Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (6 page)

As proof you can't ever take the
country out of the boy, Dale one time scored a big burlap sack
filled with live chickens from an uncle who still lived on a farm
in central Missouri. He carried the chickens home in the trunk of
his 1952 DeSoto and proceeded to wring their necks in our driveway
while I sat on the steps with my younger sister watching in
absolute humiliation. Thanks to Dale, our neighbors would qualify
as experts the next time they accused someone of running around
like a chicken with its head cut off. They clamored to their doors
and windows to watch his chicken show, mesmerized by the scene of
headless birds dancing their death jigs while blood gushed from
their open necks. But no one complained.

For me, this
silence-of-the-chickens-episode stirred my first emotions of
empathy and compassion. I sat horrified watching him clutch each
bird around the neck and then spread his legs for support while
spinning his right arm clockwise in a windmill motion before
snapping his wrist at the bottom of the circle with a jerk that
kept the bird's head in his fist and sent the headless body sailing
through the air to finally bounce across the concrete and then leap
up in one final frenzy of fluttering confusion. I was glad I wasn't
a chicken. I also was glad I'd have the freedom to become my own
man and leave that part of my heritage behind.

A rural traditionalist on corporal
punishment as well, Dale lashed me occasionally with a belt and one
time employed a willow switch in the backyard after I had vanished
for an entire afternoon walking the three miles home from his shop
at the age of seven with my five-year-old sister in tow. At least
he acknowledged the ingenuity of my feat before laying on the wood,
mumbling: "I can't believe you found the way." When I was a
toddler, I'd been told, he once bought a dog harness with a leash
to restrain me from running around in a store and then had to
remove it after some Good Samaritan intervened with a threat to
stomp him stupid.

Despite embarrassments like those,
however, I thoroughly enjoyed his eccentricities and fully
respected his discipline, which also served as the foundation for
our comfortable middle class life in suburban St. Louis with a
stay-at-home mom. I never even thought about abuse and actually
reveled in that switching as a badge of honor for what had been my
greatest personal adventure to that point in my young life. I
wallowed in the pride that the switching failed to make me cry. And
he seasoned the rod with plenty of love. I just considered those
episodes as the dark side of growing up rural in suburban America.
On the bright side, he founded our neighborhood's unit of the
YMCA's fathers-and-sons Indian Guides program, forming the Osage
Tribe for us and several of my friends. As the inaugural chief he
took the name Straight Arrow while I became Broken Bow. Through the
Indian Guides he taught me to fish and camp. But he never was a
hunter.

While my dad emerged as a role
model for discipline and responsibility, my mother was a different
story. I loved my mom, of course. She gave me life and did other
considerate things like reading daily at noon while I sucked my
thumb before nap time. But I just didn't like her, and she never
had my respect. She seemed helpless, terrified of life, and unable
to function outside the home, where she often operated like a
bully. She could swing that belt, too, and usually administered her
whippings with an order for me or my sister to "Bend over and hold
your ankles." She didn't have to wait for our dad to come home. I
learned later that she suffered from a clinical depression so
severe that a psychiatrist would treat her with shock therapy in
the 1970s. In my formative years, she emerged as a reactive role
model, providing traits for me to observe as an adult in rejecting
women who might otherwise seem attractive.

Despite those potential problems, I
still recall our household as a wholesome, comfortable, and
nurturing place. Dale worked Monday through Saturday and barbecued
on Sunday. I had a sister two years younger and then, later,
another sister came along when I was fifteen, allowing Dale to
repeatedly boast: "There's still some fire in the furnace." Neither
of my parents drank alcohol. They took us to church every Sunday at
the Overland Christian Church where Dale served as a deacon, elder
or something like that. Although the name sounds a tad cultish, the
Disciples of Christ was and is just a simple denominational
Christian group differentiated only by its doctrine of accepting
new members after they've made what they call the "good
confession." In this ceremony, the convert merely confesses belief
in Jesus Christ as lord and savior, and then the minister baptizes
the convert by immersion. Historically the group began in the early
1800s as a frontier offshoot of Presbyterianism, its members
rejecting the rituals of the larger church and adopting democracy
as a governmental structure.

I made the good
confession at the age of fourteen and joined the congregation
before I had matured enough to deeply examine my true beliefs. Once
I did a few years later, however, I realized I had no faith in
God's existence and decided it would be pointless to pretend I did.
After all, I reasoned, wouldn't God see through the hypocrisy of
pretending to believe? So what would be the point? And if he
couldn't, would he be much of a God? Someday I figured an epiphany
might strike. Until then I decided to create a value system from
common sense. Of course, my agnostic conversion occurred after my
childhood, and I concede that youthful exposure to the Overland
Christian Church served me well. I read the Christian
Bible
and enjoyed its
stories, taking lessons from the mythology and admiring the
literature.

As a kid I must
have seemed a walking contradiction. To some I appeared as a shy
introvert. The summer after fifth grade, for example, I read most
of that 1948 edition of the
World
Book
Encyclopedia
,
A to Z. I also learned the game of chess from the girl who lived
next door. From chess I learned the power of planning. From her I
learned the traits I wanted to find in female companions:
intelligence, wit, attractive looks, a forceful manner, and a hint
of mystery. I nurtured a serious crush, and we became inseparable
that summer, playing chess or learning to dance, unless I was out
on one of my adventures.

That quest for adventure formed the
other side to my childhood. I enjoyed disappearing on my bike to
explore the neighborhoods. I played baseball and roamed at will in
those days before helmet laws and child molestors. Even reading fed
my imagination as I embraced the tales of historical figures like
Daniel Boone. I dug rock and roll for the rebellion as much as the
rhythm. And from television I learned appreciation for the antihero
in literature as a fan of James Garner's Brett Maverick, the
riverboat gambler who avoided fights but usually did the right
thing at the end of each show.

In
Life
magazine I read the
exploits of the twentieth century adventurer John Goddard, who had
sat down at the age of fifteen and wrote a list of 127 goals he
hoped to accomplish in his life. These included everything from
climbing Mt. Everest to visiting the moon. By the time I read about
him he had traveled the Nile in an historic expedition by kayak as
he continued to work his way down the list.

While other ambitious youngsters focused on
goals like getting rich or becoming president, I emerged from
childhood hooked on adventure and determined to pick a career that
offered action as well as a chance to deploy my language skills. I
recognized the opportunities my household could provide. More than
anything else I wanted to become an adult who was independent and
self-sufficient. Journalism or the law loomed as my
answer.

It was purely coincidental that I
managed to attend one of the top three schools of journalism in the
United States. As a state resident, I had bargain-rate tuition at
the University of Missouri about 120 miles west in Columbia. Since
I funded my education myself on earnings from the family lawnmower
shop, it also was all I could afford. Fortunately, for aspiring
journalists, it also was the best there was. So off I went in the
fall of 1965 to Mizzou, hitching a ride with a buddy's big sister.
I never looked back.

Mizzou's School of
Journalism was very different from its reputed rivals on the
highbrow campuses of Columbia and Northwestern. Some academics
actually looked down their noses at old Mizzou. While students
elsewhere spent their hours listening to lectures and pretending to
cover make-believe events, Mizzou employed the trade school
formula. Missouri J-school students actually worked for a
commercial paper, called the
Columbia
Missourian
. It supported itself by covering
the governments and culture of central Missouri and selling
advertising there. To get a three-hour credit in basic reporting,
for example, a student would attend class on the city desk and
might work the whole semester covering Columbia City Hall, the
local police, or anything else found in a real daily newspaper.
Instead of taking tests, the student just received a grade from the
editors based on job performance.

And these editors were not your
typical college professors. One of the best at Mizzou had never
even graduated college himself. Tom Duffy had started working
during high school in East St. Louis, Illinois, as a copy boy
during the Great Depression. Marshalling his natural nose for news
and a fascination for the written word, Duffy made his mark at the
paper there, hammering away at local corruption and rising to an
editor's job. Upon retirement he accepted a job running the city
desk at Mizzou's Columbia Missourian with a title as associate
professor. He was the kind of guy who would wad your incompetent
copy into a ball and throw it at your face, an inspirational old
style newsman from the real world.

Students could not
enter J-school until their junior year, after consuming the usual
diet of coursework required to prepare all of us for life: English,
history, math, science, etc. You know the drill. Although I had
expressed an early interest in communication with my Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer plays, I wasn't that clear about journalism
until forced to submit my course plan for my third year. By then I
was considering an eventual shot at law school after graduation and
I saw journalism as a means to that end. After I covered my first
murder case for the
Missourian
, however, it became
something more. I was hooked on the rush of being at the center of
the action.

Beyond the action and the fun of
writing, however, I also began to develop the concept of a "higher
authority" in journalism. It was Duffy who explained the principle
of public service and I took it to heart. He warned us we couldn't
really ever have friends among the sources we would cover. The time
would come when we might have to expose anyone as a fraud or a
thief. That was our duty. And it flowed not from the publisher who
paid our salary or the politicians we might quote. Our duty was to
serve as that independent monitor to provide our true superiors—the
readers—with the facts to help them make their daily decisions. It
sounded great, I thought. Not only can I have fun and get paid for
asking rude questions, but I also would actually be doing something
important.

Near the end of my senior year, I
received a letter from the school inviting me to report in person
to the Dean's secretary. When I arrived she told me I should plan
on attending the 1969 awards assembly scheduled a month away. She
said I would be receiving something called the Walter Williams
Award.

"Huh?" I said. "Are you sure you
have the right guy?"

She laughed but I was serious. She
compared my student identification card with the name on her list
and confirmed it. Honestly shaken, I visited the library and
researched the award. It went annually to the J-school student who
ranked as the "outstanding writer" there.

I already had a
job offer before I won the Walter Williams Award. So I collected
that accolade and then shipped off to Flint, Michigan, for a spot
on
The Flint Journal
. It was summer of 1969, and all I had to fear was the Vietnam
War. I figured I'd end up in a rice paddy anyway before I could
establish myself as a reporter. I wanted to eventually cover a
state legislature or the federal government for a newspaper, but I
also felt war experiences could be character builders. Newspapers
and war—wasn't that how Hemingway got his start?

The Flint
Journal
was the flagship of Michigan's
Booth Newspapers chain. Outside of Detroit, Booth owned the state
with a daily paper in every major city and no competition. Flint
was a boom town in the early 1970s as home to Fisher Body, Buick,
and other General Motors units. And it would serve as the first
rung on my ladder of professional development.

EIGHT

Early 1970s

My romanticized
notion of the classic American outlaw disintegrated on September
10, 1969, when I entered the real world of crime and punishment as
the official observer at the Genesee County Courthouse for
The Flint Journal
. That
was the day Judge Donald R. Freeman sentenced the city's two most
notorious felons of all time for the murder of a Flint policeman
during the January robbery of the El Toro Lounge and the related
killing of an innocent bystander who lived in a home where they had
sought refuge. A jury had convicted them some weeks before of
capital murder. Because Michigan had no death penalty, however,
that conviction included an automatic sentence of life in prison
without parole rather than execution. So Freeman had no discretion
on the fates of Norvel Simmons and John J. Moran as deputies
ushered them suddenly into his courtroom a day earlier than their
appointed date on a tip that the pair had a dramatic plan in the
works to escape from Freeman's court. That rumor only added to the
tension in the courtroom as the two killers stood before a judge
with a penchant for verbal abuse and no option for leniency in the
outcome.