Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (23 page)

14

Crumpled on her cabin floor, Carol buried her face in her arms, afraid of the feeling rising up inside her: relief. Months of mortal fear had already begun to lift. Now there was the world to face. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and wobbled back to her feet.

“Are you okay?” Pete asked.

“I don’t know,” said Carol.

A sparrow trilled in the twilight. Carol staggered out to the porch and knelt beside Louie’s body. His eyes were lifeless and blank, like the deer her father had shot in the meadow when she was four. She pressed her ear to his blood-soaked chest. It was silent.

A veil of cloud drifted across the setting sun as Carol and Pete walked to the Candler estate to call the police on the two-way radio.

“I need to report a homicide on Cumberland Island,” Carol said.

“Where is the victim?” asked the dispatcher.

“On my porch.”

“Who are you?”

The knot in her throat hardened. “Carol Ruckdeschel—the woman who shot him.”

She and Pete returned to the cabin and waited for the police to arrive. The last pangs of dim-blue twilight clung to the sky. Carol sat beside Louie’s body and held his cold hand in hers. Then she leaned over and whispered in Louie’s ear: “I’m so sorry.”

It was nearly dark when Sheriff Jimmy Middleton arrived, along with the coroner, two park rangers, and two deputy detectives, who photographed the body and investigated the crime scene: “Victim shot in chest,” the police report read. “Wound directly in heart. Broken canoe paddle with long, sharp splinter. Porch door panels smashed out. Strong odor of alcohol about the victim’s body. Ejected double-ought shotgun shell on kitchen floor.”

The most important clue was discovered by the sheriff: two of the shotgun pellets had clipped the edge of the empty door frame, showing that the panels had already been broken out when the gun was fired.

Jesse stumbled up, whiskey bottle in hand. His bloodshot eyes were wet. He hunkered down on the stoop beside Carol’s porch, where the sheriff questioned him.

“We been drinkin all afternoon, Louie an me. Mostly whiskey.”

“Did he talk about Carol at all?” the sheriff asked.

“Louie talk bout Carol all da time. He hit her afore. He socked her once an’ gave her a black eye.” Jesse shook his head. “I wuz posed to look after Carol. I promised her daddy I’d watch out fo her. I done let him down.”

In the dark, Carol stood in stunned silence, staring down at her blood-soaked porch. She had killed another human being. Nothing could ever wash away that stain.

“All right, ma’am. You’ll need to come with us,” Sheriff Middleton said.

“I can’t leave. I need to feed my animals. And what about the turtles?”

“Ma’am, you’ll have to spend the night with us. There will be a hearing tomorrow at the courthouse.”

Carol climbed into the truck, with Louie’s corpse in a body bag behind her.

Before leaving, the sheriff and one of the park rangers drove down to Louie’s house. A light was on inside, and the sheriff saw a shadow move across the room. They crept up to the porch. The deputy peered in through the porch window.

“Sir, the man inside has a gun,” he whispered.

The sheriff scowled, then kicked open the door. The man inside jumped back.

“Give me that goddamn gun!” the sheriff shouted. The frightened young man handed over the pistol. The sheriff handcuffed him and shoved him onto the couch.

The young man said his name was Steven Waye. Eyes glued to the floor, he evasively answered the sheriff’s questions with gruff, short responses. He was on leave from Jacksonville’s Naval Air Station. He’d arrived on the island two days earlier.

Sheriff Middleton transported Steven Waye back to the mainland, where he was released to the custody of the U.S. Navy Patrol. He disappeared later that night.

Middleton called the Jacksonville Naval Air Station the next morning to inquire about the suspicious sailor.

“We have no record of a Steven Waye,” they replied.

Some authorities suspect that Louie, already plotting his attack on Carol, brought the sailor to the island to be his alibi. But no one knows for sure. Steven Waye was never heard from again.

The deputy drove the makeshift hearse slowly through the dark forest. Louie’s body bag was draped in a brown blanket in the back of the green Park Service pickup, while Carol sat with the deputy in the cab. They finally reached the Dungeness dock, where Louie’s body was loaded onto a National Park Service boat. Carol arrived at the county courthouse in Woodbine, Georgia, around midnight.

She spent the night in an empty jail cell. Carol lay in the top bunk, adrenaline-flooded, body locked, eyes frozen open, staring at the graffiti on the ceiling above her. The seconds ticked slowly. She waited for dawn, passing the time by reading the prisoners’ scrawl and wondering if soon she would be adding her own.

The guards cut off the lights for the evening. In the windowless jail cell, the raw darkness reminded her of the cave beside the Chattahoochee River where she and her dog had camped.

All night in the jail bunk, she lay rigid, like petrified wood, rewinding through the scenes of her life. Why did this happen? What had she done wrong? She understood in great detail the reproductive habits of turtles and the mating calls of frogs, but she couldn’t figure out how to interact with her own species. Every relationship had ended in disaster. She had tried to shield her heart after relic hunter Jim toyed with it and Professor Charlie totaled it. She pushed John Pennington away. She kept Louie from getting too close. But distance only seemed to cut deeper.

The next day, she ate nothing and stared blankly at the walls. Then, in the early afternoon, she heard footsteps and a clatter of keys.

“Showtime, miss,” said the jailer. He led her to the courthouse, a two-story brick building with palm trees flanking the flagpoles out front. Inside, the tap of the jailer’s hard-soled shoes echoed through the tile foyer. Carol’s muddy leather boots were quiet.

He swung open the wooden double doors to the courtroom. Heads swiveled, and silence fell across the windowless, fluorescent-lit room. She felt the eyes of the five jurors boring into her. Carol sat alone behind a wooden desk, folded her hands in her lap, and gazed down at her thumbs.

Her parents were in the gallery, solemn and stiff. Rebecca, her turtle-tagging friend from Little Cumberland, was also there. Pete sat dazed in the back of the courtroom. News reporters, park rangers, police officers, and curious onlookers filled the remaining seats.

At 2
P.M.
on April 18, 1980, the day after the shooting, the inquest was gaveled to order by coroner Danny Saturday, a plumber by trade. The five-person jury—four middle-aged white males and an older African American man—sat behind a wooden table to his left. They had been summoned to determine the official cause of Louie McKee’s death.

The five jurors first listened to Sheriff Middleton and his deputies recount the events and display the evidence, including the splintered paddle and the gray molding of the broken door frame.

“The molding had two shotgun holes,” Deputy Harvey Amerson explained. “The panel itself did not—indicating that Ms. Ruckdeschel fired the weapon after McKee had busted out the panel.”

The pellet holes also confirmed that Carol had pulled the trigger from the point where the gun was found—near the bathroom, about sixteen feet from the porch door.

“There was a strong odor of alcohol about the victim’s body,” the sheriff added. “McKee had been drinking with Jesse Bailey about an hour before the incident.”

Carol kept her trembling hands folded beneath the wooden table. Her head throbbed. Her heart pounded. She could hear the swish of her own blood.

Next, Harold Wood, a law enforcement ranger on Cumberland Island, came forward to testify. He began by explaining that “McKee had a drinking problem.” Then he said that “McKee and Ruckdeschel had an affair going,” and that “McKee had beaten her up some, the last time reported in December 1979, when he gave her a black eye and threatened to kill her.”

Pete was too emotionally shaken to testify. He listened from the back of the courtroom as his statement was read to the jurors:
“While I was sitting in the kitchen talking to Carol, I heard someone walk on the porch and try to open the door. I saw and heard this man breaking in the door angrily yelling something, and by the time he had broken the main panel in the door out, I heard a shot behind me, and he fell. Carol and I spoke for a moment. Somewhat shaken, I went and looked at the man on the porch and figured he was dead because he was not breathing. Then we went to the phone to contact the police.”

The words all blurred together in the flat fog of Carol’s brain. She felt the hardness of the wooden chair against her bones. Head down, she picked at the grit beneath her fingernails. Every now and then, she glanced up at the nervous young coroner and the expressionless, deadpan jurors.

Finally, District Attorney Glenn Thomas was called on to speak. The room was dead silent as he stood before the jury. Carol felt her stomach drop to the polished tile floor. The only man in the courtroom wearing a suit, he scanned the crowd and finally pivoted to the five stone-faced jurors.

“The statutes regarding justifiable homicide are numerous and complex,” he began. His voice was like gravel in a blender. He launched into a long speech summarizing federal and state self-defense laws. At the end, he stood rigidly behind his desk and leaned forward on his fingertips. Carol’s head pounded with her pulse. Sweat coated the palms of her clenched hands. After a long pause, he said: “It is our conclusion that Ms. Ruckdeschel reacted spontaneously and automatically to threats of serious bodily harm.”

The jury agreed. They ruled unanimously that Carol’s actions were in self-defense, and Louie’s death was a justifiable homicide. No charges would be filed against her.

Upon hearing the verdict, Carol had hoped the cannonball in her chest would lift, her blurry vision would clear, and her cloudy-headedness would dissipate. But Carol felt nothing. Nothing at all.

Blank and benumbed, she walked out of the dark courtroom into the blindingly bright light of a spring afternoon. She thanked Rebecca for coming. She said goodbye to her parents. Then she went home and washed the blood off her porch.

Afterward, she sat on the porch steps, watching color drain from the darkening sky. From the direction of Louie’s house, she could almost hear the sound of Ebby’s fiddle: not the fast-paced, foot-stomping fury of a Saturday night shindig, but a slow, soft, mournful song that trickled through the moss-draped oaks.

That’s when the tears finally came—tears of regret, tears of relief, tears of the deepest sadness she had ever known. She cradled her knees against her chest and rocked back and forth, sobbing. She wept for Louie. She wept for herself. She wept from the bottom of her being, until her heart was wrung dry.

Emptied of emotion, Carol curled up on the porch and listened to the night. Ebby’s fiddle went silent. In its wake was the tenor of distant tides washing ashore, scouring the island, rinsing it clean.

Word of the shooting spread like wildfire. Island families vilified Carol, calling her “a vulture who preys on people for her own selfish goals.” Park rangers kept their distance.

“She shotgunned her boyfriend when she got tired of him,” said one islander who worked at the Greyfield Inn. “All of her lovers end up dead.”

“She thinks she owns the island, and she’ll kill anyone who gets in her way,” said a Carnegie heir.

“She’s like a black widow spider. After she breeds, she kills and eats her mate,” said Douglas McKee, Louie’s brother.

Betty McKee was outraged that her ex-husband’s killer walked free less than twenty-four hours after shooting him. “It wasn’t right,” Betty said. “I don’t know how she got away with it. She seemed to receive special treatment. If I’d done it, I woulda been locked up for life.”

Betty had known Louie since he was three years old. He had always been a gentle, thoughtful person, she said. For twenty years, Betty had been married to him, and never once had he been abusive toward her, she maintained. Even their divorce had been civil and gracious. Betty had spoken with Louie the day before the shooting, and he didn’t seem ill-tempered or angry. Whatever he may have said or done on Carol’s porch that evening, Betty said, it certainly didn’t warrant being shot in the chest at close range.

“As a Christian woman, I must forgive her,” Betty said. “But I won’t forget.”

Even Sam Candler was aloof and standoffish after the shooting. “I was a little bit afraid of her after that,” he admitted. “I couldn’t trust her. She was never part of the island families to begin with. She became the black sheep of the island.”

Their words were like battery acid on Carol’s heart. She became even more of a reclusive hermit.

“I am the bad guy. Everyone sees me as evil,” she wrote in her journal. “I have to remind myself constantly that I know the truth. No one can understand it, because they’ve never been in a position like that, scared for their life.”

Carol had read the statistics: every nine seconds in the United States, a woman is assaulted or beaten. Over eleven hundred women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends annually—an average of three women each day. She was almost one of them.