Dark and Bloody Ground (32 page)

“Booger, what are you talking? Kill who?”

“Kill Donnie and Roger and Carol and the dumbbell. Kill them in the beds, now.” She ground her teeth and threw a leg over Benny and pressed against him. “Hodge-Podge, they ain’t no good, you know that. Lowdown snitches. We takes our money and all the money and we could run to California, don’t you see? Forget this island shit. We could mix in with them students at U.S.C., like I seen them on TV, honey. You look just like them students. I could, too. Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em, now!”

“Naw,” Benny said, “not after all we been through together,” and he touched her with indifferent fingers.

20

B
Y THE TIME ROGER, BENNY, AND DONNIE HAD ARRIVED
back in Ormond Beach to celebrate that Friday, the autopsy on the body of Tammy Acker was already complete.

Dr. George F. Buckley began his examination at nine
A.M.
that Friday at Methodist Hospital in Pikeville, with Frank Fleming among those in attendance. The murder weapon, a butcher knife measuring ten inches from the point to the hilt, three inches across at the base of the stainless-steel blade, was already under examination at the Frankfort lab. Dr. Buckley, observing a ligature mark around her throat, determined that Tammy had also been choked, apparently with a stocking, before succumbing to the stab wounds. He estimated the time of death at ten
P.M
., meaning that Dr. Acker, who presumably had been choked nearly to death at about the same time, must have lain unconscious for nearly an hour before reviving.

Eleven separate stab wounds, most measuring between two and three centimeters in length, lacerated the right side of her upper back. Some of these were relatively superficial, suggesting that the killer had hacked at her before finding a passage through the back rib cage. The two largest wounds passed completely through her chest cavity, with the knife’s point exiting through her right breast and sticking into the floor, as Frank Fleming had felt. She could have bled to death from several of the wounds, but Dr. Buckley concluded that Tammy had actually died of the two deepest ones, both of which had ripped
through her right lung. One thrust passed through her liver on its downward course; lack of bleeding there suggested that by the time this wound was inflicted, she was already dead. She had stood no chance of survival against a man wielding so formidable a weapon. Dr. Buckley measured her body at five feet one and weighed it at just under a hundred and ten pounds.

WHERE THE BLOOD FLOWS PURPLE
read a sign posted at the Fleming-Neon city limits in tribute to the diehard enthusiasm of fans of the local high school athletic teams, whose colors were purple and white and who played as the Purple Pirates. Tammy, who had been a leader of the pep squad and whose mother had helped to drill the marching band, had been famous for her fierce loyalty to Fleming-Neon High, where she had been a top student, excelling in music as well as in academic subjects, and had been one of the most popular girls in her class. In tribute to her affections, at her funeral at the First Church of God she lay in an open coffin dressed in the purple leotard of her cheerleading days.

The church overflowed with some four hundred of her classmates, teachers, school administrators, and many of Dr. Acker’s patients, friends, and business associates. He sat with his older daughter and Steve Reynolds, the boy from Pound Gap who had hoped to marry Tammy.

The music included a tape of “Purple Rain.” Friends remembered how Tammy had flown all the way to Detroit for a concert to see in the flesh the epicene, purple-clad phenomenon Prince, whose multiplatinum album and autobiographical movie
Purple Rain
had sent millions of girls swaying with the chorus of “ooh-ooh-oohs” and flicking their Bics.

The music had a powerful effect. It was so unlike typical funeral music that it intensified the grief of everyone, reminding them how full of life, how exuberant a young woman Tammy Acker had been, as ready to dance and sing and have a good time as she was devoted to her parents, her studies, and her school. This was the girl who had taken a whole year off from college just to nurse her father through his grief at the loss of his wife of thirty years. Dr. Acker, whose display of strength on the night of the murder had been drawn from the instincts of a physician used to blood and death, seemed ready for death himself this day—frail, broken, clinging to Tawny. Incredibly,
he had missed but one day at work at his clinic, although his patients came only to grieve with him. At the gravesite Dr. Acker sank to his knees in the clay and wept uncontrollably through the prayers. People standing near him heard him muttering “my darling, my darling, my darling.” It was dreadful.

“You can’t understand what this does to us,” a man from Neon said to a trooper from Whitesburg. “Dr. Acker is everything to us. He’s all we have. He’s given his life to us. That girl, she was such a lovely thing! Poor, poor Tammy! We loved her. We love him. Who would do this? Why?”

Those who had seen it could not forget Tammy’s mangled body. Lieutenant Webb, a fifteen-year veteran of the KSP, had dealt with bodies that had been burned, clubbed, mutilated, decapitated; he told everyone that nothing in the scores of homicides he had investigated equalled the savagery of this. Sickened as he was by them, he examined the photographs of the corpse again and again. Why had she been stabbed
eleven
times? That all of the wounds were within inches of one another on the same side of her back indicated a single frenzied killer, a maniac thrusting and thrusting with unimaginable fury. The ligature mark around her neck was something of a puzzle. Would he have tried one method, then switched to another? Or had the mark been made by the way she was gagged?

Nearly always, such violence against women accompanied rape. Yet neither the autopsy nor any other evidence thus far discovered betrayed any sign of sexual assault. The initial motive, obviously, had been robbery. If premeditated, the elimination of witnesses had not been carefully planned. The butcher knife came from the Acker kitchen—a weapon of convenience seized on the spur of the moment, like the curling iron. How could they have done such a hideously thorough job on Tammy and yet have failed to kill a nearly eighty-year-old man?

Danny Webb was commander of the Hazard KSP post, a two-story office building and communications center on Highway 15 near the Daniel Boone Parkway exit. Webb was well known as the kind of cop who considered himself one of the community rather than above it or against it. A native of Whitesburg, where he had lived all his life, he knew Eastern Kentucky the way cops who walked a beat used to know a neighborhood. And he loved it—the mountains, the changeable
weather, the music, the stories, the characters who made his way of life fascinating. He also loved detective work and the mysteries of the criminal mind. Somewhat to his wife’s annoyance, off-duty he was always watching crime stories on TV and renting videotapes of crime movies, especially those based on fact. He estimated that he had seen the film of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
at least ten times, and he was ready to watch it again.

Lanky, loose-jointed, with spaniel eyes set in a long, dark-complected face, Danny Webb prided himself on understanding intimately the people he was paid to protect and the outlaws who tried to outsmart him or outgun him. An affable, joking, folksy manner was one of his assets. It was hard not to consider him your friend when he sat down to chew the fat—maybe putting you at your ease by telling the story about the time he and Frank Fleming had gone down to New Orleans to interview a suspect and how this fellow had been with a Bourbon Street stripper and what had happened after that—and he
was
your friend, as long as you were cooperative. If you tried to clam up, he might throw an arm around you, bring his mouth close to your ear, mention your wife and kids, and remind you about that marijuana stash he knew you had hidden somewhere, or maybe that burglary charge lying dormant that could still be brought, if he chose to revive it. Throughout the region, Danny Webb was a familiar figure, loved by many and respected for his honesty and integrity, and feared by some for his shrewdness and dogged pursuit of facts.

“I don’t own a fancy car or live in a big house,” he liked to say. “I’m just a country boy, with a wife and kids I love. But the one thing I do have that’s worth more to me than all the gold in Fort Knox is my reputation.”

That was why when Tawny Rose Acker, Tammy’s older sister, approached him the day after the crimes and told him that she and her father were about to hire a private detective, Danny Webb took offense. He tried not to show it, but he was insulted, maybe even a little hurt. And he was alarmed.

Because Tawny Acker was someone to be reckoned with. Some called her feisty. Some good old boys called her a bitch. To Danny Webb, Tawny was an independent woman who, especially in the present situation, could cause a whole lot of trouble. Unlike her murdered sister, Tawny had never been regarded as the epitome of sweet girlishness. Tawny had not lived at home since the age of sixteen. A graduate
of the University of Kentucky, where she had been a journalism major, she continued to live in Lexington, applying her writing and editing talents to university publications. Although it was hardly exceptional for ambitious young people to move away from the mountains, some of the locals resented her and considered her a snob. The owners and publishers of the
Whitesburg Mountain Eagle
recalled that when Tawny had worked there briefly one summer as an intern, she had been delivered to the paper each morning by her mother in a Cadillac and had quit one day when she was asked to sweep the floor.

Like her sister, Tawny was exceptionally attractive, but her beauty was of a more aggressive kind. With her long, sharp fingernails and her teased blonde hair, Tawny would have looked at home on Rodeo Drive. Danny Webb, however, far from being hostile to her, respected her as a sophisticate. When she told the lieutenant that she intended to bring in a PI, clearly indicating that Webb and his men were not up to the job, he was inclined to tell her to go fuck off but, realizing the strain she was under, and being himself an admirer and, as it had turned out, a protector of her father, he forgave what might in other circumstances have been interpreted as arrogance. Her irritation was even admirable. Not only had her sister been stabbed to death, but her inheritance had disappeared. She was distraught. Why should she tolerate anything but the best?

“I am going to hire the outstanding detective in the state and in the country,” Tawny Acker said.

They were standing beside Webb’s cruiser in the driveway of the Acker house, which was cordoned off with crime-scene tape. “I’m not going to take the chance of having this investigation end up going nowhere.”

Biting his tongue, Webb conveyed his sympathies. He explained, however, that an investigation such as this one depended on intimate knowledge of the territory. Somebody coming in from the outside, nosing around, interfering with witnesses—that would be the worst possible thing to happen now.

“I’ve got every confidence we’ll solve this thing,” he told her. “I think I’m a pretty good detective, and so are my men.”

“How do I know that?”

“Well, if you don’t think we’re any good, how about the FBI? They’ve got a fair reputation, it seems like. Look, give us a chance. If
it looks like we’re not getting anywhere, I wouldn’t blame you if you did whatever you want.”

Tawny Acker agreed to hold off for the time being. In the meanwhile she was going to hire guards, off-duty policemen, or whatever it took to give her and her father twenty-four hour protection. After all, he was the only living witness, and she was a prime target for kidnapping. Webb said that he would do his best to protect her and the doctor but that he had no objections to extra help with that.

Webb had not enjoyed having to point to the FBI to mollify her; it seemed demeaning to his officers and himself; but it was true, this had quickly become an FBI matter. Rod Kincaid had already provided names and descriptions of suspects. Webb’s relations with Kincaid were cordial and cooperative, far more so than was usually the case between local authorities and the Bureau. The two men frequently worked together as a team, different though they were in style. Webb liked to kid that the restrained, methodical, precise Kincaid’s idea of a celebratory blowout after solving a case and obtaining convictions was to splurge on
two
Big Macs. On his part, Kincaid trusted Webb so completely that he readily shared information with him that he normally had to conceal from indiscreet or corrupt officers, notably sheriffs. Kincaid told everyone, including fellow FBI agents, that Danny Webb was the kind of cop that others wished they were.

Within forty-eight hours of the crimes, Danny Webb’s extensive contacts and the trust with which he was regarded by the community began to pay off as a number of local residents came forward with information that looked promising. One of the first was Jesse Spicer, a garage owner from Neon, who telephoned the lieutenant and told him that he had seen a suspicious-looking car parked near the Acker house on the night of the murder.

Spicer met Trooper Larry Carroll at the Acker house and led him across the highway and some hundred yards up the dirt road that cut through to Haymond. He had been driving someone over to Haymond that evening, Spicer said, a fellow who had had too much to drink. There had still been plenty of light when he saw the strange car.

“As I come up Haymond Hill it was a blue General Motors product, about a 1980 Chevrolet Caprice or Impala, light blue in color, and was very clean. It was so clean that it appeared like it was just
washed or waxed. The two front doors were open and gentlemen were standing in the open doorways. There was a gentleman sitting in the backseat on the driver’s side.”

Spicer described the standing men as having been dressed in suits. One was tall and sort of blond, with an athletic build, the other shorter and darker. The man in the rear seat “had everyday clothes on. It appeared he hadn’t shaved in three or four days. Like he had worked outside or something, dark hair, not neat. He looked out of place with the other two fellows. Never seen the two guys, but I’ve seen somebody resembles the guy in the backseat. But I can’t remember wherever. The main thing that struck me was the guy in the backseat. He was out of place with the other two.”