Main Street—six agents and a secretary-receptionist who sat behind bulletproof glass and a steel door—Kincaid’s responsibility was for all of Eastern Kentucky, which made him one of the busiest agents in the country. It was he who organized undercover and other operations against the endless succession of corrupt sheriffs and
interstate theft and narcotics rings and various fugitives who used the mountains as hideouts and strongholds. Throughout the Bureau, as within the IRS and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Drug Enforcement Agency, it was agreed that being a federal agent in the mountains of Kentucky and East Tennessee was about as hairy a job as you could find. You did not win any popularity contests.

As different as Special Agent Kincaid was in personality from Lt. Webb—more methodical than instinctive; more restrained than ebullient; inclined to build a case piece by piece rather than to act on a hunch—he was also an Eastern Kentucky native and knew the area equally well, if through conscientious study more than through spontaneous personal contacts. Nor was there anything of the country boy about Wilburn R. Kincaid, the name under which his home phone number was listed in the Somerset public directory. Informants often rang Danny Webb at home; hardly anyone connected Rod Kincaid with Wilburn R., and few would have thought that a major FBI agent would have a listed home number anyway. Kincaid liked it that way; he tried to keep his work as separate as possible from his home life. His wife had her own work, teaching mentally and physically handicapped children; the Kincaids’ own three children were still in school, the youngest preparing to enter the University of Louisville. With a B.A. in English literature from Eastern Kentucky University, Kincaid himself could easily have gone undercover as an English professor. About five-ten, with sandy, wavy hair and bright blue eyes, he spoke deliberately, precisely, in an orotund baritone, with no regional accent and with an absence of local idiom. His favorite spare-time reading was H. L. Mencken’s three-volume
The American Language.
Making notes at his desk, he might have been preparing for a Mark Twain seminar, except for the loaded shotgun propped in a corner.

On Tuesday morning, August 13, Kincaid sat behind his desk studying the bill of sale for a 1978 blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 four-door sedan. The price was twenty-four hundred dollars, “cash on delivery.” The receipt was dated June 18, 1985, and the buyer’s signature was Carol Malone. Mrs. Quanita W. Bowles, owner of Earl Bowles Used Cars, had telephoned Kincaid’s office earlier that morning to volunteer that Roger Epperson, whom she had known for some time through his father, had come to her lot earlier that summer and had bought the Olds. He had been driving a Thunderbird and had been accompanied by an Oriental woman, who had signed the receipt.

As Kincaid noted how closely the Olds matched descriptions of the car involved in ACKMUR and that the date of the receipt was within two days of the Gray Hawk killings, giving credence to Danny Webb’s connection of the crimes, he took a call from another woman who wished to volunteer information about Epperson. She was reluctant to give her name, because she said that if her husband knew that she was talking to the FBI, he would beat her. She was telephoning from a pay phone.

Kincaid asked the woman if she would meet him at the London KSP post. She said that she would be there in half an hour.

The woman arrived looking frightened. She said that the only reason she was coming forward was that she feared that if she had information and concealed it, she could be prosecuted; but she didn’t know whether to be more afraid of the FBI or of her husband, who would be glad of an excuse to whip her. Kincaid, introducing himself and the assistant commander of the KSP post, assured her that her identity would be kept secret.

Haltingly she revealed that she knew where a car belonging to Roger Epperson was. It was a Thunderbird. Epperson had left it behind several weeks before and had driven away in a blue four-door car.

“Did he say where he was going?” Kincaid asked.

“I didn’t talk to him. I just seen it, is all.”

Kincaid suspected that fear of her husband was causing the woman to hold back. He suggested to her that she might have heard a rumor about where Epperson was headed. If he had bought a different car, he must have been planning to drive somewhere. Had she heard anything? Even secondhand gossip would do.

“Florida,” the woman said. “I heard they was going to Florida.”

Kincaid dispatched two other agents to find the T-bird and obtain permission to search it. He alerted all Florida FBI stations to be on the lookout for an Olds with Kentucky plates and for the fugitives: the woman had not been able to say where in Florida they might have been headed, and they might no longer be there, but it was a start.

As Kincaid dictated a full account, known in the Bureau as a “302” report, of the interview, he received word that the T-bird had been found in Mt. Vernon and that a search of the glove compartment had yielded an “insurance due” notice dated June 17, addressed to Roger Dale Epperson at Lake City, Tennessee; and a resumé and personal data sheet on Carol Keeney Ellis of Clinton, Tennessee.

Kincaid put in a call to Danny Webb.

*    *    *

At that moment Lt. Webb was in a trailer home at Delphia, in the southeast corner of Perry County, interviewing Tom McDowell, whom Webb guessed Roger Epperson may have had reason to visit during the days before the Acker murder. The lieutenant’s hunch proved correct. Tom McDowell acknowledged that Epperson and two other men, one about six feet and stocky, the other small and dark, had driven up to the trailer the previous week in a big blue car that had clothes hanging in the back. Epperson had told him that they had just driven up from Florida, where they had been in contact with McDowell’s brother, Travis, in the Daytona Beach area.

“Is that right,” Danny Webb said. “You wouldn’t have a phone number for Travis, would you, Tom?”

McDowell said that his brother was a musician who played five or six instruments and moved around a lot from gig to gig. His mother might know where he was. She was also in Florida.

Webb telephoned Mrs. McDowell, who said that her son Travis was working a construction job at the Holiday Inn in Orlando. The lieutenant reached the manager of the inn and asked to speak to a worker named Travis McDowell. It took about five minutes for Travis to come to the phone. The lieutenant began with pleasantries, how he was up visiting Tom, was the weather great in Florida.

“Tell me something, Travis. We know you’ve seen old Roger Epperson down there, around Daytona, wasn’t it?”

Travis did not answer. Webb pressed him, in a fairly friendly way. Travis finally admitted that he had run into Epperson at the Pelican Lounge and at Castaways, where Travis had been sitting in with the band. He had also been to a party at a place in Ormond Beach that Roger had rented.

“Where was that?”

“Chipwood. Chippinwood. Something. It’s near the beach.”

“Who was at that party?”

“There was a man there everyone called Ben. This guy showed me a weapon looked like a damn machine gun. Roger showed me all this police stuff he had. There was a Oriental girl there.”

“So Roger’s got this place and he hangs around the Pelican Lounge?”

“Yeah.”

“Travis, I want you to do me a favor. Are you heading back to Daytona anytime soon?”

“Tomorrow. This here job’s about done.”

“When you get back to Daytona, will you not say anything about talking to me when you run into those guys, and will you call the FBI office in Daytona?”

He agreed.

Lt. Webb telephoned Rod Kincaid from the Hazard post and told him about this hot new lead. Webb said that he could not guarantee that Travis McDowell would contact the Bureau, but he thought he would.

“We can’t take a chance and we can’t wait,” Kincaid said. “We’re going to move right now.”

As soon as he was off the phone with Lt. Webb, Kincaid contacted Special Agent Bill Fluherty, a seventeen-year FBI veteran who from 1979 through 1984 had been in charge of security for the Attorney General of the United States and for the Director of the FBI. Fluherty was now supervisor of the Jacksonville office, headquarters for northern and central Florida. Kincaid explained how ACKMUR had broken open in the past few minutes, thanks to Danny Webb.

Fluherty agreed that Travis McDowell should be approached without delay. Fluherty said he would also alert the satellite office in Daytona and begin organizing plans for the arrests.

It was an extremely delicate prospect. The fugitives were known to have automatic weapons, were said to be suicidal, and would have nothing to lose. How to capture them without getting agents killed and endangering civilians—that would be the challenge.

But the first priority was to decide on the quickest, most effective way to bring in Travis McDowell and to impress on him the gravity of the situation. They needed to take him from Orlando to Daytona before he had a chance to get cold feet or perhaps become confused about his loyalties and tip off his friend. Travis himself was no crook, according to Danny Webb, but the bonds between these Kentucky mountain boys ought not to be discounted. Travis’s misfortune was in the company he had been keeping. Sooner or later, as Webb liked to say, if you climb in with the hogs, you’re going to get dirty.

“How about a helicopter?” Kincaid suggested. “It’s quick, and it ought to have the effect of reinforcing his perspective.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Fluherty said.

22

W
AITING IN MIAMI FOR BENNY AND ROGER
and Donnie to return, the women were getting antsy. They had nothing to do but shop, and Sherry especially was tiring of that, never having been one to care that much for jewelry anyway. When the men had not returned by dinnertime on Tuesday, she telephoned Benny at the Ormond Beach condo and told him he had better get out of there fast. What was he waiting for? Benny tried to explain that Roger had a number of things to take care of. The stereo for the van would not be ready until tomorrow. Roger was driving a Cadillac this car salesman was loaning him until the Triumph was fixed. Donnie was feeling left out, with all the cars being bought and none for him, so Roger had advanced him sixteen thou for a slightly used Datsun 300 ZX, gray, a really sharp little machine. Benny would take over the van when it was ready. And, oh yes, Roger had bought a classic ‘Vette but it wasn’t on the road yet, so he was thinking of buying a newer Corvette, maybe a brand-new one that he could count on to actually run. They would be down in Miami in a day or so. Everything was cool.