Murder in Little Egypt (46 page)

Professor Eisenberg said that he had been approached by a Reverend Staley R. Langham of Eldorado, who represented Dr. Cavaness’s supporters, and asked to help with the appeal. He had agreed and had accepted advance expense money in the amount of a thousand dollars from Reverend Langham. He was not licensed to practice law in Missouri, but he proposed that he visit Dr. Cavaness in Jefferson City and prepare the brief for his appeal, which Dockery could then sign, as if it were her work. He had thirteen years’ experience in these matters, and was glad to offer his help. He assured her that his interest in the case was purely intellectual and scholarly.

Beth Dockery replied that she would think the matter over. The more she thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed to her. She could not imagine, for one thing, how one would spend a thousand dollars on a trip to Jefferson City or what the purpose of such a visit would be. On an appeal it was not necessary to consult with the convicted prisoner; a brief courtesy visit was perhaps appropriate but not required; in the absence of new evidence, the trial transcript was all that was relevant.

Beth Dockery was not at all happy with the idea of putting her name under someone else’s writing, as she understood Eisenberg to be suggesting. She could not accept that his involvement was a purely scholarly one: She suspected that what he had in mind was a “kamikaze defense,” one in which the attorney deliberately performs incompetently so as to cause delay or, at best for his client, a reduction in sentence from death to life imprisonment. The tactic was unknown in Missouri but she was aware that at least one California lawyer had made a career out of it at both the trial and appellate levels.

Dockery telephoned Eisenberg and told him to get lost. When asked by a writer what he had to say about Beth Dockery’s suspicions of his motives, Professor Eisenberg replied simply, “She is dead wrong.” It was ridiculous for her to think that he was trying to set her up. He could not work with her, and he was getting off the case. He had given Reverend Langham back the thousand dollars.

For her part, Beth Dockery found that she could not work with Dr. Cavaness, who had refused to sign the forms necessary to declare his indigency and consequent eligibility to be defended at taxpayers’ expense. She passed the case on to another assistant public defender, Deborah Doak, who agreed to argue the appeal with or without the proper forms.

At the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, a forbidding pile on the banks of the Missouri River which had been in continuous operation since the 1860s, Dale was death row inmate No. 40. He passed his time reading magazines—mostly medical and antiques journals—writing letters and making audio tapes for his putative biographer, Martha’s relative from Oklahoma City. With the help of another inmate, a convicted narcotics dealer and killer who had made himself into something of a jailhouse lawyer, Dale sued the insurance company to recover the benefits he argued were due him on Sean’s death. Like most death-row prisoners, who averaged about three pending lawsuits apiece, he filed other briefs, including one against a cattle company he claimed had cheated him several years before. Martha and Reverend Langham visited him about once a month; otherwise he kept mainly to himself, occasionally dispensing medical advice to other prisoners, who sometimes irritated him with their obtuseness.

These prisoners noted that Doc Cavaness, who insisted that he had been convicted because of the incompetence of his lawyer but refused to share the transcript of his trial with anyone, never accepted offers of the dope—usually marijuana or speed, sometimes morphine—smuggled into the prison or stolen from the infirmary. He even turned down offers of copies of
Playboy
or
Penthouse
magazines, saying that in these conditions a man had to use his willpower to control himself and that such material would only make him feel more frustrated.

With the trial over, Marian returned to Wausau to try to pick up again her new life with Les, but for several weeks she was barely ambulatory. She stayed in bed most of the day, a haunted creature, beaten down finally to despair. Although Les tried to tell her that it was unhealthy for her to do so, she kept looking at the family photographs she had managed to save from the fire at the house on Fourth Street—the Christmas snapshots of all the boys, of herself and Dale, pictures of Dale and herself in the wonderful days of courtship. She found in a shoebox his love letters to her when she was in New York and he in Baltimore. She did not reread them but put them into a manila envelope and mailed them to him at Jefferson City.

Les nursed her. He told her that she was a strong person; she had survived everything else, and she would come through this. He called her Skip, treated her depression as if it were merely a convalescence. He was most concerned about her when she collapsed weeping and cried absurdly that Sean’s death had been her fault.

By the summer of 1986 Marian had more or less recovered. It took little to start her crying, but she was determined to go on, to set an example for Patrick and for Kevin. Nothing she could feel or do would make the tragedy grow or shrink by an inch or an ounce; better to defy fate and live. Les was so happy to have his gal, as he said, back on her feet that he decided they needed to celebrate. She had always wanted to see France. They made a tour of the Rhône Valley, enjoyed the beauties of the Côte d’Or.

Kevin too found himself on an emotional rack, wondering whether at some obscure point in the past he had done something, or failed to do something, that had goaded his father into wrath. At other times he felt consumed with anger at his father, vowed to witness his execution, then changed his mind, cursed his father not only for what he had done but for what he was still doing to the family, simply by being alive or by having existed at all.

“We thought it was all over,” Kevin said to Charli, “but the son of a bitch is still there. He’s still haunting us. He’ll never die, even if they kill him.”

By June of 1986, Charli knew that she was pregnant again. Kevin prayed aloud that his father’s curse would not affect this baby as it had Kelly Ann, whose grave they visited in September to mark the first anniversary of her death.

Just after seven on the morning of Monday, November 17, 1986, at the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, a prison guard was making his morning rounds when he approached a cell and noticed through the bars that inmate No. 40, Dr. John Dale Cavaness, appeared to be hanging from the cell door. The guard unlocked and with some difficulty managed to shove open the door. He found that Dr. Cavaness was indeed hanging from the door by means of three brown electrical extension cords which had been tied together and looped at one end with a slipknot. Dr. Cavaness appeared to be dead. The guard called for medical assistance.

The guard took down the body and attendants arrived to administer CPR. Other prison officials entered the cell and took photographs of the scene. Dr. Richard Bowers pronounced Dr. Cavaness dead at seven minutes past eight. The death was ruled a suicide. It was noted on the official report that the prisoner had greased the slipknot with Vaseline to make it close rapidly. The suicide had been an act of remarkable will, since the deceased must have raised his feet off the floor while hanging in order to cause the knot to tighten around his throat; and, before passing out, he could have stood upright to halt the process.

Inside Dr. Cavaness’s locker prison officials found a suicide note and eleven large and small envelopes containing legal papers and personal letters and another note stating that he wanted all his personal property to go to his girlfriend, Martha Culley.

The suicide note, neatly typewritten, double-spaced, was addressed to “The Missouri State Prison Administration” and became the final item in Dale’s official file. “I want to make it clear,” the note began, “that this final act has nothing to do with my care or treatment while confined to this institution.” Guards and other personnel had been considerate and respectful of him, Dale wrote. He could handle the confinement and depression but, he continued:

I am burdened by the problems that it creates for the ones I care most deeply about and feel that time will resolve that in my absence. I intend to attempt to pursue my exoneration but frankly am aware of the long and stressful legal processes that that would require and my situation is much like that of a patient found to have a malignancy. If the initial treatment is bungled, the patient has nothing to look forward to except a lifetime of agony, even if life is sustained. The same end result occurs when the legal approach to a capital crime is poorly carried out and I am much too aware of the prognosis in both cases. . . .

Dale praised again the attitude toward him of prison officials and concluded:

Please see that my personal belongings are turned over to Rev. Staley Langham or some other person designated by my attorney T. R. Murphy and notify one of the people I designate,
other than
Martha Culley, so that she may be spared the emotional stress of what I’m sure we all know will be a shock.

Nowhere in the suicide note nor in any of the other letters and documents did Dale mention Kevin, Patrick, Marian, or his dead sons. When in the following weeks his will was filed, Martha Culley was listed as the sole beneficiary. She was also listed as the sole beneficiary of the one-hundred-and-ninety-eight-thousand-dollar policy that he had taken out on his own life: He had changed the beneficiary from his sons, with Marian as trustee, to Martha after his conviction. A clause saying that the policy was invalid if the insured committed suicide had expired on the day before Dale killed himself.

On Wednesday, November 19, an editorial appeared in the Harrisburg
Daily Register
under the headline LET IT REST. The “strange, even bizarre” story of Dr. John Dale Cavaness had come to an end, the editorial said, “punctuated sadly and abruptly by his own hand.” The case had polarized Eldorado and Harrisburg. There had been no middle ground: “One either believed whole-heartedly in [his] innocence or believed just as whole-heartedly that he was guilty.” The story had dissolved long friendships, left some people hurt and others angry and “almost everyone puzzled.” It was unfortunate that the case would continue to be discussed for years to come, “because it’s over now. We should let it rest.”

Some old-timers and scholars of the Charlie Birger legend in Little Egypt recalled that the same newspaper had expressed almost identical sentiments fifty-eight years before, upon the occasion of the hanging of that gangster.

About one hundred invited guests showed up for a memorial service in honor of Dr. Cavaness, held later that month at the First Presbyterian Church in Eldorado, organized by Reverend Langham and Martha Culley. It was said that Dale himself had given, among the papers found in his cell, instructions for the service and for the guest list which, needless to say, did not include any family members. Pat and Betty Ray Sullivan received an invitation but discovered that they had to be out of town.

Three ministers in addition to Reverend Langham officiated at the service, which began with a tape recording of the Harrisburg High School choir performing “I Will Not Leave You Comfortless” and continued with the singing of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Amazing Grace,” the recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, the reading of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” and Helen Keller’s homily “Life Is Good” and concluded with the singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

His soul was marching on. When, several weeks later, Dr. Cavaness’s will was entered in probate, a local man said that he planned to buy the Hickory Handle farm and to erect there a concrete cross in memory of the doctor.

About a month after the suicide Dave Barron visited Kevin at his house to hand over a box of Dale’s belongings—stuff found in the Oldsmobile Toronado, some shotgun parts, a wallet, a car maintenance manual—and to see how Kevin and Charli were getting on. They had moved to a bigger place in anticipation of the new baby. Charli’s pregnancy seemed to be proceeding without complications.

On top of a cardboard box that sat on the hi-fi next to the bust of Ernest Hemingway, Barron noticed a plastic bag filled with what looked like plant food.

“He just came in the mail yesterday,” Kevin said. “Want to see him?”

The bag was filled with Dale’s ashes which, to Kevin’s shock after weeks of trying to find out what had happened to his father’s remains, prison officials had sent him, as the next of kin. Now he didn’t know what to do with them. They were spooking him, he said.

Barron, who had never before seen what undertakers called “cremains,” examined the bag and, shuddering, noticed that bits of teeth and bone dotted the ashes.

“I tell you what,” Barron said. “This stuff’s got a lot of calcium in it. It would probably harden up pretty good. What do you say we mix it up with some cement and take it over to Jeff City to the gas chamber? We could make a step out of it, a little step up to the gas chamber, so every guy who goes in there has to step on him. We could call it the Dr. Cavaness Memorial Step.”

Kevin said that it wasn’t such a bad idea. But he said that he had decided that he had better not mess with his father’s ghost. He had better try to put the old man to rest. He was thinking of driving down to southern Illinois and sprinkling the ashes on the Hickory Handle farm.

“There’s a nest of copperheads down there,” Kevin said. “I could throw him in with the copperheads but I’m afraid he might come back as a snake and bite me.”

Kevin thought he would simply spread the ashes on the land:

“I could ask Jack Nolen to ride shotgun when I go down there. Every time I’m in Egypt, I can feel the cross hairs on the back of my neck.”

Dave Barron could tell that Kevin’s feelings about Dale were complex. Barron regretted, a little, having made the suggestion about the memorial step. That was how he felt about the doc; but Kevin had filial loyalties that went beyond and above and beneath what you could type out in a police report. You could not dispense with your father. Kevin was trying to act tough, was tough, but he was marked. He wanted to do what was right, whatever that meant; but he was branded, in a way, his father’s son. It was beyond fathoming. Barron could not help thinking of his adopted son.