Murder in Little Egypt (47 page)

Barron and his wife had the nine-year-old boy in the house now. The adoption people had explained that he would try to test them, because he had never been wanted before; no one had ever loved him.

Dave Barron saw Kevin as an older version of the adopted boy. Lost. Wondering whether everybody was as hateful as his father. Wondering about his father. Lucky to have Charli, Marian. A strong young man but one brutally tested by life.

Just last week the pond near the Barrons’ house had frozen over. Dave had forbidden his daughters and the adopted boy to skate on the pond: The ice was always too thin, even in the dead of winter.

But the boy had gone out on the ice. Dave ordered him back to shore. The boy retreated to his room and threw a fit.

“I’m leaving,” the boy said when Dave came into his room.

“You are?” Dave asked him. “Where are you going? Where will you live?”

“On the street!” the boy said.

“Really?” Dave said. “You’re sure you don’t want to live in this nice warm house?”

“No!” said the boy.

“What about the rash on your face?” Dave Barron said. “It’s almost gone now. Who’s going to put medicine on it for you every night if you live on the street?”

“Can I borrow your suitcase?” Dave Barron’s adopted son said.

“No,” Dave said. “You can’t borrow my suitcase. We want you to stay here. We love you.”

“I’m going!” the boy said.

“Are you sure?”

“Well,” the boy said, ‘‘I’ll decide later.”

“Okay.”

Dave Barron withdrew from Kevin’s house, respectful, understanding that Kevin himself would have to figure out what to do with the ashes. Barron accepted that he could not solve a mystery beyond law.

On February 24, 1987, Charli gave birth to a healthy baby girl. They named her Shannon, in keeping with the tradition of Irish names in the Cavaness clan; but she looked like Charli, had her large, round brown eyes. Kevin was glad that she was a girl and that she resembled Charli. She might break the cycle. Kevin was wary of the Cavaness genes, for a generation or two anyway.

* * *

On a gray, misty day in March, Kevin drove down to southern Illinois with his father’s ashes beside him in the car, along with the few things from the Toronado that Dave Barron had given him. He met Jack Nolen at the courthouse in Shawnee Square. He transferred everything to Nolen’s Buick. Nolen headed for Route 34 and the Handle.

Unarmed, Kevin did not feel safe in Little Egypt, even with Detective Nolen by his side. He understood now what a loyal friend Nolen had been to the family and how much he had wanted to arrest Mark’s killer; and Kevin would not have undertaken this mission without Nolen’s company. But Dale’s friends were everywhere. They did not care about his mother or Charli or Shannon or Patrick or Mark or Sean. They might have heard he was coming and be waiting for him at the farm. The bend in the road before Herod would be the perfect place for an ambush. The idea of cross hairs on the back of his neck haunted him. Dale had shot Sean from behind.

On the far side of Harrisburg on Route 34, beyond the gas stations and the Huck’s Convenience Food Store, Jack Nolen pulled up, at Kevin’s request, at T. R. Murphy’s house. Kevin did not wish to give Murphy the time of day, but he thought he might as well turn over Dale’s things to him. Nolen agreed to take them into the house.

“I’ve got Kevin Cavaness with me,” Nolen said to Murphy. “He wanted you to have this stuff of Dale’s. We’re going to take a look at Hickory Handle. Old time’s sake.”

“You can’t go up there,” Murphy said. “We’re not through probate yet. You can’t go up there without permission.”

“Is that right?” Nolen said. “Well, what do you know. I’ll tell you something. I don’t know how to get in touch with the owner, do you?”

Murphy said nothing. Nolen walked out, cheerful as a dog at dawn.

At the Handle in the afternoon mist, in the wet, darkening light, Jack Nolen stood beside his car; Kevin, a large, slow-moving form, made his way up the hill from the barn, carrying the bag of ashes.

Kevin did not go to the top of the hill, to the crest where the old graveyard had been, to where you could look out over the valley toward the Shawnee hills and the Ohio, to where he and Sean had sown Mark’s ashes ten years before. He paused instead at a low knoll. He tilted the bag, keeping his hands well back, not wishing to touch his father’s ashes. He let them pour out in a slow stream, spreading them evenly on the earth.

—Southern Illinois, St. Louis, Tulsa, 1986–1988

Acknowledgments

I WISH TO THANK MARIAN GREEN AND KEVIN AND CHARLI Cavaness for their candor and tireless assistance. I am also grateful to Patrick Cavaness for his reminiscences and to Les Green for his hospitality.

About one week before his suicide, I made a formal request through the Office of the Public Defender to interview John Dale Cavaness at the State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri, although I did not expect him to reveal any more to me than he had to others. I visited the prison in 1987 to talk to guards and inmates. I am grateful to death-row inmate Doyle J. Williams for his detailed account of the doctor’s behavior in prison.

In southern Illinois and in St. Louis, Jack T. Nolen, Dave Barron, Steve Goldman, Art Margulis, Eddie Miller, Pann and Lou Beck, Pat and Betty Ray Sullivan, Greg Sullivan, Sam Yarbrough, Dorothy Zignetti, Beth Dockery, Howard Eisenberg, Erin Brothers; and, in Florida, Eddie Bell; and, in southern Missouri, Marilyn and Chuck Leonard were of invaluable assistance.

In Tulsa I wish to thank Professor James G. Watson for his help with nineteenth-century historical and literary background; Dr. J. Paschal Twyman, president of the University of Tulsa, for his knowledge of bovine genetics; Roger Atwood, M.D., and Donald Brawner, M.D., for medical expertise. My thanks also to Justice Ronald M. George of the California Court of Appeal for guiding me through legal thickets.

Many people in Eldorado, Harrisburg and McLeansboro and a few in St. Louis who talked and wrote to me about Dr. Cavaness preferred to remain anonymous. I must thank them collectively here for much valuable information and insight.

All of the persons and incidents in this book are actual and, to the best of my knowledge, accurately portrayed, based on interviews and on materials noted below, under “Sources.” The following names represent actual people but have been changed for reasons of discretion: Chet Williams, Jim Eldridge, Frank Stoat, Johnny Weingarten, Grolsch, “the Panther.”

My literary agent, Robert Gottlieb, vice-president of the William Morris Agency, has been a wonderful help throughout with his enthusiasm, good humor, optimism, diplomacy and intelligence.

I have been blessed with a distinguished, superb editor, Harvey Ginsberg, vice-president and senior editor at William Morrow, who brought to the manuscript his experience, literary taste and story sense. I came to trust his judgment—for me a novel phenomenon—although such lapses as may remain in the text are my own.

The dedication of this book to my wife, Suzanne Beesley O’Brien, is an expression of gratitude for her energetic and resourceful work as my research assistant and confidante. Without her I would not have been able to obtain some information, nor as effectively to conduct several interviews and to evaluate source material. She acted also to rebuff distractions and interruptions.

Sources

The people named above have been my principal sources. Characterizations of the persons and dramatizations of the incidents in this book are based on interviews and on various documents, including trial transcripts and evidence in Cause No. 518664,
State of Missouri
v.
john Dale Cavaness,
Eileen Jones, C.C.R., Official Reporter; other court and police documents; correspondence; press files and videotapes of television news broadcasts; school records; historical documents, journals and books.

For the earlier parts of the story, those dealing with the history of southern Illinois and the circumstances of Cavaness’s youth, I have consulted books, journals and documents of which I was made aware first through the help of Dr. Rennard Strickland, dean of the College of Law, Southern Illinois University, and most extensively with the help and guidance of Gary DeNeal of Herod, Illinois. Mr. DeNeal is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and historian who with his wife, Judy, edits and publishes
Springhouse,
a bimonthly journal which is a treasure-trove of Egyptian lore and reference. Gary DeNeal was selfless and tireless in alerting me to historical materials; neither he nor his wife holds any opinions about the Cavaness case but assisted me out of scholarly love for their native place.

Some readers, I suspect, will be as captivated as I have been by the ambiance of Little Egypt. For them I append the following informal bibliographical commentary, keyed in sequence to my early chapters and offered in the spirit of Gary and Judy DeNeal as a guide to a fascinating, little-known part of America.

John W. Allen,
Legends & Lore of Southern Illinois
and
It Happened in Southern Illinois
(Johnston City, Illinois, 1963 and 1968), provide good accounts of the origins of the name Egypt and of other place names as well as succinct accounts of most of the historical and legendary figures prominent in the region’s history.

For the backgrounds of Eldorado and Harrisburg, see
Saline County: A Century of History, 1847–1947
(Utica, Kentucky, 1947), essays by various hands covering such matters as Indians, pioneer life, courts, religion, schools, business, coal mining, etc. One learns here that the pronunciation of Eldorado as “Elder-RAY-dough” derives from its founding in 1858 by Judge Samuel Elder and his kin, who originally named the place Elderedo; the railroad changed the spelling on the station in the late 1870s.

Ethnic and geographical origins of the people of Egypt have been documented extensively, but the most colorful account is in Milo Erwin,
The History of Williamson County
(Marion, Illinois, 1876). Erwin, a local lawyer with a flamboyant literary style, produced what is in my opinion a quirky, unknown delight. See also “Why Egypt?,” by John J. Dunphy and “Egypt vs. Arkansas,” by Brann the Iconoclast, both in
Springhouse
(Vol. I, No. 3, March–April 1984).

The best account of the Herrin Massacre is in Paul M. Angle,
Bloody Williamson
(New York, 1952), a magnificent book by a distinguished historian; Angle also narrates the Bloody Vendetta, the Klan war, and the career of Charlie Birger. For an argument defending the actions of the Herrin mob, see “The Other Side of Herrin,” a pamphlet (n.d.) published by the Illinois Mine Workers; for management’s side, see “The Herrin Conspiracy,” a pamphlet issued by the National Coal Association (Washington, D.C., n.d.). See also
The Herrin Massacre,
by Chatland Parker, published by the Williamson County Historical Society (Marion, Illinois, 1925).
Oldham Paisley,
(Marion, Illinois, 1974) by Margaret N. O’Shea, gives a vivid account of the life of the region’s most respected newspaper publisher and editor, 1915–70, and his struggles to cope with the various waves of violence.

The best account of the Harpes and of other outlaws resident at Cave-in-Rock is Otto A. Rothert’s
The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock
(New York: 1924), which documents many of the brothers’ crimes; see also Paul I. Wellman,
Spawn of Evil
(New York, 1964).

For Charlie Birger, the definitive source is Gary DeNeal’s
A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger
(Danville, Illinois, 1981), a thoroughly researched and fascinating biography, much of it based on interviews with surviving gangsters and law-enforcement figures. John Bartlow Martin’s accounts of wars between the Birger and Shelton gangs appear in his
Butcher’s Dozen and Other Murders
(New York, 1950). See also Angle,
Bloody Williamson,
cited above.

For a detailed portrait of Little Egypt during the Depression, see Malcolm Brown and John N. Webb,
Seven Stranded Coal Towns
(Washington, D.C., 1941). For postwar southern Illinois, see Baker Brownell,
The Other Illinois
(New York, 1959).

For moving personal accounts of life in Little Egypt during the Depression, see Robert J. Hastings,
A Nickel’s Worth of Skim Milk
and
A Penny’s Worth of Minced Ham
(Carbondale, Illinois, 1972 and 1986).
A History of the Baptist Hour Association
(Harrisburg, Illinois, 1957) gives an account of the growth of the program and offers a portrait of the religious character of the region.

For Billy Potts, see Ronald L. Nelson, “In Search of Billy Potts,”
Springhouse
(Vol. II, No. 3, May–June 1985), and the same author’s follow-up article in the July–August issue. I have written a prose narrative of the story in
Springhouse
(Vol. IV, No. 3, May–June 1987) in which I have combined various accounts including Robert Penn Warren’s “The Ballad of Billie Potts.”

For Crenshaw’s Hickory Hill, now known as the Old Slave House, see
Illiniwěk
(Vol. X, No. 3, May–June 1972), a thorough documentation of the history of the salt works and the activities at the mansion, which is now a museum.

For James Ford, see W. D. Snively, Jr., and Louanna Furbee,
Satan’s Ferryman: A True Tale of the Old Frontier
(New York, 1968). Charles Neely’s
Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois
and Richard Dorson’s
Buying the Wind
(Menasha, Wisconsin, 1938; Chicago, 1964) are sources of regional folklore and song.

The origin and meaning of Dale Cavaness’s favorite term, “Rudie,” is obscure; Kevin Cavaness suggests the derivation I have included in the text; etymological sources affirm the connection between “rude” and “rowdy” with specific reference to “Illinois Rowdies” of frontier days who frightened visiting Englishmen by bringing long rifles to church (see the
Oxford English Dictionary
). A senior resident of Evansville, Indiana, however, assures me that to anyone within a two-hundred-mile radius of Evansville, which would include Eldorado, the term “Rudy” means male homosexual, deriving from the first name of a deceased homosexual necrophiliac undertaker, whose activities became legendary in a region known for its attachment to the morbid and the gothic. It seems doubtful, however, that Dale Cavaness meant the term in this way.