Before He Wakes (12 page)

It was dated July 12, 1975, only a few months after Barbara and Larry got back together after their separation. It was not notarized and had been signed by only one witness: Barbara Ford. The will was unnecessary. Under North Carolina law, Larry’s share of the house had automatically become Barbara’s at his death.

That same day, Barbara went to Kay-Lou Realty to tell Kay that she wouldn’t be returning to work. That was a relief to Kay. Barbara had never made a sale, and well before Larry’s death Kay had been trying to come up with some way to let her go without hurting her feelings.

After Barbara had talked with Kay, Barbara Landrum asked what she planned to do.

“I’m going to sell my house and move back to Durham,” Barbara told her.

As she was cleaning out her office, Stan Byrd, another sales agent, dropped by to offer condolences. Byrd barely knew Barbara and had thought of her as “quiet, a regular little homemaker” until he had learned of her fling with Carlton Stanford in Charlotte three weeks earlier.

“If I can do anything for you, just let me know,” Stan told her.

“You know what you can do for me,” she said with an alluring smile, and Byrd had no doubt about her meaning.

“Scared the hell out of me,” he recalled later.

Larry’s parents had been so stunned immediately after his death that they couldn’t think clearly or rationally. The whole thing had seemed surreal. They kept telling themselves that their son could not be dead, gone forever from their lives. They had learned few details of his death, they said later, and hadn’t really begun to question the circumstances of it until the empty days that followed.

Doris had turned her family’s thoughts in that direction as they were leaving Larry’s house on the day of the funeral. “Something is terribly wrong here,” she said, expressing a feeling that had been growing in all of them.

They forced themselves to talk about it, and when they did they found that they were of like mind. There were but three possibilities. Either Larry had shot himself accidentally or intentionally—or somebody else had shot him.

They dismissed one possibility immediately. They could not believe that Larry had deliberately killed himself. His religion didn’t condone suicide. Beyond that, they knew that he loved his children too much. He loved his parents and the rest of his family too much. He was too sensitive to the feelings of others to bring them such grief.

Accident seemed the most plausible explanation for his death, yet that, too, seemed unlikely to the Fords. Larry had never even liked guns. He wouldn’t be playing around with one, especially at that time of night. He always came home tired from his workout, they knew, took a shower and was in bed before eleven o’clock because he had to be up early for work. Even if he was in pain and couldn’t sleep, as Barbara had claimed, Larry surely wouldn’t be fooling around with a gun in bed. Besides, he knew too much about guns to be careless with one. Henry had taught Larry how to handle guns when he was just a boy, and Henry had emphasized safety. Larry always had been careful with guns. He also had been trained in the use of several types of weapons in the Marines. He knew how to handle guns. And he was safety-conscious about everything.

If he had not shot himself accidentally, that left the only other possibility, and it was almost unspeakable for the Fords. Could somebody have shot Larry? If that were so, they realized, Barbara would have had to be involved. Either she had shot him or she had to know who did.

Larry’s parents simply didn’t want to believe that. They knew that Barbara had problems and that she had mistreated Larry, but to think her capable of murder? The mere possibility of it seemed like something from a movie or a TV show, not something that could touch their lives, and they felt bad for even allowing it to enter their thoughts.

They were not about to point any fingers of accusation. They simply would try to deal with it one day at a time.

The Fords knew that Barbara had gone to the beach, and they called her after she got back to find out how she was doing. She invited them to come for lunch the next day. Mary Terry was still there, and Doris and Henry talked more to her than to Barbara. Barbara barely mentioned Larry.

The Fords invited her to come to their house for Sunday dinner three days later, and she did, bringing the boys and Brenda Monroe’s son, Locke, as well. Ronnie was there, and the tension between him and Barbara was palpable.

The most close-mouthed of all the Ford children, Ronnie usually kept his thoughts to himself. He was by far the most suspicious about Larry’s death in the days immediately following.

After dinner, Ronnie told Barbara that he had found a key to Larry’s locker at the Boys’ Club in the clothing that she had given him after the funeral. He would just drop it by the club, he said.

Barbara said that whatever might be in the locker belonged to her and the boys and asked for the key. When Ronnie declined to give it to her, she became angry.

Later, as she was standing on the back porch about to leave, Ronnie began asking questions that indicated he had doubts that Larry had shot himself accidentally. Barbara told him that there were only two possibilities: accident or suicide.

“And Larry didn’t have the guts to kill himself,” she said coldly.

Earlier that week, Detective John Buheller had asked Barbara to come to his office in Asheboro to try to clear up her husband’s death.

“I felt like it sounded suspicious,” he later said of her story, “but I really didn’t have anything to go on.”

Barbara came alone.

“She was sort of cagey,” Buheller recalled years later. “She didn’t give up a lot of information. Just cool. She was concerned about when we were going to close the investigation so she could collect the insurance.”

Buheller asked her to take a lie detector test. She said she’d have to think about it. Several days later, a lawyer called Buheller from High Point. He represented Barbara Ford, he said, and she definitely wouldn’t be taking any lie detector test.

Fifteen days after Larry’s death, Barbara’s former boss, Kay Pugh, and Kay’s close friend Brenda Wilmoth, who was about to leave her husband, Tommy, were accosted by him as they rode in Kay’s yellow Cadillac. Both were shot. Kay died of a bullet through the heart. After his arrest, Tommy Wilmoth, who later would plead guilty to second-degree murder, told authorities that he had shot the two women because he thought his life was in danger. He believed that Kay, Brenda and Barbara Ford were involved in a lesbian triangle and had plotted to kill their husbands. Larry’s shooting had convinced him of this, and he believed that he was the next to die. Although no evidence ever would turn up that this was anything more than the product of a fevered imagination, rumors about Wilmoth’s claim soon swept through High Point and Randolph County, and they would complicate matters for years to come.

Not until these rumors reached the sheriff’s department, Buheller later would say, did he have the first real indication that Larry Ford’s death might have been something more than the accident his department’s reports had proclaimed it to be. The rumors, which he heard from several sources, reminded him that he had not yet sent to the SBI lab in Raleigh the evidence packet containing the wipings he had taken from Larry’s hands. He mailed it, along with the pistol, on April 10, nineteen days after he performed the tests.

There was no point in taking any action, Buheller knew, until he could be certain whether or not Larry had fired a weapon. If he had, that was evidence enough that his death had been an accident or suicide and no cause for further concern. If he hadn’t, then he would have to investigate.

SBI forensic chemist Michael Creasy examined the pistol and processed the hand-wiping samples on April 26. All the tests were negative. In his opinion, he wrote in his report, Larry hadn’t fired the gun that killed him.

When Buheller learned the results, he knew for certain that Larry’s death had not been suicide and he thought it unlikely that it had been an accident. Only by dropping the gun, causing it to discharge, could it have killed him without him holding it in his hands. The position of the gun and empty shell and his location on the bed made that possibility doubtful, if not impossible. Indeed, Larry’s position on the bed made it appear that he had been trying to rise when he was shot. Had he been awakened by a sound only to discover a pistol aimed at his chest?

Buheller drove to Windemere Heights to talk again with Barbara. He found her at Brenda Monroe’s house. Barbara had put her own house on the market soon after Larry’s death, and it had sold quickly. Brenda had invited Barbara and the boys to stay with her family until Bryan’s school year was up, and Barbara had trucked her furniture to Durham and stored it in the basement of her parents’ house, then moved in with the Monroes. The boys had been bunking with Locke, and Barbara had been sleeping on the couch in the den. On weekends Barbara and the boys had been returning to Durham to stay with her parents.

Brenda was present as Buheller talked with Barbara, and she later described the visit as friendly. Buheller indicated that he just wanted to clear up some details about the shooting. He asked a few questions and talked about the location of the empty cartridge before he broke the news about the gunshot residue tests. He led Barbara and Brenda to think that he still thought the shooting was an accident, however, that Larry no doubt had dropped the gun, causing it to go off.

In fact, Buheller now strongly suspected that Barbara had shot her husband, and he called Doris and Henry Ford and asked them to come to his office in Asheboro. The Fords were not especially surprised when Buheller told them that Larry had not fired the gun. But they were stunned when the detective went on to tell them about the wild rumors that were spreading about the case. Although their son Ronnie was aware of the rumors and was conducting his own investigation of his brother’s death, this was the first that his parents had heard about them.

Buheller said that he was almost sure now that Larry had been murdered and Barbara had done it. He intended to prove it, he said, and he wanted to begin by having Larry’s body exhumed for autopsy. Would they sign their approval? They would, said the Fords, who were almost speechless after the things he had told them.

Randolph was in a judicial district with another county at the time, and Buheller went to Assistant District Attorney Ron Bowers in Salisbury, forty miles away, to ask him to request a judge’s order for the exhumation and autopsy. The autopsy, Buheller said, would reveal the angle and projection path of the bullet, which still was in Larry’s body, and might also tell how far away the gun was when it fired. This information might eliminate the possibility of accident.

Bowers took Buheller’s request before Superior Court Judge Thomas Seay Jr. of Spencer on May 16, and Seay approved and issued the order.

Newspapers in Asheboro and High Point reported the order, and Barbara was upset when she heard about it. She told Brenda that she didn’t want Larry’s body to be mutilated, and she didn’t see any need for it.

“I don’t know what that will prove,” she said.

A week after the judge’s order was issued, a backhoe scraped away the red dirt from the steel vault containing Larry’s bronze coffin. Workers hired by the funeral home that had buried Larry removed the coffin and opened it for Deputy Larry Allen to identify the body. Moisture had entered the coffin and green mold had begun to form on Larry’s skin. The coffin was resealed, placed in the back of a hearse and delivered to the office of the state’s chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill, sixty-five miles away.

Allen and Buheller drove to Chapel Hill that afternoon to serve as witnesses while Dr. Brad Randall, the assistant chief medical examiner, performed the autopsy.

Randall found the bullet that killed Larry in his spine. The bullet had pierced Larry’s right lung, and right pulmonary artery, and Dr. Randall deduced that Larry had bled to death within minutes.

The wound suggested that Larry was shot at close range, Randall thought. The muzzle of the gun might even have been touching his chest when the bullet was fired, but it was too late to tell for certain because Larry’s body had been cleaned and embalmed, and a plastic plug had been placed in the wound. That ruined any chance for a close estimate about the distance of the gun from Larry. That two months had passed since Larry’s death didn’t help either, he noted.

“
FORD DEATH RECLASSIFIED AS MURDER
,” a headline in the
Greensboro Daily News
reported on Thursday, May 25. The short article quoted Randolph County Sheriff Carl Moore. He had no choice but to reclassify Larry’s death a homicide, he said, although he had no idea who had shot him.

Brenda Monroe didn’t see that headline or hear anything about it. If Barbara saw it, she didn’t make it known, and Brenda saw no signs of special concern in her. Barbara blamed the detective for the unnecessary autopsy and investigation. “She felt like it was all Buheller,” Brenda recalled later. “That was the bad word, Buheller.”

Brenda couldn’t understand why Buheller had focused on Barbara either. She could not imagine that Barbara had killed Larry. Barbara was living with her. She could see her grief, see what a caring person and loving mother she was. Barbara took part in her family’s daily devotionals. She read her Bible and prayed every day. Those were not the actions of a murderer.

School was out at the end of May, and Brenda kept the boys while Barbara went off to a church camp in Indiana as a chaperone for the young people’s group at Cedarcrest. After her return, Barbara took the boys to Durham, saying they were planning to go to the beach with her parents. The Monroes later joined them for a few days at the Terrys’ cottage at Long Beach. It was not until near the end of June that Barbara returned to Trinity to pick up the rest of her belongings at the Monroes’.