Uncle John’s True Crime (30 page)

JAILHOUSE ROCK

When Officer Billy J. Kirkpatrick arrived, he ordered Lewis out of the car, but the Killer wouldn’t comply. “[Kirkpatrick] had to pull him out of the car,” Loyd recalled. “He told him to keep his hands on the steering wheel where he could see ’em. Jerry said he just wanted to see Elvis, but Kirkpatrick told him to shut up. Now Jerry, he had tried to hide his pistol by puttin’ it in between his knee and the door. When Kirkpatrick opened the door, the damn gun fell out onto the floorboard. Kirkpatrick picked up the gun, and it was cocked and loaded!”

Kirkpatrick also found that the front passenger window of Lewis’s car was smashed out and that Lewis had a deep gash on his nose, which he concluded was due to “broken glass resulting from [Lewis] attempting to jettison an empty champagne bottle thru the closed window of his ’76 Lincoln.” Kirkpatrick and four other policemen arrested Lewis and took him to jail, ironically, just as Lewis’s father, Elmo Lewis, was being bailed out. The elder Lewis arrived at Graceland just as the wrecker arrived to tow away Lewis’s Lincoln. “Ha! Ain’t this some crap, man?” Loyd remembered Elmo saying when he arrived on the scene. “I just got word that they’ve taken my son to jail. I just got me outta the Hernando Jail, and Jerry done gone ahead.”

The Latin
capere
means “one who catches.” That’s where the term “cop” comes from
.

SUSPICIOUS MINDS

Word soon got out that “the Killer” was trying to kill “the King,” but Lewis’s sister Linda Gail believes that Presley called Lewis at the Vapors and invited him to come to Graceland, that Harold Loyd never told Presley that Lewis was there, and that Lewis became belligerent because he thought Presley would get mad at him if he didn’t take the invitation seriously. “I believe, really and truly, that the people who were associated with Elvis at that time were trying to manipulate him,” Gail says. “He was supporting all of them financially, and it was in their best interest to keep him isolated. If him and Elvis had started runnin’ the roads together, can you imagine what that would have been like? It probably would have been more than Memphis could handle.”

LAST MAN STANDING

After the incident, the Killer and the King’s friendship was never the same. When Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lewis said, “I’m glad. Just another one outta the way. What the @#%* did Presley ever do except take dope I couldn’t get ahold of?” Then after Johnny Cash died in 2003, the 71-year-old Lewis televised an all-star tribute concert called
Last Man Standing
, a reference to his being the last surviving member of the “Million Dollar Quartet.”

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How do you make sure the police won’t interrupt your burglary? Fix it so they can’t even leave their headquarters. That’s what happened in 2001 in the Dutch town of Stadskanaal. Thieves simply padlocked the front gates of the high fence that surrounds the police compound, then robbed a nearby electronics store. That set off a burglar alarm in the police station, but there was nothing police could do about it—they were all locked in. As the crooks made off with TVs and camcorders, Stadskanaal cops had to sit and wait for reinforcements to arrive from the next town. A police spokesman said, “It’s a pity all our officers were at that moment in the police station. Normally most of them are on patrol.” They’ve since taken precautions to make certain it never happens again.

According to the FBI, 75% of bank robbers use the stolen money to buy drugs
.

In the history of the United States, thirteen people have tried to assassinate the president. Here’s the story of the first one
.

J
UST A SHOT AWAY

On the rainy morning of January 30, 1835, Richard Lawrence sat on a chest in a shop in Washington, D.C., clutching a book and laughing maniacally to himself. Suddenly he stood up, dropped the book, and said, “I’ll be damned if I
don’t
do it!” Lawrence grabbed two pistols, put them in his coat pocket, and headed for the U.S. Capitol. There, he waited behind a pillar for President Andrew Jackson to emerge from the funeral of Congressman Warren Davis. After a few minutes, the 68-year-old president hobbled into view, leaning on the arm of the U.S. treasury secretary. Lawrence leaped from behind the pillar, pointed a pistol at Jackson, and pulled the trigger.

The gun misfired.

Undeterred, Lawrence pulled out the second pistol and fired one more time at point-blank range.

That gun also misfired.

Enraged, Jackson struggled to get away...from his companions who were holding him back. The elderly president swung his cane wildly at Lawrence, shouting, “Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this man came from!” Jackson had assumed that his would-be assassin had been sent by one of his political opponents. Jackson assumed incorrectly.

NUTTY AS A FRUITCAKE

Born in England in 1800, Richard Lawrence moved to the U.S. when he was 12 years old and lived an uneventful life as a house painter in Washington, D.C. But then something changed. In 1832 Lawrence suddenly decided to go to England, but only got as far as Philadelphia. When he returned to D.C., he complained that all the newspapers in Philly had attacked his character. As he raved on and on, his family was shocked. That was, by all accounts, Lawrence’s first psychotic episode.

California penal code bans the scattering of “cremains” from the Golden Gate Bridge
.

THE KING AND I

In the months and years that followed, Lawrence drifted further into madness. He developed an extravagant sense of fashion. Decked out in exorbitantly expensive finery, Lawrence took to standing completely still in his doorway for hours on end so passersby could “bask in my presence.” He was no longer Richard Lawrence, he told people, but “King Richard III of England” (who reigned for two years in the 1480s). Lawrence quit his job painting houses; he assured his concerned friends and family that he would become wealthy as soon as the American government awarded him the money he was owed. (He claimed he owned two lavish estates.)

But the money never came. And who was to blame? President Andrew Jackson. Because he publicly opposed the national bank, Jackson was single-handedly preventing this transfer of funds. Lawrence came to the “natural conclusion”: Remove Jackson, and get the money he was owed. It made perfect sense, at least to Lawrence. That’s what led him to try to kill the president on that January day in 1835.

DEPOSED

Lawrence was defiant in his innocence. At one point during his trial, he angrily stood and announced, “It is for me, gentlemen, to pass judgment upon
you
, and not you upon
me
!” The prosecuting attorney, Francis Scott Key (the man who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”), pointed out that the only reason Jackson wasn’t killed was because the bullets and powder had fallen out of both guns in Lawrence’s pocket. (It was a humid day, and the shoddy pistols were affected by the moisture.) After that, Key didn’t have to work very hard to convince the jury that “King Richard” was mad. It took them only five minutes to deliberate. The verdict: Guilty by reason of insanity. (Historians theorize that the chemicals in Lawrence’s paints were what ultimately drove him to suffer from paranoid schizophrenic delusions.)

Lawrence lived out the rest of his life in the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C., where he died in 1861.

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Police Blotter:
“A woman reported Thursday that someone broke into her home on Summer Street and switched hardware in her computer with identical hardware that does not work. There are no leads.”

Step back, smartmouth: A cop can TASER you from 15 feet away
.

We respect the police for keeping us somewhat safe in this crazy world. But as these stories prove, cops are only human
.

A
RE Wii HAVING FUN YET?

In September 2009, narcotics investigators in Polk County, Florida, searched the home of a known drug trafficker. While removing weapons, drugs, and stolen goods, several officers passed the time by taking part in a video bowling tournament on the suspect’s Wii videogame system. The cops competed fiercely, stopping their search when their turn came up. Little did they know their activities were being recorded by a wireless security camera that the drug dealer had set up to watch for intruders. A local TV station got hold of the footage and aired clips of the cops giving each other high-fives and distracting their fellow bowlers with lewd gestures. “Obviously, this is not the kind of behavior we condone,” Lakeland Police Chief Roger Boatner said. The impromptu tournament might even jeopardize the case against the career criminal, whose lawyer called the search improper. “Investigations are not for entertainment,” he said.

BETWEEN A GUN AND A HARD PLACE

MRI machines are huge, complex magnets; even the tiniest metal object can severely damage one. In 2009 Joy Smith, an off-duty deputy from Jacksonville, Florida, took her mother to get an MRI... and forgot that she was still carrying her police-issue Glock handgun. Smith walked into the MRI room and her gun was pulled from its holster; she tried to hang onto it, but her hand became stuck between the pistol and the machine—which made a horrible nose before shutting off. Smith sustained only minor injuries. The MRI center didn’t fare as well: Between repairs to the machine and a day’s lost revenue, the cost to the center topped $150,000.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

In September 2009, Dutch police officers raided a farm near Wageningen University in the Netherlands and destroyed an entire crop of what they
called “some 47,000 illicit cannabis plants” with a street value of $6.45 million. However, according to university officials who cried foul, the plants were
not
psychotropic marijuana—which is illegal to grow—but hemp-fiber plants—which are perfectly legal to grow, and for which they had a permit. The plants had been part of a multiyear study to test hemp as a sustainable source of fiber. The project has been postponed while the school attempts to recoup the costs from the police department. “The street value from a drug point of view,” said a disappointed university official, “is less than zero.”

How about yours? The FBI has fingerprint records on more than 90 million people
.

TAKE A BITE OUT OF A CRIMEFIGHTER

Two employees of the Police Officer Standards and Training Council in Meriden, Connecticut, had, according to reports, a “spirited” relationship—analyst Rochelle Wyler and training coordinator Francis “Woody” Woodruff, a former police chief, regularly taunted and insulted each other. One day in April 2009, Woodruff jokingly referred to Wyler as a “clerk.” She responded, “Whatever, Woody. Bite me.” So Woodruff grabbed her left arm and bit her, leaving tooth marks and a bruise. Woodruff claimed he was just “horsing around,” but Wyler reported the incident, and Woodruff was arrested and charged with assault.

SNOWBALLISTICS

One snowy afternoon in December 2009, about 200 office workers took part in a snowball fight on 14th Street in Washington, D.C. Everyone was having a good time...until someone threw a snowball at a Hummer SUV driving down the road. The Hummer slid to a halt; a large, imposing man got out. “Who threw that damn snowball?” he shouted. When no one answered, the man pulled out a pistol, sending people running for cover. A few tense moments later, a uniformed police officer arrived and ordered the man to drop his weapon. That’s when the gunman identified himself as Detective Mike Baylor. With the danger passed, the crowd started chanting: “You don’t bring a gun to a snowball fight.” At first, the D.C. police department denied that the detective, a 28-year veteran, pulled out his gun. But the incident was caught on several cell phone cameras and soon made the rounds on YouTube...and then the local news. D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier called Baylor’s actions “totally inappropriate.” He was placed on desk duty.

In Charleston, South Carolina, prisoners may be charged $1 for the ride to jail
.

Here’s the story of Dashiell Hammett, king of the crime novel
.

Those are the opening lines from
The Maltese Falcon
, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, voted one of the 100 best novels in the English language by the Modern Library, and the one for which he’s most famous. Hammett’s looks were a far cry from Sam Spade’s: he was thin—and his short white hair and little black mustache made him look anything but tough. But like the rugged antiheroes in his detective stories, Hammett lived a hard life, drank heavily, and preferred to work alone. And his character showed in the stories he wrote for
Black Mask
magazine during the 1920s, which established him as the king of the hard-boiled mystery writers and the father of the film noir movie classics that followed. Although Hammett didn’t invent crime fiction, he wrote with such skill that his influence
dominated it, elevating the genre to an art form. But that’s not how it started out.