Crime Beat (16 page)

THE GANG THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT

THE MAIL-ORDER MURDERS

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

October 4, 1987

I
T WOULD HAVE BEEN
comical if it hadn’t been so deadly, if lives hadn’t been mercilessly ended or, at the very least, haunted by terror. They were called the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, yet they were a gang that had so many shots, they were bound to hit their targets sometimes, and people were bound to die.

For months they tried to kill Doug Norwood, but whether they came at him with machine guns or bombs or stun guns, they always managed to screw up. The same thing with Dana Free. Three times they missed. And when it came time to kill Victoria Barshear, well, the gang just decided she was too pretty to die.

Those were some of the gaffes that made them laughable. But there was nothing laughable about what happened to Richard Braun and Anita Spearman. They killed Braun, though it took two tries, in the front yard of his home. It took only one visit from the gang and Anita Spearman was left dead in her bed.

They were want-ad killers, a gang of losers, social outcasts and law enforcement washouts headed by a man with the seemingly appropriate name of Richard Savage. They picked their targets from West Palm Beach to St. Paul, their clients from the Atlantic to the Rockies.

It was nothing personal. In a sleazy Tennessee bar where strippers danced, the gang plotted the deaths of people they had never even seen: Anita Spearman, the well-known and well-liked assistant city manager in West Palm Beach; Doug Norwood, a law student in Arkansas; Dana Free, a contractor in Georgia. And others, many others.

T
HEY PICTURED THEMSELVES
as guns for hire. One day barroom bouncers, the next day cross-country contract killers. No job too big or too small. One member helped a man put a bomb on a plane loaded with 154 people. One shot down a man in his driveway while his son watched in horror. Another threw grenades into a home where a 14-year-old and his mother were sleeping.

Their crimes were spread across the country, to avoid a pattern of terror that might aid the police in their investigations. What did the bombing of a businessman’s van in Atlanta have to do with a suitcase explosion in the cargo hold of a jet in Dallas? What could the arson of a poultry plant in Iowa have in common with the murder of a city official in Palm Beach County?

Seemingly, the answer would be nothing, the questions not even considered. Even so, in less than a year, a far-flung network of investigative agencies working on the many separate cases found the common denominator in the back pages of a magazine published for gun and battle buffs. From there the investigators picked up the pieces of the puzzle and put it together. Even today, they feel lucky about it.

“This is a case of truth being stranger than fiction—it’s mind-boggling,” says Tom Stokes, special agent in charge of the Atlanta office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). “At times you needed a flow chart to keep it straight. These guys were bouncing all over the country doing these jobs. Thank goodness, we got coordinated on it.”

In the end, two people were dead, several others were injured, and many were scared for their lives. Doug Norwood, who escaped death three times after being shot and bombed, still carries a gun. Who can blame him? Across the country Savage’s gang had left a trail of terror and deadly ineptitude.

T
HE TRAIL STARTED
in spring 1985 in Knoxville, Tenn. Richard Savage was into his fourth business venture in almost as many years and there was no telling whether his Continental Club was going to do any better than the restaurant or the motel or the nursing home that had failed before it.

Savage’s new profession—operator of a rundown strip bar—was his strangest yet. It seemed so far from the way he had started out. Born in Knoxville 37 years before, he had joined the Army out of high school, serving for six years, including a tour in Vietnam as a courier. When he left the military he decided to put on a new uniform, that of a cop.

However, Savage found no lasting promise in the new uniform. After earning a criminal justice degree in Kentucky, he worked only briefly as a cop in Oklahoma, then as a federal prison guard in Lexington, Ky. He bounced around the Midwest and by 1980 had drifted into his series of failed business ventures.

By 1985, Savage was determined to put the skills he had learned in his previous careers to good use. He decided to put himself out for hire.

The back pages of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine are devoted to classified ads offering a whole raft of goods and services to what the magazine calls the “professional adventurer.” On any given month this marketplace might offer anything from countersurveillance information to mercenary manuals to handbooks on revenge.

But in the early 1980s, the
Soldier of Fortune
classified ads offered more sinister services. Investigators have said it was through ads placed here that a variety of hired killers advertised their lethal skills. And it was into this market that Richard Savage placed his own skills the summer of 1985:

Gun For Hire: 37-year-old professional mercenary desires jobs. Vietnam Veteran. Discrete [
sic
] and very private. Body Guard, Courier and other Skills. All jobs considered.

Sylvester Stallone, portraying Rambo, was on the cover of the magazine’s June issue in which Savage’s “Gun For Hire” ad promised that all jobs would be considered. The ad carried the telephone number of the Continental Club, and within days the phone was ringing with inquiries.

The calls were from people both looking to hire and looking for work. By midsummer Savage had surrounded himself with a cadre of men seeking dial-a-gun work. There was 21-year-old Sean Doutre, a knockabout who signed on as a bouncer at the Continental Club. There was Michael Wayne Jackson, 42, the one-time police chief of a tiny Texas town but now a maintenance man. There was William Buckley, 35, a local security guard. And there were others—all men who apparently found the macho image of themselves reflected in the action stories and ads of
Soldier of Fortune.

Other callers were clients looking for a variety of questionable jobs done. Savage was asked to guard gold in Alaska, to find men still missing in Vietnam. But for the most part, people called because they wanted someone killed.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Savage would tell a
News/Sun-Sentinel
reporter a year after his ad ran. “Nearly everybody wanted someone killed. They wanted me to kill their wives, mothers, fathers and girlfriends.”

According to investigators, indictments and court records, Savage and his gang entered into deadly agreements with a number of the callers. The going rate was $20,000 a kill.

Investigators believe that within a few weeks of his ad in
Soldier of Fortune,
Savage had accepted the first assignment and dispatched a crew of hit men to suburban Atlanta to kill a 43-year-old businessman named Richard Braun. On June 9, an explosive device was placed in Braun’s van, but it exploded before Braun got in the vehicle. The bombers would make up for missing him two months later.

The second job was in Fertile, Iowa. A St. Paul, Minn., bar owner named Richard Lee Foster had called Savage, claiming that the Keough Poultry Company in Fertile had ripped him off. Savage assigned Michael Wayne Jackson and William Buckley to the Foster case, and on the night of June 23 an explosion ripped through the Keough plant. No one was hurt, but Foster got his revenge—for the time being.

B
Y EARLY AUGUST
, the dial-a-hit-man crew was back in Georgia, this time in Marietta to kill a building contractor named Dana Free. Savage had been paid $20,000 by a Denver woman angry at Free over a failed business investment. But killing Free wasn’t easy.

On Aug. 1, Buckley and Jackson planted two grenades under Free’s car. Free drove around with the devices under his car for a day but nothing happened, partly because the pin on one of the grenades had not been removed. So the next night, Buckley slid under the car and reattached the grenades with their pins tied to the drive shaft. If the car moved, the pins would be yanked out and . . . kaboom!

In the morning, Free got in and as he started to pull out of his driveway, he saw a grenade, pin still attached, roll out from under the car. He managed to jump from the vehicle before the other grenade blew up. He was uninjured—and lucky. He went into hiding.

Next, it was back to the Midwest. Bar owner Richard Lee Foster had been impressed enough with Savage’s handling of his complaint with the Keough company to sign on for another job. But this time the results weren’t as good. Over three nights beginning Aug. 10, members of the gang planted an assortment of bombs in Harry’s 63 Club, a St. Paul bar competing with Foster’s. None of the devices functioned properly, and for the first two nights the bombers crept back into the bar to remove them. On the third night, with the bomb smoking and setting off alarms, the police bomb squad beat them to it.

“They just couldn’t get it right,” says ATF special agent Tom Stokes. “They were like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight or think straight. Sometimes you had to wonder if this whole thing wasn’t a comedy of errors.”

O
N AUG. 26
, the comical bumbling ended. On that day, according to investigators, Savage sent Doutre back to Georgia and, for the first time, the gang struck with deadly accuracy. Richard Braun, who had escaped death once before, was machine-gunned as he drove his Mercedes-Benz out of his driveway. Braun’s 16-year-old son, who was also in the car, was slightly wounded and watched his father bleed to death.

The want-ad killers next took an assignment from an Arkansas man named Larry Gray, who wanted his ex-wife’s boyfriend, a Fayetteville law student named Doug Norwood, eliminated.

Four days after the Braun killing, Norwood answered the door of his apartment and two men came at him with an electric-charged stun gun. Norwood escaped after punching one and throwing the other through a glass door, but was wounded by gunfire as he fled from his apartment. He ran to a car parked nearby and asked a man standing next to it for help.

“He just looked at me, slowly got into the car and drove away,” Norwood recalls.

That was because Norwood had stumbled up to his assailants’ getaway driver, a man he would later come to know as Richard Savage. Norwood then ran into a nearby Laundromat and called the police. His attackers, later identified as William Buckley and another Savage associate named Dean DeLuca, managed to escape.

Norwood had no idea why he was being attacked or who was after him. He bought a .357 Magnum and started carrying it wherever he went. However, the weapon didn’t help him much on Oct. 1. That afternoon, when he turned the ignition key in his car in a University of Arkansas parking lot, a bomb beneath his car partially exploded. The car was destroyed but Norwood escaped without injury.

While some members of the gang waited for another chance to get Norwood, others were working on new assignments.

In Lexington, Ky., investigators say a woman named Mary Alice Wolf hired Savage to kill her ex-husband’s new wife, Victoria Barshear. Savage sent Doutre, Buckley and DeLuca to do the job but it never got done. After seeing Barshear, the hired killers decided she was too pretty to kill and left town.

But Dana Free was still unfinished business. And at 3 a.m. on Oct. 12, William Buckley, the man who had already messed up earlier chances at Free, as well as Norwood and Barshear, threw two grenades into a house in Pasadena, Tex. No one was hurt in the explosion, and Free wasn’t even there. The home belonged to his ex-wife and 14-year-old son, who were inside asleep when the grenades came crashing through the living room window.

The gang’s next assignment was potentially the most lethal they ever attempted. On Oct. 30, at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, an American Airlines flight from Austin, with 154 people on board, was taxiing toward the terminal when a small bomb exploded in the luggage hold. Passengers were rushed off the plane, scared but unhurt.

Investigators found the remains of a time bomb in luggage belonging to passenger Mary Theilman. She had been meant to die, presumably along with the rest of the passengers. A month later, authorities charged Theilman’s husband, Albert, with the crime. It would be a year before they would charge William Buckley with selling him the bomb.

I
N OCTOBER
, Richard Savage began receiving calls from a man in Palm Beach County, Florida. The man, Robert Spearman, said that he had this problem. He was married and didn’t want to be. But he didn’t want a divorce.

On Oct. 16, Savage flew to Palm Beach to meet Spearman and take a $2,000 down payment on a $20,000 contract to kill Spearman’s 48-year-old wife, Anita. Five days later, Savage sent Sean Doutre and Ronald Emert, another associate from the Continental Club, to West Palm Beach to collect the balance.

In the weeks after Doutre and Emert left with the money, Robert Spearman placed several more calls to the Continental Club. Authorities would later charge that these were calls to find out what was happening on the deal and to demand quick service from Savage.

Whatever they were for, Spearman no longer needed to call after the early hours of Nov. 16. On that morning, after Spearman had exited his Palm Beach Gardens home to drop by his marine contracting company’s office, Sean Doutre entered the house through an unlocked door and found Anita Spearman, who was recovering from a mastectomy, asleep. Doutre beat her to death as she lay on her bed.

A short time later, Robert Spearman came home to find his wife dead and the house ransacked. He quickly called the sheriff’s department, portraying himself as a grieving husband. It was an act authorities would not take long to see through.

T
HERE WERE ALL
these victims, all these bizarre crimes, but seemingly nothing that linked them. This widespread dispersal of investigative effort should have insured the gang’s getaway. But it wasn’t to be. For in addition to having bungled many of their murder attempts, the hit men had operated in a way that belied the very promises of their classified ad.