Killings Read online

  Jonathan Henry, as described in court, seemed even more disreputable than those who had testified that he might have been murdered. Michael Thompson, a Warlock who appeared in a kind of Hitler mustache, took the stand to describe how he and Henry spent their days. Henry would come by for him every day about three or four in the afternoon, and then they would “just ride around, get some beer and drink, do anything we wanted to, really.” Thompson said they occasionally dealt in LSD, in a minor way, for gas money. The proprietor of a bar frequented by the Warlocks testified that Henry had waved a gun around, threatening people, the night before he died. Mervin testified that Henry had bragged to him about shooting someone—or, as Mervin put it, about having to “dust somebody off.”

  Henry, in fact, sounded remarkably like the description that West Chester State students offer of John Mervin. But after a week’s testimony, the assistant district attorney was under no illusions about being able to persuade the jury that John Mervin was anything but a decent young officer who had once been obliged to pretend to be like Jonathan Henry. After reminding the jury that they were not trying “the police or police in general or the issue of Support Your Local Police,” the assistant district attorney further reminded them that neither sympathy nor prejudice should affect a jury’s decision—and the sympathy and prejudice he was talking about was sympathy for John Mervin, a young college student, and prejudice against Jonathan Henry, a violent drug peddler. The judge repeated the admonition in his charge: “We are not here concerned with whether Henry deserved to live.”

  It took the jury approximately twenty-five minutes to reach a verdict of not guilty. Afterward, in the corridor, the jurors were having a final chat with each other when Mervin walked by, holding hands with a pretty girl. A number of the jurors walked up to shake his hand and pat him on the back and wish him luck. “Thank you. Thank you, sir,” Mervin said to one of them. They smiled at him as he walked on down the corridor—a nice-looking, neatly dressed, polite young man who did look as if he had always been clean.

  Jim, Tex, and the One-armed Man

  * * *

  Center Junction, Iowa

  FEBRUARY 1971

  Jim Berry came to Center Junction in 1962 and didn’t do much that anybody approved of from then until the time he left, rather suddenly, last June. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, he had ended up in Center Junction because a decrepit house there happened to become available sometime after he married a woman from a nearby town. He hadn’t been in the house long before he was in an argument with the town council about whether he could be forced to install a septic tank. His steadiest source of support for a houseful of children and stepchildren seemed to be Aid for Dependent Children payments—a form of welfare small-town people in Iowa tend to consider a government subsidy for random breeding. Some people in Center Junction say they found Jim Berry a likable person when he was sober, but nobody liked him when he was drunk. Dorothy’s Tap, the only tavern in town, wouldn’t serve him. When Jim Berry drank, one citizen recalls, “he was always a-needlin’ and a-pushin’.” He owned a shotgun and a rifle and a pistol, and it was said that he could throw a knife well enough to take the bark off a tree. There were stories in Center Junction about people who had called Jim Berry’s bluff and faced him down—the way a Western-movie hero might face somebody down in a bar—but a lot of people, aware, perhaps, that they really might not act like a Western-movie hero if Berry started needling them, feared and resented him. Someone who asks a citizen of Center Junction for an explanation of why Jim Berry was so belligerent when drunk is likely to get a simple, direct answer. “He had Indian blood in him,” the citizen will say. “Liquor makes ’em wild.”

  People found it irritating that Berry always seemed to get away with things. Nobody in Center Junction has ever got away with much. Most people who live in Center Junction live there because they were born there. Since there isn’t any work to speak of in the town itself—it’s a fading little farm town of only about two hundred people—a lot of people drive to work every day in places like Monticello or Anamosa or even Cedar Rapids, thirty miles away. Some of their children get tired of driving and move to Cedar Rapids. Jim Berry never woke up early on a cold morning to drive to the Cuckler Steel Span Company, in Monticello. He was an upholsterer by trade, but he worked at it only sporadically. After an operation on his back a few years ago, he began drawing Social Security disability payments. People in Center Junction muttered that his back seemed all right for hunting or fishing or leaning over a bar. Nothing serious seemed to happen to Berry when the deputy sheriff picked him up for drunkenness or driving without a license. People in Center Junction often say that Jim Berry once killed a child on the highway in the southwestern part of the state. In fact, a manslaughter charge against him was dismissed; he served a few months for leaving the scene of an accident. When people mention the case, they seem angry not only that a child died but also that Berry seemed to have got away with something.

  Center Junction people admit that when Berry did do upholstery it was excellent work—work that made it easy to believe him when he said that in Nashville he and his brother did the jobs for the city’s top four decorators. In fact, people in Center Junction say that Jim Berry was good at whatever interested him. “There ain’t nothing Jim couldn’t tell you; there ain’t nothing he couldn’t fix, or even make,” one of them has said. “I don’t know what his IQ was supposed to be, but something fantastic.” A couple of years ago, Berry took a correspondence course in electronics. He fixed a few radios and television sets—and fixed them well—but the main result of the course was that he became an avid citizens band radio operator, installing an elaborate rig in the shed he sometimes used as an upholstery shop. He got to know citizens band slang, so that, wanting to sign off to another CBer and send regards to the man’s wife, he could say, “Seventy-threes, good buddy, and a stack of eighty-eights for the XYL.” He even went to a couple of CB jamborees. He was particularly proud of having the most powerful station in the area. (“Jim had to be top of the hill,” one of the townspeople says.) By “skipping” signals off the ionosphere, CBers often operate at distances much greater than the hundred and fifty miles permitted by FCC regulations, and Berry boasted of being able to talk to West Germany every morning. Because skipping is against the regulations, CBers who do it identify themselves with “skip handles” rather than real names or call letters, and often use the handles even for legal conversations. Berry liked to call himself the Bald-Headed Hippie or Freddy the Freeloader for long-distance broadcasting. The skip handle he preferred locally was Buckshot.

  —

  Around June of 1969, Jim Berry got into a CB conversation with a man who had an even more powerful station than he did—a man called Tex Yarborough, who lived in Maquoketa, Iowa, about twenty-five miles east. It turned out that Tex Yarborough and Jim Berry had a lot in common—although Tex was only about thirty, a dozen years younger than Jim. Like Jim, Tex had ended up in his wife’s home county, having come up from Dallas a couple of years before. He had three rifles and a pistol. Tex was a machinist by trade, but, like Jim, he didn’t make a fetish out of steady work. In fact, he didn’t work for the year he knew Jim Berry. (When Mrs. Yarborough was asked later how her husband managed, with no income, to support a wife, three children, a roomful of radio equipment, and three cars, each car with its own CB mobile unit, she said, “Credit. We had good credit.”) Like Berry, Tex was a proud son of his home state. He ordinarily wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and he apparently claimed at times to be a cousin of Ralph Yarborough’s, who was then the senior senator from Texas. Tex had been in trouble for offenses like passing bad checks and assault and battery, and he had been in jail in Texas. His skip handles were Short Stuff, Tex, and Dirty Pierre.

  Jim Berry and Tex Yarborough became friends. They spent a lot of time talking on the radio—to each other and to people like Lumberjack and Blue Goose and Sparkplug and the Mustanger. That fall, they met often to go hunting or fishi
ng or drinking. They had their differences. Jim believed that Tex sometimes “threw a carrier” on him—that is, keyed his microphone so that people talking on weaker stations would be cut off. (Center Junction people claim that Jim was in the habit of throwing carriers himself.) One night, when Jim and Tex returned to the Yarborough house after visiting a few taverns, they had a scuffle that consisted of—depending on which story is believed—Tex’s knocking Jim down for making an offensive remark to Mrs. Yarborough, or Jim’s trying to help Tex to bed drunk and being attacked for his trouble. But Tex put in some radio equipment for Jim, and Jim, in return, agreed to make some new cushions and a skirt for the Yarboroughs’ couch—a project that was only half-finished when a fire in Jim’s shed burned up the rest of Tex’s material. According to Berry, there was even talk about a partnership: in a building Yarborough knew about in Maquoketa, Jim would do upholstering while Tex acted as salesman and deliverer. That was supposedly the project Jim wanted to talk about when he asked Tex to come by—about a year after they had met—and they went to Lou’s Place in Monticello, where they met the one-armed man.

  —

  Lou’s Place, identified by a sign for Hamm’s Beer on a side street in Monticello, has a beer-company décor. There is a Schlitz clock, a Miller clock, and three Hamm’s clocks. Calendars are by Budweiser, Pabst, and Hamm’s; lamps by Pabst, Hamm’s, and Schlitz. About the only objects of nonbrewery art are three tapestries—peacocks, mountain goats, and horses—that Lou (Louise Garrett) bought once from a foreign-looking traveling man. In Lou’s Place, people often argue in loud voices and men use bad language in front of women, who use bad language back. But the most abusive customer can usually be put out by a barmaid, who may be only five feet two but has the advantage of being sober, of having put out a number of similarly abusive customers in the past, and of holding the power to refuse service indefinitely. Jim and Tex arrived at about noon on a Friday in June—Tex a heavyset man wearing his customary cowboy boots and cowboy hat, Jim a taller, thinner man with a small, tired-looking face. They had come in about the same time the day before, and Bonnie Balsiger, the barmaid on duty, remembered them well—particularly Tex Yarborough. “He told me, ‘I don’t know how I ended up in a dumpy little town like this,’ ” she said later. “I told him that no one drug him into the town and if he didn’t like it he could get the hell out of it.” At one point in that first afternoon, Bonnie, leaning over the bar to pick up a glass, had noticed that Yarborough had a knife in his lap. He was talking about using it to slice up Jim Berry.

  “You’re going to have to forgive me for what I’m going to have to do,” Tex told Bonnie.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, don’t do it in here,” she said. She ordered Tex to put away the knife or get out, and he put away the knife. He and Jim had spent the rest of the afternoon drinking together. “He was real picky, real boisterous, real loudmouthed,” Bonnie said later of Tex. “The kind you have to cool down.”

  On Friday afternoon, Tex and Jim spent some time drinking with a group of pipeline workers, including a one-armed man named Jim Leonard. Wet weather had stopped work on a gas line being laid near what Jim Leonard remembered as “some little ole bitty place south of Anamosa.” He had come into Lou’s Place to ask his boss for an advance on his wages so he could drive home for the weekend to Bald Knob, Arkansas, where he and a number of other pipeliners live between jobs—relying on two subscriptions to a pipeline newsletter from Houston to keep them informed about where the next job might be. He had stayed around for a few hours to drink. Leonard’s boss, agreeing to the advance, had laid a hundred-dollar bill on the table. The hundred-dollar bill was just about the conversational high point in a long afternoon at Lou’s Place that was otherwise marked by Lou’s telling Tex Yarborough that he was being too argumentative to be allowed at the pipeliners’ table and by a number of people present getting into an argument about something called a water dog. (Jim Berry said water dogs were very common in Tennessee—“kind of like a lizard but with skin like a catfish”—and made excellent bait for striped bass. The other side questioned not only whether a water dog made good bait for striped bass but whether there was such a thing as a water dog. For Lou’s Place, the argument was, as Jim Berry later described it, “a regular argument—a group argument.”) At one point in the afternoon, Berry had asked Jim Leonard, the one-armed man, for a ride home—Center Junction being, in a manner of speaking, on the way to Bald Knob—and at about seven they left for Berry’s house, stopping on the way so that Berry could buy a pint of Jim Beam.

  At Center Junction, Berry showed Leonard his radio set and his guns, and then they sat down for a drink in the living room—a room with a floor of worn linoleum and walls decorated with a three-dimensional picture of the Statue of Liberty and an operating cuckoo clock and a picture of a saucer-eyed soldier over a passage about mother love (“A mother’s love is like a rose hung on your chest…”). Mrs. Berry was not living with her husband at the time—she and the children were in an apartment in Anamosa, the county seat—and Berry made a phone call to Maquoketa trying, fruitlessly, to find a couple of girls. Not long after that, Tex Yarborough came in the door. “I want that hundred-dollar bill,” he said to Jim Leonard. There was a brief scuffle, and then Leonard ran out to the front yard, only to be caught by Yarborough and knocked to the ground. Suddenly the one-armed man kicked at Yarborough and jumped to his feet. “They’re trying to kill me!” he shouted. “They’re trying to rob me!” And, with a terrified look on his face, he ran down the street—at a speed he later estimated at five hundred miles an hour. Tex slowly walked back up to the house, where Jim Berry was standing in the doorway, holding his 20-gauge shotgun. Tex was only a couple of feet from the door when Jim fired the gun. Tex seemed to stand still for a moment. Then he turned and walked off the porch into the yard. “You shot me, you rat,” he said. “You shot me.” He walked across the street and sat down next to an old stump. Then he got up and walked back across the street and crawled into the front seat of the one-armed man’s car. He was there when the ambulance arrived. The deputy sheriff came and took Jim Berry to jail in Anamosa. One of the neighbors locked Tex Yarborough’s car. The motor was still running, and so was the citizens band mobile unit.

  —

  Tex Yarborough died later that evening, from the damage done by a shotgun wound in the stomach. When Jim Berry came to trial in Anamosa last fall, he said that he had shot Tex in self-defense—that Tex had been holding what seemed like a knife when he stood over the one-armed man, that Tex had muttered, “You’re next, Berry, you son of a bitch,” as he slowly approached the door, that Tex had reached for the gun. The way the events were seen by some people who live in a neat white house across the street—people who wouldn’t have been surprised at just about anything they saw going on in Jim Berry’s ragged front yard—Yarborough stepped onto the porch, the screen door flew open, and he was shot. Jim Leonard—referred to by everybody involved as “the one-armed man”—said that he, too, had seen something that he thought was a knife in Yarborough’s hand, and that Yarborough had said, “Give me that money or I’ll cut your goddamn throat.” The prosecution pointed out that Berry had said nothing about a knife until a few hours after he was in custody—at which point the deputy sheriff had returned to look around the yard, finding only a cowboy hat. The jury failed to reach a verdict.

  A lot of people in Center Junction were outraged that Jim Berry had apparently got away with something again. As his second trial approached and the news got out that the county had hired a special prosecutor from Cedar Rapids to help the county attorney, it was said around town that if Berry was found innocent and returned to Center Junction, some of his neighbors would sell their houses and leave. The second trial was held in Cedar Rapids, so not many Center Junction people could attend regularly, but a number of them showed up for the closing arguments—the men identifiable by the start of beards being grown for this summer’s Center Junction centennial celebration. Berry’s
mother came up from Tennessee for the trial. (In answer to a reporter’s question, she said that Jim’s grandmother on his father’s side had been part Indian; she volunteered the information that Jim, as a fourteen-year-old who had managed to join the Navy during the war, had had his picture in papers all over the country for collecting so many dimes for the campaign against polio.) The evidence was much the same as it had been at the first trial. Berry again testified that Tex had told him about past acts of violence—about pulling a man off a barstool at the Wagon Wheel in Maquoketa and stomping his face in, about beating a man’s brains out with a frying pan. The jury, after two days of deliberations, failed to reach a verdict. The jurors had seemed attentive but puzzled. Why didn’t Berry just lock the door if he had been threatened? But why would he shoot Tex Yarborough if he hadn’t been threatened? But then why would people spend a Friday afternoon at Lou’s Place arguing about water dogs?