Dark and Bloody Ground (51 page)

Big John’s task was simplified, however, in that Donnie Bartley, whom the others would surely have tried to kill, was no longer resident at Bowling’s jail. For safety’s sake, Bartley was moved to a nearby halfway house. Big John had come to know Donnie and the
other Bartleys well; they were almost family together by that time. While Donnie was still his guest, Big John had graciously let the inmate’s parents manage the Old Mill motel and restaurant, which the jailer owned. Louise and Donald Bartley, Sr., remarried to one another, brought together by adversity or perhaps by something beyond common knowledge and understanding, seemed to be enjoying a degree of prosperity, on the evidence of automobiles registered to them and to Donnie’s sister and observed parked at the Old Mill. These included an older Olds sedan leased from Avis, but also a 1986 Subaru GL sports car, a 1985 Cadillac Eldorado, and a classic 1957 Thunderbird, this last alone worth more than most new cars.

The Morris jurors chose the KSP trooper as their foreman. After hearing closing statements—the defense stressed the lack of physical evidence; Craft quoted Mark Twain’s line that a human being’s most precious possession was his or her last breath on earth—they retired to deliberate. They were gone about an hour before reporting that they had reached guilty verdicts on all counts, recommending twenty years each for robbery and burglary.

The emotions in that sweltering courtroom—the air conditioning had broken down, and it was unseasonably warm, eighty-four degrees inside; the jurors fanned themselves with their parking passes—were heightened by the presence of so many family members, relatives of victims and killers alike. Once so close, the Eppersons and Morrises now avoided each other except for an occasional bitter exchange. Troopers stood behind the defense table, in every corner, and at the doors. Outside, they were on guard with shotguns.

In contrast to the Acker trial, the defense chose this time to call witnesses during the penalty phase in an attempt to sway the jury against the death penalty. Benny Hodge’s mother, identified as Eula Burkhart, was the first to take the stand to plead for mercy for her son. She described the hard life with Billy Joe Hodge, the beatings, the shooting of Benny’s dog. She characterized Benny as a sweet boy who loved Christmas.

“Do you know why Benny would kill old people?” James Wiley Craft asked her. She denied his guilt. As did one of his sisters and his daughter by his first marriage, who called him a wonderful father, stressing the presents he gave and his cooking. Craft inquired of her what she had given him for Father’s Day in 1985.

A preacher who had counseled him in jail stated that Benny had described how his stepfather had punished him by trying to force him
to eat his own feces. It was the reverend’s opinion that Benny still had hopes and dreams. A psychologist testified that Benny had told her that his present wife had taught him how to love. His sixth-grade teacher remembered him as a good boy who sometimes came to school with bruises on his face. Benny’s second wife described how he had made a chocolate wedding cake with cherries on top for their nuptials at Brushy Mountain. Craft asked why, if she loved Benny so much, she had divorced him. Wasn’t it true that he had run off with a prison guard?

All of Roger Epperson’s immediate family members asked the jury to be merciful. Of them, his mother was the most emotional, his father the least. In her closing argument one of his lawyers described her client as a man with a drug problem and an alcoholic who was really “generous, considerate, a man who would put a Band-Aid on a bunny rabbit or try to save a bird who had flown in the window.”

As the jury again retired, now to decide on life or death, James Wiley Craft wondered whether any of them could possibly be affected by the hearts and flowers they had just heard. After an hour, he began to worry. After two more hours, the trooper-foreman emerged to inform the judge that they had not been able to agree. It was past five-thirty. Perhaps if they had a quick meal it would put them into a mood for unity. The judge agreed.

Craft happened to glance through a window that looked into the corridor outside the jury room. Apparently taking a breath of air after their snack, the six men and six women were milling about the hallway. The trooper was leaning down to talk earnestly to an older woman, one who Craft remembered had voiced misgivings about the death penalty during voir-dire examination, although she had said that she could imagine herself voting in favor of it. Unable to hear anything, Craft deduced that she was the lone holdout and that the trooper was trying to convince her to join the others arguing for death, the man of law reasoning against false sentiment. Letting him on the panel could prove to be a fatal defense mistake.

Just after six o’clock, the jury returned. They had chosen death for both defendants.

The Morris family cried from relief. Bobby Morris, responding to a reporter, said that his parents deserved no less than what the jury had decided. His heart went out, however, he added with tears streaming down his face, to the Epperson family.

James Wiley Craft studied the reactions of the jury. The trooper
had his arm around the woman who Craft had guessed had been the holdout. She was crying, and the big man was trying to comfort her.

There were tears being shed over in the jailhouse, too. For humanitarian reasons, authorities at the federal prison in Lexington had permitted Sherry and Carol to be with their husbands on this day. Sherry was waiting in Big John Bowling’s office as a pair of troopers led Benny in.

“What is it?” Sherry asked.

“Death, again,” Benny said.

They embraced. Suddenly, as they were kissing, old Judge Bishop popped his head in.

“Say, Hodge,” the judge said. “I forgot to tell you. Those twenty years you got on the robbery and burglary? They’ll run consecutively.”

Now that his purpose for the government had been fulfilled, it was time for Donnie Bartley to learn what punishment was to be his. Back in May of that year, he had stood before Judge Hogg and, on the advice of his attorney, refused to waive his right to a trial by jury. James Wiley Craft had asked for a sentence of two hundred years, abiding by his agreement not to seek the death penalty in return for Bartley’s testimony. A jury would be bound by the limitations of Craft’s request; a judge sitting alone would not, and would remain free to condemn Bartley to death.

But on December 15, immediately after a Letcher County jury was chosen, Bartley ignored his attorney and asked that Judge Hogg alone decide his fate. His reasoning was unclear. Judge Hogg asked him whether he understood that he could still be sentenced to death, despite any agreements that had been made.

“I never committed the murder,” Bartley said in a near-whisper.

The judge continued to question him for some thirty minutes.

“I plead guilty,” Bartley finally said, “but I didn’t kill Tammy Acker. Benny Hodge committed the murder.”

Judge Hogg announced that his own inclination was to give Bartley the death penalty, since he considered him equally as guilty as his cohorts, whether he had personally killed anybody or not. He had tried to kill Dr. Acker, as he himself had admitted. But an extraordinary thing had happened. Just that day, Dr. Acker and his surviving daughter had come to the judge’s chambers and asked him to spare
Donald Bartley’s life. Maybe their hearts were filled with mercy; more likely, they could not face the ordeal of another trial, in which Dr. Acker once again would have to relive that awful night. Only last month the doctor and Tawny had sat through most of the Morris trial, out of bonds of love and commiseration that had sprung up between them and the family of other victims of Bartley and his friends.

Bartley was a lucky man, Judge Hogg said. Out of respect for the Ackers, the judge sentenced him to life in prison without possibility of parole for twenty-five years.

Bartley did not feel lucky. He had been tricked, he maintained to anyone who would listen. He claimed to have understood that he would be eligible for parole after eight years. He began serving his long, possibly terminal stretch at the State Reformatory at La Grange—bitter, dreaming of revenge, considering himself one of life’s victims. “I’d rather be homeless,” he said, “sleeping under a bridge, than in this cell.” He passed the time lifting weights and “making love to my guitar.”

32

S
HERRY SPENT THIRTY-SEVEN MONTHS
and six days in prison, nearly all of that time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lexington, before she was paroled. She was glad that she knew as much about prison life as she did, because her experience helped her to adjust. She dealt with the inevitable racial conflict during her first week in her own fashion. A large black woman challenged her to a fight. When the guards finally pulled them apart, Sherry’s opponent was nearly unconscious and had lost some teeth. After that they became, if not friends, then peaceful toward one another.

Her experience also helped her to know how to control and conceal the marijuana and the green money she managed to acquire. She hid her currency by stuffing it into a full bottle of shampoo. She got into trouble only because during the first year and a half of her stay the Lexington prison was coeducational, with men and women on different floors and in different buildings but permitted to mingle with one another during meals and recreational activities. This experiment in prison reform proved as disastrous for the institution—the illegitimate birth rate soared—as it was for Sherry, who was disciplined for three charges relating to unauthorized contact with males. One involved kissing a guard; the other two had to do with prisoners and were of a more intimate nature.

“You all are crazy,” she told the warden and her accusers. “You think I’m some kind of a Linda Lovelace?”

Her punishment was forty days in the hole, or solitary, without privileges.

Of privileges there were many available to those on good behavior.

The prison had a movie theater, outdoor basketball and tennis courts, a running track, miniature golf, racquetball courts, a gymnasium, and roller skating on Tuesday and Friday nights. For the artistically and intellectually inclined there were classes in painting, leather-crafts, and ceramics; and there was a library. Sherry read the first book in her life, a romantic novel, while in prison; she also kept up with the outside world by reading the Roane County paper and the
Mountain Eagle.
On a typical day she arose at five, showered, and had breakfast at six-thirty. She worked in the physical therapy department of the prison hospital through the morning, lifted weights following a regimen Benny had devised for her, and, after lunch, returned to her cell to write him a letter every day. Sometimes she would send him a poem when she was feeling lonely:

What could be more beautiful

Than watching Spring arrive

And seeing all the world awake

And Nature come alive?

What could be more wonderful

Than spending Easter Day

With someone who will

Not let the sunshine slip away?

What could be more special

Than to share all this with you—

My Husband. My world. My dearest friend.

My Joy my whole life through!

It sounded like a greeting card, but she claimed it as her own.

After an early dinner, shared usually with two Mexicans with whom she had become friends, she reported for work at the prison’s industrial plant. At first she stitched men’s underwear; later she operated a press in a shop that printed court documents; eventually she became secretary to the supervisor of the entire industrial operation, earning a dollar twenty-five an hour. Twice she was named
“Employee of the Month” and received a fifty-dollar bonus. She was in bed by midnight.

For all this activity, however, Sherry was not among those who found life on the inside more appealing than the brutality of the street. She longed for the free world, marking each day served on a calendar, her earliest possible release date always in mind. Had Benny not also been confined, she might have tried to escape. Although not as often as to Benny, she wrote regularly to her parents, brothers, and daughter. All except Renee came to visit: Billy Pelfrey did not think that seeing her mother behind bars would be healthy for the girl.

Sherry’s only excursion away from the prison was just before Christmas in 1987, when she was subpoenaed to testify at Donnie Bartley’s sentencing hearing. She relished the chance for a day on the outside. She enjoyed seeing Ben Gish again and some of the others she had met around the courthouse.

It was dark by the time the prison van made it back to Lexington. She dreaded returning behind the walls and, having amused them for hours with her stories and repartee, prevailed on the marshals to drive around the city so she could see the Christmas lights. They stopped to buy her a cheeseburger and fries and, joking with her that this was her chance to run, let her off by herself at the front gate. She walked in alone, unhandcuffed and unshackled.

“I been out on a date,” she said as she signed in.

During that day down in Whitesburg, Judy Jones Lewis, a young reporter for the
Lexington Herald-Leader
who had heard about Sherry from Ben Gish and others, talked to her for a while at the jail and noticed how men were drawn to her. Policemen, lawyers, jail employees, they all stopped by to chat, looking for an excuse to be near her. Judy Lewis asked her about it.

“I always liked males more than females,” Sherry said. “Women are treacherous. I’ve always had a way of getting over with men—you know, being cutesy and flirty.”

Judy Lewis wrote in her notebook: “Sherry folds her legs under her, like an Indian princess holding court, and men filter in and out of the room. They awkwardly find a seat in one of the vinyl chairs in the jailer’s office and listen to her story.” She was so fascinated by Sherry that she asked her if she would be willing to give her a full interview sometime. Sherry said, why not?