Dark and Bloody Ground (47 page)

29

O
NCE THE CONVICTIONS CAME DOWN
in the Acker trial, Rod Kincaid devoted all of his time to trailing that money. There was something mysterious about the Acker hoard, not merely that so much of it had vanished. Mike Caudill said that if anyone ever wrote a book about this case it should be called
Kentucky Moonstone;
he was referring to a novel written more than a hundred years ago by Wilkie Collins,
The Moonstone,
which was the name for a diamond that brought misfortune to everyone who came into possession of it. Maybe the Acker money was cursed.

According to Tawny Acker, everyone in her family had known that her father kept money in the house, a million or more, she had never been sure how much. Some of it was so old that it had dark marks on it from rubber bands; some was new. She, her father, and her late sister, Tawny said, had often touched it; their fingerprints should be on the bills and wrappers. Tawny did not say that her sister had died because of that money.

At least two of the men who had stolen it would now die young; the third would spend his life in prison. Rod Kincaid was confident that at least two of the three wives of these men would end up in jail, along with at least a couple of the lawyers. That made ten people whose lives had been ended or wrecked by that money; Kincaid was sure there would be more.

There already were, in a less drastic but still painful way. One day
that summer, Danny Webb was talking to a Whitesburg neighbor of his, an elderly lady he had known all his life, who said to him, “Danny, ain’t you going to get yourself one of them cars?” What cars? Webb asked. Why, the cars from the Acker case, the woman said. Hadn’t he heard? All the police who had worked on the case were ending up with the automobiles that had been in evidence. She figured Danny would get the Corvette.

Had the lady finally gone around the bend? Webb told her about the recent negotiations that had finally returned some of Dr. Acker’s property, including the cars, to him. It was one of many asinine quirks of the law that the cars and other items that had been in evidence could not automatically be turned over to the doctor after the trial. A separate, civil action was required to determine which of the seized property had been purchased with the money stolen from his house, which objects themselves had been taken from the house, and which had belonged to the defendants prior to and separate from the robbery. Had Epperson and Hodge simply agreed to give up claim to everything, this would have been a simple matter; but they had not. At a meeting between the parties, which had required transporting the prisoners from Eddyville to the Hazard KSP post, Epperson had, amazingly, insisted that the Corvette had been bought with money other than Dr. Acker’s, and both convicted killers had quibbled about other items. Dr. Acker had no use for such things as a golden coke spoon, but he was not about to permit insult to be added to tragedy and stood his ground, backed up by James Wiley Craft, who was acting for him now as his personal attorney, not as Commonwealth’s Attorney, as was permitted by Kentucky law and custom.

Many stolen items had vanished, among them Tammy’s bracelet, black pearls, and Rolex—this last, according to what Bartley’s mother had told police, tossed into a river. Dr. Acker was able to prove by serial numbers that some of the guns were his. The cars were the principal items of dispute. The argument grew rancorous. Craft shouted to Epperson that no jury in the world, if it came to that, would side with him; Frank Fleming lost his cool and called Roger and Benny sons of bitches. The meeting resolved nothing, but a week later, on the advice of their attorneys, Epperson and Hodge gave in.

So what was this about the
police
getting the cars? It didn’t take Danny Webb long to find out that Dr. Acker, rather than selling them, had decided to do something nice for the policemen who had fought
to get the cars back and had been so attentive and helpful in bringing his daughter’s killers to justice. He had offered one to Frank Fleming and another to Lon Maggard at what the doctor considered wholesale but was far below their worth: Fleming took the 300 ZX for forty-seven hundred, Maggard the MR2 for forty-five hundred. Neither officer had even that much cash to his name, so they had agreed to pay Dr. Acker at the rate of a hundred a month, with no interest.

Danny Webb was incensed. Department regulations were specific: no officer was permitted to accept outside payment or gifts in connection with the performance of official duties. Fleming and Maggard were tooling around in these sports cars to the amusement and malicious gossip of everyone in Letcher County. Some zealous lawyer handling Epperson’s and Hodge’s appeals could jump on this as evidence of collusion between the police and the victim. Innocent as Dr. Acker’s gesture was, a public defender could construe it as a payoff. As Webb knew all too well, and as Fleming and Maggard ought to have remembered, the Department of Public Advocacy was staffed by true believers, zealots so personally and ideologically opposed to the death penalty that they would go to extraordinary lengths to try to get a death sentence overturned. One of them was already after James Wiley Craft for representing Dr. Acker in the civil case.

Danny Webb could not remember a worse moment in his life as a policeman. He was these detectives’ superior officer, responsible for everything that they did. His good name and the KSP’s were on the line. He instituted proceedings to have Fleming and Maggard fired.

When the detectives learned that their heads were on the block, they immediately sold the cars, after having had them for only four days, and gave the cash received for them to Dr. Acker—a total of some twenty-three thousand dollars, as it turned out. When Fleming and Maggard found out that a KSP major had bought the ‘85 Corvette and was not selling it, they were resentful. Was there a different standard for higher-ups?

No, Danny Webb explained to them, the major had paid a price for the Corvette that was equal to its actual value, about nineteen thousand. Still exasperated, Webb relented. He had known Maggard and Fleming forever and had considered them friends. He decided to forgive them for being just country boys who had been carried away by all the wealth and automobiles involved in the trial and had suffered a lapse in judgment, though a costly one. They had been foolish,
not corrupt, and both were remorseful. He withdrew his request to have them fired. But his relations with them were never again quite as they had been; both knew that their chances for promotion were at an end. Within a year Fleming and Maggard retired from the KSP—worn out, they said, by too many homicide investigations—and went to work as detectives for the CSX railroad. He was getting paid more, but Frank Fleming especially missed being a trooper; it had been everything he had ever wanted to be. He dropped by the Hazard post often and was glad when his new job sometimes let him work again with Danny Webb.

When Rod Kincaid heard about the incident, he filed it in his mind as further proof of the Acker money curse, not that he had much sympathy for the detectives; an FBI agent would have been fired on the spot. It was another instance of the difficulties he faced trying to cooperate with local officials, too few of whom were like Danny Webb. What was he to make, for instance, of the use Lester Burns had made of Pulaski County sheriff’s deputies? Of the sheriff himself? There was nothing illegal about hiring off-duty policemen as guards. Why bribe them when all you had to do was hire them? The more Kincaid investigated Lester Burns, the more astounded he was by the network Lester had established over the years. He was everywhere! Everyone seemed to owe him favors of one kind or another. So many of these obligations stemmed from legitimate work Lester had done for people for free or from other favors Lester had bestowed, large and small. The numbers of people to whom he had given hams or farm machinery or what have you were countless. Lester was always picking up the check, sometimes for an entire restaurant. Lester Burns, Kincaid began saying, has corrupted half of Eastern Kentucky for the price of a steak dinner!

Lester’s enormous material success made all the more mysterious why he had risked everything to accept what for him was peanuts in stolen money. He had been completely reckless, leaving footprints all over the place. Having learned from Sheriff Adams and others that Lester had made a big cash deposit immediately after returning from Florida last August, Kincaid had now obtained copies of deposit slips, currency serial numbers, and IRS cash transaction forms showing the amount as ninety-two thousand. It was obvious what he had been doing, trying to pretend he thought the money was legitimate. From Bartley, and from Donnie’s mother and sister, Kincaid could
assume that Lester’s fee had been much larger than that. On the Comer–McNeal tapes, Lester himself bragged about four hundred thousand.

How much had gone to the other lawyers? Other than a cancelled cashier’s check for five thousand, Bartley and his family had no proof of the two hundred thousand-plus they claimed had gone to O. Curtis Davis before he was fired. As for Dale Mitchell, a deputy had stated that Mitchell had been present when a car with a woman in it, undoubtedly Sherry Hodge, had arrived from Tennessee one night at Lester’s farm. By the Bartleys’ account, including that of the new Mrs. Bartley, Sherry was the banker. Physical evidence that she had controlled the money, however, consisted of only one item, the receipt from an express-delivery package Sherry had sent the Bartleys from Florida and that they claimed had contained several thousand in cash. There was also one small piece of evidence that she retained some cash: paperwork involving a two-thousand-dollar cashier’s check that Sherry had tried to draw in favor of Dale Mitchell at an Oliver Springs, Tennessee, bank back in March. She had presented the teller with the cash and requested the check. Suspicious of the bills, which appeared uncirculated and possibly counterfeit, the teller had asked Sherry to wait, had informed a bank officer, and had stalled Sherry while security at the bank’s Knoxville headquarters could be notified. Knoxville instructed the branch manager to refuse the money on the grounds that the customer did not have an account and to have someone take down the suspect’s license tag number. The bank passed Sherry’s tag number on to the FBI. Agents questioned Sherry at her parents’ house a few days later. She explained that she had borrowed the money from a friend who was helping her pay Benny’s lawyer.

By comparison, Lester Burns had made tracing a large part of his share of the money far easier, chiefly because he had already been under investigation. Initially through Dr. Billy Davis, who had decided to plead guilty in the Comer–McNeal–Burns insurance scam, Kincaid discovered the roles of Lillian Davis and Houston Griffin, who cooperated in interviews: they were not in jeopardy, since Lester had not told them that they were facilitating a crime. The boys at Max Flynn Motors, the folks at the 7 Gables Motel—Lester had managed to incriminate himself in numerous ways. And there was plenty of evidence against Carol Epperson. By August, Kincaid decided that it was time to ask a Lexington grand jury to act against Sherry, Carol,
and Lester. Kincaid was betting that what was not already known about the whereabouts of the money would then come out. He remained pessimistic only about getting evidence against Pat Mason; so far, there was nothing on her. Was it possible that she had actually won her million-plus by chance? At this point he could not say yes, but legally there was not one reason to say no.

Lester had been expecting it. He had prepared his family. But when he actually read this latest indictment against him, he was mortified. On August 20, the grand jury proclaimed that Lester H. Burns, Jr., Carol Ann Epperson, and Sherry Loraine Hodge “knowingly did conspire together and with each other, and with Roger Dale Epperson, Benny Lee Hodge, Donald Terry Bartley, and with diverse other persons to the Grand Jury known and unknown, to commit offenses against the United States, that is, they did conspire to transport... to receive, conceal, store, barter and dispose of stolen money.... It was a part of the conspiracy that Epperson, Hodge, and Bartley would and did commit an armed robbery/murder at the residence of one Dr. Roscoe Acker, Whitesburg, Kentucky, and did steal approximately $1.9 million from Dr. Roscoe Acker. ... It was a further part of said conspiracy that Lester H. Burns, Jr., Carol Ann Epperson, and Sherry Loraine Hodge would and did agree to conceal, hide, wash, clean-up and launder said stolen money so that it would not be detected by law enforcement officials.”

What horrified Lester was that, the way the indictment read, it not only implied but appeared to state that he had been in on the robbery and murder to begin with. He wondered how many people would read it that way; he vigorously protested, to no avail. In those dark moments, feeling as if the prison gates had already clanked shut behind him forever, his only solace was his family. To his deep gratitude, one of his sons-in-law accompanied him to Rod Kincaid’s office in London, where he was photographed and fingerprinted. Watching Lester go through the demeaning routine, Kincaid took no pleasure in it.

Lester was already scheduled to go on trial in October on the various counts against him from Project Leviticus, to all of which he was pleading not guilty. That procedure would have to be postponed. On August 28, he appeared in U.S. District Court in Lexington for his arraignment. On the surface he had regained some of his bravado,
although his demeanor before the magistrate was meek, and he kept repeating “thank you very kindly.” Dressed in full Western regalia, he entered a plea of not guilty and posted a fifty-thousand-dollar bond.

Outside the courtroom Lester faced a squad of reporters shouting questions and shoving microphones at him. Swaggering a little, shoulders pulled back, cocking his head, every inch the cattle baron, he said that he had no doubts that he would be vindicated. To this day he did not know whether his fee had come from stolen money or not.

“You are asking the wrong person,” Lester advised, referring to Sherry Hodge and Carol Epperson, both of whom were being held in the Fayette County Correction Center. Carol had been unable to make bond; Sherry had been denied bond, on evidence that she had the means to leave the country. Lester suggested that Carol, if she did not get out of detention within a few days, would probably make a statement. As for him, he was confident.