Murder in Little Egypt (2 page)

Cave-in-Rock’s bloodiest tenants were Big Harpe and Little Harpe, Micijah and Wiley, brothers who killed for the pleasure of it, attacking travelers with the terrible cry “We are the Harpes!” and slaughtering their victims with knives and tomahawks, then slicing them open, tearing out the innards, and filling the bodies with stones to sink them in the river. They ranged about accompanied by antecedents of Charles Manson’s followers, three women who shared the brothers sexually and bore them three children. Big Harpe’s infant daughter irritated him one day with her crying, so he bashed out her brains against a tree. The Harpes’ documented victims number in the forties, but they killed many more than that, until Big Harpe was finally cornered, shot, and decapitated by the father of one of his victims, who lodged the head in the crotch of a tree as a warning. Little Harpe was hanged in 1804. They were serial murderers before the term was coined.

More recently Charlie Birger, a bootlegger and gangster who virtually ruled Little Egypt from 1925 to 1927, brought a brief, national notoriety to southern Illinois and created of himself an enduring legend that says much about the place. Named Sachna Itzik Birger at his birth in Lithuania in 1882, Charlie emigrated with his family to New York in 1887 and moved on to St. Louis. By 1913, after a stint in the 13th U.S. Cavalry, he was selling beer and whiskey to coal miners in southern Illinois. When the Klan interfered with his bootlegging, Charlie engineered the murder of its leader in a shoot-out at the Canary Cigar Store at the European Hotel in Marion in January 1925.

Charlie Birger was popular. Even today, local cynics say, the people of Harrisburg would erect a statue to him if they could get away with it. He won their affection by protecting them from the rival Shelton brothers’ gang and by well-publicized acts of charity, donations to church building funds, gifts of candy and ice cream to children, bags of groceries left on the doorsteps of the poor. Harrisburg was where he lived and educated his children, as he said in a radio broadcast over station WEBQ (We Entertain Beyond Question) in 1926. Nor were folks on the highways in any danger, “because a gangster’s bullet in this instance will be aimed at an enemy gangster.” He liked to parade the town square in his big Lincoln, armored and decked out with firing chairs and gun slits, a couple of his men perched on top with machine guns.

“Baron of Egypt, America’s Robin Hood,” a writer for H. L. Mencken’s
American Mercury
called him, noting that Charlie often dressed the part with his soft brown leather coat, riding breeches, leather hunting cap, bright yellow cavalry boots, and jingling spurs. His tailor, recalling Charlie’s fondness for a large beer stein decorated with portraits of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, called him “a knight of another sort.” He was the local killer made good. People looked up to this Robin Hood, this protector who kept the booze flowing and dispensed gifts. His was a time of relative prosperity in Egypt. The coal mines were at full tilt, everyone had a job, but nobody was getting rich, because the mine owners, like the railroad owners, were all absentee. The big money ended up in Chicago or left the state. Only Charlie Birger appeared to have whipped the system, with a Hair that made him the darling of reporters from St. Louis, Chicago, and the East.

“Live and let live is my motto,” Charlie liked to say. And “I don’t know what in the hell’s the matter with me. Every time I kill a man it makes me sick afterwards. I guess it’s my stomach.”

In 1928 he was hanged for the murder of the mayor of West City. Five hundred ticket-holding spectators filled the courtyard of the Benton jail for the event; others jammed the street outside and peered from the windows of buildings across the way.

“It’s a beautiful world,” Charlie Birger said just before he dropped. It made wonderful copy.

After Charlie Birger’s hanging, the region grew somnolent. The Great Depression came early, hit hard, and lingered until the middle of World War II. The coal mines never fully recovered; southern Illinois missed out on the postwar economic boom. People stayed on, attached to the land between the rivers, used to the old ways, working sporadically in the mines, growing corn and peaches, talking of new industries that never appeared, cashing relief checks, hunting and fishing and going to church. Many of the educated young cleared out, so the population remained about the same in 1984 as it had been in 1934. Violence was frequent but less dramatic than before, accepted merely as the way things were. As if longing for the glamorous, wild old days, county officials put up a historical marker in 1976 on the site of Shady Rest, Charlie Birger’s roadhouse and arsenal, where a man could buy a drink and a woman and bet on a cockfight or a dogfight. Quickly the marker vanished, shot up and blown up by ancient enemies or kids on a lark, nobody knew which.

Then in mid-December of 1984, something happened on a lonely road outside of St. Louis that woke Little Egypt up. A farmer, out to feed his horses at dawn, discovered the body of a young man. It looked like an execution: two shots to the head; dumped and abandoned.

Within a day the news reached Eldorado and Harrisburg and set people talking. The murdered young man was Sean Cavaness, twenty-two years old, the son of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, who was then living in Harrisburg and practicing at Pearce Hospital in Eldorado, as he had since 1955. Citizens of the two towns immediately recalled that Dr. Cavaness’s firstborn son, Mark, had also died of gunshot wounds several years before. Mark had been found lying near his truck on a farm Dr. Cavaness owned near Galatia, in Saline County. Most people believed that Mark had accidentally shot himself to death; there had been a lengthy investigation but never any arrests, nor even any known suspects; and people had pretty much forgotten about Mark until now. It seemed an unbearably cruel blow for the doctor to have to suffer, losing a second son like this. His wife had left him in 1971, taking all four of their sons with her. Then Mark had returned to Egypt, only to die, and now Sean was dead in St. Louis. Another boy, married, was living in St. Louis; and the fourth son was with his mother and her new husband somewhere up in Wisconsin. But the people of Eldorado and Harrisburg did not give too much thought to the distant ex-wife and the surviving sons. They grieved for their doctor.

No man in Little Egypt was more admired than Dr. John Dale Cavaness, or Dr. Dale, as he was affectionately called. He had a reputation for being the most skillful physician and surgeon in the region and the most kindly. He understood people, not only their illnesses, and he never asked those to pay who could not afford his services, but treated them for free, sometimes not even bothering to send a bill. His patients regarded him as a medical genius, as one of their own, and as a kind of Robin Hood. Religious folk wondered why God would have singled out this good man to bear such a heavy cross.

Then the unimaginable happened. After his son’s funeral in St. Louis, which had been attended by friends of the doctor from Little Egypt, detectives arrested Dr. Cavaness for Sean’s murder. The news tore through southern Illinois like a twister. Within days St. Louis homicide detectives were arriving armed with search warrants, nosing around Harrisburg and Eldorado like foreign agents. Not since the Herrin Massacre had anything like this happened to people used to minding their own business and telling outsiders to mind theirs. The story hit front pages and television news programs in Chicago and St. Louis.

These big-city sensationalists did not understand the doctor, local people insisted, nor the devotion of his patients and friends, nor the character of Little Egypt itself. Everybody knew that Sean had been unstable. Probably he had been killed by drug dealers— possibly he had committed suicide—the St. Louis police needed a scapegoat—the people of St. Louis wanted a hanging—so the rumors multiplied.

The doctor’s hometown supporters, organizing for his defense, began to attract attention throughout the Midwest and Upper South and in national publications. They set out to show the world what Dr. Dale Cavaness was really like.

2

IT MUST HAVE BEEN IN HIM FROM THE BEGINNING—THE fighting instinct, the intensity of will.

“He was breech birth,” his mother liked to say of him, “and he’s been doing things the hard way ever since.”

She often reminded her son and others of how she had nearly lost her own life, or so she said, giving him his. She talked about the event almost as if it had been a survival contest between mother and son that ended in a draw on October 15, 1925, when John Dale Cavaness battered his way into the world buttocks first.

He was Noma and Clarence Mark “Peck” Cavaness’s only child. After him, as Noma never tired of saying, she could not bear another.

She did not wish her son to forget her importance to him. When he was still very young, only three or four years old, she devised a new sort of contest with him. She would let him crawl up onto her bed with her to chatter and laugh and snuggle. In the middle of the giggling and maternal teasing Noma would pretend to die. All of a sudden, she would expel her breath, roll up her eyes and shut them, muttering, “I’m dying,” and lie there motionless.

It was the death game.

As she described it, Dale would crawl up to her face and touch it. “Mommy! Mommy!” he would begin to cry. “No, Mommy! Don’t die, Mommy! Are you dead? No!”

Soon he would be wailing hysterically, pounding at her with little fists. She would stay still.

Then, just as he was ready to hurl himself onto the floor in agony, Noma would pretend to revive. She would open her eyes and laugh. And the boy would cling to her, reprieved.

The remarkable thing about the death game, Noma Cavaness always said, was how frightened little Dale became. She dared not let the game last too long, not even as long as she could hold her breath. He might have gone berserk with terror and grief.

His mother’s hold on him remained strong for the first ten years or so. His father worked as a brakeman on what was then the Louisville and Nashville railroad. The L&N ran southeast from St. Louis to Eldorado, over toward Shawneetown and across the Ohio into Kentucky and beyond, so Peck Cavaness was often away for days at a time and never had regular working hours. Noma was ever present and watchful. They called the boy Dale after Noma’s father’s family. Her mother and father lived in the house next door on Maple Street in Eldorado, just across from the Ferrell Hospital, with her aunt and uncle next door on the other side. Dales set the tone of daily life.

Of the Dales (English in origin) and the Cavanesses (Scotch-Irish), the Dales were the older, more established family in the area, along with the Wards, Noma’s mother’s people. The Dales had been in southern Illinois since before the Civil War, migrating up from the South, establishing the settlement of Dale in Little Egypt as a timber town in the days when pioneers were still clearing the great forests. The town remained a point of family pride, although by the 1930s it had dwindled to scarcely a village on the road between Eldorado and McLeansboro, where the Dales and the Cavanesses shared a common graveyard. The social gap between the two families was not large; but in their regional longevity the Dales had acquired bits of property here and there and the respectability that land bestowed. They were not rich, but they were middle class. As a working man, Peck Cavaness had married a smidgen above himself.

Noma wanted all the Dales’ respectability, and then some, passed on to her son, and she wanted him to rise in the world. It was she who insisted on his finishing his homework every night and prodded him about his grades, which were excellent from the start. It was she who told him that he was smarter and better than the other boys and that she and his father would sacrifice to get him places. And it was she who took him to Sunday school and to services every Sunday at the First Presbyterian Church in Eldorado, where young Dale heard sermons in the gloomy, strict Calvinist mode of those days, with emphasis on predestination and the unknowable nature of God’s chosen, the elect. You could never be sure whether you were saved or damned; all you knew was that the matter had already been decided. It was a hopeful sign to be successful in this life. Achieving respectability might possibly mean that, through God’s mysterious grace, you had been saved, even as not being able to pay your way might indicate that you were headed for perdition. So you always wore your new shoes to church; they squeaked, and everyone could hear that you could afford new ones. But only God knew your fate. The best you could do was to work hard, hope, and pray, as the hymn said:

Few are thy days and full of woe,

O man of woman born!

Thy doom is written, “Dust thou art,

And shalt to dust return!”

Cheered by this hope, with patient mind

I’ll wait heaven’s high decree,

Till the appointed period come

When death shall set us free. Amen.

Whatever her sternness, Noma made the best peach cobbler in the world, and nobody could match her fried chicken or chicken and dumplings. But the way she made Dale dress for school increased the tension between mother and son. She insisted that he wear fancy corduroy knickerbockers when the other boys all ran about free in bib overalls ordered once a year from the Sears catalog. Those knickers set Dale apart, as Noma wanted and as he hated. He was not allowed to get dirty. On the rare occasions when Dale did come home with mud on his knickers, Noma would throw a fit. He had gotten dirty just to spite her, she told him. He had run off “wallering” in the mud just to infuriate her.

She also forced Dale to study the violin, a radical choice in a place where a baseball bat or a shotgun, or at worst a country fiddle, was the preferred instrument. Soon he was getting beaten up all the time. Mother Noma complained to the teacher and the principal, but other boys continued to waylay and pummel him, calling him a priss and a mama’s boy.