As a beautiful blond young-country charmer with a knack for soaring choruses, Katrina Elam shares superficial similarities with the soulless Faith Hill, last seen in an overapt role as a Stepford wife. But Elam’s pop-damaged peers can’t match her passionate delivery and pristine phrasing. Her debut disc showcases not only her rich, expressive voice but also her surprisingly subtle songwriting. Elam’s nuanced takes on relationship issues are a welcome change from the genre’s usual frying-pan-to-head slapstick sass, and her slow songs, delicately decorated with piano and strings, never become bloated ballads. Elam isn’t too pensive to party; she serenades the yee-haw crowd with the fiddle-fueled “I Want a Cowboy,” and she gallops through most tracks at a perky-pony pace that should keep her set list lively.
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The Case That Haunts
On a mild winter day in February 1983, two men rummaged through the basement of a vacant apartment building at 5635 Clemens Avenue in northwest St. Louis. Their purpose, they would later tell police, was to find a metal pipe they could use to fix their broken-down jalopy.
After searching the main floor, the men crept downstairs into the basement. Blinded by the darkness, one of the men flicked a cigarette lighter. The horror revealed by the flame sent them running for the police.
Facedown amid the boiler-room rubble lay the headless body of an African-American female. Naked from the waist down, she wore only a yellow V-neck sweater fitted loosely around her torso. Fingers flecked with chipped crimson-red nail polish, her hands were bound behind her back with a strand of red-and-white nylon rope. Between her shoulders, where her neck used to be, there was only a hack-sawed hole.
When St. Louis homicide detectives Joe Burgoon and Herb Riley arrived, the building was teeming with police. Awaiting crime-scene technicians, the two veteran detectives speculated on the corpse’s identity. Maybe, they guessed, she was a prostitute or drug addict from nearby Cabanne Courts, a housing project with a murderous past. It wasn’t until technicians at last rolled the body over that they realized she was not a woman, but a pre-pubescent child. Instantly, the mood in that damp cellar turned from morbid curiosity to disgust. A child-killer.
At the time, the FBI called it the only decapitation in the nation involving someone so young.
As police officers searched a sixteen-block area for the girl’s head, Burgoon and Riley returned to headquarters to check missing-persons reports. Surely, they thought, the girl’s parents or relatives — someone — would call to report her missing. With any luck, they’d establish her identity that night and draw up a list of suspects.
The body went unclaimed on a slab in the city morgue for more than a week before it was given the name Jane Doe. For nine months she lay frozen. Finally, on a glum, rainy day in December 1983, she was buried in a pauper’s grave in an historic black graveyard in north St. Louis county. At the funeral were a few homicide detectives, the chief medical examiner, and a half-dozen news reporters. Four muddy gravediggers served as pallbearers.
As he was leaving, Herb Riley told a reporter, “I’ve been involved with her since the day she was found, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop looking for her killer.”
The day of the grisly discovery, February 28, still casts a pall over the homicide department. For years detective Burgoon commemorated that day by sending out teletype bulletins to police departments in all 50 states. No one ever responded. After a dozen years, he was told the mass dispatches were too costly to continue. Today homicide detectives observe the occasion in hushed tones of remorse.
Never a suspect, never an arrest, and never was the head found. Most of what is known of Jane Doe came within days of her discovery. She was likely between the ages of eight and eleven. She was big for her age, around four-foot-ten. Without the head, she measured just over four feet. She had been raped and then strangled. Based on the lack of blood at the crime scene, police believe she was dumped in the basement after her beheading. Mold growing from the wound on her neck indicated she was there for several days before the two men found her.
Little else is known about the girl who has become the most notorious cold case in the nearly 200-year history of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. Thousands of futile police hours have been spent. The cops who first worked the investigation have retired or died of old age. A new generation of homicide detectives are still at work on the case, hoping DNA technology will spark even the slightest clue. They say they’re nowhere near giving up, but the odds are stacked against them.
“Without your victim’s identify, you don’t know who the killer could be,” says Mary Fran Ernst, director of forensic education at Saint Louis University Medical School. “The entire world is your stage.”
In his mind, Joe Burgoon can still see the building where they found the girl. It is three stories high, brick, with the Latin word for home, Domi, inscribed in stone above the doorway. Traces of blood streak the cellar walls where the killer dragged the body into the darkness. There’s no smell of death. The coolness of the basement preserved the body.
Located about a mile east of the University City Loop, the neighborhood is undergoing a subtle transition, giving rise to new homes priced at $250,000 and up.
But even the most progressive revitalization efforts can do little to mask its violent history.
It’s in this same neighborhood that in 1972 police found a woman with her face peeled from her head. In 2001 a ten-year-old boy was mauled to death by a pack of stray dogs in nearby Ivory Perry Park. Last month police found a man with his throat slashed just some 200 yards from the building that contained Jane Doe. For all its mayhem, homicide detectives still associate the neighborhood with the beheading.
On a recent autumn day, Burgoon pulls his wife’s white Ford Explorer up to the grassy lot where the apartment once stood. The city razed the building years ago, but in Burgoon’s mind, it’s still there, taunting him even now.
Eight years after he left homicide, and nearly a year since retiring from the force at the age of 65, he still can’t shake the memory of Jane Doe. Not a week goes by, he says, that he doesn’t think of her.
Described by a former colleague as “almost too nice for this dirty business,” Burgoon, with his quiet demeanor and nearly photographic memory, landed hundreds of violent criminals in prison during his 27 years on the force, earning him the nickname “Father Homicide.” Something about those flickering green eyes, the fidgety way he makes small talk, that embarrassed look on his face when he lights up a Carlton, won Burgoon the empathy of victims’ families and suspects alike. He’s the kind of guy people want to help.
But with Jane Doe, there was never any family or suspect to coax. Burgoon couldn’t work his good-cop magic.
Mary Case, the city’s medical examiner at the time of the murder, says the case affected Burgoon more than any other detective. During those months the girl lay in the morgue, the two were in constant contact, investigating any leads that might reveal her identity.
“I’ll always associate him with Jane Doe,” says Case. “Whenever I see him, it’s the first thing I think of, and it’s always the first thing we’ll discuss.”
At six-foot-two and 230 pounds, Captain Leroy Adkins casts an imposing presence. He doesn’t scare easily, but for a decade following the ghoulish crime, he was plagued by nightmares. He says he’d awaken in a cold sweat, the investigation spinning wildly in his mind.
“I wonder: Did we miss something? Is there something we should have done but didn’t do? Something we missed at the scene? For the life of me, I can’t think of anything.”
The first African-American head of homicide, Adkins, now 71, was a year on the job at the time of Jane Doe’s murder. Wanting to dispel the belief among many of the city’s black residents that the police department cared more about white victims than black ones, Adkins immersed himself in the case. He organized meetings in the black community, urging residents to help. He wrote letters to the St. Louis American, Ebony and Jet magazines.
Adkins’ tired eyes reflect the frustration and resignation that come from this infuriating case. The nightmares are gone, but harrowing memories linger. Jane Doe, he says, enters his mind when he’s reading the paper, watching television, in the quiet-time moments before sleep.
His wife, Glenda, knows the case nearly as well as her husband. For years she’s been the sounding board for her husband’s unanswered questions.
“There’s just so much wonderment in this story,” she says. “You wonder how no one can be missing a child of that age. Where is the family? What about her schoolmates? Her friends? How could no one report her as missing?”
Right up until his death in 1996, detective Herb Riley kept his promise to never stop his search for the killer. Given the moniker Herb “Seek and Find” Riley by local crime tabloid The Evening Whirl, the hard-nosed cop was the yin to Burgoon’s yang. Playing the part of bad cop, Riley was well known for his ruthless interrogations and his daily four-pack habit of Lucky Strikes. Of the more than 2,000 homicides he worked, Jane Doe was one of only two cases he never cracked.
After retiring in 1986, Riley brought home boxes of his notes and kept in regular contact with Joe Burgoon and other detectives.
“He was constantly talking about it,” recalls his son, Jeff Riley. “I remember visiting him at the hospital and asking him if he was happy with his life and what he’d done. He replied that he was, but said he wished he solved the Jane Doe case. He said when he died he would finally know who did it. He believed the afterlife would reveal all life’s mysteries.”
Hours after finding the girl’s mutilated body, Burgoon and Riley sent out all-points bulletins nationwide. When the dispatches yielded nothing, they began checking school attendance records, looking for students no longer on the rolls. Only the St. Louis Public Schools kept computerized attendance records at the time, but even those lists gave no indication as to where a student went after leaving school.
For the most part it was guesswork, with detectives calling as many as a half-dozen school districts before locating a child. For each child eliminated, hundreds more remained to be checked. So mind-numbingly frustrating was the task that detective Wayne Bender was hospitalized for migraines.
Finally, some seven months after the murder, the detectives accounted for every eight- to eleven-year-old black female enrolled in St. Louis city schools and the neighboring districts of University City, Wellston, Ferguson-Florissant and Normandy.
Who was she?
Desperate for something, anything, police have tracked down a score of false leads over the years, some more preposterous than others.
There was, for example, the time just months after the murder that a frantic woman appeared at police headquarters claiming to have just met the killer. He lived just a few blocks from the shuttered building. The woman said the man invited her into his apartment and showed her a human skull and a machete.
Minutes later, Burgoon, Riley and Adkins arrived at the apartment with a search warrant and a sledgehammer. They busted down the door and recovered the skull and knife.
“The machete was a novelty piece you could bend a million ways. It could never cut someone’s head off,” recalls Burgoon. “He got the skull from his high-school teacher in California. It was all verified. He wasn’t our guy.”
Then there was the Charlack police officer who got a skull from a man he had questioned at a storage shed on St. Charles Rock Road. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Danny Davis of Pagedale told the cop he bought the skull for $35 in the late 1970s at a souvenir-gift shop near Northwest Plaza shopping center. Davis said he was told the skull was that of a young Indian woman who had been killed by a tomahawk. A forensic anthropologist determined it was too old to be Jane Doe’s skull.
Other leads have been less conventional. Grasping for clues, Burgoon once sat in on a séance in a Maplewood home. Under dim candlelight the detective passed around photocopied fingerprints of Jane Doe to a table full of psychics. As the clairvoyants channeled the spirits, Burgoon sat in the corner and observed.
“The psychics put their hands on the fingerprints and would shoot straight up in their chairs like they got a jolt or something,” remembers Burgoon. “At the end of the meeting they told me to call the Coast Guard. The head is on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The séance wouldn’t be the last time homicide detectives looked to the paranormal for help. In 1994 Burgoon and Adkins agreed to appear on Sightings, a nationally syndicated television show on the occult and the supernatural.
Connected by phone, the homicide detectives sat in St. Louis with notepads at the ready while a psychic in Florida entered the mind of Jane Doe. Producers filled in the backdrop with Hitchcockian theme music and shadowy, slow-motion footage of children at play. The final product was vague enough to seem eerily real, but it only harmed the investigation.
Prior to the show’s taping, detectives mailed the psychic the bloodied sweater and the nylon rope used to bind Jane Doe’s hands. They never got them back. The evidence was lost in the mail.
Perhaps the most far-fetched story surrounding the case came in 2002 when Sharon Nolte called detectives. A Kansas City insurance investigator, she was convinced Jane Doe was a Chippewa Indian named Shannon Johnson. Nolte said she also knew the killer, a drifter living in southern Texas.
She worked the case independently for seven years before contacting the police, her investigation taking her to an Indian reservation in Minnesota where she collected sample DNA from a woman she believed to be related to Jane Doe. She says she even visited the killer, inviting herself into his home and collecting DNA evidence in his bathroom.
Nolte has few positive things to say about the St. Louis police department. She claims her story fell on deaf ears — that Carroll and Burgoon never took her seriously. Of the $23,000 she says she spent on the case, $4,500 went to a private lab that tested the DNA against that of Jane Doe. The tests came back negative, but Nolte still maintains she was right.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the police department. I think they stink,” she says. “I told them who she was and who killed her, and they never did anything with it. I had a bag full of the killer’s pubic hair. Do you know how difficult it is to collect a bag full of pubic hair?”
As with all the people who have stepped forward to help police solve the case, Carroll and Burgoon say they appreciate Nolte’s efforts, but in the end her story just didn’t add up.
“You don’t want to play anyone cheap,” says Burgoon. “In a case as tough as this one, you want to listen to what anyone has to say. What do you have to lose?”
The most recent twist to the case came this past July, when detectives Tom Carroll and Jeff Stone flew to Texas to interview Tommy Lynn Sells. On death row for the brutal murder of a thirteen-year-old girl, Sells claims to have committed dozens of murders across the country, including five in Missouri.
The interview was inconclusive, but Carroll doubts Sells’ involvement.
“He’ll claim anything. Whatever case you put in front of him he’ll say, ‘It could be me.’”
Buried within the Web site for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lies a page devoted to Jane Doe. Of the roughly 1,400 children profiled, she is the only child without a mug shot or artist’s rendering. In its place appears the bloodied yellow sweater found on her body, along with information about skin color, weight and age.
It is on this Web site, and a handful of other databases devoted to missing children, that detective Tom Carroll continues to search for Jane Doe’s identity. Police long ago abandoned the hopes of finding her head. Even if they were to find it, it would be nothing more than a skull, perhaps providing the girl’s dental records, but little else.
It is in the ethereal world of the Internet that Carroll digs for clues. In six years of scrolling through thousands of profiles, he’s identified a dozen missing girls who perhaps match the description of Jane Doe.
Carroll, 40, is the latest detective to head up the case from inside a department whose interior is little changed since the days of the girl’s vicious death. Detectives are outfitted with the bare minimum: a desk, phone, filing cabinet. Fluorescent lights, a worn linoleum floor and half-finished coffee cups complete the scene. Save for the width of the cops’ neckties, it might be the stage set for the 1970s sitcom Barney Miller.
Once Carroll comes across a possible match, he contacts the child’s parents. Each phone call is another stab in the dark.
“It’s to the point you really are walking on eggshells when you’re calling these people,” says the soft-spoken Carroll, who works the Jane Doe murder whenever he has a free hour or two. “People will let time heal a lot of things, and do you really want to gash that back open?”
The conversations are more or less the same. Carroll identifies himself and prefaces the discussion by saying he’s not calling to report good news. He tells them St. Louis police have a deceased black female they can’t identify. He then describes Jane Doe as best he can. Inevitably the strangers on the other end of the line begin quizzing him, wanting to know what color hair the victim had. What color were her eyes? Doesn’t he have dental records?
After a while Carroll is forced to show his hand. He tells them the little girl’s head was never discovered. That revelation comes followed by a long pause, but most parents of missing children sympathize with the cop. After so many years, they’re looking for any answer, good or bad.
Eleven of the twelve families have provided DNA samples, all of which have ruled out any connection with their missing child. When one couple declined to help, Carroll enlisted local police to search their trash for hair follicles, fingernail clippings or anything that might provide a DNA sample to run against Jane Doe.
Twenty years ago DNA-typing was the fodder of fantasy novels. Today evidence as to the identity of her killer is virtually non-existent. A white substance found on her stomach was initially believed to be semen, but further tests showed it contained no DNA. A pubic hair found on her leg failed to provide enough DNA to identify a killer, but Carroll and others have a theory on the origins of the hair — it fell off one of the cops at the crime scene.
“I’d lay money down that it came from one of us,” Carroll says.
While DNA technology has so far failed to unravel the Jane Doe puzzle, it has helped St. Louis police crack several other cold cases. Just last month a grand jury indicted Danny Ray Kittrell in the grisly killing of a woman stabbed more than 50 times with a screwdriver in 1983. Last year police charged Vester Herrod with first-degree murder and rape in the killing of two women in the early 1990s. In both cases, DNA obtained from the suspects’ semen led to arrests.
Owing in part to the success of those cases, the St. Louis Police Department recently received a $150,000 grant from the United States Department of Justice that will pay detectives overtime to pore over cold cases and check if DNA technology might help unlock those unsolved murders.
The grant is unlikely to solve the case of Jane Doe.
“Everything we could do for her has already been done,” says Mary Beth Karr, DNA technical leader for the police department.
Working in tandem with Carroll, Karr has eliminated all but one of the potential Jane Doe matches the detective has brought her over the years. The remaining sample awaits advanced testing with the FBI, but Karr doesn’t hold out much hope.
“I’d be shocked if it were a match.”
Still, she remains optimistic DNA will one day unlock the case. Jane Doe’s genetic profile currently resides in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a massive database that continually attempts to match DNA material found at crime scenes.
Since 1994 the Missouri Department of Corrections has taken DNA samples of all felons convicted of committing a violent crime. Beginning next year, Missouri will join 33 other states in collecting DNA on all convicted felons — no matter the crime.
Of the many theories homicide detectives kick around, the most common pins Jane Doe’s killing on a parent or close relative. If they’re serving a prison term for some other crime, police may soon know Jane Doe’s identity, and possibly that of her killer.
Until then, the case goes on much as it has for the past two decades, with investigators chasing down any leads they can.
Carroll’s logs show he last worked the case October 25, when he ran fingerprints of a missing Jamaican girl against those of Jane Doe. Those very same fingerprints were tested back in 1988, but he wanted to rule them out a second time. In a case as vexing as Jane Doe’s, police have checked and re-checked all their leads.
Resting next to Jane Doe’s grave is a white teddy bear, left there two years ago by Sharon Nolte, the woman convinced that Jane Doe is a Chippewa Indian. Next to the stuffed toy, Nolte left the child an offering of food — a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Today the food is long gone.
Jane Doe’s memorial is in stark contrast to the one left to a little girl in Kansas City. It was there, in 2001, that police stumbled across the headless body of a three- to five-year-old African-American girl. Immediately, detectives began looking for similarities between Jane Doe and the Kansas City victim but failed to find any link. Like Jane Doe, the Kansas City victim’s identity and that of her killer remain an enigma.
Three years later, Carroll has not entirely ruled out a connection.
“Hard to believe this could happen twice in the same state and not be related,” he says. “Maybe the culprit was in prison for fifteen to eighteen years for another crime and came back to do the same thing again.”
This past August, Kansas City residents established a permanent memorial to the girl they’ve come to call Precious Doe. Next to the woods where police found her body, they’ve planted a pair of hawthorne trees in her memory. Two white cement benches offer visitors a chance to reflect on her death.
Jane Doe’s grave is nearly impossible to find. Washington Park Cemetery, in which she is buried, has fallen on tough times. In 1991 the cemetery’s owner, Virginia Younger, committed suicide shortly after the state’s attorney general sued over botched burials. The allegations included reports of bones strewn about the property, bodies missing from graves and multiple caskets dumped into the same plots. In 1993 the cemetery faced further upheaval when thousands of bodies were disinterred to make way for MetroLink and to level a hill that obstructed air traffic at nearby Lambert Airport.
Today visitors to the cemetery are greeted by a rusty iron gate and a shuttered house that once served as the graveyard chapel and museum. Blanketing the grounds, waist-high thickets of poison ivy and weeds choke the toppled tombstones of generations of black St. Louisans. The air stirs with the sound of cars barreling down Interstate 70 — the din of traffic broken only by the roar of a commercial jetliner as it makes its descent toward the airport.
At the time of her interment, no tombstone marked Jane Doe’s grave. Months after her funeral, an Illinois high school class launched a letter-writing campaign urging city officials and the cemetery to place a marker on her grave. In response, the owner of a monument company came forward and donated a small $300 stone. The owner’s wife chose the somber inscription from a book of epitaphs. It reads: “The saddened hearts were healed knowing the pain of life is over and the beauty of the soul revealed.”
Burgoon years ago videotaped the location of Jane Doe’s grave for police records, afraid that when he died, she would be lost forever amid the tangled shrubbery. It is here that the former detective finds himself on a recent afternoon.
After pausing a moment to reflect on the long-ago tragedy, Burgoon is ready to head back to his car. He knows he’ll never stop thinking of the little girl who has consumed his thoughts for much of the past twenty years. In nine simple words he summarizes the thousands of hours he and other detectives have spent trying to crack the city’s most vexing murder.
“This case, we struck out,” he says. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
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Where the Boys Are
Lee stares out at Washington Boulevard through the late-evening drizzle. No one’s driving by, except for the 97 bus, which rolls over a plastic soda bottle with a sudden pop! It sounds like a gunshot but Lee doesn’t flinch. He’s familiar with what real gunshots sound like.
It’s only a few blocks away from the bustle of the Fox Theatre, but tonight the Stroll’s dead. If the johns were trolling past in their Mercedes, in their SUVs and Crown Vics, more guys would be hustling hand jobs and head and Lee likely would have scored by this hour, thanks to his young soft face and sweet-thug appeal. But tonight it’s only him and one other guy out here, pacing the sidewalk in front of the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center.
Like Lee and all the other prostitutes on this street, Mike’s a black male. But he’s got the haggard looks and the jittery moves of a crackhead. Lee’s not homeless, not a crack addict. He’s 28 and lives at home with his parents, which helps explain why he wants to use an alias for this story. They would kill him if they knew he did this.
A black SUV approaches. Lee and Mike wave but the guy rolls on.
“Is that a Lexus?” Lee asks.
“Nah,” Mike says. “It’s a Range Rover or something.”
The rain comes down harder.
Lee finds a dry doorway, lights a cigarette and misses his chance at a new-looking green pickup. Mike flags down the driver and strikes up a conversation through the rolled-down window. Less than a minute later, he’s inside.
“I know that guy,” Lee says sourly, watching the car pull away. “He ain’t gonna get nothin’ from that guy. He tried once with me. It was like, five dollars.”
He hikes his New York Yankees jersey up over his head to ward off the rain and crosses the street. Minutes later his perseverance pays off, in the form of a Chevy Blazer. The driver, fiftyish, looks well off, but Lee won’t ask him any personal questions as they drive around. Instead the transaction is negotiated, then quickly administered.
“He was drivin’ with one hand and jerkin’ me with the other,” Lee recounts. “He jerked me off for $25. Done deal, you hear me? Done deal! It didn’t take nothin’ but about five minutes.”
Cash in his pocket, he heads back to Mom and Dad’s.
Over the Harbor Light Center’s sparsely appointed entryway, a device that looks like a ceiling fan in a science-fiction movie spins, emitting purple-blue ultraviolet light. The contraption, called a Silent Air Mover (SAM), represents the latest weapon in the war on tuberculosis. The center has about ten of these $1,500 bug lights, which purport to zap all bacteria in their path.
“TB is an airborne thing, and this is a critical area,” explains Tim Best, a Salvation Army captain and a Harbor Light administrator. “Those in the homeless population are more susceptible to TB. They don’t get tested, so they don’t know they have it, and so when it goes active it doesn’t take much for you sleeping next to me on a mat for me to breathe it in.” On any given night, Best adds, up to 49 homeless men sleep here on three-inch-thick pads.
Though the St. Louis Health Department boasts that the Harbor Light is the first place in the U.S. to use the technology, some say it’s a Band-Aid approach, similar to the way the city fights prostitution. Rather than work to prevent the problem before it starts, the effort simply seeks to slow its spread.
A pudgy and genial ex-cocaine addict who was once homeless himself, Best understands the plight of the men who come in here. The Harbor Light facility at Washington Boulevard and Garrison Avenue operates drug- and alcohol-treatment programs, job-training programs and a veterans’ re-integration program, and it’s equipped with beds for men who are too sick to sleep on a mat. Though the facility was built to house 150 per night, it sometimes serves as many as 300. Some stay for one night, some stay for the better part of a year.
The nature of the relationship between the Harbor Light and the men who walk the Stroll is a complicated one. Because they are required to be indoors and accounted for by 9 p.m., those who bunk at the facility can’t participate in the nighttime street scene, which usually heats up around midnight.
But Lee says male prostitution and the shelter go together like condoms and lube.
“It’s an easy target for homosexuals,” he explains. “They go by a men’s shelter. They know that most times a man in a shelter, he is down and out. So he’s an easy prey.” He motions with his hands as if giving out cash. “‘I’ll give you this, I’ll give you that.’”
“Gerald” used to walk the Stroll. Now he stays at Harbor Light. The unemployed 33-year-old’s life story is full of ups and downs. He comes from a well-to-do family in the county. Openly gay, he took up prostitution and his family disowned him. In 2000 he began hanging around the Stroll, hooking and developing a crack habit.
A few months ago he came to the Harbor Light for the rehab program, and now he’s trying to find a job. Today he picked up applications from Wendy’s, Rally’s and McDonald’s. But now, shortly before lights-out, he’s in the mood to reminisce about his best client.
“He would pick me up further down Washington, in a Mercedes I think, around 1 or 2 a.m.,” Gerald recounts. “He was a banker at Bank of America or US Bank. I’d see him every week or every two weeks, he’d drop in randomly. We’d go to a hotel on Grand and he would bring food — Chinese food, Popeye’s or Lee’s chicken.
“We’d sit down, eat and then get into the grind. He gave me $200 to get down and dirty — not intercourse but oral sex. We’d stay until we finished, four hours or five hours.
“They’re not getting the satisfaction from their womens,” Gerald speculates about the men who visit the Stroll. “How they wanna, when they wanna.
“Or else they’re not ready to admit they’re gay.”
To see him in a white T-shirt that contrasts with his bloodshot eyes, it’s difficult to imagine Gerald in high heels and a dress, his fingernails and toenails painted red. But this is the way he’d dress for the Stroll. His crack addiction, he says, was a motivator to work, and the drug, in turn, helped him maintain the energy to stay out all night long. Now, between detox and job-hunting, he hasn’t been walking the Stroll.
But he plans to go back.
“This is me, this is my life,” he says. “I had some good experiences at it, dressing up as drag queens.”
In 1980, plainclothes St. Louis police officer Gregory Erson was killed while working a prostitution detail. In those days the Stroll was located on Washington Avenue at the eastern edge of the Central West End, and it featured women. Erson’s death prompted a major police crackdown. A decade later, in 1992, comedian and activist Dick Gregory led a march along the Stroll with the goal of reclaiming the neighborhood from its seedier elements. “The people must get the courage to know they can do something about the prostitutes and dope dealers,” he told the Post-Dispatch. “With courage comes the power.”
A year later 34 female prostitutes and 34 johns were arrested during a two-week crackdown on the “South-Side Stroll,” located in the area framed by South Grand Boulevard, Jefferson Avenue, Meramec Street and Gravois Avenue.
St. Louis has had a Stroll for as long as anyone can remember, and female prostitutes continue to ply the above areas. But nowadays “the Stroll” refers to the region roughly bordered by Washington Boulevard and Locust Street on the north and south and Jefferson and Compton avenues on the east and west.
Carter Hendricks owns a business in the neighborhood, but he’s concerned that there might be break-ins if his shop were to be identified in print. He’s been here since the late 1980s, Hendricks says, and first noticed the male prostitution trade about ten years ago.
“The clientele has changed,” he says. “The clientele in the mid- to late ’90s was much more heavily married white businessmen from the county. You know, driving Oldsmobiles.”
But now more of the men doing the trolling are black. Hendricks speculates that many are on the “down low” — black men who consider themselves straight but have sex with other men on the sly. Whatever the case, Hendricks says the Stroll is busier than ever: “It’s a marketplace, and sometimes the marketplace gets really organized. It’s been more of a problem again in the last few months.”
Because the neighborhood is dominated by light industry, for a long time the night moves didn’t prompt much public outcry, according to Robert Berger, chairman of the Locust Business District. But loft renovations have begun to draw a residential contingent.
“About six years ago we had thirteen families within our district,” Berger says. “Now I wouldn’t be surprised if we had close to a hundred. Over the past year and a half, two years, you’re seeing more and more individuals parking their cars and walking to their place of residency. At our meetings there’ll be people coming up and complaining about auto break-ins, or break-ins in their place of business, or being accosted on the street, or a woman’s purse being stolen within that area.”
One disgruntled resident is 38-year-old advertising writer Wade Paschall, who moved into a restored loft near the Stroll three years ago. He’s now trying to mobilize his neighbors to get the area cleaned up.
Paschall believes Harbor Light isn’t pulling its weight.
“It’s hard to go after an organization like the Salvation Army,” he says. “It’s like: ‘Who can hate ice cream?’ On their own, all their programs are great. But when you put them all together, it’s just sort of this recipe for disaster. There is a lot of overcrowding in the facility. This is not a case of, ‘Hey, I don’t want this in my backyard.’ It’s that this isn’t working for the guys inside any more than it’s not working for me. I don’t think it’s that they have any bad intentions, it’s just that it’s gotten beyond their control.”
Tim Best says that’s a common misperception.
“I would absolutely dispute that it’s not working for these guys,” the Salvation Army captain counters. “Anybody who feels that way ought to come down and let me take them on a tour and show them that we’re a series of connected small groups. While I understand the view from outside — that we’re a big facility where everything is all melded in together — what we really are is a mini-continuum of care. Providing care for a guy who is just coming off the street, all the way to guys who are being restored in their work ethic, who are being restored to their family. Treatment begins when a guy comes off a mat and enters into the program.”
“You drive by at night and see ten guys loitering in front of the building,” Paschall complains. “If they’re Harbor Light guys, then why aren’t they inside? And if they’re not Harbor Light guys, then why doesn’t the Harbor Light call the police?”
Best says he does precisely that. “However, if they’re across the street, we’ve been told in the past that we don’t have the right to call the police for people that are not on our property. Well, we call anyway, and if they are our guys they are brought inside, and if they’re not our guys they’re asked to move along.
“There’s a view that because there are guys hanging around in the neighborhood, we’re not being effective,” he continues. “But a lot of those guys are not our guys. We don’t like it either — it makes it difficult for us to do our jobs as well.”
Robert Berger would just as soon see the Harbor Light pack up and leave. His business-district group has met with local aldermen and Salvation Army officials a number of times over the years, hoping to persuade them to relocate, but nothing has been worked out. Harbor Light, meanwhile, has been rebuffed by city officials in its attempt to expand eastward onto an abandoned block the Salvation Army owns east of Garrison.
Best dreams of an insulated, aesthetically pleasing campus. “One of the things I’d love to be able to do is have a campus-style setting where we’re blocked off, so that the neighborhoods don’t get too concerned,” he says. “We’d have a lot of green space, so that when you drive down the street guys aren’t hanging out on the corner. They wouldn’t need to be if we had a city block, or two, where we had nice decorative walls and green space, picnic areas — places just for them to hang out while they’re not doing anything.”
Until then, Berger contends, something needs to be done.
“With more individuals moving into the area, the safety of these people lies in the hands of the Salvation Army. They’ve got to change with it. I believe they should consider moving before one of their people ends up hurting somebody. At that point in time there’s going to be a ruckus.”
After a few weeks off, Lee’s anxious to get back to the Stroll. But before hitting the street on this summer night, he kicks back with a tallboy of Busch in a car parked in front of his parents’ house.
When he left just now, his mom asked where he was going. “I just gotta handle some business, you hear me?” he told her, sounding like 50 Cent — affable yet vaguely menacing.
Lee says he’s close to his mother. She was shot a few years ago in a gang-related spree that his family fears may been intended for him. While their mother was in the hospital, his sister padlocked the house and the family scattered. With nowhere to go, Lee crashed at the Harbor Light. He hated it.
“I’d rather be on the street than staying somewhere like that,” he says. “Those guys are straight trash.”
He says his current situation isn’t bad. He has two young daughters he sees often and hopes to get married soon to his girlfriend of a year (she’s not the girls’ mother). His parents continue to take care of his financial needs, which is more than most 28-year-olds could ask.
“I don’t trip off money like that,” he says. “I got a nice house. I live good, I eat good. They support me as far as food, clothes, everything. Unless I’m trying to get something I don’t need to be getting.”
What he doesn’t need to be getting is drugs. Lee’s got a pretty demanding weed habit and dabbles in coke and heroin. He took to the Stroll six months ago, after he got fired from a landscaping job. A friend from the south side told him about it. “He told me I could make some cheese by doing nothing, just by standing around,” Lee says. “Disgracing myself for a minute, but not too disgracing.”
An aspiring rapper, Lee has laid down some of his tracks but has yet to catch a break in the music business. He says his brother recently got him a job washing dishes in Clayton, which he’ll start soon. But the Stroll is his most reliable source of income. “It’s kinda tough out here. But I don’t got nothin’ better to do, nothin’ that I’m good at,” he says. “I knew there was money in that field. I’m down there to get in where I fit in.”
Lee spins countless tales of tragedy, including the time he and a friend were walking in this north-side neighborhood one early morning in 1993 and discovered a corpse just around the corner from his house. He interrupts his narrative to spit out the open window. A decade of friends and family getting shot has left a bad taste in his mouth.
He says he recently tested negative for TB, HIV and other STDs. If a john on the Stroll wants more than the hand job he offers, he turns them down.
“I don’t get down like that,” he says. “I come from a moral family. I don’t lose my morals. I don’t need no cheese like that. I’m not gonna penetrate nothin’; they can’t put their mouth on it. But you’d be surprised how many just want to jerk me.
“You have to have boundaries, because you can hop in the car with a mothafucker who’s a straight-up serial killer, a Ted Bundy-typa shit,” he says. “I know the dangers of all that. I got in the car with mothafuckers before and they ain’t got no conversation for me. I say, ‘Hey, pull this car over and let me up outta here.’ You know a lot about someone when you get in the car with them by their conversation. If they ain’t got nothin’ to say, then there’s probably something else on their mind. You gotta read signs and you’ll be all right. Don’t look at the dollar signs. I watch enough Court TV to know that people are sick.”
His line of work, he speculates, is even more dangerous than a female prostitute’s.
“With all these faggots out here, I guess it’s kind of different than women prostitutes. It’s more sick-ass men out here.
“This ain’t for everybody,” he says suddenly. “To me it’s sickness. Even though I do it. You gotta be something wrong with you if you can participate in something like that. What ordinary, normal person would participate in something like that? I might not do what some other guys do down there, but at the same time I still participate in what’s going on down there. That makes me no better than them. No matter how I make my money, it’s still foul.”
Before he leaves for the Stroll, Lee excuses himself, walks across the front yard and relieves himself on the side of his parents’ house.
Will Lipe, a St. Louis police officer who works out of the Ninth District, has come to a meeting of the Locust Business Association in order to bring those present up to date on what the department is doing to combat prostitution in the neighborhood.
“Over time we have gotten buildings in the area torn down in which prostitutes would take their customers and do whatever,” Lipe says. “We do occasionally have the vice squad that goes down there and picks up male prostitutes, just like they do with female prostitutes that you see on TV. Undercover, targeting the customers or targeting the prostitutes themselves.”
One resident has joined the business owners at the meeting and asks what to do if she sees men hustling. “If you see them and you think they’re engaged in prostitution, call 911,” Lipe advises. “We’ll dispatch a car that should — at the very least — run them out.
“Unless they actually see them engaged in prostitution, solicitation, et cetera, they can’t really charge them with that,” Lipe goes on. “But they can arrest them for bench warrants. I would say a large percentage of them have bench warrants.”
(A few weeks later, Lee will be arrested on the Stroll for outstanding warrants — driving without insurance or a valid license — and spend four days in jail.)
“There is male prostitution in the area. We are aware of it,” Lipe assures the group.
But the same cannot be said of some of his superiors.
Harry Hegger, division commander for the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth districts, says he hasn’t heard the area around Washington and Compton referred to as “the Stroll.”
Police chief Joseph Mokwa, however, is familiar with the situation.
“The department is aware that there are some prostitution issues, and we’ve been aware of it for some time,” Mokwa says. “We’re trying to collaborate with the Salvation Army, and we recently had a meeting with the circuit attorney, and the public safety director for the city and neighborhood residents. As more residential development continues in this area, there’s going to be less tolerance of that kind of behavior.
“We’re also looking at long-term solutions to try and make sure we don’t have recidivism,” Mokwa goes on. “The best solution is to modify the lifestyle of people that are engaged in prostitution, and get whatever kind of systemic problem — whether it’s alcoholism or drug problems — that’s forced them into this lifestyle. Secondarily, if that’s not productive, we’d like to have the judges prohibit the people from being in the area that they’ve been arrested in the past. Thirdly, I guess we’d have to incarcerate people if the behavior didn’t stop, and diagnose why they’re in that area in the first place.”
Harbor Light security manager Sam Taylor pilots a Salvation Army van around the neighborhood several times every week, telling loiterers to move on. Having patrolled the Stroll for years, Taylor thinks police should focus more on the johns.
“I’m not saying they’re not doing all they can,” Taylor says as he cruises the area late one night. “They’ve been stepping up their efforts. Maybe the officers who ride through here should spot some of these cars that come around the block five or six times, get a license plate and run ’em. Then you’ll see where most of these guys are coming from” — the implication being that johns are commuting in from the county.
“Just in the last six months to a year we kind of hit critical mass, having enough people where we felt like we can start making a difference here,” says Wade Paschall. “We said to the police, ‘Hey, we live down here, we work down here and we want to help you guys in any way we can.’ We are just in the beginning stages of doing that, but I think you’re going to start seeing a lot of cracking down.”
A lot of times the way you can tell that they’re here for sex work is that they may stand against the wall and may peer into cars for long periods of time. Another way to tell is if they’re walking around and they’re not walking around for any particular reason.”
Some people have a special talent for discerning the flavors of a fine wine, others for identifying rare species of insects. Anthony Galloway can spot a male prostitute from a distance of 100 yards.
An openly gay, 23-year-old black man, Galloway works for the St. Louis Effort For AIDS, specializing in outreach to at-risk gay men of color. On this pleasantly cool Thursday night, he’s making his rounds on the Stroll, handing out “Safer Sex Kits,” each of which contains three condoms (two regular and one flavored), a packet of lubricant and a sheet of safe-sex tips. By the time he’s done he’ll have given kits to about half the two dozen or so men he encounters. Later tonight hustling will be even more bustling.
Galloway has been handing out the kits on the Stroll for five years. Somebody has to do it, he says, noting that Harbor Light doesn’t distribute condoms and the St. Louis Department of Health and its Metropolitan Center for HIV/AIDS Services, located nearby on Grand Boulevard, will likely move soon. HIV and AIDS, meanwhile, are on the rise in St. Louis, which also boasts the nation’s second-highest rate of gonorrhea and ranks third in chlamydia.
Galloway, who distributes condoms in “public sex environments,” including clubs and places that sell pornographic materials, speculates that the down-low phenomenon, coupled with garden-variety Show-Me State homophobia, combine to draw johns to the Stroll. “Missouri is a highly conservative state. It’s very homophobic, which has a lot to do with the amount of down-low men,” he theorizes.
Although some Stroll denizens wordlessly refuse Galloway’s kits, many recognize and return his greeting. Some know him by name. And in exchange for a few dollars, many are willing to talk about their lives.
“I love women. Sex with men I really don’t like,” says a middle-aged Stroll walker who identifies himself as John Smith and goes so far as to produce his Social Security card to prove it. “I don’t like it, man, but sometimes you gotta make ends meet.”
Smith says he’s been on the Stroll for ten years, during which time he has developed a special relationship with some of his clients.
“Sometimes guys might just want a hug or something — it’s not always about sex. They come down here to get somebody they can be friends with. Some guys come out here because they want somebody to be with them that’s for real, that’s down to earth.
“I like to be around them just for the company,” Smith goes on. “Someone to talk to, man. Some of ’em are really good listeners, and some of them will befriend you and help you out in any way they can. They might want you to cut their grass, they might want you to put up a computer stand or something.”
And what of those who characterize the Stroll as a den of secret, seedy commerce?
“It’s not secret — what’s so secret about it?” he responds. “Everybody’s business is not everybody’s business. A lot of people come down here, man. You’ve got guys that’s got wives. You’ve got guys that’s in church, that’s preachers, you’ve got schoolteachers, you’ve got people with high status, man. They want to keep it low-key. Everybody entitled to their own privacy, right?”
Answering his own question with an affirmative nod, Smith gets back to his business.
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The Ten Most Hated Men in Rock
David Byrne has done it right. Destined to live high on the hog by way of Talking Heads royalties until the day he dies, the adventurous quirkmeister has been nothing but ballsy since his seminal new-wave outfit parted ways. You may not like everything he’s tried since his career apex, but complacency has, to his credit, been Byrne’s worst enemy.
Sting, meanwhile, is another story. This turtleneck-sweatered Jaguar shill has so desecrated his Policeman legacy that we’re not entirely convinced the current soft-rock incarnation isn’t the original Sting’s evil twin. He is, without question, the most hated man in rock.
A better question is: Who’re numbers two through ten? According to San Francisco Chronicle pop-music critic Aidin Vaziri, the runner-up is Eric Clapton, a ranking based almost exclusively on the guitar god’s synth-slop collaborations with Babyface. While we may not agree with this ranking, the criteria for what makes a rocker “hated” is more or less spot on: have talent, use it well for a substantial period of time, then intentionally squander it for commercial riches, fame and/or forced mass appeal.
Admittedly, it is tough to find ten men who strictly adhere to such requirements, so we’ve chosen — with the help of a secret, eleven-man panel — to implement a graded system in which talented sellouts merit weightier consideration than, say, Johnny Rzeznik or Fred Durst. That said, to exclude such ass-clowns from this list outright would be doing a public disservice. So too would including Sting, as he is as consensus a top dog as doggies can top. Without further ado, let the hatred begin!
1. Paul McCartney Barely qualified to carry John Lennon’s roach clip while both toiled with a grotesquely overrated boy band known as the Beatles, Sir Paul’s true colors have reverberated loudly and horribly since Mark David Chapman put a tragic slug in Yoko’s hubby. “Band on the Run” could have been written by a third grader, and McCartney’s duets with alleged pedophile Michael Jackson — and the ensuing public pissing match over Wacko Jacko’s savvy purchase of the Beatles’ catalogue — cemented McCartney’s legacy of poor taste and idiocy. And wasn’t it great when Sir Paul, sharing the stage with Madonna at the close of the 1999 MTV Music Awards, thought Lauryn Hill was a man, referring to the artist of the year as “some guy named Lawrence Hill?” Nice one, asshole. Worst of all, who can forget the post-9/11 ode to freedom named, with typical genius, “Freedom”? Marrying a young, blond, one-legged starfucker twelve hours after burying your hero-philanthropist wife was a good one too, mate. Go fuck yourself, McCartney. You deserve worse than that, but such dread is unattainable on this earth. We can only hope Satan delivers the goods to Sir Paul in Hell, where knighthoods carry no currency.2. Carlos Santana “Or else forget about it!” We wish we could, Carlos. And that would likely be possible had you made just one album of duets with flash-in-the-pan pop stars such as Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas. But no, you followed it up with “a little bit of this” and “a little bit of that” with no-talent teen tart Michelle Branch on the dreadful Supernatural sequel, Shaman, and proceeded to ride the low-rent pop-culture train all the way to a spot on National Basketball Association playoff lead-ins with the Black Eyed Peas. Pathetic career trajectory for a man once considered to be the heir apparent to Jimi Hendrix, and Santana has no one to blame but himself. It’s not like his record label swooped in and said, “Say, Carlos, we need you to do this duet with the guy from Nickelback or else we’re going to drop your ass.” Look for him on the next Jennifer Lopez album.
3. Jimmy Buffett Alcohol-rehabilitation counselors, antidepressant manufacturers and shrinks should present Buffett with gold-encrusted plaques of recognition thanking the Key West ukulele hack for supplying roughly half of their paying clientele. Here’s how the vicious cycle works: 1) Begin liking Buffett during perpetually drunk collegiate undergrad years; 2) prolong perpetual drunkenness by becoming Parrothead and attending Buffett shows until the age of 40; 3) crash car drunk on drive back from Buffett show at Pensacola Fairgrounds; 4) enter court-mandated rehab program; 5) get sober; 6) recognize how bad taste in music and hollow life was during personal “Cheeseburger in Paradise” bender; 7) start seeing shrink and taking Prozac; 8) realize that entire wardrobe consists of imitation Hawaiian shirts, huarache sandals, golf visors and jams; 9) start drinking again; 10) hit the road for Chattanooga stop of Buffett’s “Four Inebriated Horsemen” tour with Alan Jackson, Clint Black and Randy Travis. Margaritaville, unfortunately, has inescapable walls made of petrified ape dung, which is an apt description of Buffett’s entire catalogue.
4. The Adams Family (Ryan & Bryan) You’ve been asking for this double entry, Ryan, by refusing, time and again, to cover “Summer of ’69” in concert. If you didn’t want to be confused with Bryan Adams — or, short of that, teased a little for being one consonant short of Canada’s pint-size pride — you should have changed your fucking name. Lots of rock stars do it, bro. Releasing three mediocre albums a year and mounting the likes of Winona Ryder and Parker Posey have done nothing to help R. Adams’ credibility either. Bryan, meanwhile, paved the way for mediocre soloists like Phil Collins and Patrick Swayze to cash in at the box office by contributing to Robin Hood. For this, the gravel-throated Canuck will never be forgiven, even if the aforementioned “Summer” is a true-blue gem.
5. Elton John Bernie Taupin’s not-so-tiny dancer was way better in the Studio 54 era, when he was as high as a Rocket Man and actually cranked out adventurous pop hits with gusto. Now sober, Sir Elton seems content to belt out cheesy power ballads for animated-feature soundtracks, host garish awards-show afterparties and retrofit “Candle in the Wind” to cash in on the It-Dead Princess of the Moment. Leavin’ Levon far behind, indeed, and much the worse for it. Heaven hope the sun goes down on this pasty, toupee-wearing key tickler ASAFP.
6. Johnny Rzeznik Feel free to debate whether what the Goo Goo Dolls record can even be considered rock. Also feel free to debate whether or not it’s music. Any way you slice the pie, this moronic, saccharine, neo-glam outfit is the worst band in America, with Rzeznik being the synthetic cherry filling. Quick, name one Goo Goo Dolls song! That’s okay, you’re not alone. The fact that Rzeznik ascends to this high a ranking without ever exhibiting an ounce of artistic talent is testament to how much people just want to drop-kick his pretty-boy bean through the goalposts at Fuckface Field. At least this Calvin Klein underwear-model wannabe has one thing going for him: Avril Lavigne evidently wants to ride him. And in Missouri, that’d be barely legal.
7. G.E. Smith We know: How can a Saturday Night Live bandleader named after a power company qualify for this list? Here’s how: Smith served as Hall & Oates’ lead guitarist from 1979 until 1985, which marked the peak of the Philly duo’s commercial viability. And — come on — was there any blond ponytail more ubiquitous than Smith’s during his ten-year SNL run? Absolutely not — homeboy played on every imaginable televised tribute concert, including Bob Dylan’s, Live Aid and Farm Aid. Indeed, where there was an Aid — and a camera — there was a blond ponytail, which Smith took great pains to flap across his face like a horse does with tail and ass. Smith was Michael Bolton before Michael Bolton was Michael Bolton. The difference is Smith didn’t even have to open his mouth to attain such reviled status; his “look at me!” facial expressions did it all.
8. Conor Oberst & Chris Carrabba Who wants to hear sad, sad songs about the day-to-day pathos of well-to-do suburban white kids? Well-to-do suburban white kids, that’s who. And that’s about it. “Emo,” then, is really a genre within a genre within a genre, which makes it a mystery as to why these two wimps have been garnering so much ink and critical fellatio. Every song they write is overwrought and essentially intellectually dishonest. Everybody’s got problems, to be sure, but we’d love to transplant this double entry (two whiny weenies equal one man, by our count) of pastoral crackers to the ghetto for a few decades. Then we’ll see if they continue to pump out the same prepubescent pussy bait that’s gotten them this far.
9. Fred Durst It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe Durst’s claim that he drilled Britney Spears six ways ’til Sunday; this rap-rock goofball is largely responsible for rock’s darkest era: the late 90’s (Kid Rock, you can take a bow too). Fortunately it looks like Durst’s career is over. Otherwise, he’d likely outstrip Rzeznik for the sixth spot and would rank number one if this poll were more concerned with sonic proficiency.
10. Bob Weir You can actually stop truckin’ now, Bob. The Dead’s insistence on staying on the road post-Jerry Garcia has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the band was just a collection of semi-competent nerds with a prodigiously charismatic and talented frontman. And “Rock Star Bobby” is the worst of the bunch, a bona fide gravy trainer who would’ve probably invited frequent guest Huey Lewis to join the band as a full-time harmonica player had Garcia not understandably kept his pink Izod-wearing ass in check. Weir’s side project, Rat Dog, is basically a below-average bar band with a frontman who needs a teleprompter to remember his own lyrics. But frankly, given our unyielding love for all things Garcia, we were willing to forgive and forget until Weir & Co. jumped on a stage in a movie-studio lot to appear on Leno recently. With Garcia on the injured list (for good), Weir stepped in to sing lead vocals on “Touch of Grey.” Horribly. Why he didn’t just defecate on Jerry’s headstone instead, we’ll never know.
Rounding out the Top Twenty: 11. Glenn Frey & Don Henley. 12. Scott Stapp. 13. Rod Stewart. 14. Phil Collins. 15. Lenny Kravitz. 16. Steve Miller. 17. John Cougar Mellencamp. 18. Michael McDonald. 19. Max Weinberg. 20. Lars Ulrich.
Honorable Mention: Eric Clapton, Anthony Kiedis, Kid Rock, Scott Weiland, Liam & Noel Gallagher, Zack de la Rocha, Peter Gabriel, Kenny Loggins, George Thorogood, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bruce Springsteen, Axl Rose, James Hetfield, Ozzy Osbourne, Steve Winwood, Bruce Hornsby, Billy Joel, Dave Matthews, John Popper, Julian Casablancas, Jack White, Rob Thomas, Huey Lewis, Jackson Browne, Dave Grohl, Chris Cornell, Mark McGrath, Melissa Etheridge and the lead singer of Maroon 5 (we’re too indifferent to even bother learning his name).Click the links beneath the photos to print out your very own “Least Wanted” posters, then hang them around town, CORE Project-style! (Note: All posters are in PDF format and require Acrobat Reader [available
here] to view. Posters average 500k in size.) -
Man Killer
Bill Prewitt dozed in the front seat as his wife Patty drove their Ford Torino home in the pounding rain on a February night twenty years ago. The couple, all-American high school sweethearts, had been out late eating barbecue, dancing at a country & Western bar and playing Atari at a friend’s house.
It was about two in the morning when Patty pulled up the long driveway to their two-story farmhouse north of Holden, a western Missouri town of 2,200 residents.
A soft-spoken family man whom his daughter described as so gentle “he couldn’t make the dogs mind,” Bill went upstairs and found four of his five children sleeping. The oldest girl had spent the night with a friend.
Patty says Bill was fast asleep when she came to bed ten minutes later. Outside, thunder and lightning crashed. Thick clouds diffused the light of a full moon.
Within an hour and a half, Bill Prewitt was dead, shot twice in the head with his own .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle.
Patty Prewitt, his wife of fifteen years — a beautiful 34-year-old who always cracked jokes, volunteered in the PTA and served as president of the Holden Chamber of Commerce — claimed an intruder killed her husband and attacked her at knifepoint.
Prosecutors said it was impossible to believe that a stranger found Bill’s rifle in the bedroom closet and, in total darkness, loaded it with bullets that were stored in the chest of drawers — and then shot Bill at close range while Patty slept next to him.
The state’s attorney argued that Patty shot her husband then threw the rifle into a pond on the family’s 40-acre farm. The rifle and her boot prints were found when the pond was drained. Her motive, said prosecutors, was lust and greed. Three ex-lovers testified that she had wanted Bill dead for years. Two of the men said she had offered them thousands of dollars to murder her 35-year-old husband.
After a four-day trial, a Pettis County jury convicted Patty of capital murder and sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years. A week after the verdict, a witness contacted Patty to say that she had seen a man in a white car watching the Prewitt house from a country road in the wee hours of that murderous night.
This same witness told police about the car — a day after the murder — but the lead was never investigated. Circuit Court Judge Donald Barnes refused to grant a new trial to hear the evidence.
Since going to prison eighteen years ago, Patty’s effervescent personality and persistent claims of innocence have persuaded prison supervisors, cellmates, church workers and at least a dozen state legislators to lobby for her early release, now scheduled for 2036 at the earliest. She will be 86 years old. Family and friends say Patty is the victim of shoddy police work and overzealous prosecutors who cast her as a cold-hearted adulteress driven to murder.
“I did not murder my husband,” Patty tells the Riverfront Times in a recent interview at the state women’s prison in Vandalia, 100 miles northwest of St. Louis. “I would never have taken Bill away from our kids.”
Patty Slaughter met Bill Prewitt in the seventh grade. She was a geeky tomboy, an honor-roll student who rode a horse and lived on a ranch. He was a smart, good-looking athlete who lived in a tidy house with white carpet in Lee’s Summit, twenty miles southeast of Kansas City.
When Bill asked Patty out on a date their senior year, she couldn’t believe he even knew her name. Patty was tall and thin, a gorgeous woman with long brown hair and sparkling eyes. She was always telling stories in her warm, country accent, talking with her hands and laughing loudly — very loudly. Bill was quiet and shy. He was only five-foot-seven, but scrappy enough to stand out on the basketball court.
In the summer of 1968, Bill and Patty married and, shortly after, she was pregnant. He had a short-lived career as a teacher but hated it and went back to a job at the lumberyard where he had worked as a teenager. Eventually they built a home near Patty’s family and had more kids.
Patty remembers those days as being close to perfect. She tended a huge garden, cooked, cleaned and played with the kids while Bill worked. “Money was always tight, but we all lived in cut-off shorts back then and nobody worried about fancy cars.”
Everything changed in May 1974 while the couple was running errands in Sedalia. Patty claimed that in broad daylight three men pulled her into the bushes in a quiet neighborhood and raped her. She never reported the crime. She said she was ashamed.
She told Bill when he caught up with her later that day. At first, she says, her husband was sympathetic and “was so sad and sweet.” At the trial, Patty said, “We never told anybody, not even my best friend.” Later, she added, “He got more and more distant somehow. He didn’t want to make love to me.”
By the summer of 1976, Patty says she was lonely and confused, and she began having an affair with Ricky Mitts, a tall, dark-haired hippie who lived nearby. Patty says the affair lasted only a few months — but long enough for her to get pregnant. Desperate to keep his family together, Bill decided to raise the baby, Morgan, as their own.
“He just didn’t want anyone to know,” Patty says now.
When Mitts testified against Patty nine years later, he claimed Patty offered him $10,000 to kill her husband.
Bill and Patty’s marriage tumbled to its lowest point in the fall of 1976, around the time they saw a for-sale ad in the Sunday paper for a lumberyard in Holden. Bill loved the idea of owning his own lumber company, so he and Patty borrowed $60,000 from the bank and their families and bought the business.
Holden seemed like a sleepy farm town. The lumberyard was next door to the Holden City Hall and across the street from the town’s tiny police station. Bill and Patty worked together while the kids played nearby.
“They were the ideal family, something out of Norman Rockwell,” recalls Kirk Powell, then editor of the weekly newspaper, the Holden Progress. “She was a very bubbly kind of person. Bill was kind of shy and real quiet, but very nice.”
Almost no one in town knew about their marital problems. But for almost a year, they lived separately and, Patty claims, they both cheated on one another.
Two of her relationships were short-lived flings, though another affair with a married man lasted several months. But Patty says neither she nor Bill wanted a divorce. “I didn’t want to lose Bill,” she says. “He was my best friend, even when I was being stupid.”
It wasn’t until the fall of 1978 that she says they finally mended their broken relationship. “I started throwing dishes at him,” she says. “I knew if I threw dishes in my kitchen, I would get his attention.”
She says they screamed at one another until they both broke down crying. Then they swept up the dishes and started rebuilding their life together. “That was the end of me cheating and him cheating.”
Like the Prewitts’ marriage, things could also get stormy in seemingly peaceful Holden. Teenagers drag-raced down Main, bar fights spilled into the streets after midnight and outlaws stole cars, robbed houses and sold drugs. Once, a bullet broke the front window of the W.E. Prewitt Lumber Company.
“There were people who were proud of their outlaw persona,” remembers Kevin Hughes, a former Johnson County sheriff’s deputy. “The kids would line up on the main drag so they could run from us and do this Dukes of Hazzard thing.”
The mayor of Holden, Don Hancock, proudly called himself Boss Hogg. He drove a Cadillac and wore a white suit and a ten-gallon hat.
Still, no one in Holden worried much about crime. Patty says they left their doors unlocked until a strange man wandered into their house while their daughter was home alone, five months before Bill’s murder.
Sarah Prewitt Lewis, now married with two children and living in Lee’s Summit, says she was lying in her parents’ bed watching TV when the man knocked on the door, then opened it and walked upstairs. “I barely had time to get under the bed,” she remembers. From there, she could see his feet as he walked into her parents’ closet and then opened the doors on the chest of drawers.
Patty says she reported the incident to the sheriff’s office but didn’t press charges because she thought the young man, who lived down the street, was mentally slow.
In the following months, the Prewitts began receiving obscene phone calls — the last one two weeks before Bill’s murder. Jane Prewitt Van Benthusen, the oldest daughter, remembers answering one of the calls. The man said, “We’re going to fuck like bunnies.”
After Bill’s murder, officers investigated the whereabouts of the man who had been in Prewitt house. They discovered he had recently moved and was working eight hours away the night Bill was slain.
As business owners and parents, Bill and Patty Prewitt worked hard to make Holden a better community. She organized fairs and parades and volunteered as a room mother at her kids’ schools. Bill was president of the city recreation league and coached soccer. When Bill and Patty found out that drugs were being sold at the high school, they and other parents formed a task force.
“My husband always called me Crusader Rabbit because I was always taking on some cause,” Patty says now. “I grew up opinionated and he grew up not making a fuss.”
Patty was the one who called customers who were behind on their payments, which sometimes ran into the thousands of dollars. Like other small businesses in rural America in the mid-1980s, the Prewitt Lumber Company was struggling financially.
Kevin Hughes, the former Johnson County sheriff’s deputy who led the murder investigation, says Patty was upset because Bill let people run a tab even when they owed money.
But the Prewitt kids say their parents seldom fought. “They danced in the grocery store,” recalls Jane, who was fourteen when her dad was killed.
On the morning of February 18, 1984, Cliff Gustin awoke at 3:50 to the sound of someone banging on his front door. Patty Prewitt was standing in the rain with her kids in her arms, frantically screaming. “Somebody pulled me out of bed,” she told her neighbor. “I think Bill’s been hurt.”
When Gustin arrived at the Prewitt home with the Holden police chief and two reserve officers, they bounded upstairs and found Bill Prewitt dead. He was lying on his side, blankets up to his chest, and his head, shoulders and face covered in blood.
They tried the lights but they didn’t work. At 4:29 a.m., Gustin flipped the main switch on the breaker box to “on.” A police report said the electric clock in the house was one hour and ten minutes slow — which meant someone threw the circuit breaker off at 3:19 a.m.
When Gustin restored the power, the lights came on in the dining room, at the top of the stairs and in the basement. At Patty’s trial, Gustin, a former police officer, testified that the basement door was open. He said no one searched the house for an intruder.
When Deputy Hughes first talked to Patty on the morning of February 18, she was wearing a red coat over white pajamas and had seven cuts on her neck. “When I saw the marks on her neck, I thought, ‘That looks like she did it looking in the mirror with a razor blade,’” recalls Hughes, now a private detective in Wyoming.
Patty told Hughes she had been awakened by what she thought was a clap of thunder. Soon after, she said a man pulled her onto the floor by her hair, yanked her pajama bottoms and panties off and held a knife to her throat as he got on top of her. She said she could not see the man because the room was dark.
At first, Patty told Hughes the attacker did not rape her. She now says she was sexually assaulted but didn’t tell the police because she worried that her marriage would crumble again if Bill found out.
“I know it sounds crazy because Bill was dead, but he wasn’t dead to me,” Patty says. “I was in shock.”
When the attacker left, Patty said, she tried to wake Bill but he didn’t move. “He was breathing kind of ragged, kind of rattly like a kitty,” she told Hughes during the taped interview the day of the murder.
She tried the lights and the phone but neither worked. After checking to make sure the kids were OK, she ran outside to the truck and grabbed a flashlight. “I shined it on Bill and there was blood down the mattress and on down the dust ruffle and I knew this was really bad,” she related to Hughes.
That’s when she woke her children and told them to get dressed because there was a small fire in the house. “The kids kept saying, ‘Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy?’ And I said, ‘It’s okay but we’ve got to get out,’” Patty told police.
She hurried her kids downstairs in the dark, helped them put on their coats and shoes, then rushed them outside and locked them in the car before running back inside to check on Bill one last time.
At the trial, Johnson County Prosecutor Tom Williams scoffed at the story Patty gave to police. “The defense would have us believe that she took the time to dress the children with Bill still hurt and alive and the rapist about….. I submit to you that is incredible.”
At the Prewitt house, blood stained the white curtains and the ceiling above Bill’s body. The shades were partially raised.
Hughes observed one gunshot wound above Bill’s right ear. Officers later discovered two .22-caliber rifle rounds in Patty’s jewelry box and a box of .22 shells in Bill’s chest of drawers.
On Patty’s nightstand Hughes discovered several Alfred Hitchcock mysteries and a novel called Murder in California, which he said was strikingly similar to the story he had just heard from Patty. Downstairs in the filing cabinet, he found Bill’s life insurance policy.
Hughes later testified that he searched the carpet in the bedroom for hair because Patty said she had been yanked out of bed by her long brown hair. None was found.
But Patty’s friend, Mary O’Roark Englert, testified she saw large amounts of hair when she dumped water out of the wet vacuum cleaner while cleaning blood from the carpet one week after the murder. If hair had been collected, it could have been analyzed for DNA using today’s technology.
Englert says she also found a second shell casing that police had not recovered after a week of searching. On the afternoon following the murder, a deputy found one .22-caliber shell casing after he sat down on a wicker love seat in the bedroom and the evidence fell out.
Hours after the murder, officers also dusted — unsuccessfully — for fingerprints on several doorknobs. But they didn’t look for fingerprints on the breaker box, a flat surface from which prints could have been more easily retrieved. The person who killed Bill would have touched the breaker box when he or she flipped the main switch at 3:19 a.m.
Hughes says officers found no signs of a stranger inside or outside the Prewitt house. “It was a rainy night, and usually, an intruder doesn’t wipe their feet at the door,” he says. “There were no muddy impressions.”
Officers did find pry marks on the family room door and a piece of wood missing near the lock. But Sheriff Charles Norman later testified that the damage appeared old.
On the afternoon following the murder, Hughes interviewed twelve-year-old Sarah, who says she told the deputy about hearing noises in the basement and seeing a light beneath the basement door as they were fleeing the house.
Hughes says Sarah told him the story days after the murder. (None of the police reports obtained by the RFT detailed conversations investigators had with the Prewitt children.) “Patty was good about planting things into her kids’ minds after the fact,” Hughes says.
At 32, Sarah says her memory remains clear. Thinking the house was on fire, she had bolted into the living room to rescue her flute. “I saw this light under the basement door,” Sarah recalls. “I thought Dad was down there. I remember driving to the neighbor’s house thinking Dad was in the basement fighting the fire.”
The basement door was closed when they left, she says.
A week after the murder, when Patty’s friends were cleaning the house, they took pictures of man-size footprints on the dirt floor of the basement. “They led from the window to a little room behind the stairs,” Mary O’Roark Englert says.
Police later said the footprints were not there when they arrived on the day of the murder and probably belonged to officers who searched the house.
When Deputy Hughes read Patty her Miranda rights on February 20, she didn’t think she needed a lawyer. “I thought only guilty people needed lawyers,” she says now.
She talked to investigators for the next seventeen hours; only the first fifteen minutes were taped. Hughes says he didn’t record the full interrogation because “the sheriff’s department was on a shoestring budget.”
Patty claims Hughes would scream at her, then another deputy would try to calm Hughes down. At one point Patty remembers saying, “You know, I’ve seen Starsky and Hutch.”
“Hughes had a reputation for being able to make a rock talk,” Patty says. “I’m the one he couldn’t break.”
Hughes remembers it differently. “Patty has a lot of charm and she uses it well. She gave me the impression that she was used to manipulating men. She thought whatever she did, she was going to be believed.”
At her trial Hughes testified that when he asked Patty about her affairs, she told him, “My fire burns hotter than most.”
Patty insists she would never say anything that stupid.
The trial began on April 16, 1985, in Sedalia. More than 100 people from Holden, mostly Patty’s family and friends, along with Bill Prewitt’s relatives, packed the small courtroom. One juror remembers Patty appearing stoic as the soap opera unfolded.
Jon Hancock, the son of the mayor who called himself Boss Hogg, testified he and Patty had an affair in 1978 and that she told him she wished Bill would die in a car accident. According to Hancock, she also said she knew where his rifle was and talked about killing Bill in his sleep.
Patty says she may have said something like, “Bill makes me so mad; I wish he’d just keel over and die.” But she insists she was never serious.
“If I had a nickel for every man or woman who’s having an affair and said something along the lines of, ‘I wish someone would shoot that SOB,’ I’d be a wealthy and retired lawyer,” says Phil Cardarella, the Kansas City attorney Patty retained for her defense.
Hancock wasn’t the only one who claimed that Patty wanted Bill dead.
Mike Brown, a former lumberyard employee, told police in the days following the murder that Patty offered him money to kill her husband. But eight months later, in a signed statement, Brown said Deputy Hughes threatened to throw him in jail if he did not cooperate with police. He also said that Bill was present whenever Patty made jokes about having her husband killed.
Brown was not called to testify at Patty’s trial. But his friend, Richard Hayes, told jurors that he and Patty had sex three times in 1978. On two occasions, he said, her kids were home, leading prosecutor Tom Williams to say Patty had “neglected her children.”
Hayes told officers shortly after the murder that Patty offered to buy him a lumber company if Hayes “got rid” of Bill. Two months later Hayes signed a far more detailed statement prepared by police. In it, he claimed that Patty told him Bill beat her and that his life insurance “would make her a wealthy woman.”
Patty insists that she never asked anyone to kill her husband but concedes she told her lovers that Bill beat her so “they wouldn’t think badly of me.”
At the trial, Hayes admitted that an assault charge was pending against him when he made statements to police. Shortly after, the charges were dropped.
On the stand, Ricky Mitts, the hippie who lived down the street from the Prewitts, said Patty feared losing custody of the kids if she asked for a divorce. He also said Patty claimed Bill beat her, but he doubted it was true. “Bill was one of the kindest people I ever met,” Mitts says in a recent phone interview from his home in Grandview, Missouri.
When police interviewed Mitts after Bill’s death, he told them he had visited the Prewitt house three weeks earlier. He also admitted he had shot Bill’s semi-automatic rifle in the past. But he denied having an affair with Patty or that she had ever asked him to kill her husband.
A week later, Mitts says, he contacted police to tell them Patty had offered him $10,000 to kill Bill. “I had become a believer in Christ and [felt] convicted” about the need to tell the truth, he says.
But shortly after giving a statement to police, Mitts approached Patty and offered to divorce his wife and marry her. He thought that husbands could not legally be forced to testify against their wives.
“If I’ve ever wanted to commit murder, it was at that moment,” Patty says during a prison interview.
Mitts says he was in love with Patty when he offered to marry her, even though he had just told police she wanted to kill her husband. “She was beautiful,” he says. “I would have done anything for her but kill Bill.”
Prosecutor Williams told jurors Patty finally grew tired of waiting for someone else to kill her husband and decided to do it herself.
“Her motive is clear,” Williams argued. “Lust. Her fire burns hotter than most people’s. And greed. With the insurance money, she would be free and independent.”
Williams explained to the jury that the Prewitts were behind on Bill’s life-insurance payments and that the grace period on both policies expired February 18, the day Bill was killed.
But when payments were missed, the whole-life policy remained in effect because the insurance company drew from the $14,000 in principal the Prewitts had already paid. The other policy would have been reinstated when the Prewitts made their monthly payment of $12. The two policies totaled $93,000. Patty testified that the couple’s debts to banks, vendors and family members exceeded $170,000.
“Bill and I were civilized adults,” Patty writes in a recent letter to the RFT. “We were not the kind of people who kill people for any reason. Divorce is the option civilized people use. Good Lord!”
Four days after Bill’s death, officers used a magnet to recover the rifle from a pond 500 feet from the Prewitts’ front door.
When deputies drained the mud and water from the pond, they found two footprints on the edge of the bank and another within one foot of the rifle. The prints matched the bottom of Patty’s red rubber boots, which had been sitting outside the front door.
According to the state’s theory, Patty ran through the thunderstorm to the pond and threw in the rifle. Williams argued that the gun stuck in the mud, “like a dart sticking straight up out of the water.”
Williams said Patty waded into the water and pushed the rifle down. The shiny red boots were caked with an inch of mud when police presented them at a preliminary hearing.
But two of Patty’s friends insist that’s not the way the boots looked two days after the murder. Mary O’Roark Englert and Jerri Austin testified that they picked up the boots when they were at the Prewitt house to get clothes for Patty and the kids.
“They weren’t spick-and-span, but they weren’t muddy,” Englert remembers in a recent interview at her home in Independence. “There was no way someone was walking around a pond in them.”
In fact, Sheriff Norman testified that when he tried to walk through the pond, his boots mired down in the mud. Patty says after her attorneys had her buy a similar pair of boots and walk through the pond, the fleece inside was stained brown and ruined.
“Look at these boots,” Bob Beaird, her defense attorney, told the jury. “Not one piece of mud on a shoestring, not one piece of mud in an eyelet, not one drop of muddy water inside of them. She doesn’t walk on water.”
According to testimony, the boots were eight inches tall. But Sheriff Norman testified the rifle was found on a sandbar in the middle of the pond in water that was eleven inches deep. The water closer to the bank, he said, was “deeper and very, very muddy.”
Yet when deputies retrieved Patty’s white flowery pajamas from her on the morning of the murder, there was no mud on them. When police cleaned out traps in the sinks and tubs of the Prewitt home, no mud was found there either.
Sarah and her eleven-year-old brother, Matthew, testified that they had been at the pond with their dad when it was frozen two weeks earlier. Sarah said she was wearing her mom’s red boots, which she often did. “We were walking out [on the ice] and my foot fell through,” Sarah told the jury. The defense theorized that is why the boot print was in the center of the pond.
Kansas City pathologist James Bridgens (who is now deceased) told the jury that Bill was shot twice at close range — once in the temple and once in the back of the head — making it “highly improbable” that the room was completely dark, as Patty described it. He also concluded that the shooter stood on Patty’s side of the bed and would have been forced to lean over Patty as she slept.
The shot to the temple, Bridgens explained, would have rendered Bill unconscious but he could have continued breathing in a “rattly” manner — the same word used by Patty to describe Bill’s breathing.
The shot to the base of the skull, Bridgens testified, would have caused almost instant death. Prosecutor Williams argued that Patty would have been unable to describe Bill’s “rattly” breathing because he would have been dead after the attacker left the room.
“By breathing, by clinging to his life, Bill Prewitt convicts that woman,” Williams told the jury.
Juror Joy Cooper says she held out hope that Patty was innocent until hearing the pathologist’s testimony. “It was very damaging,” Cooper says today.
Though Patty’s defense team did not call its own expert pathologist, the testimony of Bridgens has been questioned in other murder cases. In Cass County in 1988, three pathologists testified that a bullet that killed a woman was fired into her mouth, while Bridgens maintained she was shot by someone standing behind her. A medical examiner in Dade County, Florida, wrote that “Bridgens lacks credibility” in a 1985 murder case in which charges against the defendant were eventually dropped.
“I had stated that my husband was making gurgling noises,” Patty wrote in an April 1993 letter to former Governor Mel Carnahan, asking for clemency. “Bridgens knew that so he testified that my husband would not have made any noises at all.”
When deliberations began on Friday, April 19, 1985, seven jurors favored convicting Patty Prewitt while five maintained she was not guilty. “We all talked about what a bad job her attorney did,” juror Joy Cooper recalls.
When the jury sent a message to the judge asking to declare a hung jury, he told them, “Try harder.”
At twenty minutes till five o’ clock, after deliberating for six hours, the jury foreman announced the guilty verdict. Patty’s daughters recall that Bill Prewitt’s family stood up and clapped.
Patty dropped her face into her hands and sobbed. Her kids started screaming. Many of the jurors also began weeping as her children’s cries echoed in the halls outside the courtroom.
Before the trial began, Patty was offered and refused a plea bargain that would have made her eligible for parole after five years. “I said, ‘I’m not leaving my kids for five years,’” Patty remembers.
Instead, the jury sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years.
Last month prosecutor Tom Williams spoke of the twenty-year-old crime and the trial he still remembers well. “In all my years of prosecution, I’ve never felt more secure in a conviction than I feel in this one,” he says. “She was guilty as hell.”
Still, juror Ronald Beaman, who now lives in Leavenworth, Kansas, says he felt the prosecutor went too far in trying to “portray her as a bad woman because of the affairs rather than just presenting the evidence of the actual crime.”
Jennifer Merrigan, a law student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, says Patty was convicted on the “slut theory.” After Governor Bob Holden’s office denied Patty’s petition for clemency last October, Merrigan and staff attorneys at the Midwestern Innocence Project began investigating her case.
“A lot of times, especially when women are tried for violent crimes, the prosecutor puts on evidence of their loose moral fiber,” Merrigan explains. “The jury convicts them basically for being a slut.”
Juanita Stephens read about the guilty verdict in the Holden newspaper a week after the trial. The woman, who lived a mile from the Prewitts, contacted Patty to ask why she hadn’t been called to testify.
That was the first time Patty or her lawyers ever heard about the strange car that Stephens said was parked a half-mile from the Prewitt home a few hours before the murder. Stephens said she made a special trip to tell Sheriff Norman about the white car, which she said was parked with its lights off atop a hill on a part of the road where the Prewitt house would be visible.
Stephens saw a man sitting inside the car at 12:15 a.m. as she returned home from town. She said the car later turned into her driveway, then backed out and headed in the direction of the Prewitt home.
At a hearing for a new trial, the sheriff (who is now deceased) testified that he didn’t recall the conversation. He also said the Prewitt home would not have been visible from the road because of trees and hills. But the murder was in February when the trees were bare.
“Establishing that out on this country road, at the time of the crime, there was a strange car stopped nearby is extremely significant,” says defense attorney Cardarella. “Had they revealed that information, there is no way on God’s green earth that woman would have been convicted. And they knew that.”
After the judge denied Patty’s request for a new trial, her lawyers appealed and Patty remained free on bond. For a year, the family clung to hope. Then on a Friday night in late April of 19
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Is There a Hidden Meaning to Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” or Is He Just Singing about Dandruff?
Brandon D. Richardson
Director, Rich Kid Marketing and Promotions
“It’s a very good song, big in clubs and big on radio, and there is a meaning: It’s like when you’re clean and you’re kinda pimpish, you wipe yourself off. You’re wipin’ away the haters, the ones that’s hatin’ on your game or tryin’ to step on your toes. That’s what it’s about. There’s nothing more behind it — no dandruff, no nothin’.”
Barbie Besse-Morris
Housewife
“There’s probably a hidden meaning to that song, and I’m not sure I even want to go there. It could be a woman that he’s trying to get off his back, and he’s calling [her] ‘dirt.’ That’s usually what men are talking about anyway when they do that kind of song.”
Tom Agustino
Trainee, Buckingham Palace Guard Academy
“It’s about being envied. You pull up in a nice car, they see you with a nice girl, and they start talkin’ shit about you and that’s what you need to brush off your shoulders. There’s no reason to talk bad about anybody, no reason to care about what other people think. All that’s important is what you think about yourself.”
Jay Perry
Barber/Owner, Nappy Roots Unisex Salon
“He’s sayin’ if you’re a pimp, go on, brush your shoulders off. You can be a pimp in your job. You can be a pimp when it comes to relationships — ladies are pimps, too. If you’re feelin’ that way, go on and brush your shoulders off. You floss a lot, you got a nice ride, you spend money around town, you’re a big-timer, so you brush your shoulders off, dig? He’s not talkin’ about dandruff, I’m pretty sure.”
Hope Foster
Sandwich Maker, Subway in the Loop
“I don’t like that song, don’t like the beat or the lyrics, and I don’t like Jay-Z. I like Nelly and Chingy.”
Geoff Oliver
Massage Therapist
“Some have speculated that it’s about being a rehabber, working in these old houses with all that falling plaster. But I think it is a dandruff song, a little tune that his mama taught him when he was young to remind him to brush the dandruff and lint off his shoulders when he went to school, and now he’s made it in to a hip-hop song. Some people think of dandruff as ‘dirt.’”
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Dirty Little Secrets
The way Jason Cole tells it, a friend had just picked him up to go buy a pair of Air Force Ones. Cole didn’t know the car had been reported stolen. When St. Louis police tried stopping the young men near a strip mall at the intersection of Delmar and Union boulevards on February 4, 2003, Cole bailed out and ran while his buddy sped off. The seventeen-year-old says he was scared — he’d been injured in a crash a year earlier when a car he was riding in was chased by police who were looking for robbers, and he wasn’t eager to face the cops again.
Whatever his past experiences with the law, Cole wasn’t fleeing when the police caught up with him at the strip mall.
It was 3:30 p.m., the middle of what had been a routine day for Ryan Wilson, a mechanic at Boss Express Lube next to the mall. In a written statement prepared less than 24 hours later, Wilson stated that he saw a police cruiser park next to the repair shop while another officer approached on foot. Police ran toward Cole, he recalls, but there wasn’t any need. “He didn’t look like he was up to anything,” Wilson says today.
In a statement written shortly after the incident, Donald Logan, one of Wilson’s co-workers, confirmed Wilson’s account. “The man stood there while the officers ran to him,” Logan wrote. “He was facing the officers and saw them coming.”
Carolyn Martini, a jobs trainer at an employment agency called Productive Futures, was about twenty feet away, watching the scene unfold through her office window. By this time, several police cars had arrived. Martini believes Cole was trying to blend in with people standing outside.
“There were people everywhere,” Martini recalls. “I remember my students wanted to go outside. I told them to stay here. He was not going anywhere — I want to make that very clear. He was not trying to get away.”
Nor was Cole threatening anyone, Martini asserted in the statement she prepared a day afterward. “The black male was not resisting at all and had both hands in full view,” she wrote. “I saw nothing in either of his hands.”
“They took me to the ground and handcuffed me,” recalls Cole, who stood five-foot-eight and weighed 130 pounds at the time, according to court records. “An officer had me pinned down with his knee. Another officer grabbed me by the hair, pulled my head up, then hit my face against the ground.” The impact knocked out one tooth and drove another into his upper gum, leaving Cole bleeding and screaming in pain. He was driven away in a patrol car, but he says the officers soon stopped and summoned an ambulance. “The officer said, ‘If you get any blood on me, it will be worse than it already is,’” Cole remembers.
After being X-rayed and treated at Children’s Hospital, Cole was taken to the police station, where he was locked up for a few hours, then released. Charges of cocaine possession and resisting police are pending.
Bystanders agree Cole didn’t provoke officers. In his written statement, Wilson said an officer hoisted Cole off the ground by his pants and shirt and threw him to the pavement, where he was surrounded by officers who held him down. Then an officer slammed Cole’s face into the sidewalk, Wilson says. Earnestine Evon Underwood, who was working at Productive Futures, recalled the same thing in her written statement. “While one officer had the young man pinned to the ground by placing his foot on the young man’s back, another officer slammed the young man’s head, face first, into the concrete,” she wrote. “The young man was offering no resistance to the officers.”
“It was wrong,” Wilson says today. “I guess they were just getting their rocks off. I went up and asked them, ‘Why’d you do him like that?’ One of the officers said, ‘That’s what happens when you run from the police.’”
In a written statement Cole gave police, he said he was injured when he tripped while being arrested. He also admitted he was carrying crack cocaine, which he claimed he was holding for a friend.
His lawyer, Richard Sindel, dismisses Cole’s statement, arguing that it was made under duress.
“Here’s a seventeen-year-old kid who’s in the custody of police who’d just knocked the crap out of him [and are] saying, ‘Here, say this,’” asserts Sindel, who says he may file a civil lawsuit on Cole’s behalf once the criminal case is dispensed with. “He had gone approximately five or six blocks from the area where he’d gotten out of the car. It’s pretty inconceivable to me that if that were the case, he didn’t throw the cocaine away.”
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce says her staff and the U.S. Attorney’s Office looked into the circumstances surrounding Cole’s arrest and concluded no charges should be pursued against police. Citing the pending charges against Cole, she declined to provide further details. Through a spokeswoman, U.S. Attorney Ray Gruender declined comment for this story.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has a file on the alleged beating in its internal-affairs division. But the case didn’t turn up when the Riverfront Times filed a public-records request six months ago for internal-affairs documents on cases dating back to April 1, 1997, involving officers suspected of criminal conduct.
In fact, not much turned up at all.
It took the department three full months to produce paperwork. First came one-page summaries of 40 complaints, all of them censored to obscure the names and badge numbers of accused officers. The department subsequently produced 28 more summaries, similarly redacted. Some of the summaries were incomplete, cut off in mid-sentence at the end of the first page, before narratives revealed the gist of alleged wrongdoing.
The department didn’t hand over any investigative files detailing how complaints had been handled. In most cases, the records that were furnished did not even indicate whether the complaints had been sustained or disproven.
The police did, however, supply a bill. To cover 30-plus hours of staff time spent compiling the paperwork, the department sent along an invoice — for $1,090.
During the past decade, and especially over the past five years, brutality complaints against St. Louis police have plummeted.
In the early and mid-1990s, the department received more than a hundred physical-abuse complaints annually and upheld four to six allegations each year. By 2002, however, the force had reached a ten-year low, with a mere 24 complaints of physical abuse, none of which were upheld.
St. Louis police last upheld a physical-abuse complaint in 2000, according to department statistics covering the years 1992 through 2002. During that decade, the department sustained nearly 3 percent of such complaints. But if the past four years are considered separately, the rate falls to less than one-half of 1 percent.
Complaints involving other types of officer misconduct are also dropping. Until 2000, department stats show between 587 and 826 internal-affairs complaints were handled each year, including allegations of theft, harassment, verbal abuse, conduct unbecoming an officer and violations of various department procedures. By 2002 the figure had fallen to 384.
Police aren’t offering any explanations for the numbers. The department didn’t respond to requests for interviews with officials knowledgeable about internal-affairs cases and procedures, nor did the department answer written questions submitted at the request of police spokesman Richard Wilkes.
Outside the department, experts say there could be several reasons behind the trend.
“It could mean either one of two completely opposite things,” says Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminologist who has studied internal-affairs procedures with the help of grants from the U.S. Department of Justice. “Police behavior could, in fact, be improving. Or it could be that people are just discouraged by the complaint process and so don’t bother. There’s a long history of departments actually intimidating people from coming in and filing complaints. They just lie and bullshit them, say, ‘You can’t file a complaint here. No, we don’t accept these complaints.’” One of the best-known examples, Walker notes, is Rodney King’s brother, who was threatened with arrest when he tried to file a brutality complaint after the infamous videotaped beating in 1991.
Two years ago the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled that internal-affairs files are public records when officers are suspected of criminal conduct. The court specifically stated that police departments cannot treat such files as personnel records, pre-empting a tactic that departments, including St. Louis, had often employed in denying access to internal-affairs records. When in doubt, the court said, err on the side of disclosure.
The justices weighed in after Kirkwood police officer Steve Guyer sued his employer, which refused to give him an internal-affairs file prepared after he was accused of drug trafficking and receiving sexual favors from prostitutes. The allegation, which was handled by St. Louis County police, proved false: An investigator who spoke with several witnesses, including the person believed to have filed the anonymous complaint, determined it was a case of neighborhood gossip. But the department claimed the files must be kept secret because they were personnel records, which are exempt from disclosure under the state’s Sunshine Law.
With lawyers paid for by the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, Guyer sued, contending that the Sunshine Law required release of the records because the files constituted investigative documents — the equivalent of police reports that are generated when a civilian is accused of a crime. The supreme court agreed in a ruling issued in March 2001.
The decision in Guyer v. Kirkwood prompted Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon to alert law-enforcement agencies that internal-affairs files are subject to the Sunshine Law. In a bulletin issued shortly after the decision, the attorney general cautioned that the court had decided complaints are “always” public records in cases of alleged criminal conduct, and that the accompanying investigative files “may” be subject to disclosure. “The impact on police personnel records is significant,” reads the dispatch from Nixon’s office.
Since Guyer, several local departments, including St. Louis County, Kirkwood and University City, have released internal-affairs files in response to requests from the Riverfront Times. Besides the Guyer documents, the departments released files on former University City officer Anthony Hall, who was fired for suspected theft in 2001; and former county officer Thomas Zeigler, who got into a domestic dispute with his wife in 2002 and was later charged with shooting a fellow officer. No names were blacked out, and cases against the officers were spelled out in detail, as were the efforts made by investigators to find the truth.
St. Louis police claim the department has destroyed most of the investigative files the Riverfront Times requested. Citing records-retention guidelines published by the Missouri Secretary of State’s Office, Michael Stelzer, counsel to Chief Joe Mokwa and the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners, says the department destroys files after one year on claims that aren’t proven and gets rid of files after five years on sustained complaints.
Lynn Morrow, director of the local-records preservation program in the Secretary of State’s Office, says state guidelines for internal-affairs records were written within the past two years. “It wasn’t scheduled previously,” Morrow says. “We had some police clerks that asked us to put it in there.” The guidelines, he adds, are the least that law-enforcement agencies are required to do: “These are minimum [rules]. There’s nothing whatsoever to prohibit any official from keeping a record forever if they want to. And some of them do.”
Regardless of whether complaints are sustained, destroying internal-affairs files isn’t a good idea, says Walker, the University of Nebraska criminologist. Most internal-affairs complaints, particularly those that allege excessive force, aren’t sustained owing to a lack of evidence and witnesses, Walker points out. But that doesn’t mean the files aren’t valuable tools that can be used to identify problem officers.
“I would keep them indefinitely,” he says. “Does the Pentagon purge their records of officers? You want an officer’s history. If you have an officer who suddenly gets a rash of complaints, that’s worth knowing: Is this part of a long-term history, which suggests you’ve got a real serious problem, or is this something new?”
Even in cases where investigative files have not been destroyed, St. Louis police refused to turn over records. Stelzer cites a clause in the Sunshine Law that says arrest reports aren’t public records if no charges are filed within 30 days. But the Riverfront Times did not ask for arrest reports, nor is there any indication that an officer was arrested in the vast majority of the 68 summaries the department did provide. Furthermore, the same section of the Sunshine Law that governs the release of arrest records also states that investigative files — which are distinct from arrest records under state law — become public once an investigation is over.
As for blacking out names and badge numbers in complaint summaries, Stelzer cites portions of the Sunshine Law that permit police to redact information if disclosure would jeopardize an investigation, reveal investigative techniques or endanger someone.
Only 29 of the 68 censored summaries provided to the Riverfront Times indicate whether complaints were upheld. Six of those complaints were sustained. But owing to redactions and the lack of investigative files, it’s impossible to determine the nature of many charges.
One example is a 1997 case in which a suspected car thief complained that he was kicked, slapped and struck with a flashlight after members of the department’s mobile reserve unit arrested him for stealing a Ford Mustang that belonged to a member of the unit. According to a summary dated August 12, 1998, the suspect complained to internal affairs four days after his arrest on October 29 of the previous year. An internal-affairs sergeant photographed his injuries, which included cuts on his head and abrasions on his shins. A week later the internal-affairs division turned over the case to the mobile reserve unit. The summary doesn’t say why the investigation was assigned to a unit that included the accused officers. The document does show that four officers received written reprimands ten months after the initial complaint, but who they are and exactly what they did wrong isn’t clear. Though the report is titled “Alleged Physical Abuse,” the department’s statistics show that no physical-abuse cases were sustained that year.
In another case, a 2001 complaint summary doesn’t say whether the department sustained an allegation made by a man who accused an off-duty officer of brandishing a gun during a road-rage incident at the intersection of South Grand Boulevard and Humphrey Street. Besides writing down the officer’s license-plate number, the complainant identified him from a photograph. As in every other summary provided to Riverfront Times, the department blacked out the officer’s name and badge number and withheld the investigative files.
Only the police department knows precisely how many internal-affairs cases involve alleged assaults, thefts or other crimes. But state records, court files and the department’s own statistics hint at the extent to which the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is keeping mum about officers who have been accused of breaking the law.
The department, which gave a mere 68 censored summaries to the Riverfront Times, handled 445 physical-abuse cases alone between 1997 and 2002. Noting the discrepancy in a January 5 letter to Stelzer, the newspaper asked why physical-abuse allegations hadn’t been considered potential criminal matters and therefore subject to the Sunshine Law. To date, the newspaper has received no explanation.
At least five city officers had their state peace-officer licenses revoked by the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission because they committed crimes during the time period covered by the newspaper’s information request, but the department released complaint summaries in just two of these cases. The other three cases:
· Mark S. Hubbard, a narcotics officer who lost his license last year after he removed license tabs from a Jeep leased by the FBI and put them on his Nissan Maxima. Although there’s no indication Hubbard was prosecuted, the state determined that his peace-officer license should be revoked because he committed a crime.
· Delores I. Cowan, who lost her license after she took a $300 money order from a suspect in 1997 and deposited it in her bank account. According to State Administrative Hearing Commission records, Cowan pleaded guilty to a crime (records don’t state the charge) and received a suspended sentence.
· Francesco LoForte, who lost his license two years ago after he was accused of stealing from a burning car a gym bag that contained a handgun. LoForte wasn’t prosecuted, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t guilty, the commission concluded. “The preponderance of the credible evidence shows that LoForte took the bag and its contents,” wrote state administrative hearing commissioner Willard C. Reine.
Nor did the department provide any documents regarding Jeffrey Pierson, who resigned from the force in November 2002, a few days after security guards at Union Station said they’d caught him masturbating in his pickup truck. Pierson kept his state license because a surveillance videotape that showed him moving his hands around in his lap was too grainy for the commission to reach a definitive conclusion. Pierson explained that he was scratching a “terrible irritating male itch.” He retained his state license, but he no longer works as a police officer in Missouri, according to the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission.
The Riverfront Times asked Stelzer why the department failed to turn over documents on officers who’d been stripped of their state certification. He promised to address the matter. That was on December 23 of last year. The newspaper hasn’t received an explanation.
State records aren’t the only documents that chronicle conduct by officers whose identities and alleged crimes are shielded by the department. Seven people who claimed police brutality during the time period covered by the Riverfront Times’ public-records request have sued in federal court and collected settlements totaling more than $370,000. In only one of those cases did the department supply a complaint summary.
The department released a censored summary in the case of Nancy Meyer, who collected $30,000 after she was beaten by Officer Christina Gonzalez during the 1999 Mardi Gras celebration in Soulard. Gonzalez, a probationary officer, eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge. Lieutenant Daniel G. Simpher recommended that she be dismissed from the force.
The department released no documents in six other brutality cases that resulted in lawsuits settled with taxpayer money. The biggest winner was Gregory Bell, a mentally handicapped man who was beaten by police in 1997 after he accidentally triggered a burglar alarm in his own home. Bell collected $250,000, but Stelzer says the department can’t release any records about the incident because former Sergeant Thomas Moran was acquitted of assault charges in the case, and state law requires that records be sealed when defendants are acquitted of criminal charges.
In the other five cases, settlement amounts ranged from $8,000 to $25,000. According to court documents and plaintiffs’ attorneys, the plaintiffs all complained to internal affairs before suing the police. None were convicted of crimes stemming from the incidents that sparked their lawsuits.
Crawford Miller, age 74, sued after officers in search of marijuana and drug profits broke down his door on March 6, 2000. Miller has driven a cab in St. Louis for 54 years and has never been charged with a crime, according to court records in St. Louis and St. Louis County. He was in bed recovering from radiation treatment for lung cancer when officers arrived. His first inkling of trouble came when he heard someone on his porch.
“They didn’t knock,” Miller recalls. “I didn’t know they were the police — they never said ‘police officer’ or nothing.” He says the officers wore military-style fatigues instead of standard-issue uniforms and broke down his door just as he was opening it. “I’m looking in the barrel of a shotgun,” he recounts. “I thought I was being robbed.”
Miller says he ran from the doorway toward a shotgun he kept behind his bed. He was about twelve feet away from his gun when the officers caught him. “They threw me down on the floor,” he remembers. “I was telling them that I had just had a cancer operation and I couldn’t put my hands behind me — I’d had half of my left lung removed. They told me they didn’t give a damn what I’d had. They put their foot in my back and pulled my arms behind my back, broke three of my ribs and pulled my rotator cuff out of the socket, and put handcuffs on me. They went through everything in the house — they even went through my garbage.”
Police found neither drugs nor money, although court records show they seized the shotgun. Miller says police also took his prescribed Percocet and a bottle of expensive cologne.
After he telephoned the station to complain, a sergeant who’d taken his pain medication returned the call, Miller says. “I knew his voice. He told me, ‘Ain’t nobody taken your medicine.’ They didn’t do nothing. So the next day I got up and went down to internal affairs.”
That didn’t work either, Miller says. “They told me I would hear from them, and I never heard from them. When I didn’t hear from them, I would call. They would say I had to come in. So I would go again.”
Nearly four years after the raid, Miller hasn’t heard the results of the internal-affairs investigation. “Nobody did nothing,” he says. “Calling the police on the police does no good, because they don’t go against each other.”
According to the federal government, Miller and others who have complained to the St. Louis police department’s internal-affairs division shouldn’t have to wonder about the outcome of investigations.
In guidelines issued in 1999 and updated in 2002, the U.S. Department of Justice recommends that police departments release as much information as possible about internal-affairs cases. At a minimum, the guidelines say, departments should tell complainants whether their allegations were upheld or dismissed, and why.
“You have to tell people how their complaint was responded to,” explains Daryl Borgquist, spokesman for the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, which published the guidelines. “You can build trust between people when you have communication and things are open.”
In the Jason Cole case, Cecilia Nadal, owner and president of Productive Futures, called internal affairs the same day the teenager was arrested. A year later, she’s still waiting to hear the results of the probe.
“We were waiting for the legal system to work and hoping that it would,” Nadal says. “And to this point, it hasn’t. It’s so clear to me that the culture of internal affairs is one of defensiveness and not objectivity.”
Alderman Terry Kennedy, whose ward includes the strip mall where Cole was arrested, says he made sure police were aware that he wanted to be notified of the investigation’s outcome. He says he last inquired about the case in late summer, but he hasn’t heard anything back.
South-side resident Tom Hallaran says police haven’t told him anything about an internal-affairs complaint he lodged after his home on Illinois Avenue was raided shortly before the World Agricultural Forum last spring. Police seized computer equipment, papers, climbing gear, welding tools and assorted other belongings. “‘Instruments of crime that could be used in protest situations’ — that’s what it said on the warrant,” says Hallaran.
Hallaran says he’s still missing about $600 worth of computer equipment and climbing gear. Occupants of a nearby home that was also raided say tires were slashed while bicycles were in police custody and that their belongings reeked of urine when they were allowed back into the building several days after the raids.
Hallaran recalls that he spoke twice with internal-affairs investigators, once within a week of the raid and again in June, after Chief Mokwa ordered an investigation to determine whether officers had damaged property. That, Hallaran says, was his last contact with police. “They haven’t followed up with us at all. They haven’t brought any charges, but we still haven’t received a lot of our stuff back and we don’t know the status of what they’re doing.”
The department refused to supply internal-affairs files on the raids to the Riverfront Times, claiming they’re not public records because urinating on personal belongings and slashing bicycle tires aren’t crimes that would trigger disclosure under the Guyer ruling. Notwithstanding a state law that defines destruction of property as a criminal offense, department counsel Michael Stelzer argued that any wrongdoing by officers during the raids would be a civil matter. (For more about this issue and incidents surrounding the World Agricultural Forum, see “Legal Loopholes” in the August 13, 2003, issue of Riverfront Times.)
Federal court files in brutality cases show that the St. Louis police department fights hard when asked for internal-affairs records. In at least two cases, the department has hired the high-powered law firm Lewis, Rice & Fingersh — which unsuccessfully defended Kirkwood in the Guyer case — to quash demands for internal-affairs files. In both instances, federal judges denied pleas to keep police records secret.
In one of those cases, attorney Thomas Casey got a court order compelling the department to produce an internal-affairs file on an alleged September 1998 pistol-whipping of his client, Matthew Quinlisk, who was driven away in an ambulance after his encounter with police. Although Casey believes his client was assaulted, the department provided no documents on the case in response to the Riverfront Times’ request for records.
Officer Daniel Earley was off-duty and talking to a woman outside a Lafayette Square bar when Quinlisk made a “smart-ass comment of some kind, to the effect that ‘That’s a mighty fine-looking woman you got there,’” Casey recalls.
“Earley turns to him and says, ‘What did you say?’” says Casey. “Earley walks up to Quinlisk. As he’s approaching, he takes out his 9mm Beretta, then slaps Quinlisk on the head with the butt of the gun — I think it was several blows. Quinlisk goes down to the ground, and he’s out. He was hurt pretty goddamn bad.”
Although Quinlisk was arrested for assault, prosecutors dismissed the charges. Internal affairs dismissed Quinlisk’s allegation along with the other 96 physical-abuse complaints the division handled that year. But Quinlisk collected $17,526 to settle his federal lawsuit.
“It was whitewashed,” Casey says today. “Those internal-affairs files — they’re so sanitized, it’s not funny. We tried showing a cover-up. We were not very successful in that regard. We had trouble finding cops who would come in against Earley. We did have the corroborating testimony of the people who Matt Quinlisk was with, and I thought they were pretty believable.”
It’s not unusual for the police department to pay plaintiffs even when internal affairs doesn’t sustain complaints, Casey says. “They will always cough up the money, and they’ll settle the case, but not for a great deal of money,” he says. “Of course, the problem with these cases is, more often than not, you’re dealing with less than the cream of society. The people the cops beat up tend to be shit bums. That doesn’t mean they deserve to get beat up, but nevertheless, they don’t have a whole lot of jury appeal.”
Gregory Bell, who was beaten by police officers in his own home, demanded more than money to settle his brutality lawsuit. In addition to giving Bell $250,000, police in 1998 agreed to revise their internal-affairs procedures to make it easier for victims to come forward and to reduce the chances of officers intimidating complainants or not accurately recording allegations.
Before the Bell settlement, citizens had to travel downtown to lodge complaints at police headquarters, and they weren’t allowed to keep a copy of their statements. To settle Bell’s case, the department signed a consent decree, agreeing to keep complaint forms at patrol stations and to instruct officers to give them to anyone who asked. The department was also supposed to issue a press release about the changes.
But it wasn’t until the spring of 1999, when Bell’s attorneys asked U.S. District Court Judge E. Richard Weber to enforce the consent decree, that the department finally put out a bulletin informing officers that complaint forms should be kept at precincts. The promised press release came months later, on the day before Thanksgiving.
Some say nothing has changed.
Scott Addison, a friend of World Agricultural Forum protesters who were arrested last spring, says police at the South Patrol subdivision didn’t seem familiar with the revised procedure when he asked for a complaint form. “They had me standing there for about an hour,” Addison remembers. “A cop finally shows up with this crumpled-up, stepped-on piece of paper. ‘This is all we have,’ he said.”
In the Jason Cole case, Cecilia Nadal says the internal-affairs sergeant who answered the phone when she called wasn’t interested in gathering evidence while blood and memories were fresh. “He said, ‘You cannot make a complaint unless you come down here,’” Nadal recalls. “He said, ‘As far as we’re concerned, there is not a victim.’ It was obvious they were trying to get me off this, to leave it alone.”
Nadal had arrived a few minutes after the action but spoke with several witnesses, some of whom recalled seeing Cole’s face slammed into the sidewalk and others who only heard the “thump” of his body hitting the ground. “There’s no question they used brutality,” Nadal insists. “You saw blood all over the place, and you saw all these people crying. I’ve never been in a situation where I saw so many people upset — black, white and other cultures. They couldn’t believe what had happened.”
Nadal called Alderman Kennedy, who besides representing the ward where her business is located is also sponsoring an aldermanic bill to establish a civilian board that would hear complaints against police. Kennedy says deal
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Michelob Ultra vs. Guinness Draught in a Bottle
Both come in a bottle and are considered “beer.” The label of each has a brown-and-beige motif, with a shock of red to get you mentally pumped in anticipation of the adventure that lies ahead. The labels of each are made of paper and are affixed to the glass with some sort of sticky goo. Both combine multiple fonts on said label, some blocky, others fancy. Ultra’s bottle is clear; Draught in a Bottle’s is deep, chocolatey brown. Both have a cap on top that covers a hole you’ll soon be wrapping with your lips and angling into your mouth.
Mich Ultra offers twelve ounces for $2.75, or 22.9 cents per ounce. Guinness Draught in a Bottle costs $3.50 for 11.2 ounces, or 31.25 cents per ounce. The former contains 2.6 grams of carbohydrates; the latter, 9.6 grams. Mich Ultra, however, is packed with 0.6 grams of protein, while Guinness contains only 0.3 grams. The former’s innovation: “Low Carbohydrate Light Beer.” The low-carb thing is sweeping the nation, and the fit wealthies are lapping it up. Guinness’ innovation, not so much, but it’s pretty cool: in the bottle, a clever little invention called the Rocket Widget. When the brew is uncapped, the Widget creates a surge that forms Guinness’ famed creamy head right inside the bottle. Every time you swig, the Widget refreshes the surge.
Low-carb beer is a funny concept, considering beer is made from grain, and grain makes bread and pasta, which, according to Dr. Atkins, makes you puffy. Mich Ultra has a born-on date, which is dumb; Guinness doesn’t, which isn’t.
Ultra’s Web site attempts to equate consumption of the light beer with meditation, which is insulting. Guinness Draught in a Bottle is an insult to anyone who has ever enjoyed a pint of true-blue Guinness draught at a pub.
One tastes like beer-flavored Sprite; the other tastes like flat, watered-down molasses, chocolate and tar. Guess which is which.
You are correct.
Guinness is pasteurized stout; Michelob is probably pasteurized, too, but it doesn’t swagger about it. Mich Ultra is a much better-tasting product than we imagined; Guinness Draught in a Bottle is a less better-tasting product than we imagined. Ultra washes down a slice of spinach pizza at Racanelli’s quite well and aids in the removal of excess internal mouth crumbs. Guinness Draught in a Bottle’s foam is apt to gather at the corners of your mouth, which will make you look like a sickly lush. So be careful. Guinness is, however, still Guinness — yummy; and Michelob Ultra is, alas, still Michelob — not so much.
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Best Evidence
Heavy snowfalls pounded St. Louis in early February 1982, dumping twenty inches of the white stuff on some neighborhoods and paralyzing the city. Businesses closed, government services were curtailed and people hunkered down. On February 4, after five steady days of snow, side streets and parking lots still were blocked and temperatures hovered in the single digits. People who didn’t have to go out didn’t.
Mary Bell, a freelance court reporter who lived in the LaSalle Park neighborhood, was one of many who stayed home.
On that cold Thursday 21 years ago, George Allen Jr. says, he knocked on Bell’s door. “Can I come in and get warm for a few minutes?” Allen asked the pretty blonde who answered.
A troubled 26-year-old with a criminal record, Allen had a history that suggested mental illness, and he admitted that sometimes he drank so much he couldn’t recall his actions. Weeks later, when he was interviewed by police, Allen struggled to remember what happened at 1018B Marion Street on that terrible day in February 1982. A police detective helped Allen put the pieces together.
During a lengthy police interrogation, Allen remembered that Bell was attractive, with large breasts and a small waist, and young — maybe between twenty and 25 years old. Allen remembered that Bell (who was actually 31) told him she didn’t usually let men in her house, but he just pushed his way in. Allen remembered that Bell took off running, terrified.
“I was chasin’ her up the steps,” he told the detective. “I remember chasin’ her through the kitchen. I was wrasslin’ with her.”
Bell, Allen said, had a “big butcher knife about twelve inches long.” Allen said he knocked the knife from her hand. Bell ran to a second-floor bedroom and tried to hold the door shut but couldn’t keep Allen out. “We went to bed together; it was a brass bed,” Allen said. He raped her on the bed, and he raped her on the floor against the wall, next to the bed. Bell fought hard and screamed “real loud,” Allen told the detective.
During the rape, Allen said, he heard a woman “knockin’ on [Bell’s] door and yellin’ out her name: ‘Sherry’ or somethin’ like ‘Sherry.’” The woman knocked on the door for about five minutes, then “went into her house,” Allen said.
Allen said he fought with Bell before and after having sex with her. “She was stabbed during the fight,” Allen said, though he was unsure as to exactly when. “I don’t remember how many times I stabbed her. When I’m threatened with a weapon I’m — I don’t, ah, usually think; I just react.”
Allen picked up a towel “to wipe the blood off,” then left.
Bell’s body was discovered after 6 p.m. that day. An autopsy revealed multiple wounds and evidence of rape. Bell had been stabbed fourteen times in the back; eight of the wounds pierced the front of her body. Her throat had been cut five times from ear to ear, the blade slicing through all of the neck muscles, the carotid artery and the jugular vein and into her spine.
After two trials — the first ended with a hung jury — Allen was convicted. He would likely have been sentenced to death, except he caught a break — a juror’s mother died during the penalty phase, interrupting the trial and preventing the unanimous verdict required for capital punishment. Instead, Allen received a 95-year prison sentence.
Allen’s confession was critical to the prosecution’s case: There were no witnesses to the crime, there were alibi witnesses who said Allen was elsewhere on the morning of the murder, there was no physical evidence to implicate Allen and there were other suspects. Allen ended up in police custody only because patrol officers saw him walking on the street and initially thought he matched the description of a black man they wanted to bring in for questioning in the Bell murder.
Almost from the beginning, Allen insisted he’d been tricked into confessing to the rape and murder, that police coached him with details and lied when they told him they had evidence putting him at the scene. But his complaints were dismissed, his appeals turned down and the book on Mary Bell’s murder closed.
Now, after twenty years behind bars and with all of his legal appeals exhausted, Allen is getting one more shot. A prison-ministry volunteer who took a hard look at Allen’s conviction pushed for DNA testing in the case. Recently St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce agreed, giving Allen one last chance to prove his innocence.
Her decision, which comes as more than 100 disputed convictions — including ones with confessions — are being overturned nationally because of DNA testing, shakes the dust off a case that always was troubling. Old questions have resurfaced; old wounds have been reopened.
And it’s not just Allen’s life that hangs in the balance.
In August 1981, about six months before her murder, Mary Bell had separated from her lawyer husband, John Bell. She’d been seeing 29-year-old lawyer Russell Watters since June 1981. John Bell later testified that his wife was “open to the idea” of reconciling. But Watters, who moved in with Mary Bell in January 1982, insisted “She loved me [and] I loved her.”
On the day his lover died, Watters said, he woke up between 7 and 7:30 a.m. and took a shower while Bell fixed him breakfast. Around 9 a.m., he later testified in the murder trials, Bell took a telephone call from her mother, Eleanor Enger. Watters said Bell cut the conversation short, telling her mother that she’d call back later because she wanted to see Watters off to work. Watters said he left by 9 a.m., locking the door. Bell’s next-door neighbor, Sandra Salih, heard Watters leave. When he slammed the door, her windows shook.
Enger told the jury a slightly different story. Yes, she called her daughter at 9 a.m., but Bell never mentioned Watters. She said she’d never met Watters and didn’t know he was sharing the apartment with her daughter.
Between 10 and 10:15 a.m., Pamela Richardson, who transcribed tapes and notes for court reporters, called Bell. Bell had four tapes for Richardson to transcribe, and Richardson, who was downtown at the time, agreed to come by Bell’s apartment to pick them up. The apartment’s parking lot was still full of snow, so Richardson would have to park on the street.
Richardson testified at trial about their telephone conversation. While they were talking, Richardson recalled, Bell interrupted the conversation briefly. When she picked up the phone again, Bell explained, “I just took a shower. I had to put on a robe.” Richardson said that when Bell put the phone down, “I thought maybe somebody had come to the door.”
Sometime after 10 a.m., neighbor Sandra Salih heard “angry male and female voices” coming from Bell’s apartment. The “woman’s voice was the loudest,” Salih testified. “She was crying while the argument was going on. To me it was loud, angry crying.” Salih testified that the argument lasted about ten minutes and assumed it was Bell and Watters who were fighting because “that’s who I thought lived there.”
At about 10:30 a.m., Salih heard someone knocking on Bell’s door. It was Richardson.
It wasn’t the first time Richardson had been to Bell’s home. “I would knock on the door and [Bell] would look out her kitchen window, which was the level above the front door. I would see her face up there and I would hear her coming down the stairs. She would look out her peephole and then call my name before she opened that door,” Richardson told a jury.
Richardson testified that Bell was an “extremely” cautious person who followed the ritual “every time.”
This time, Bell didn’t look out her kitchen window or peer through the peephole. Richardson heard “some movement right inside the front door. I heard the sound of a down jacket rustling against what I know now to be the door.” And, she said, she also “heard some bumping sounds, muffled bumping sounds later … right up against her front door.” She knocked louder, called Bell’s name two or three times to the window above. But Bell never answered the door, and Richardson gave up. She said that she tried calling Bell several times during the day, to no avail.
Richardson wasn’t the only one trying to get in touch with Bell. Watters said he tried to call her several times but couldn’t reach her.
Watters came home around 6 p.m. Bell’s white Volkswagen Rabbit, just a few months old, was in the parking lot. Watters told the jury that both the doorknob lock and deadbolt were unlocked. When he opened the door, he saw Bell’s shoes at the bottom of the stairs. The apartment was dark, and the radio was on. Some cards were shuffled about on the floor. He smelled burning coffee and turned on a light.
“I called out for Mary,” Watters said. The bedroom door was closed, the room dark. “I believe I looked in the bedroom.” But he didn’t turn on the light. He only looked behind the bedroom door for the laundry, because, he told the jury, “I know we talked about doing laundry that night.”
Watters went downstairs to the building’s basement laundry room to look for Bell. When he didn’t find her, Watters said, he went to Mellodie Wilson’s apartment. Wilson, the apartment manager, had become friends with Bell.
The two returned to the apartment to look for Bell. They found her in the bedroom — her nude body was across the room, in a corner between the bed and the wall. From the door, the bed would have hidden the body. Bell was lying face-down on the floor, a pool of blood beneath her.
When police arrived, they found blood on the bed, the bedroom wall and carpet and a robe and a director’s chair in the kitchen, as well as in the bathroom.
They also found evidence of rape: seminal fluid in the crotch of Bell’s jeans, on the back inside part of her robe and on a director’s chair. That led police to believe Bell had been wearing a robe and a pair of pants when she was attacked. Anal lacerations indicated that she’d been sodomized.
Of the twenty identifiable fingerprints at the scene, nineteen belonged to Watters and one to an investigating officer.
On the basis of Richardson’s contact with Bell, the time of death was estimated to be between 10 and 10:30 a.m.
The investigators found an eight-and-a-half-inch long bloody butcher knife, concealed in a first-floor closet near the front door. It had been wrapped in a towel and placed in a Styrofoam cooler. The blood on the knife was Bell’s.
On the towel was a beard hair. The chief criminalist of the St. Louis Police Department later testified that the beard hair came from a white man.
Six weeks after Bell’s murder, police still hadn’t made an arrest. Both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat carried stories and updates about the case, and police were under the gun to get the killer in custody. Three lie-detector tests were given, the police said, but they didn’t divulge to whom the polygraphs had been administered.
Police ruled out John Bell, Bell’s estranged husband, and Russell Watters, her lover, as suspects. Both had alibis.
John Bell said he was snowed in at home. Tom Liese, a lawyer and friend of Bell’s, said he helped Bell dig out from 9:15 to 10:15 a.m., after which they were together until about 2 p.m.
Watters also had an alibi. Michael Pitzer, a lawyer with Watters’ office, said Watters arrived at 9:30 a.m. or between 9:30 and 10 a.m. Pat Detjen, the law firm’s receptionist, said Watters came in at 9:15 a.m. after a fifteen-minute commute from his apartment through snow-clogged streets. A year-and-a-half later, Detjen even remembered what Watters was wearing that day: charcoal-gray pants, a camel-hair sweater and Western boots. Robert Rosenthal, another lawyer at the office, said he went to lunch that day with Watters and Pitzer.
The police turned their attention to a man named Kirk Eaton, who’d been seen in the area of Bell’s apartment shortly after the murder. Eaton was a convicted rapist whose brother lived near Bell. Eaton left town shortly after the Bell murder. A memo went out to officers about Eaton, describing him as “a Negro male, five-eleven, five-ten, 150 pounds.”
On Sunday, March 14, 1982, officers Terry James and Mark Burford were patrolling the Lafayette Square neighborhood when they spotted a black man walking down Park Avenue in the 1900 block of Park — several blocks from Bell’s apartment in what is now a row of thriving retail shops and restaurants. The officers asked the man for identification, thinking he might be Eaton.
George Allen showed the officers several pieces of paper bearing his name but nothing with his picture. The officers ran Allen’s name to see whether there were any outstanding warrants for his arrest. There was none. Nevertheless, the officers asked Allen to accompany them to the 3rd District station.
Allen asked why. Because Allen couldn’t produce any photo identification, James testified, “We would like to take him to the 3rd District station, check him out, verify his name and see if he was wanted.” If everything checked out, James testified, “I believe we said we’d cut him loose.” The officers cuffed Allen and put him in the back of the squad car.
It was the last time Allen was a free man.
Allen was held in a holdover cell as the officers compared an old photo of Eaton with Allen. Unable to rule out the possibility that the man they had locked up was Eaton, they called Detective Pam LaRose of the sex-crimes department, as well as homicide detective Herb Riley. Riley asked them to bring Allen down to police headquarters.
Accounts of what happened next differ and would later become issues in Allen’s trials and his appeals.
Allen later would claim in court filings that he was strip-searched while a female detective was in the room. He said he was “required to disrobe completely and was without clothes for one hour” and interrogated for several hours. He said he asked for a lawyer but was told that “he didn’t need an attorney because he wouldn’t be there that long.” The officers asked him how many times a week he had sex and whether he liked to sleep with black women or white women. Allen said that Riley told him he was sure that Allen had committed the crime, that the police had his fingerprints to prove it. He said the police asked him to draw a diagram of the apartment but that when he did, they told him it was inaccurate. He said he talked to Riley for as long as three hours before the confession that would convict him was taped and that he made the confession because he felt he had no choice.
Police gave a different story.
LaRose said she read Allen his Miranda rights at police headquarters and interrogated him at the homicide office for about half-an-hour. She asked “personal questions … about sex … if he thought sex was a normal thing.” She wanted to know whether he’d ever forced a woman to have sex. Allen said yes, then no. At that point, LaRose decided that she didn’t have anything to book him on and “terminated the interview.”
One of the arresting officers, Mark Burford, concluded that Allen wasn’t Eaton and returned to duty after LaRose finished her interrogation. Then, at about 1 p.m., Riley met with Allen. Riley also concluded that Allen wasn’t Eaton; he testified, “Once I came back and determined that he was not Kirk Eaton, he could have left.”
But, Riley admitted to Allen’s defense lawyer, “I did not say he could leave.” And no other officer mentioned to Allen that he was free to go, either. According to the police, Allen had been in custody for about two-and-a-half hours.
Riley asked Allen why he was walking the city streets when his home was in University City, because it seemed odd that he would be walking around the area. He wanted to know whether Allen had ever had “relations” with white women. Then he asked Allen whether he was familiar with the LaSalle Park area, the area where Bell was murdered. Allen said yes. Riley wanted to know whether Allen had been in the area around the time of the big snow. Again Allen answered yes.
Riley also testified that he showed Allen a photograph of a vase. And Riley recalled telling Allen: “‘You know that we have fingerprints from this house’ or maybe I might have said from the vase. I don’t remember.” He never told Allen the fingerprints were his, but, Riley testified, “I wanted him to think that we had his.”
Once Allen admitted to being in the area around the time of the murder, Riley said, Allen became a suspect and police began tape-recording Allen.
The taped interrogation begins with a brief statement from Riley: “The date is March 14, 1982, and the time is approximately 1:47 p.m. My name is Detective Sergeant Herb Riley, assigned to homicide, and to my left is, ah, Officer Terry James, assigned to District 3. Ah, the gentleman in the room here with us is a man who may or may not have information relative to this incident.”
Before the interrogation, Riley had shown Allen pictures of the apartment complex where Bell lived. During the interrogation, he refers to the pictures: “I asked you if you had ever been down to these apartments, ah, particularly, ah, in February when we had the deep snow. And you looked at the pictures, and was you down in that area?”
“Yeah, I was down there,” Allen answers; a moment later, he adds that he was positive it was “late — late at night” when he knocked on Mary’s door. (The murder occurred in the morning.)
Riley mentions additional photographs of doors, wooden decks and steps at Bell’s apartment that were shown to Allen.
“Had you ever been up on that deck and, in fact, had you ever knocked on that particular door?”
“Yeah, I did,” Allen responds. A lady answered, he adds.
What did she look like? “Ah, I guess white,” Allen says. “Dark hair, I guess.” (Bell was a blonde.)
Riley continues: “When I asked you what she looked like, George, I mean, was she an attractive woman or …”
“Yeah, she was attractive.”
“Did she have a nice body on her?”
“Yeah.”
“You remember how she was dressed at that time?”
“Uh, I think she had on a nightgown,” Allen answers, then describes the nightgown as white.
Allen says he asked the woman whether he could come in and get warm. She said she didn’t usually let men in the house.
“And what — did she let you in there?” Riley asks.
“No, I don’t think so. I think I forced my way in.”
“Well, then what happened?”
“Ah, we started wrasslin’.”
“I mean,” Riley continues, “do you remember when you went in the door, did you go up some steps, or what happened? Ah, you remember?”
“Well, I think I was chasin’ her up the steps.”
Riley asks what happened next. “Well, I was wrasslin’ with her, tryin’ to force some answers,” Allen says. “We went to bed together” on “a brass bed.”
Riley asks, “Are you sayin’ that because I showed you a picture of that, or do you recall that?”
“I recall it.”
Did Allen have sex with Bell? Allen says yes, but “front, was all.”
“Did you stick it in her butt?” Riley asks.
“Ah, no, I didn’t.”
“You sure of that?”
“Uh, no, I’m not sure.”
“Could you have?”
“I might have. I could have.”
The two men talk abut Bell’s figure. “Was there anything about her body that especially turned you on?” Riley asks.
“Um, her chest, breasts.”
“What was — what about her breasts?”
“They were large,” Allen responds. Riley asks Allen to describe Bell’s figure.
Allen estimates Bell’s measurements for the detective.
“Shit, man, you talkin’ about a big — big, big chest, ain’t ya?” Riley says. “You sound like you’re an authority on measurements. What’d you say 38 –”
“-27-35.”
“Sounds awful good, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Allen answers.
Riley has Allen go back through his testimony up to this point and asks, “Did you have sex — other than on the bed, did you have sex anyplace else in that room?”
“On the floor. And, ah, I guess over against the wall and then –”
“On the floor, next to where?”
“Next to the bed.”
A couple of questions later, Riley goes back to the question of sodomy.
“OK. Did you stick it in her butt?”
“Yeah, I guess I did. Yeah.”
“Was she — was she resisting this, George?”
“Uh, yes, she was.”
“Had you ever had white girls before?”
“Yeah, I have.”
“Huh? Well, where — when you had white girls before, did you usually stick it in their butt like that, or — ”
“Yeah, if it went in.”
Riley goes back through the places Allen claimed to have sex with Bell, then asks, “I mean, was she — when she came up the steps, was she, ah, running around the apartment or did she run right to the bed, or — ”
“She ran in one room up and tried to, ah, hold the door shut,” Allen says.
Riley asks what happened after Allen raped Bell. “Uh, then I remember, uh, puttin’ on my clothes and runnin’ out the door.”
“Oh, but didn’t you do somethin’ first?”
“I don’t remember doin’ anything else.”
Riley presses: Did Allen take anything from the apartment? Allen denies doing so.
“Did you pick up a towel while you was in the house?”
“Yeah, I guess I did,” Allen says, but he can’t remember the color.
“Did you wrap anything in this towel?”
“No.”
“Think now, George.”
“I don’t remember — I don’t remember taking anything. I remember runnin’ out of the house, that’s all I know.”
“OK. When you was in the house, did you hear any noises? Like noises comin’ from the outside? Or noises from the inside?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Nothin’?”
“Nothin’.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Riley has Allen go back through the sequence of events. Allen remembers a knock on the door, a voice calling “Sherry.”
Then Allen again tells Riley that after the rape, he left.
“When you started to go, was she still screamin’, or what was she doin’? ‘Cause what’s gonna keep her from screamin’ if you left?”
“Well, I had hit her a couple of times, and I think she was ah — ”
“What’d you hit her with?”
“My hand.”
“Well — didn’t use nothin’ else? Think about it, now.”
“Uh-uh, nothin’ else.”
“Huh?”
“That was it.”
“Well, I know you’re a, you know, you’re a pretty good-size man.”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you cut her?”
“No, I don’t remember cuttin’ her.”
“Didn’t you get somethin’ from her house and cut her?”
“What, like a knife from the kitchen? It might have happened that I hit her or somethin’ — but I don’t remember it.”
“I didn’t say a knife in the kitchen. You said a knife in a kitchen. Do you remember stickin’ her with a knife?”
“I know I recall chasin’ her through the house,” Allen says.
“Do you remember stickin’ her with a knife?”
“No. I don’t remember stickin’ her with one, no.”
Allen continues to deny that he stabbed Bell; Riley keeps pressing. Finally Allen says Mary had a knife, that he knocked it from her hand.
“Did you pick it up?”
“No.”
“Think about it, now.”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t touch the knife?”
“No.”
“We have the knife, you know,” Riley tells Allen. “Do you remember if you touched the knife?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.”
Allen tells Riley that Mary had the knife and that he chased her in the apartment. He knocked the knife from her hand.
“Did you go back and pick up the knife?”
“No.”
“George?”
“I didn’t.”
“George, did you stab this woman?”
“I don’t remember stabbin’ her.”
“Could you have stabbed her and don’t remember?”
“I could have.”
“How many times did you stab her, George?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You remember everything else. Why wouldn’t you remember that? Look at me.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Look at me –”
“I don’t –”
“Look at me. Look at me, George.”
“– because I’m a heavy drinker, and if I did it I was drunk at the time, I know.”
“But you’re not saying anything about stabbin’ her.”
“Was she stabbed?”
“Yes, she was stabbed.”
“Well, she was stabbed during the fight, then.”
Riley has Allen go back and tell the story again. Allen admits and then denies cutting Bell.
Riley gets exasperated: “George, I can’t understand you. You remember so much, so many of the little details as I’m askin’ you questions. You remember about the big bust she had, and about her waist and about this –”
“I’m rememberin’ it ’cause you got the evidence. I don’t remember nothin’,” Allen said. “You got the evidence and the fingerprints, you know. Before we started talkin’ I said, no, I don’t remember.”
Riley continues to ask about the stabbing, trying to get Allen to tell him where he stabbed Bell.
“I don’t remember killing her, I really don’t.”
Riley pulls out two pictures of Bell: “Will this help your memory? Is that the woman you’re talkin’ about? George?”
“Yeah, that’s her.”
“You see the way she’s stabbed there? In them pictures?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you stab her like that?”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
The interview continues only a few more minutes. Riley asks Allen a few more times to admit stabbing Bell, and when he waffles — “I guess I did” — Riley says, “Don’t guess, did you –”
“I said I did.”
The interview ends, and soon after Allen is charged with murder.
Herb Riley was a veteran cop with a reputation for getting people to confess. He’d served on the force for 27 years, seventeen of them in homicide. He retired as a sergeant in 1986. When he died in 1996, the Post-Dispatch described him as a detective “who used his smooth gift of communicating to get numerous murder confessions.”
But Allen’s lawyers weren’t as impressed with Riley’s gift. They noted that Riley showed Allen pictures from the murder scene before the tape started rolling, asked Allen leading questions that provided details from the crime scene and tricked Allen into thinking police had evidence linking him to the scene.
After the confession, investigators worked feverishly to obtain the physical evidence that would back up the confession, but they couldn’t come up with anything.
In 1982, DNA evidence wasn’t part of the criminal-law landscape. The first time a federal court admitted DNA evidence was 1986. The Missouri Supreme Court didn’t approve its use until 1991.
So the lab work that was done to find Bell’s murderer was primitive by today’s standards. Police criminalists, however, were able to do a basic test on the seminal fluid found in Bell’s apartment. Some men secrete blood antigens into their semen and other body fluids, but the seminal fluid found at the crime scene came from a nonsecretor, tests showed. A saliva sample taken from Allen also showed he didn’t secrete antigens from his blood into other body fluids. The results didn’t rule out Allen, but neither were they conclusive. Joseph Crow, the police-department criminalist who performed the test, was asked at trial what percentage of the male population would have the same results that Allen had. “About 89 to 90 percent,” Crow said.
Investigators also analyzed fibers from Bell’s home and Allen’s. They were hoping to find fibers from Allen’s home inside Bell’s apartment. They didn’t.
And despite Allen’s claims during the confession that he hit Bell in the head, Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, a forensic pathologist with the St. Louis medical examiner’s office, said that when she examined Bell’s head for evidence of trauma, “there was nothing significant there” — no injury to her head that would’ve made her lose consciousness.
And Allen had his own alibi witnesses.
Allen lived with his mother and sister in University City, a little more than ten miles from Bell’s apartment. His mother, Lonzetta Taylor, testified that her son was home the morning of February 4. Around 8 or 8:30 a.m., she rousted him from his room to help push his sister’s car out of the snow. When Taylor decided to walk to the grocery store, sometime between 11 a.m. and noon, she said, Allen was still at home. And when she returned from the store, about a half-hour later, he was still at home. She stayed home for the remainder of the day, and Allen was home the entire time, she said. She also said that Allen did not own a car, nor did he have permission to drive her car.
Elfrieda Allen, Allen’s sister, also recalled seeing George at 8:30 a.m. on February 4. Joe Randolph, Elfrieda Allen’s boyfriend, had been staying at the home because his car was stuck in the snow. When he woke, Randolph said, around 10 or 10:30 a.m. — the approximate time of Bell’s murder — he saw Allen walking around the house.
At the time Allen was charged with murder, the public-defender system sometimes hired private attorneys to handle big felony cases. Douglas Levine had been out of law school for about four years, had practiced with well-known criminal-defense lawyer Charlie Shaw and was a sole practitioner when he was asked to handle Allen’s defense.
“They had contacted a couple of attorneys prior to talking to me,” Levine says. “One or two people knew [Bell], socialized with her, and they just would not do it. She was loved by everyone.”
Levine says he knew Bell, too — he’d had a case in which she’d been the court reporter — “but I didn’t know her well.” He also knew John Bell and Russ Watters “at least on a casual basis.”
Before ultimately agreeing to represent Allen, Levine says, he thought long and hard.
When Levine took control of the case, he had a client with a minor criminal history. According to newspaper stories from 1982, Allen had been charged in 1977 in St. Louis County with the crime of assault with intent to ravish. The story from the Globe-Democrat says that the St. Louis County prosecutor knocked the case down to a misdemeanor because Allen was deemed mentally retarded. (That file can no longer be found i
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Baron Rothschild
Fifteen years ago, late December. Balaban’s backroom, where St. Louis’ hottest young dealmakers exult over the stock market, sneak soft drifts of cocaine into the sugar bowls, eat entrées they once couldn’t pronounce. Tonight, 30 of the most successful converge for their annual self-declared “board of directors” dinner. Afterward, they swirl cognac, waiting for this year’s Christmas present to unwrap herself.
A stranger — male, clothed, wearing cowboy boots — strides into the room and heads for a man as tall as he is: “Pete Rothschild?”
Hazel eyes, startled dark. Charm rushing like blood to the surface. Hand extended in automatic greeting.
Handcuffs.
“Sir, you’re under arrest for fencing stolen property.”
Stunned into uncharacteristic silence, Rothschild spurns the cuffs and walks out, staring straight ahead as he passes, one by one, the men he most wanted to impress.
“He was white as a ghost,” recalls Chris Canepa, who planned the joke. “Pete hated me for so long.” Canepa hadn’t expected the set-up to sting so; everybody knew Pete wound up selling hot stuff from time to time. For years, the city had been bulldozing its fine old brick houses, and entrepreneurial thieves had been stripping abandoned ones. Trucks of salvaged gargoyles and stained-glass windows lined up outside Rothschild’s Antiques, blocking the intersection of Euclid and McPherson avenues in the Central West End. Most of the stuff he bought was legit, but periodically a customer walked in and saw her grandmother’s jewelry or a minister found the windows somebody had pried out of his church. If your property was stolen, you checked at Rothschild’s first. And if you found it, he cheerfully gave it back.
Besides, the gag was payback. That fall, Canepa had gone into Rothschild’s and asked what to buy a mutual friend for her birthday. “Got just the thing,” said Pete. “She’s been eyeing it for weeks; it’s kind of pricey, but….” He wrapped up a hideous English footwarmer the woman had given him outright, begging him to take it off her hands.
Pete also set up his friend Buzz Wall, asking him to deliver a box of diamonds to Pete’s dad, then staging the box’s theft. Pete played jokes on his sister, on business partners, on people he’d just met. He’d tease a perfect stranger, then look into his eyes and laugh, holding his gaze until he laughed along with him.
He reveled in his reputation, had ever since his parents shipped him down to Devereaux Academy, a boarding school in Texas that served as a repository for “wild kids from all over the world.” Pete and a new ally stole a truckload of watermelons, sold them in Victoria, drove to Austin and sold the school truck for $50. Along the way, they met up with Ken Kesey, soon to be famous for a psychedelic bus of even merrier pranksters.
After graduation, young Rothschild sampled three colleges and spat them out. Mowed lawns, became a Fuller Brush man, read Faulkner and Hemingway for fun. Got hired as a department-store Santa, got fired for making out with Santa’s helper. Moved to Gaslight Square and started an underground newspaper called Xanadu, brazening interviews with Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. “Jimi had this prissy little Brit manager in pink suede boots who kept stomping his foot,” recalls Rothschild. “We waited around all night; my music editor, Marvin Homan, was drunk on his ass. Finally we got near the Holy Grail — we could see Jimi in the next room — and I’ll be damned if Marvin didn’t throw up all over that manager’s pink suede boots.”
He grins, still relishing the moment. Xanadu read more like Berkeley than St. Louis, and Rothschild’s Antiques operated more like New Orleans.
St. Louis remembers outrageousness.
But St. Louis doesn’t relish it.
Wellston, 1970. “I’ll give you 4 cents a pound,” says Rothschild, flipping long black hair over his shoulder and pulling a wad of $20 bills from his bib overalls.
“Seven cents,” insists Sam Polsky, glaring at the 22-year-old from beneath the homburg he wears constantly, even inside his own store. The two go toe to toe, call each other names, dicker about the schmattes (Yiddish for “rags”). When Polsky sticks at 6 cents, Rothschild shoves the bills back in his pocket and turns to leave.
“Wait a minute,” calls the old man, irritated and impressed.
Rothschild and his new friend Bob Wood toss the 50-gallon drums of old blue jeans — 5 cents a pound — into Wood’s pickup and drive back to their store, Ultimate Alternate Clothiers (in the basement of what is now Rothschild’s Antiques). Euclid is dotted with bus stops and big trash cans; there’s a hoosier bar, a head shop, a witchcraft shop complete with a pentagram on the floor. In the evenings, after closing, Rothschild cranks the music and people dance on the sidewalk. Every morning, hung over or not, he and Wood open for business.
Off hours, they comb the city in Wood’s pickup, bargain for fixtures at old North Side confectioneries, talk their way into warehouse basements. At St. Louis Shade & Hardware they find cases of Howdy Doody shoe polish, Depression glass still in the boxes. Every day’s a treasure hunt.
After the vintage jeans gave way to vintage junk, the Central West End cleaned up and the junk turned into antiques. Rothschild had an eye for wit and tarnished elegance. He could set aside the schlock in seconds and, from the grubbiest of environs, pluck an object with enough style to tell its story.
Wood, scion of a real-estate family, left the antique store in 1974 to concentrate on bricks and mortar, but Rothschild stayed put. By then he’d married and divorced his first wife, the wild-spirited daughter of a family that could belong to any country club it chose. Single again, he moved easily in the emerging café society of the Central West End, bringing his old hippie friends along with him. No more joyrides with Buzz Wall to the lesbian bar on the East Side where waitresses lip-synched polkas. Instead, he taught Wall to drink Champagne and slurp oysters at the Chase.
Rothschild had bought his first building four years earlier — a two-family on McPherson for $5,000, $4,500 of it financed. He’d thrown a keg party to knock out the kitchen’s plaster walls and found out the next morning that rehab was hard work. Still, the plaster dust had gotten under his skin. He made ridiculous mistakes but kept going, earning what he figured was a street-level equivalent to a doctorate in real estate, financed by the Central West End’s appreciating property values. He saw how city blocks changed when the worst house got fixed up. Saw what a difference a few nips and tucks could make to the façade of an old mansion. Saw possibilities everywhere, felt the rush of the deal.
In 1977, he married again, this time to Joyce, a gorgeous blond phys-ed teacher. She came from a nice middle-class family in Affton, she was five years his senior and she was recently divorced, with a baby girl. They moved into Hortense Place, and Joyce raced to catch up with Pete’s social whirl. Soon the two were vying with each other even at the tennis net. The marriage ended in 1983 in a battle as ugly as anything on TV.
The bright spot for Pete: He won custody of their son, David, beginning what would prove “the most fun and the best and deepest relationship” of his life. He sent David to private schools to help him overcome dyslexia, took vacations with him every spring break. David grew up steady, methodical, mellow as the Grateful Dead. As he came into his own adulthood, he insisted on closeness and taught his father to open up.
Then, when Joyce learned she had terminal cancer, a decade of parental acrimony dissolved. Rothschild became his ex-wife’s good friend, gave her an apartment a few doors from her daughter. He grieved most for his son’s sake, because in their relationship he’d found the joy and connection he’d never quite managed with his own father.
Pete Rothschild’s real name is Milton David Rothschild II. But despite his affinity for wine, antiques, property and exchanges of gold, Rothschild blood does not run in his veins. His biological father was a Polish Jew, a concert pianist on tour. His mother was Scots-Irish, and he jokes that she must have been the source of the fiery temper that baffled his adoptive parents. That’s all he knows, and he says it’s all he wants to know. His parents are Milton and Marian Rothschild, and loyalty binds him.
Milton and Marian married late, but they made up for it. They worked together every day at their jewelry store in Clayton, called each other “Mr. R.” and “Mrs. R.,” told each other everything. Milton was short, brusque, as reliable as the gold clock faces he sold. Marian worried about everybody’s feelings but her own. When Milton was 47, they adopted Pete and then a little girl, and forged a home life so stable and predictable it nearly drove Pete crazy: the same meals at the same time with the same small talk; the same expectations, held up daily and never fulfilled. By his teens he towered over his father, tormented his sister, fit nowhere.
He didn’t want a carefully planned life, the sort that fit neatly within the four walls of a jewelry store. He did want success, but he wanted it his way. He wouldn’t start with pearls and diamonds; he’d cast about, find sows’ ears and make them silk purses. Sell his own taste. Sell himself.
A Monday evening in the early ’80s at Joe Edwards’ place in University City. Cards slide in quick fans across the table. Five cards into the game, Bob Wood folds. “If I don’t have it, I don’t want to go looking for it,” he mutters to Canepa, who tends to fish.
Edwards takes his time with his cards; he likes high stakes, but he always wants a plan.
Rothschild, Edwards’ friend since seventh grade at John Burroughs School, plays hunches like quicksilver and hopes the next card will change everything. When it doesn’t, he bluffs.
The poker players all wound up betting on real estate, with varying degrees of bravado. Edwards stuck to the U. City Loop. Canepa saw himself as a landlord type and called the real dealmakers, Wood and Rothschild, “maniacal.”
Rothschild began with flats in the Central West End, bohemian student housing that didn’t need much TLC, the occasional warehouse or hotel. Then he started buying bars and never stopped. Bars meant fun, and they had a practical appeal, too — with gay bars, he could venture into areas still too rough for other clientele — and all his tenants wanted to own Cheers, so they poured their own dreams and liquid assets into the properties.
With a changing cast of partners, Rothschild opened a succession of companies, among them Saloon Keepers for the bars; Bacchus Investments; Money Tree Investments; Land Shark Investments, a Belushi rip-off; and Rainbow’s End. He had separate partnerships for each big project or section of town, and three serious anchors: Rothschild Development, Rothschild Management Group and Rothschild Realty.
He had a knack for buying cheap in areas about to take off, for stripping the cool stuff from historic buildings and getting the assessments lowered. In 1986, when federal tax breaks dried up, huge development projects had run aground; the city turned to Rothschild to salvage the wrecks. He bought up blocks of residential property that had been abandoned by developers and described himself as “lucky enough not to have ever been smart enough to figure out how to lose money for a living.”
In the Central West End, he continued to buy any good deal, high end or low. Beloved restaurateur Herbie Balaban, 20 years his senior, was his model: Both men loved the quaint mysteries of old brick; both loved urbanity, conversation, good food and wine, fine fabrics and antiques. They teamed up to persuade neighboring businesses to ante up for community projects and safety measures, and, as one business owner recalls, “They were quite a road show.”
But Rothschild didn’t stay in the Central West End. He developed in Soulard, bought condos in Normandy and commercial buildings in Midtown, fanned out into the inner-ring suburbs, bought a few mansions in Ladue and a share in the Seven Gables Hotel in downtown Clayton. Amassed rental and rehab buildings all over the metropolitan area. Overextended himself. “We grew pretty fast,” he says, “so we made mistakes.” He runs his fingers through hair that’s short now but still flows in thick, rebellious waves. “I’d see an opportunity to buy something, and they’d say, ‘If you want this, you have to close next Thursday.’ When you don’t have enough staff and you’ve taken on another 200 units to manage — we were scrambling for a while.”
Rothschild Management Group now employs 16 people to lease, manage and maintain about 1,000 rental units — roughly triple the staff it had just two years ago. Rothschild Development’s rehabs keep seven full-time contracting crews busy. The shape-shifting of a few hundred properties occupies four bookkeepers. Rothschild is finishing up a spate of condo conversions, costing out a possible townhome complex in Soulard, planning a complex of staggered residential towers with rooftop penthouses overlooking the Cardinals’ proposed Ballpark Village downtown. He’s also juggling plans for the Z Club, the Smile Building in Soulard, a theater in the old firehouse in Grand Center and the LaSalle Building, next to Metropolitan Square.
In the Central West End, Rothschild plays landlord to Duff’s, Kopperman’s, Llewelyn’s, the Coffee Cartel, the Wildflower, Chez Leon, the Vintage Room, and the Euclid building that once held the Sunshine Inn. For two decades, he bought steadily throughout the neighborhood — but what he wanted most was to own all four corners of his signature intersection, Euclid and McPherson. He started with the Rothschild’s Antiques building, then added two more corners (Left Bank Books and Zoë’s Pan-Asian). All that was missing was the northwest corner, the Balaban’s building. Then, last year, it went up for auction, but Rothschild was outbid by $150,000 by Keith Barket and his partner, who offered $950,000. “We were on it,” says Barket. “The seller kept shopping us. We had it under contract. But then Herb passed away, which delayed the closing. And then they came back to us and raised the price.”
Last July, for a cool million, Rothschild got his fourth corner, buying it from the estate of his role model.
Acapulco, late ’80s. Beach sand caught in their sandals, Pete and his future wife walk hand in hand through the marketplace. A Mexican silver charm gleams in the hot sun, catching Donna’s eye. She’s not used to pesos yet, can’t figure out how much the guy’s asking. Pete steps forward and begins bartering.
Fifteen intense, haranguing, flattering minutes later, the deal draws to a close. Both men smile, and the coins and charm pass each other in midair. “How much money did you save?” whispers Donna as they step away. Pete does a quick mental calculation: “I think about 3 cents.”
For six-and-a-half years, Rothschild tried to buy the Smile Building at Ninth and Allen streets, an 1872 German Turnverein (meeting hall/gymnasium) converted to a soda factory. When the owner was asking half-a-million, Rothschild offered $200,000. No dice. The building sat empty, rotted, returned to the city like a dying animal to its lair. Mercantile Bank stepped ahead of Rothschild, but when they finally put it up for auction three years later, they got no bids. Rothschild finally got it — now with a hole the size of a swimming pool in the ceiling — for $1,500. Then he let it sit for six years, waiting for the right deal.
It’s the tarps spread for years over that building, the debris flying off the roof, that make people call Rothschild a speculator, a breed he swears he loathes. He’s been known to profit by flipping a property, but he’s just as apt to lose money by holding it because he’s in love with the possibilities. He took on the Westwood condo conversions in Clayton after Barket turned them down because the profit margin looked too slim.
Rothschild’s not a true speculator; neither is he a true developer, building from scratch. He’s a dealmaker, a stitcher of silk purses. He forms alliances, but he operates on his own, far outside the closed Clayton loop of big real-estate transactions. He doesn’t make plans; he reacts to opportunities. And he’s impossible to predict.
When he bought a loft building on Washington Avenue, he says, he talked to the Community Development Agency and, assured of their support, went away to put the project together. By the time he returned, CDA had a new director, Joan Kelly Horn, and she wasn’t about to help. “We ended up selling and making half-a-million, but I didn’t want half-a-million,” he says, still frustrated. “I was excited about the project.”
Enthusiasm works on him like a drug, and when decisions lose him money, he solves the losses by buying more. “I hear he’s stretched out pretty good,” murmurs Barket. Donna’s sick of people thinking they’re “rolling”; she says that for all his shrewd barter, Pete’s just as likely to make a lousy business decision out of loyalty or impulse. “He always manages to land on his feet, but if we ever stop, it may catch up with us. It’s that old lyric: ‘The pleasure’s not the taking, it’s the loving of the game.’”
If the game brings profit, the more the better.
Meeting a young partner, Shawn Carroll, at one of the condos they’re rehabbing, Rothschild goes to the threshold of the narrow bathroom and pretends he’s falling in. Then he flips the Lucite towel ring up and down and pronounces it “cheesy.” He knows when to splurge up front, adding the slate kitchen floor or marble Jacuzzi that will make the difference at closing. Buyers of his rehabs praise his exquisite taste, his boldness in chopping up an old house and making it new inside. They complain about pesky practical details — the missing cold-air return, the garage door his crew never returned to fix.
Rothschild doesn’t always respond to code requirements as quickly as the city would like. He does know the fastest ways around the rules, though, and through the corridors of power. He’s influential with politicians, police officers, everybody he’s ever done a favor for, everybody who hopes to make a deal with him someday. One of his real-estate partners is St. Louis excise commissioner Robert Kraiberg — a convenient friendship, snaps one Soulard resident, for one of the city’s largest bar landlords.
Soulard residents can be bitter about Rothschild. In the late ’80s, after the federal tax credits dried up, several watched open-mouthed while Rothschild walked away with deal after deal on properties they’d have loved to see individually owned but were never given a chance to bid on. In 1994, Dave and Carolyn Frisch of Carbondale, Ill., did get to bid $11,000 at a delinquent-tax auction and happily turned over earnest money for “a really neat old building” in Soulard. Two days later, they were told the city had rejected their bid and signed a firm contract with Rothschild for $14,000.
He sold the building back to them for $15,000. He also sold back condos on West Pine Boulevard after infuriating their denizens by buying them dirt cheap at a tax sale because the owners had neglected to pay taxes on their parking lot. He says he wouldn’t have sold if the judge hadn’t required fair warning to the owners. He’s regularly blamed for letting the fabulous old Argyle Apartments at Euclid Avenue and Lindell Boulevard disintegrate, then selling them off at a handsome profit so the city could replace them with a garage. But he says he bought into that deal only three years before the sale and that the apartments were already a shambles.
He seizes opportunity and pays for it afterward, losing the currency of public goodwill.
Mr. R., now 99, speaking by phone: “He was a regular boy; he did everything that the kids did. Sometimes we liked him, sometimes we didn’t. But eventually he recognized his obligations and became a very, very thoughtful, fine son. And he was always industrious.”
Mrs. R., 93: “Tell how when he was young, he cut grass.”
Mr. R.: “Yes, and he had an ice-cream route. He’s an excellent salesman. I told him early in life, the better things are all available, but there is a common denominator, and that is money.”
Mr. R.: “What kind of boy was he? He wanted his way all the time; he fought for everything he wanted. You know, he’s an adopted boy.”
Mrs. R.: “What do you want to say that for?” Her voice softens: “He wants to be recognized; that’s been driving him.”
“He’ll give you the shirt off his back if you’re his friend,” attests one of them. “If not, he’ll take the shirt off your back.”
In meetings, Rothschild comes across as nonchalant, as laconic as Hawkeye Pierce, as magnetic as Johnny Depp. Then he pulls out the contract, customized to his advantage. And people feel betrayed.
“I think sometimes we confuse him being a good negotiator with getting screwed,” remarks one commercial tenant.
“I really like the guy,” says another, “but he’s an incredible sonofabitch in business. The smallest deal, you’d think it was the World Trade Center. He has a need to win by making up rules only he understands.”
Rothschild’s old friend and partner Bob Wood has the same reputation of ruthlessness. “You almost have to maintain that,” he insists, “because the field’s so competitive. In this business, unless somebody loses, you don’t win.”
Yet even Wood is more easygoing, less driven by the minutiae of every deal. Rothschild is intense and personal about everything. Probe his business relationships and you’ll find a tangle of loyalties, grudges, even a little selective naïveté. “With someone I like who needs something more than I do, I can be a pushover,” he shrugs. “When I’m in a situation where toughness is called for — I can be that person. But for the most part, I’ve found that negotiations are a lot easier when you realize that both sides have to come out feeling they have won.”
Veterans of his deals say you’re more likely to emerge bloodied and bowed. “You feel exasperated, worn down, bullied,” says one. “But you’re in this trap, because he’s got all the good stuff.”
Some say he’s built an empire. Others say he’s scattered and sloppy, can’t keep proper watch over the buildings he can’t help buying.
His most painful example: the “ancient beast of a boiler system” at the Golden Dynasty restaurant on Grand and Lindell. Intending to redevelop the building, Rothschild appeased the beast. But on an icy Monday in January 1999, it gave up the ghost — just in time for Bill McClellan to arrive and write a column about the shivering, beleaguered Chinese immigrant family that ran the place. Rothschild was so crushed, he took McClellan out for a beer afterward and tried to explain. “When you invest a lot of yourself, you have a picture of the person you want to be,” he says now, “and you try to live your life in hope of becoming that person. When a different picture of you comes to light in an unfair way, it hurts your feelings.”
This is the paradox of Pete Rothschild: brash and vulnerable, calculating and impulsive, tough and contrite. “What I really want, what I crave, is making people happy,” he blurts. “I make many decisions in life based on that. It’s fine to be perceived as powerful, but I’d much rather have somebody like me.” If he’s crossed, his revenge is vicious, but his closest friends have stuck with him for decades, and even his harshest critics admit they can’t help liking him. Enthusiastic as a 20-year-old, Rothschild refuses to gather the cloak of authority around himself. He expends vast amounts of energy to create intimacy and win approval.
Yet he’s chosen “the most hated profession that anybody could have.
“Nobody likes their landlord,” he says matter-of-factly. “Joe [Edwards] is my hero, because he figured out it’s a lot easier to be loved selling someone a beer and hamburger than being a landlord. Every single day I sit there and think, ‘Damn, I wish I had decided to sell a great burger or open up a great museum.’ There’s 25,000 things that can go wrong with an apartment or building, and somebody’s always going to be unhappy.”
He knows this. He knows what people want of him and what they end up thinking about him. But he can’t resist the deals. He bought the Sunshine Inn building on Euclid in 1998 and immediately raised the beloved restaurant’s rent impossibly high, forcing the end of 25 idealistic years and scattering dreams and granola in the street. Once again, he’d messed with the expectations: He’d come in like Herbie Balaban, the hope of the funky, liberal, communitarian Central West End, then dealt as coldly as a Clayton commercial developer.
Rothschild enters his McPherson office the back way, running up the outside wooden stairs. People look up as he walks in, checking his mood. He makes jokes, but they’re abrupt ones. In his office, rolls of blueprints lean askew in the corner, rocked by a sea of granite samples. There’s a stained-glass window, a Dionysian bronze, an oversize martini glass, an overflowing ceramic Champagne bottle, an oversize coffee mug that reads, “I’m not greedy but I like a lot.”
Asked what sort of pleasures end up disappointing him, Rothschild looks baffled: “The hot-fudge sundae has never failed to taste good to me.” Leigh Leonard, director of property management for the past two years, teases, “Pete loves everything in mass quantities: more people, more buildings, more food, more wine, more stuff. If we could just own everything, life would be much easier!”
He works through lunch, but his assistant, Deborah Fenton, makes an almond-bark run. “We just go down to Bissinger’s with a $5 bill and say, ‘Pete needs chocolate,’” she shrugs, used to an office that’s “like living in a sitcom” — with all the characters larger than life.
“Nobody in town has as many partners as Pete,” says Stephen Trampe, president of Owen Development. At last count, Rothschild had 26. He and Trampe originally planned to redevelop the Continental Building, on Olive Street near Grand Boulevard, together. Now Rothschild’s out of it, for reasons neither will discuss. Asked whether he trusts Rothschild, Trampe stammers, “That’s too simple — the question is much more complex than that. I mean, I don’t want — I mean, he’s a friend of mine, it’s very — it depends on your perspective, and what you are doing, and when, and how.
“People always want to tell you stories about Pete, and sometimes you don’t even know what to say,” he adds. “There aren’t that many people in town who have two or three reputations.”
Rothschild’s steadiest partner is Larry Cherry: shorter, slower, fleshier, prone to summaries like “High finish. Pete likes high finish.” He started in the women’s-shoe business and switched to real estate; five years ago he “partnered up” with Rothschild to help with property management. “I kept getting calls from my connections,” says Cherry, “so three years ago, Pete said, ‘All right, let’s put you out there on the street; let’s make some serious money.’
“We could both pull the trigger on a $1 million building faster than deciding what we want for lunch,” finishes Cherry. “But Pete’s tough to keep up with. He plays Monopoly for real.”
They’re finishing up renovations on about 150 condo conversions in the central corridor, including 72 rundown apartments north of Olive that Rothschild had the wits to buy just before Washington University secured the Loop with a massive building acquisition around Delmar and Olive boulevards. He’s now going upscale with the renovations, playing at the tide’s edge.
He’s also eager to be part of the Grand Center action, despite a few scotched deals and a recent $1 million lawsuit by St. Louis University. Filed last August, the suit accused Rothschild of defrauding the university by misrepresenting his property on the northeast corner of Grand and Lindell. The university signed a contract, believing that all leases would expire the next month when, in fact, Bullfeathers Pub had a long-term lease, was in breach of contract for failing to pay rent and had been cited for serving alcohol to minors.
Rothschild says Bullfeathers’ status was never an issue in his mind because the redevelopment plan he worked out for SLU assumed that Bullfeathers would remain. “What I told them was that Vito’s Pizza didn’t have a lease,” he explains, jaw clenched. “They mistook that and thought for some reason there were no commercial leases.” University insiders can’t decide whether to believe him; in any event, he settled the lawsuit to their satisfaction, selling Bullfeathers a building he owns in Dogtown.
His portfolio gets him out of scrapes — but it also wins resentment. “It’s easy to not like someone who’s everywhere,” remarks Karen Duffy of Duff’s Restaurant, one of Rothschild’s longest-leasing tenants. “It frightens people to have one person with that much power. It feels a little … undemocratic. Herbie [Balaban] was the king of Euclid, and Pete’s sort of come into that role.”
Except that Herbie’s reputation was golden, and it gleams with even greater luster since his death last year. Compared with him, and with Joe Edwards, Rothschild lacks a grand vision — and the focus to see it through.
“Nobody has a reputation better than Joe Edwards’,” remarks Trampe. “He will make personal sacrifices for the sake of the deal; it’s never about money. Joe’s always had a vision, not of what Joe wants to be but of what Joe wants the community to be.”
Rothschild’s drive spirals out from his own ego. Yet he has plenty of ideas about what the Central West End, Soulard, Grand Center and downtown St. Louis should be. He talks with passion about the need to end racism and improve schools; he sketches a retail-and-restaurant streetscape lively enough to lure St. Louis University students to Grand Center. He’s on the boards of the Downtown St. Louis Partnership, the Central West End Association, the Ninth District Police Business Association and Northside Team Ministries. Last year he turned a gone-to-seed Lindell mansion into a Symphony Showplace fundraiser and developed the first environmentally conscious house built on spec in St. Louis. He’s putting one of his employees through college. Compared with the average real-estate developer, he’s Mother Teresa.
Except for that reputation.
Euclid Avenue, 1981. Donna Emmenegger, a skinny, pretty 22-year-old waitress, finishes her shift at the Flami
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Grave Losses
Set high on a limestone bluff, streaked gold at sunset, the burial mound overlooked the entire Meramec River Valley. Inside, some of the bodies were flexed into fetal position, others laid out straight as Uncle Harold. Still others were bundle burials, the bones defleshed and stacked together. Maybe they were the black sheep of the clan. Maybe they were kept in the charnel hut so long their flesh rotted. Maybe, rather than drag home heavy corpses, a warring party left the dead to nature, returning after the birds picked away the flesh and the sun bleached the bones.
What’s sure is that the dead rested in peace for 1,000 years or so, enfolded in the earth they’d loved as their mother.
Then a bulldozer tore into that earth.
Fenton needed a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
Everybody in Fenton knew that the hillocks above Mound Street were burial mounds. But by the time city residents got wind of plans to destroy them, developer Gary Grewe had contracted to build a bigger and better Wal-Mart on the site.
Missouri is the heart of Wal-Mart country. The world’s first supercenter was built in Washington, Mo., in 1988; the 1,000th was christened in St. Robert, Mo., in August 2001. Grewe’s Fenton Supercenter slid neatly into place in a $193 million redevelopment plan for Fenton’s downtown, with $47 million in tax-increment financing subsidies for the bulldozing.
When we inquired about the archaeological significance of the latest Supercenter, Grewe offered a single comment: “We built a 1.3 million square foot shopping center that’s the neatest thing ever built in St. Louis; it’s the biggest. I don’t like this line of questioning.”
At the outset, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, charged with historic preservation, had informed Grewe that any human remains would have to be removed. He hired an engineering firm, SCI, whose archaeologists mapped the site and started digging. They took samples, but they weren’t authorized to do pollen and seed counts or radiocarbon dating or document the mound’s layers or filter all the soil for bits of pottery, stone and animal bones. No skeletal analyst was on site to examine the bones, which are often so fragile they turn to powder when they’re moved — but can unlock a diary of stresses, diseases, diet, periods of hunger, age, gender and cultural practices.
SCI project director Karl Ruhmann can’t comment because SCI signed a confidentiality agreement with the developer. But in the initial field plan submitted to the state, SCI wrote, “A report will be generated that details the biological, cultural, and physical characteristics of the remains.” As it became obvious that no one was prepared to pay the attendant costs, the “scope of work” shrank. Contractually, SCI’s obligation was a simple one: Get the human remains and get out.
Debra Magruder, who hired on with SCI’s crew when the first mound was nearly excavated, says they did that one right. She says that during her first day on the job, in February 1999, the crew’s members were shovel-scraping, just the way they’re supposed to, lifting thin layers of dirt so they wouldn’t miss or damage any artifacts. “But by the time they got to the second mound, where all the burials were, they were so crunched for time that they got approval from Cal [Rea, the state archaeologist overseeing the dig] to start chunking. We were standing on our shovels, picking up dirt and throwing it over our shoulders. There’s no telling what got lost.”
SCI was glad Magruder had no field experience, she says, “because field school teaches you to go slow, and they wanted us to go fast. It was pretty messy out there at times.
“Just before I started, a femur was found,” she adds. “The story I heard was that the guy working in that area thought it was a tree root and used some root clippers and snapped it in half. Then, when they figured out it was a femur, they just covered it and left it, half sticking out, and a looter came and ripped it out of the mound.” The femur was indeed protruding from within a stone box chamber. On Feb. 17, a survey crew lifted the tarp and found that someone had dug horizontally into the vault and stolen the bone.
Rea, who has left the DNR, didn’t respond to queries about the Fenton dig. “We were told not to talk with anyone about what was going on,” adds Magruder. She and five other crew members wrote a letter of complaint to the state, saying they’d been “told that the developer had no legal responsibility to excavate the mounds and he could blast through them if he wanted to.”
In July of 1999, the excavation was pronounced finished, and as soon as the last truckload of bones was driven away, earth-movers leveled the mounds. No one had surveyed the periphery, so if there were bundle burials outside the mound — as archaeologists had found at the Gateway Academy site in St. Louis — the bones were crunched into dust.
Bones already uncovered by the dig were placed in 26 metal bank boxes and stored at SCI. On July 21, 1999, SCI archaeologist Joseph Galloy, worried that no official report was being prepared, sent a two-page summary of the findings to the DNR. Most of the burials had been found in the larger mound, he reported: “One grave box contained only a pair of articulated hand bones, reminding one of the beheaded and behanded individuals in Mound 72 at Cahokia.” Two mass burials were found, one with a wooden crypt or charnel house that looks as if it burned halfway through mound construction. Most of the human remains — roughly 50 sets — were encountered beneath larger trees, which may have protected them from pot-hunters. Two bird bones speared one of the skulls. Large mussel shells, ceramics, shell beads and a drilled bear tooth were found in or above graves. The mounds could have been built anytime between the Late Woodland and Early Mississippian periods, 600-1400 AD.
The public never heard that information. But Chris Bury, a sweet-faced young mechanic with the Missouri Department of Transportation, took pictures before the mounds were flattened, and he salvaged some artifacts. Using both hands, he raises the lid of his treasure box and removes a pointed chert tool, streaked orange and gray. “It was built to fit in your hand,” he says, resting the cushion of his right palm in the hollow. Wrapping his fingers around the stone, he rests the tips in indentations on the other side and drags the tool’s sharp edge along his left forearm. “You could scrape skin, scrape bark — see, it’s been used; it’s rough right there. And see how the edge is sliced out to clear room for the base of your hand?” He reaches into the box and brings out a second, smaller tool. “See, here’s a broken one. They were made just alike. I found ’em right where the bulldozer went through.”
Blue-eyed, towheaded Doug Canady fell in love with American Indians when his second-grade teacher covered the walls with their pictures. Now a 41-year-old civil engineer, he reads archaeological journals on the weekend and wonders passionately about the first Missourians. He first heard about the mound excavation in September 1999, from a construction-worker friend who’d toured the site. “He told me he picked up a human tooth off the ground and a project superintendent told him, ‘Looks like you found yourself a souvenir,’” Canady recalls grimly. “By the time I drove up there, nothing was left but rubble.”
Early in September, just before the Supercenter’s scheduled grand opening, Canady forces himself to return to the site. Wal-Mart trucks are lined up like a neat child’s toys; pop music is already blasting into a parking lot half-filled with trainees’ cars. “I can’t even get oriented,” he mutters. “I’d say the mound was about 50 or 100 feet above the Tire & Lube Express.” He walks toward the ridge, now two crescents of rough orange rock, sliced clean in half, with trees sticking up from their outline like a child’s drawing. “I thought there was such respect for human remains,” he sighs. “I always thought that was one thing that would pretty much stop a project.”
Archaeologist Tim Baumann knew better: “You could have the most important site in the U.S., and if no burials were in the way they wouldn’t have to pick up one artifact. As we speak, there are hundreds of sites being destroyed.” A faculty member at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Baumann serves on the DNR’s Council for Historic Preservation. He learned about the project in the summer of 1999, too late to undo the damage.
“No serious archaeology’s ever been done in that area,” Baumann points out, “and nobody has excavated a mound this size, with the number of burials that came out of this one, in 20 or 30 years.” Yet, as hungry as he is for the lost information, he maintains that, ideally, the graves should never have been touched, their souls’ journeys never interrupted. They stood at the far edge of the bluff, he notes; why couldn’t they have been fenced and preserved? They’d lend historic gravitas, attract sightseers. They might even bring a few more shoppers to Wal-Mart.
The human remains stayed in metal boxes at SCI for two years while their custodians argued. The DNR wanted the findings documented and reported to the public — but wanted the developer, G.J. Grewe, to pay. That’s the provision in most cultural-resource laws: The developer is benefiting from the destruction of cultural heritage, so the developer pays the costs of recovery, analysis, documentation and appropriate reburial.
Missouri’s law, however, doesn’t insist. Chapter 194’s Unmarked Human Burial section suggests that all the right things be done as quickly as possible, but it doesn’t spell out how, penalize delays or stipulate who pays.
“We believe our client has already gone above and beyond what is actually required by the Unmarked Human Burials Sites Act,” Grewe’s lawyer, Joseph G. Nassif of Thompson Coburn, wrote in October 2000. “If the State desires additional follow-up, the costs should be borne by the State.”
The person now taking direct heat for the Fenton project, state archaeologist Judy Deel, didn’t oversee it. Cal Rea did, but he’s now in law school in Wisconsin; Deel jokes that this project drove him to it. Then, sighing, she recounts the state’s limited and ineffective role, her soft, warm voice bending easily into apology: “We’ve had some … um … inquiries from the public, like ‘If this is a burial ground, how did it happen that it was developed out of existence?’ This — did not go as smoothly as we could have wished.”
If a single dollar of federal funding had trickled into the project, if a single patch of wetland had been compromised, if any federal agency had played even the most peripheral role, the National Historic Preservation Act would have provided rules, monitoring and accountability. An archaeological survey would have been done, efforts at preservation would have been made and, by executive order, a report would have been prepared for the president of the United States.
The DNR says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could have provided that kind of federal supervision by defining their purview more broadly. But Corps spokesman Charles Camillo says his agency found no impact on the waterways on the Wal-Mart side of Gravois Bluffs and only minimal impact on a creek on the other side.
“The Corps has been playing some funny games,” says Joe Harl, co-founder of the Archaeological Research Center of St. Louis. He remembers projects in which the Corps broadened its involvement because “drainage” was affected, making archaeological salvage possible. But he also cites instances in which they’ve tried to pinpoint their responsibility to a single patch of wetland.
In Illinois, the state law echoes federal law so closely that federal involvement isn’t needed. Mounds like Fenton’s would be surveyed, their historic significance determined. If the site couldn’t be preserved intact, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency would work to mitigate any negative impact. Any findings would be studied and a report made to the public, all at the developer’s expense and under the state’s supervision.
Missouri law guarantees none of that.
Where were the Native American activists? Roughly 25 tribes once lived in Missouri, but they’re all gone now, dispersed or destroyed or moved west. Today’s political pressure comes from developers and their lobbyists.
Missouri has an Unmarked Human Burials Consultation Committee, with two Native American members, but because the committee’s role is to advise on reburials, the group wasn’t notified during the excavation. “I heard about it from area historians, not through the committee,” says member Eddie Brown, a Pascua Yaqui tribesman and social-work professor who directs the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at Washington University. “I brought it up at the last meeting. But you know the forces we’re up against. There’s going to be development, come hell or high water. The state is understaffed and busy with politics, and this has taken a very low priority.”
The Osages, now in Oklahoma, are the most likely to claim the ancestral bones, simply because they lived here so long; many scholars believe they are direct descendants of the Mississippian mound-builders. But when the RFT called Carrie Wilson, who represents the Osage Nation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Fenton excavation came as a surprise. “Tell them the Osage tribe wants a report,” she snapped, impatient with explanations of Missouri’s inadequate laws. “At some point, the State Historic Preservation Office has to take responsibility. The Osage should have been consulted at the planning stages. Maybe we could have negotiated with the landowner to take this site out of play; maybe the state, or another organization, could have bought it. At least we could have looked at all the options.”
Wilson takes a deep breath: “What Missouri has to understand is that this is Missouri’s history. The Mississippi was the Nile, the cradle of American Indian civilization. There were more people living in the Mississippi area than anyplace else in the U.S. If you had an Egyptian pyramid, would you say, ‘Sorry, private land, we’re going to go ahead and destroy the site’? Missouri is sitting on a vast history that has never really been looked at, because it’s too close to home.”
The Fenton burial mounds haunted Canady for two years. Finally he was told by the DNR that the information had been classified to protect the (now bulldozed) site from looting. Bemused, he wrote in July to ask why the bones had been removed in such a fashion, why they hadn’t been reburied yet, why no one would tell him anything. In August, he received a reply from deputy state historic-preservation officer Claire F. Blackwell, who called the Fenton project “an unfortunate example of the ambiguity of Chapter 194.”
Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General Shelley A. Woods wrote to SCI: “I understand that your company is refusing to turn certain human remains over to Missouri Department of Natural Resources staff, apparently because your company has not been paid by its client.” SCI’s Karl Ruhmann fired back: “We have been trying to get the State of Missouri to take possession of these humans for well over eight months…. The State had not, until this letter, shown much direct interest.”
September was Missouri Archaeology Month. The DNR proudly distributed a new video, On the Trail of the First Americans and Missouri’s Native American Heritage. Maybe it was inspirational: On Sept. 20, two years and two months after the excavation ended, the burial committee was informed that all obstacles had dissolved. The DNR had taken custody of the remains. “Judy [Deel] probably got in her truck and went and got them herself when people started asking questions,” chuckles Gayle Fritz, a Wash. U. archaeologist who is new to the committee.
Until the Osage and other interested tribes have a chance to claim the remains, the bones will wait in acid-free boxes in what Deel calls a “secure location” in Jefferson City. Meanwhile, the DNR has finalized arrangements for a piece of land in a state park so that even if no tribe claims the remains, they can be unboxed and reverently returned to the earth.
“We might use a general pipe ceremony,” muses Carter Revard, emeritus professor of English at Washington University. Revard grew up in an Osage town in Oklahoma and studied his heritage with a scholar’s thirst. When he helped plan a reburial several years ago, he turned to the pipe as the symbol that binds all Native Americans in truth and reverence. “In effect, we pray,” he explains, “asking that the dead be given a good way home, saying that now the earth has them back to her and they can be at peace.”
Canady is relieved that the remains will be reburied, but he finds the ending bittersweet. “I wonder what future generations of Americans will think,” he says, his square jaw set rigid. “Will they wish the high promontory with the Indian burial mound was still there, or will they be awash in thanks for the Wal-Mart Supercenter?”
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Bad Rap
Lavell Webb sits in front of a television at the Boonville Correctional Facility, watching a videotape, surrounded by a few prison officials, a couple of visitors and an armed guard. He is the center of attention as the lawmen form a half-circle around him, their eyes alternately watching the television and stealing glances at Webb’s reaction to what he’s viewing. He shifts in his chair every so often, reclining, legs stretched one moment, leaning into the TV the next. The room is large and drab, crammed with a dozen chess-and-checkerboard tables and chairs, a few vending machines and a metal detector at the door.
The video shows an interview with St. Louis rap group the St. Lunatics from ’98, when Webb, a.k.a. City Spud, was one of them in person, not just in spirit, back before there was any need for the free Lunatics — Ali, Kyjuan, Murphy Lee and, of course, Nelly — to name their debut full-length CD Free City in honor of their incarcerated brother. Back when his jumpsuit was flashy orange camouflage, not prison gray; back when he was making music and rhyming about making money, not paying the price for doing what others brag about in their rhymes.
The video interview was three years ago, and the St. Lunatics were nobodies. They didn’t have a hit record. Nelly wasn’t rap’s It boy. There were no screaming teens, no gold Humvees, not even a record contract. They weren’t making money, at least not much. All they had was a regional hit, “Gimme What You Got.” And City Spud was free.
All five in the video are dressed in colorful fatigues, playing stars and getting the word out about all things Lou. Ali, Kyjuan and Murphy Lee sit on stools in the back; in front, Nelly and City Spud flank the interviewer. Spud’s seated in the worst possible spot. The interviewer’s angled away from him, so Spud’s left out of the conversation, staring at the man’s back. Spud’s a quiet guy in the first place, and despite the presence of his friends, he looks all alone on that stage. He attempts to jump in a few times, but without a mic his utterances are ignored. Boonville Prison officials want to play the tape over the prison’s closed-circuit television system; everyone at Boonville knows who City Spud is, and they seem to like him. Prison officials want to showcase his achievements. They seem proud of him.
Ever unassuming and a bit uncomfortable with the attention he’s getting in this room, Spud wavers, mumbles, unsure whether he wants his fellow inmates to see it. He doesn’t really shine on the video; he just sits to the side. When the group performs one of their songs later in the show, he seems confident and assured. But it doesn’t matter who he is in here. He could be the King of England and it wouldn’t change the reality: He’s not leaving anytime soon.
He decides against airing the St. Lunatics interview.
“Right now, I’m not Spud,” he says later. “Coming here made me — I had to go back to being Lavell. Spud’s supposed to be out on tour with Destiny’s Child right now. When I got here, I just had to put that away for the time being. Not away to the point where I’m not writing and I just don’t want to do music. But I have to deal with this here. I do get emotional sometimes. Videos popping up, and I can just see myself on the video, but missing family and friends and just missing freedom, period.”
Lavell Webb’s in a messed-up situation; he’s a founding member of the St. Lunatics, whose debut went platinum last month, but he’s not up onstage with them. He’s not in Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” video, though he’s on the recording — that’s him rhyming “Now that I’m a fly guy, and I fly high/Niggaz wanna know why, why I fly by.” He created the music for four songs on Nelly’s multiplatinum Country Grammar album, along with one on Free City, and is receiving producer’s royalties for them. But those tracks were laid before he landed in the clink. He was sent here in November 1999; Nelly and the Lunatics hit the national charts six months later. And all City Spud can do is track the Billboard charts that the mother of fellow Lunatic producer Jason (J.E.) Epperson sends him every week. Fan mail trickles in. His family visits him, though Nelly and the other St. Lunatics don’t. His royalty checks are fattening his bank account, but he can’t touch it and can’t spend it on anything anyway.
Sitting at the chessboard table later, out of earshot of the prison officials who are milling around, City Spud gets reflective. “I’m in this situation because I made a wrong decision,” he says, “not because I was listening to rap or because I’m a rapper and I’m trying to be real to the world or whatever. But because I’m human. I made a mistake. I basically got caught up with the wrong person at the wrong time doing the wrong thing. It wasn’t no rap. It was because I ain’t perfect.”ike countless county kids both white and black, Lavell Webb started selling some pot, a reasonably low-risk proposition in the world of get-cash-quick schemes. It was the spring of ’99, and he had quit his job at a North County McDonald’s — what self-respecting rap star would want to be caught in McDonald’s fatigues? — and needed some sort of income. On tax day ’99, in Breckenridge Hills, he was to sell $1,500 worth of marijuana. It was supposed to be easy; the customer was to beep Spud as a signal that he was off work and ready to hook up. No big deal. Spud was carless, though, and the guy he solicited to drive him came up with a devious scheme: Turn a nice little profit into a virtual windfall by keeping the dope and snatching the dough. That was supposed to be easy, too. The partner would do the dirty work and keep a grand; Spud would stay in the car, get $500 and keep the pot.
With his partner driving — someone Spud says he knew to be bad news, so never hung with — the two cruised to the customer’s neighborhood and Spud pointed out his house and car. Then the two zipped to a 7-Eleven around the corner, where Spud called the buyer and told him to swing by Spud’s to make the transaction. They stopped in a parking lot a block away. The partner put on a mask and grabbed his gun. Spud stayed at the car. His partner, according to City Spud’s written statement to the police, “got out of the car and ran and hid by [the victim’s] house. I’m sitting in the car thinking why am I getting myself into some crazy bullshit like this for $500. Thinking of that I got out of the car nervously to see what was going on. First I ran the opposite way of [the victim’s] house thinking of just leaving. But for some strange reason I ran back. Got back to the car started to get back in but I didn’t. I walk over toward [the victim’s] house to see if anything was going on and did not see anything. Walked back to the car got in 2 minutes later I heard gun shots fired. Sitting there panicked [sic] like I looked back and seen [the partner] running back to the car. When he got in he said man he didn’t give up shit but this $30.00 and said man I had to pop him. I looked at him and said man you tripping.”
The victim was shot five times in the back but, miraculously, lived. He suffered severe internal injuries that will stay with him for the rest of his life. He lost the use of his left hand. But he lived, and when he came to, he told police the gunman seemed to know that he had $1,500 in his pockets. Only one other person knew that bit of information, and that was Lavell Webb, a.k.a. City Spud.
The police started looking for him and stopped by the home of his grandmother Regina and her husband, John, who helped raise Lavell. They didn’t want their last name mentioned. “When I found out that they were looking for him,” says John, “I put the word out, ‘Lavell, you go down there now, for two reasons.’ I know Lavell didn’t know anything about the law. And when the police told me that they were looking for him for a shooting, I said, ‘Lavell is subject to get scared, take off running and these trigger-happy cops — a young black man fleeing — were going to kill him.’”
Adds grandmother Regina: “Lavell’s thinking is, ‘I’m going to tell the truth about this situation, because if I tell the truth, then everything’s going to be all right.’”
“And that’s the result of his Christian background,” says John. “Tell the truth.”
So Nelly drove City Spud to the police station, and Spud owned up. He told them that he made the phone call that set up the victim. That he didn’t pull the trigger. That he didn’t think there would be any violence. That he stayed in the car. And he told the truth without an attorney present. Why should you need an attorney present to tell the truth?
Lavell Webb has almond eyes and a complexion that closely resembles his friend Nelly’s. Because of this striking resemblance, when the two hung out, they were often mistaken for brothers, which never bothered them. It happened so often that they stopped correcting the mistake. Ask anyone Webb’s defining characteristic, and they’ll all say that unlike Nelly, Lavell is low-key.
“He’s real quiet,” says St. Lunatic member Ali. “We called him City Spud for the fact that he was — it was like calling a fat person Tiny. He was from the county. He was always from the county, real passive, real nice, real neat, just a really cool guy. He was so county that we called him City.”
“He’d sit over on the side of the room,” adds fellow Lunatic Murphy Lee, “quiet and on his own, and then come over and say, ‘Hey, yo, I got this song.’ He’d wrote a song in two hours, a whole song, verses and all, and know how the beat should go. It was crazy. He’s just the music man.”
Nelly’s Country Grammar and the St. Lunatics’ Free City both have a defining sound, one that’s simultaneously smooth enough to appeal to the ladies and youngsters but hard enough, and with enough bounce, to attract hardcore hip-hoppers; the sound has built a bridge between rap and R&B. The beats and melodies on Grammar were created by Jason (J.E.) Epperson and City Spud.
“Beat-wise, me and J.E. was just constantly in the studio,” says City Spud. “We was just making beats after beats all day. We just put them on tape, give them to the rest of the group, and they pick whatever they like. And if it sounded hot — something they could just ride — it’d come back to us. And if it’s hot, then we do it. As long as the beat’s just banging, with a lot of bass. Just well-put-together music. It wasn’t sloppy and scattered. I like the smoothness to a lot of beats, man — I like the chords. I really like doing R&B music, so that’s why my rap music was kinda more R&B-ish. I think a lot of my music was meant for it — R&B hooks for them.”
“I’m just a music person, period,” he continues. “I grew up in a church — Granny making me go to church. You know how little kids hate going to church? So I had to find something to do. I started playing the drums for the choir, and it just took off from there. I was in, and then I got into band in elementary school and middle-school band, high-school band, percussion, drums.”
“Lavell has always been a quiet, very creative and very musically inclined person,” says step-grandfather John. “When he came here, I made him the promise that whatever he wanted to be — besides a bum — we would back him. He decided that he wanted to be a drummer, so we bought him drums. And he played the drums in the church a long time. Then he decided that he wanted to play the piano, so rather than buy him a whole new piano and then find out that he didn’t want to play it, we bought him a keyboard. And he took that keyboard and worked miracles with it.”
“It was a constant thing,” adds Regina. “He stuck with it. He could do that for days and days on end.”
In Boonville, City Spud doesn’t do much of anything for days and days on end. He plays a lot of chess and checkers and he writes. Since “Ride Wit Me” hit, he started getting more mail in a week than he had in all the time he’d spent here prior. Most of the fans show him love, tell him to keep his head up and to keep thinking about the music, which they adore.
Most of the inmates know that he’s a St. Lunatic, but it’s not much of an issue here. When Country Grammar exploded, and when “Ride Wit Me,” which is officially attributed to “Nelly featuring City Spud,” cracked the Top 5 on the Billboard singles charts, his name became more recognizable inside. But the inmates leave him alone. “There’s not a difference in the way they treat me,” he says. “More people are saying ‘What’s up, City?’ now. It’s cool. But it wasn’t like they was treating me a certain way but then when it came out and blew up like it blew — it wasn’t like, ‘Ah, we gotta treat ’em this way now.’ Not with the people that I’m cool with anyway.
“I feel I’m an inspiration to some, in the sense that I’m still part of the group that broke the ice for St. Louis. A lot of the guys that are up here that got a lot of great talent are on their way home. I talk to them, let them know this-and-that. We share ideas. I just tell them what I know and how things go, because a lot of the guys just know this-and-that. But they don’t know the things behind this-and-that.”
As with a lot of the other inmates, a single misjudgment cost him dearly. But it also divided him from a blast of fame. Nelly and the St. Lunatics are everywhere: in the magazines, causing a ruckus in airplanes, hopping from party to party, touring with Destiny’s Child, playing, making money and spending it, fucking, smoking — doing it right — experiencing in real life all the toys and games that as wannabes they’d long pined for. The St. Lunatics have arrived, and musicians only arrive once and shine for so long; regardless of when City Spud gets out, he will have missed the salad days of the St. Lunatics, a group that he helped form in 1992. That said, Spud will be in a better position than everyone else here when he’s released: The royalty checks are rolling right in and gathering interest; by the time he’s released, he’ll likely realize that a gold Humvee isn’t the smartest way to spend $100,000.
None of the Lunatics have visited him in the nearly two years he’s been at Boonville. Both his mother and his grandparents say he has been angry at the Lunatics for not visiting him. Asked whether he wants them to, he pauses. “I really don’t — I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not like, ‘Come see me man — I want to see you.’ Because they’re busy. They’re rarely in St. Louis anyway. So if they’re here, they’re here for a day or two, and then they’re right back out.”
Even if they made the time to visit Spud, Nelly and the St. Lunatics would be discreet about it. They’re walking a line right now. With fame comes unforgiving scrutiny; the audience gravitating to the Lunatics consists equally of pop and hip-hop fans, some of them teens, and parents pay close attention to the music their impressionable children choose to consume. Were they more of a thug group designed to appeal to the rough-and-tumble hip-hop crowd, the Lunatics could wear as a badge of honor the fact that one of their members is locked up. They’d be considered more “real” and more believable when rhyming about the thug life. But although the Lunatics’ music contains a fair amount of cussing and smoking and lovemaking, they’re not thugs and aren’t interested in that angle. So they’re attracting listeners who are not enamored of felonious behavior. A little partying, Lunatics-style, is OK. But a member of the group involved in a shooting crime could change the perception of the Lunatics. This sensitivity was evident in every interview with St. Lunatics members: A publicist was always on the phone line with them, ready to nix any discussion of the specifics of Spud’s crime. Though the publicist insisted that she was simply fending off any information that might be used against him in appeal, it was clear that their record label would prefer this incident to remain as hush-hush as possible. Nelly isn’t commenting on his friend’s situation.
Lunatics manager Tony Davis says the group hasn’t visited Spud to protect his safety: Boonville officials suggested it might not be a good idea. When inmates “start seeing the cars and jewelry,” he says, “when people really start seeing it, that’s when the jealousy comes out. Even though we sold 2 or 3 million albums before we started purchasing cars and jewelry, it’s just like — when they were just seeing them on TV and hearing about it, it was all good. But when you start seeing them roll around the streets in Benzes and Hummers and all the jewelry, that’s when people started spreading rumors. And that’s what the jail was saying. If people can start seeing his picture, it might just click in their head: This is really who that is.”
Davis acknowledges, though, that talk of City Spud’s situation is kept to a minimum: “With Nelly’s success, we always tried to avoid the question or stay away from it.”
So they shout to him in other, more discreet ways. They named their album for him. They call to him on the record. They talk to him on the phone. They’re showing him love; it’s just not face-to-face. Plus, Spud’s a quiet, humble guy. Says Ali: “You know how he is. He’s always like, ‘I’m cool.’ But we’re like, ‘Spud, what you need? You got money in your account, we got money, what you need?’ Whatever, whatever. [City says,] ‘Nah, I’m happy. Just keep doing it.’
“The whole fact of like using Free City like that,” continues Ali, “was to just scream his name out for him, like, ‘Yo, we know how he feels because we all cried — we went all this way together and then boom. We ain’t going to let you die at all. We got you and we trying to get you out of there, and we gonna just shout your name.’”
Their devotion isn’t surprising. The St. Lunatics, all out of high school and working day jobs, formed in 1993. Consisting of Nelly, Ali, Kyjuan, Murphy Lee and City Spud, the five decided to make a go of it in their spare time while they were working elsewhere: A couple were doing the college thing, others were making money in the service industry. In the rap world of the early ’90s, St. Louis was nowheresville. The East Coast’s reign was on the wane — Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions and Big Daddy Kane were played out — and the West Coast gangsta rap of NWA and their offshoots (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E) and Snoop Doggy Dog were selling like crazy. The rap scene seemed to leap from the left coast to the right coast in a single bound, completely hopping over the Midwest talent as it made its way to LA. If you were making hip-hop in the Lou in the mid-’90s you may as well have been in Anchorage; no one from the industry was searching St. Louis, or any other city in the middle of America, for the next big thing. No one heard a sound.
The St. Lunatics matured inside this abyss. They approached the business with discipline and determination. Temptation was out there — how do you pay the bills as a North Side teenager? Work in fast food? Become a professional athlete? Play the drug game? At least one member of the crew has admitted in song to dabbling with the latter: “I opened up shop at 13,” rhymes Nelly on Country Grammar as he lists a string of substances available at his store. But the short-term gain of the drug trade doesn’t fly for long if you’ve got half a brain. The Lunatics, says Ali, decided that they’d better keep straight if they wanted to win in the music industry. “That was something that we talked about. We cleared that up from day one when we started the Lunatics in ’93. We sat down like a firm or some type of corporation at a young age and was like, ‘Yo, we gonna start a group, we gonna be focused, we gonna do it like this.’ It was all crazy at the beginning how we used to do it: If you’re late, you do pushups and all kind of stuff. We’re not doing this because we’re not risking going to jail, because if we go to jail, it’s like this-and-that. That was a firm thing with us.”
Around the same time, City Spud was transferring his expertise on the drums to learning beat production in the studio. While the others were honing their rhyme skills, Spud and J.E. were working the beats. Spud “was mostly getting into production first,” says Murphy Lee, “so rapping wasn’t it. It was like, ‘I can produce.’ It was easy for him to write a rap, so easy to write a whole song, a whole album as well as that. He was trying to expand his stuff, so he was on the production big. Spud was in the studio — studio man — studio and Spud, studio and Spud.”
“When we first started out back in the day,” adds Ali, “getting different equipment here and there, Spud was just studying, studying, studying to where we look up and, OK, he got that one. Move on to the next one.”
You know the type: the quiet guy who talks little, but put him in front of a musical instrument and magical, fluent language flows out effortlessly. That’s the sound of a Spud track: smooth, melodic, dense and rolling with a deep thunder-beat, perfectly suited for both a late-night cruise and a sweaty club.
The group’s break arrived in ’97 when DJ Kut started playing the St. Lunatics single “Gimme What You Got” on radio station The Beat; suddenly, the sound of this city was airing next to Biggie, Tupac and the Wu-Tang Clan, and the cut didn’t sound out of place; it didn’t sound local, didn’t sound minor league, didn’t sound like a North County basement track. “Everybody in the city had a feeling,” says Ali. “Everybody was like, ‘Yo, you know they from St. Louis? That’s from St. Louis!’ It was one of the best songs on the radio at the time. ‘Whoa, who they? Where they from? They from St. Louis!’ Everybody was showing us love: ‘Ain’t you one of the Lunatics?’ It was crazy, and Spud was like a big, big, big attraction.” Why? “The girls,” he says with a laugh. “Him and Nelly had like a battle — it was friendly, it wasn’t personal — but as far as the girls, the girls in the audience were like, ‘Nelly, yeah! Spud, yeah!’ They just had it going like that.”
Soon enough the word started spreading to the labels. With the success in Atlanta of the Organized Noise camp and in New Orleans of the Cash Money and No Limit camps, the gaze of the industry was starting to focus on the No Coast, and the major-label scouts were looking for that Midwest flavor.
The St. Lunatics started to make their mark after a visit to Atlanta, where they passed out some tapes of their music, one of which ended up in the hands of someone with influence. The buzz was starting in the early part of 1999. A jittery sort of excitement started to consume the city; finally, somebody was showing them how it’s done St. Louis-style.
But the members of the group were still working their day jobs. The money was just up the way, so close you could see it, but it hadn’t arrived yet. They had a tiny hit on a radio station in a city not known as a hip-hop hotspot. It wasn’t much, but it was something, just enough of a taste to send the mind reeling at the possibilities. Just enough to make a man’s head get a little fuzzy, to start thinking down the line at the potential. Just enough to assess the current situation and find it lacking.
Nelly was working at the post office. Ali was cutting hair at a barbershop. Murphy Lee was at Office Max. Kyjuan was out at Lambert. And Spud was at McDonald’s. “That’s all you knew him from,” says Murphy. “Anytime we was at the park, anytime we was around, he had on a McDonald’s tie with the button-up shirt. That’s what you knew Spud from, flat-out: McDonald’s. All his life that’s what he’d been — that and rapping.”
McDonald’s or rap star? Friday night he’s onstage and the girls are gazing. Saturday night the same girls are at the counter asking him to Super Size it for them. What self-respecting rap star’s gonna accept that? Spud made a play, and the play set the stage. “I had quit McDonald’s, it had been like three or four years, and it was like, doing this rap, I think my ego was getting in the way. I’m thinking, ‘All right, we got this buzz on this song. We’re this hot rap group in St. Louis, and you come in McDonald’s, you can find one of the rappers — he’s working there.’ No. You couldn’t catch me there. I needed — I was trying to get the fast money then. We’re discussing deals with this company and that company, it’s looking good because we’re having meetings with major labels, but every time you turn around it’s like, no, no, no. So I’m steady, I’m like, no, this ain’t working. I’m trying to get money right now to tide me over just in case somebody does pop up. And both of them popped up at the same time. My situation and the yes with the record company.”
“We were just about to start to really see something, production money-wise, you know?” says Lunatics road manager and longtime friend Yella. “We were right there. We were feeling good, you know what I’m saying? And then for this to happen, we were like, ‘What? What is going on?’ It was right at the edge. We were right there.”
Boom. The word appears in conversations with Spud, his family and the Lunatics, as if “the incident” were a blind-side punch, something that happened to City Spud rather than Spud making a conscious decision to get involved in a double-cross. It was as though he’d been hit by a car or struck by lightning.
That view is understandable — he’d never been in trouble with the law. No misdemeanors. No run-ins. No midnight knocks on the door. Just a quiet kid working on the music, working at McDonald’s and having some fun. Joining up with a few friends and sowing the seeds of a dream, one that was as honest and serious as it was funky.
But on April 15, 1999, Spud was riding with the wrong person. Making money. That wrong person was somebody with a record, a reputation and a ride, and Spud needed a ride. When the beep came from the buyer, the driver suggested that they jack him. “I was thinking no,” says Spud in his statement, “but I said whatever.”
It was a crucial “whatever” from someone who’s always been laidback, says his mother, Donna Webb. “Lavell has always been a very easygoing, nonchalant, laidback person. So, knowing him the way I do, I really believe that what happened that night was that his level of indifference took over, not even beginning to think in his wildest dreams that that would have happened — not saying yes, not saying no, but ‘whatever.’”
Doug Sidel, the assistant St. Louis County prosecutor who handled the case, spins the incident differently. Spud was an active participant in a classic setup: Lure someone out into the night with a lot of cash in his pocket, then jack him. “Lavell shows [his partner] where the kid lives, shows him where the kid’s car’s parked, and he drops this co-defendant off and the guy hides behind some kind of a wall.” No, Lavell Webb did not do any shooting or robbing. But without his knowledge, the gunman would never have been able to jack anyone. Instead of a “whatever,” had Webb uttered a simple “no,” the shooting wouldn’t have happened.
After the shooting, Spud wrote in his statement to police, his partner drove him home: “I walked in the house and just sat in the dark thinking why and how did I get myself in some bullshit like this. The next day my friend said the police had been by his house. He gave me the card, then my brother said the police had been by my grandma’s house. So I came here to talk.”
Spud laid it all out for them. He told the truth. He hopped into a police car and even tried to help track down the gunman. And when, at the end of that night, he was finished telling them his story, when he thought he was on his way to at least partially absolving himself of responsibility, when it was time for them to let him go — they didn’t. They locked him up and charged him with one count of first-degree robbery, one count of first-degree assault and two counts of armed criminal action. Then he called a lawyer.
Had he walked in there the way that the gunman did a few days later, with a lawyer on one side and feigned ignorance on the other, there’s a good chance Spud would be free now. Unlike Spud, the gunman hasn’t been charged. He had been masked, so the victim couldn’t identify him. Without the weapon, which the gunman apparently ditched, the only proof of his identity was City Spud’s word, which wasn’t good enough.
Had City Spud not made a statement implicating himself, not said a single word, the only evidence that could have connected him to the crime would have been circumstantial: the victim’s word that the gunman knew he was carrying a large amount of cash. Spud wasn’t on the crime scene, the victim himself acknowledges.
It’s heartbreaking for his family and friends: Telling the truth got Spud locked up. Saying nothing, invoking the Fifth, could have kept him free. “As a mother, I struggle every day with how I raise my children, and that was to be honest, to tell the truth, the police is your friend,” says Donna Webb. “And in those situations where those are the options, honesty is always the best policy. So even though I know in my mind as an adult of reasonable intelligence that this is not my fault, I believe that it is my fault. I struggle with the fact that I taught Lavell the right way, I taught him to be honest, I taught him to tell the truth, I taught him to trust the police. So in a situation like this, the fact that he did the right thing cost him a lot, and it’s a major sacrifice to me.”
Sidel acknowledges that Spud’s honesty led him to prison. “Well, I guess that’s a possibility,” he says. “I mean, that’s correct. But people implicate themselves in statements to the police every day. Statements are used against people all the time. So he’s not the exception. It’s not an exceptional situation.”
On the advice of his lawyer, Levell Littleton, City Spud pleaded guilty to two of the four charges: first-degree robbery and armed criminal action. Because of his lack of a criminal record and the help he gave police in trying to track down the gunman, the family had hoped the system would be lenient with Spud. This was not the case. Given the state’s minimum sentencing laws for felonies (which require criminals to serve 85 percent of their sentences), St. Louis County Circuit Judge James Hartenbach didn’t have much power to be lenient. He gave City Spud the minimum sentence on both charges: 10 years for first-degree robbery and three years for armed criminal action. But Hartenbach could have suspended Webb’s 10-year sentence, which would have sent him to prison for only three years. Instead, citing the grave injuries to the victim, Hartenbach ordered Webb to serve the sentences concurrently. With the 85 percent minimum requirement, Webb is in until at least 2008.
Spud’s family was blindsided by such a lengthy sentence for a first-time offender. The morning of the sentencing, says Donna Webb, Littleton came into the courtroom and told them that “he had done the best he could and that Lavell was going to be put in. Well, that was devastating, but, still, he also did say that he probably wouldn’t do more than 18 months. An hour or so later we go into the courtroom and the judge sentences him to three years on the ACA charge and 10 years on the robbery charge, and then makes a statement that says, ‘Are you aware of the 85 percent rule?’ And the answer is no, never knew that.” The family’s outrage is now directed at Littleton. They say he left them in the dark about the threa