Murder in Little Egypt (38 page)

Nolen had sent Barron a copy of an edition of the Eldorado
Daily
Journal
so that he could get a better idea of what he would be up against when he came down. REACTION TO ARREST IS ONE OF DISBELIEF the headline read. The article said that local reaction was “overwhelmingly supportive” of the doctor and quoted a cross-section of the community as affirming that they were one hundred percent behind their beloved Dr. Dale. A nurse at Pearce Hospital who had worked for the doctor for twenty-five years vehemently denied that he could be guilty of murder. “I’ve seen him work too hard to save lives,” she said. Another hospital employee stated that the doctor’s patients believed that “the sun rises and sets with him.” “If he did do it, I hope and pray that they can’t prove it,” somebody else told the reporter.

When Barron met Nolen at the County Courthouse, he asked whether public reaction was calming down or changing. Some of the evidence had come out. The prosecutor’s office had publicly stated that they could place Dale with Sean on the night of the murder.

Nolen said that public support for the doc was stronger than ever.

“I don’t get it,” Barron said. “What about Sean? What about Marian and Kevin?”

“People think the doc’s a kind of Robin Hood,” Nolen said in his jovial way. “Don’t worry,” he laughed, “I’ll stick by you boys. I’ll ride shotgun. Folks around here aren’t used to big-city cops. They won’t be sorry to see you leave town, either.”

Barron studied Nolen’s round, ruddy face, his natty clothes, the embroidered rose in his lapel, and hated to think what it would be like down here without him. Barron already had a gloomy impression of southern Illinois. He felt as if he were in another country in another century. He did not enjoy being without his gun, but he was out of his jurisdiction. From what Nolen had told him, the folks in Egypt liked to settle an argument with a bullet. Nolen handled as many homicides a year as Barron did, with only a fraction of the population of St. Louis County.

At the courthouse Nolen escorted the St. Louis detectives as Barron signed an affidavit noting probable cause for a search warrant to be issued for the garage at 210 West Walnut and another for Dale’s Galatia farm.

Nolen drove them out to the farm and, following Dale’s hand-drawn map, they discovered in a pile of rubble not far from the Shea house the pathetic belongings of the dead Sean: a red nylon jacket, a set of keys, a brown leather wallet containing his driver’s license. All had been stuffed into a white plastic bag and hidden under a plastic tarp covered with bricks and trash, just as the doc had described.

Handling Sean’s things, Barron felt nausea. Seeing these objects brought the reality of what Dale had done into sharper focus. Even in the company of Nolen and the other detectives, it was lonely out there on the farm, and the loneliness and sadness of Sean’s life were present in a young man’s wallet and keys and jacket, left by his father in a trash heap. Had any human being in the history of the world deserved such a father? Had anyone had such a father?

Detective Kaminski took photographs of the site and of the objects. The men, guided by Nolen, explored the area. Nolen pointed out the spot where Mark’s remains had been found seven years before.

“I’ll send you the photographs of Mark,” Nolen told Barron. “I’ve never seen anything like them. I’ll bet you haven’t either.”

They headed back to Harrisburg along Route 34. Nolen showed the others where Dale had hit the McLaskeys’ car in 1971 and killed the father and daughter. Barron said that the former Mrs. McLaskey had telephoned the police and had been put in touch with Steve Goldman right after the doc had been arrested. She was married again, Barron gathered, and living in St. Louis. Evidently she had neither forgotten nor forgiven the doc. She wanted the chance to testify against him at the trial.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Nolen said. “Now isn’t that something. What do you know. I’ll bet the doc’ll be mighty surprised to see her,” he chuckled. “How do you do. That’s what they say, what goes around comes around. Isn’t it the truth?”

Nolen pulled his Buick in behind the garage at 210 Walnut, and they began the search for the gun, following Dale’s diagram of its location. They found the blue-steel, four-inch-barrel .357 magnum pistol, exactly where Dale said it was, jammed between a wooden strut and the drywall. Kaminski took photographs.

The St. Louis detectives stayed the night at the Holiday Inn in Marion, twenty-five miles west of Harrisburg, and spent the next day interviewing people who, Nolen suggested, would be able to account for Dale’s movements and his behavior during the period immediately after Sean’s murder. They talked to nurses, a lab technician, and the administrator at Pearce Hospital. Barron remembered telling Steve Goldman that he was going down to southern Illinois and would come back with everything needed for the case. He had retrieved the murder weapon and Sean’s belongings, but he could see that he was not going to get anything else.

The atmosphere at Pearce Hospital was so palpably hostile that Barron commented to his colleagues that he wished he had brought along his bulletproof vest. Nurses, secretaries, administrators, doctors—everyone was defensive about Dr. Cavaness. Their responses ranged from a formal, unrevealing courtesy on the part of Ann Pulliam, the chief administrator and the chairman of the hospital foundation that now ran the place, to outright resentment and rudeness from the nurses. According to everyone, Dale did not appear to be acting strangely at all on Friday, December 14. He had made his rounds as usual. Only the doctor’s laboratory technician, Russell Anderson, said that Dale had looked tired, possibly ill. Mrs. Pulliam said that he had been his usual attentive self, inquiring about the well-being of Mrs. Irma Pearce, the widow of the hospital’s founder.

“They don’t want to believe anything has happened,” Barron said afterward, relieved to be back in Nolen’s car. “They think we’ve invented all this. They despise us.”

“I told you they wouldn’t be friendly,” Nolen said. “It’s the same all over Eldorado. I feel sorry for Ann Pulliam, though. She’s a nice lady. It’s not her fault the guy on her staff who was supposed to be taking out gallbladders was a killer.”

Barron wondered whether Dale had killed other people in addition to his sons. A story had surfaced just before Christmas, by way of an anonymous phone call to the St. Louis police from McLeansboro, that Dale might have killed a widow in order to inherit her estate. The woman had been a patient of Dale’s since his McLeansboro days and, after her husband had died, she had made Dale her executor. The widow’s neighbors, according to the anonymous caller, had begun noticing that Dr. Cavaness was keeping company with her. He would show up at her house late in the evenings, starting in late 1982 and into ’83, and sometimes take her out and bring her back in the early hours; on other occasions he would spend the night. The neighbors, watchful like everyone in small towns, would see his car leaving at six or seven in the morning.

“Martha Culley won’t be real pleased if she hears this,” Nolen said.

One evening in the summer of ’83 Dale brought the widow back late at night and the two of them were laughing in her driveway, with drinks in their hands, before disappearing inside. It was a hot night and a woman across the street was sitting out on her porch from where she could see and hear everything. In the morning Dale’s car was gone.

The widow had a regular bridge game the next night. When she didn’t show up, the other players wondered, but they did nothing until two nights later, when the widow had still not come out of her house and the neighbors noticed that the paper had not been picked up for two days and lights were burning. The police found her dead in her bed.

There was no autopsy. No one had said anything until now, but the story was that Dale had inherited her jewelry and antiques and that she had also loaned him money over the years.

“I think he killed that old woman,” Barron said. “Kevin tells me that he did inherit some jewelry from her but that it was just junk, from what Kevin could see. I think he got jewelry and antiques and sold the good stuff.”

“We’ll never know now,” Nolen said. “That old lady was nearly eighty when she died. If Dale really was seeing her, she might’ve died of joy. She might just’ve keeled over in ecstacy.”

At Hickory Handle the detectives interviewed the farm manager, Hap Dawson, who said that Dale had appeared to be in a completely normal emotional state on Thursday, December 13, when he arrived at the farm at about noon, driving the Oldsmobile, and stayed until after four.

Barron went alone to see Martha Culley. At her request he interviewed her in the presence of her attorney at his law office in Harrisburg. Barron began by telling her that she was in no way considered a suspect nor someone with firsthand knowledge of the homicide.

Martha said that she had known Dale for twenty-five years, had been seeing him romantically for fifteen years and living with him off and on throughout that time. Barron identified her on his notepad as “Doc’s live-in girlfriend.” He saw her as someone who had once been attractive but was now pretty well worn. She described how Dale had traded cars with her on Wednesday night, taking the Toronado, but stated that she had no idea where he was going and had never known that he had driven to St. Louis. On Thursday evening they attended Peggy Ozment’s annual Christmas party, which was held at the Gateway Holiday Inn in Muddy. It was a big bash, and they had had a good time, staying till one in the morning.

After they had come home from the party Dale received a phone call. He did not tell her about the nature of the call.

“He didn’t tell you that it was his ex-wife or Kevin calling, saying that Sean had been killed?” Barron asked.

“No,” Martha said.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of unusual, his getting a call saying that his son was found murdered and not telling you about it?”

“I don’t see anything unusual about it,” Martha said.

“Not unusual that he didn’t tell you about going to St. Louis or what he had been doing?”

Martha said that she found nothing unusual about it. Dale lived his life and she lived hers. She hoped the charges against Dale were not true.

Dave Barron had not expected Martha Culley to be an eager witness. Aside from her connection to Dale through romance and a house, her son-in-law, T. R. Murphy, was the doc’s lawyer. Her former son-in-law was a convicted drug dealer linked to the doctor. Everyone in Little Egypt seemed to be related or connected to everyone else. The judge who had issued the warrant authorizing the police to seize the Toronado turned out to be the son of a state’s attorney from the 1920s who had served time for his association with the Charlie Birger gang and had been the target of assassination attempts by gang members who considered him an informer. Jack Nolen had all the links and genealogies in his head. Martha Culley herself was the daughter of another judge.

“Now you see how tough it is,” Nolen said, “to get an impartial jury down here. The doc’s big mistake was killing Sean in St. Louis. I seriously doubt whether we could get a conviction in southern Illinois.”

But Martha had accurately, it seemed, described the doctor’s movements and behavior after Sean’s death. Along with everyone else’s statements and the St. Louis evidence, Barron now believed he could form a picture of Dale as a man capable of murdering his son one morning after being up all night drinking, then driving a hundred and fifty miles back to southern Illinois to go about his business, tending to a sick heifer, having a whale of a time whooping it up at a party, and spending the next day caring for patients—to say nothing of driving back to St. Louis and staying up most of the night talking to the police and putting on an act for his family.

“He’s not your run-of-the-mill, everyday guy,” Nolen said. “You can see why people admire him, can’t you? He’s got a whole lot of unusual qualities.”

By the second week in January the Dr. Cavaness Defense Fund, coordinated by a group of Eldorado business people, friends and employees of the doctor, raised approximately thirty-six thousand dollars to hire a lawyer to defend him. The money came in amounts ranging from substantial to as little as a dollar and included donations from most of the eleven counties of Little Egypt. Pictures appeared in the papers showing children breaking open their piggy banks. People offered to mortgage their houses for the cause, although that would not be necessary, the committee assured everyone. Considering the population of the area and its poverty, an extraordinary amount of money was flowing in. Much was made of the doctor’s having treated the sick for free over the years, and patients were urged to pay their outstanding medical bills.

Early in January T. R. Murphy contacted attorney Arthur S. Margulis of St. Louis, who agreed to represent Dr. Cavaness through his trial and possible appeal for a flat fee of fifty thousand dollars, as Murphy announced in calling for more donations. (Criminal defense lawyers in St. Louis, unlike those in many other parts of the country, do not charge on an hourly basis.) Margulis, one of the top criminal defense attorneys in Missouri, was highly regarded enough to have been one of two lawyers elected by the fifty-five hundred members of the bar in his circuit to a committee which advised the governor on judicial appointments. Margulis was at the doctor’s side as the grand jury brought down its indictment.

When Dave Barron announced to the press that the gun believed to be the murder weapon had been found in Dr. Cavaness’s Harrisburg garage, the revelation was denounced in Eldorado as a smear and an attempt to dry up the defense fund. “No one on our committee believes Dr. Cavaness is guilty,” declared Bertis Herrmann, the proprietor of Herrmann’s Tin Shop, a hardware and heating and air-conditioning business, and the self-appointed, unofficial spokesman for the fund committee. “Everyone I have talked to feels he is innocent,” Herrmann told the Harrisburg
Daily Register
.

Several people wrote lengthy letters to the Eldorado, Harrisburg and other regional papers, defending the doctor as the victim of a big-city frame-up. One such letter, written by a woman, spoke of the “decadent, abominable and deplorable grand-scale character assassination of Dr. John Dale Cavaness by those who perpetrated the diabolical plot to frame him for the murder of his son. . . . People are sickened and angered by this whole prevarication [
sic
]. . . . To the St. Louis detective who described Dr. Cavaness as being the most cold-blooded and unemotional person you have ever seen, then just how long have you been in your field (two seconds?)? And what cave have you been hiding in? What would you do if your son was killed and you were framed for the murder, dance in the Follies?”