by Dan Barry
Later, in the foggy darkness outside the prison, someone will read a statement from the ex-wife, Crystal Holton, in which she says that all the anger and hatred can finally leave her, to be replaced by a child’s innocent love—“love times four.”
Later, well after sunrise, Kelly Gleason, one of the lawyers who fought to keep Mr. Holton alive, will set aside her mourning for a friend and give in to fitful sleep.
Later, in the hot afternoon some 50 miles to the south, four polished tombstones will again cast shadows toward a playground at the bottom of a cemetery’s hill. Arranged in order of age, the stones bear the names of the four Holton children: Stephen, 12, Brent, 10, Eric, 6, and Kayla, 4.
But first confirmation, in accordance with procedures. And now the disembodied voice of Tennessee: “Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the legal execution of Daryl Holton. The time of death, 1:25. Please exit.”
A Violation of Both the Law and the Spirit
RIPTON, VT.—JANUARY 28, 2008
Imagining that late December night of long darkness, you can almost hear these youths of Vermont tramping up to the isolated farmhouse to intrude upon the sanctuary stillness. The break of snow beneath their feet would be the least of it.
They had driven or walked a half-mile up a snow-covered lane called Frost Road, then trudged past a large blue sign that explained the historic significance of the farmhouse and the cabin beyond. And now they were entering the coldness of an uninhabited place, carrying with them cases of beer, bottles of rum and a store of ignorance about things that matter here.
Over the next several hours, more than 30 teenagers and young adults toasted their post-adolescence with liquor carrying the added kick of illicitness. By early morning they were gone, leaving a wounded house watched over by winter-stripped birches and sugar maples.
The damage left in their wake reflected some alcohol-induced mischief tinged with certain anger. Broken window, broken screen, broken dishes, broken antiques. Pieces of a broken chair used for wood in the fireplace. Gobs of phlegm spat upon hanging artwork. Vomit, urine, beer everywhere. And a blanket of yellow, pollen-like dust, discharged from fire extinguishers in parting punctuation.
Before long, distressing word spread from Ripton to Middlebury and beyond that the preserved farmhouse once owned by Robert Frost had been vandalized—desecrated, some said. If these children of the Green Mountains knew this house was once Frost’s, then shame. If they did not know, then shame still; they should have. How many had been weaned on Frost? How many had tromped through here on class trips and family outings?
It seemed once that Robert Frost would be with us forever, like some lichen-laced stone in a field. But finally he did die, in 1963 at the age of 88, leaving biographers to quarrel about his merits as a man and readers to marvel over his body of work, which, among other achievements, twinned a mastery of language with wisdom about natural things.
Here, though, Frost lingers. Peering down from his portrait in the Middlebury Inn. Speaking through snippets of poetry displayed at the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail. Shuffling in spirit around the Homer Noble Farm, which he bought in 1939 and lived in during summer and fall: there in the rustic cabin above, writing, ruminating, while his close friend and protector, Kay Morrison, in the now-vandalized farmhouse just below, screened visitors eager for an audience with the great and garrulous bard—who might very well talk and talk until those visitors fairly begged to be dismissed.
Imagining still, as all poets invite us to, you can almost see Frost observing the vandalism and aftermath from that cabin above, wondering briefly whether these youths were, say, acolytes of Carl Sandburg, exacting revenge because Frost considered their hero poet second-rate. Sipping his tea, he rummages through his mind’s deep storehouse for the metaphors that would provide context, that would find renewal in this destruction.
A day or so after the vandalism, a passing hiker alerted Middlebury College, which now owns the property, that the farmhouse door was open. Then a car wedged in snow off the main road led the authorities to a young man who said he had been at a party in the area. Oh really, said Sgt. Lee Hodsden of the state police.
With the help of Officer Scott Fisher of the Middlebury police, who is based mostly at Middlebury Union High School, Sergeant Hodsden gathered names, called in witnesses and heard accounts of that night, some delivered through tears, a couple with indifference. What emerged was a small-town epic about so much more than $10,000 in damages.
A 17-year-old boy who had once worked as a kitchen aide at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus recognized the remote farmhouse’s potential for parties. He also knew a young adult willing to buy the central party ingredient, alcohol, at the Hannaford Supermarket. Word spread by mouth and text messages.
Mix 30 or more young people with 150 cans of beer, a few bottles of liquor and some drugs, put them in a museum-like, unheated house in the dead of winter, and the ensuing discussions will not center on the sublime construction of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Some played drinking games, some got sick, some did damage, and all followed that snowy path out, bound together by a secret that could not keep.
Even a frozen meadow sends ripples when disturbed.
Rippling through Middlebury College, which dispatched a cleaning crew to the farmhouse. Kelly Trayah was among those who cleaned up the vomit, repaired the furniture, wiped the yellow dust from the many books, and now he wonders whatever happened to respect for elders. He is 37.
Through the college’s classrooms, where the English professor and nature writer John Elder, intimately familiar with the farmhouse and cabin, wonders what possibilities the destruction might provide. Could this violation of Frost lead to a celebration of Frost?
Through Middlebury Union High School, where administrators and teachers are talking about disconnection and, once again, substance abuse. For the rest of the year, the principal, William Lawson, predicted, “there will be a lot of Robert Frost quoted.”
Finally, through the state police barracks, where Sergeant Hodsden had more than two dozen young people photographed, fingerprinted and cited for unlawful trespass, with a few also cited for unlawful mischief. He cannot shake the indifference of one youth in particular, who asked whether he could use his mug shot on his Facebook page.
In conveying his disgust over this communal breach, the police sergeant employed the Frostian technique of repetition.
“They should have known,” he said. “They should have known.”
A Name and Face No One Knew, but Never Forgot
FRANKFORT, KY.—APRIL 21, 2008
After the murder, the body was swaddled in bedsheets and a Mickey Mouse blanket. It was placed in a van, driven far from any road in rural Henry County and dumped in a narrow creek bed, just as another July day was dawning.
The summer of 1998 baked on. Autumn arrived to rain-swell the creek and send skull bits floating down the bed of silt and stone. Winter followed to skim the mesh of gray twigs and pale bones with a veil of ice. Then, one February morning, two hunters running their beagles were stopped cold in their tracks; the living, finally, took notice.
Soon came Dr. Emily Craig, Kentucky’s well-respected forensic anthropologist, along with County Coroner Jimmy Pollard and a couple of state police detectives, all tutored in her lesson not to treat crime scenes as Easter egg hunts. She put on her latex gloves and thick boots, got down into the creek, and began handing up pieces of a broken human being, the evidence already shouting to her that this was a man shot dead in the head.
Investigators recovered most of a skeleton and some associated evidence, including a brown sandal, a gold bracelet and a mesh shirt bearing a Dallas Cowboys insignia. Now for the questions:
Who were you?
Who killed you?
Back in her autopsy room in Frankfort, Dr. Craig logged the case by pen in the official register: “John Doe,” she wrote. Then she laid the bones in anatomical order on a stainless-steel gurney and developed a rough
description. Male; possibly Hispanic; at least 30 years old; about six feet tall; extensive dental work, including a gold crown. Dead about six months.
The state police publicized a description of what the dead man might have looked like. Dozens answered, hoping and not hoping that their father, husband, brother, son, had been found. But nothing panned out. So Dr. Craig applied clay to skull to create a facial reconstruction for the public’s consideration; again, nothing. She and the other investigators moved on to other cases just as sad.
They did not know that 1,250 miles away, in the South Texas town of Freer, a distraught mother had reported her 34-year-old son missing.
The bones were placed in a small plastic tub labeled “Henry Co. Doe” and tucked into an evidence room used to store books, Christmas decorations and the bones of Kentucky’s unidentified dead going back 30 years. Here was a tub labeled “River Legs”; there, a bag labeled “Shelby County Babies.”
More seasons passed. One day in October 2000, Detective Jim Griffin of the state police learned that a man just arrested for a minor crime wanted to talk about one of his old cases: the creek-bed body. The detective was skeptical, having wasted years of time listening to jailhouse lies. He arranged to meet the man; you never know.
The informant said he was awakened one night in July 1998 by two agitated acquaintances saying they needed his help. He so feared one of the men that he saw no way out. So he helped them lug a wrapped body out of a remote farmhouse and into a van, took a long ride, and then joined in dumping that body in a creek.
The skeptical detective asked the man for just one detail, just one, that no one else could know. The man paused, then said: The body was wrapped in a Mickey Mouse blanket.
“Gave me goose bumps,” Detective Griffin recalls.
It eventually came out. Two men and a woman had met a man they knew as Jose, or Juan, or Miguel, or Mike, in the bars of Louisville. A plan was struck days in advance to lure him to a farmhouse and relieve him of this kilo of cocaine he kept talking about. His last words were for mercy. Please, please. Don’t shoot.
In December 2002, the three defendants were convicted and given lengthy prison terms, even though no one in Kentucky, including those who killed him, knew who the victim was. He was known casually as Juan Doe; more formally as Unidentified Male, Case FA-99-09.
Out of diligence and with faint hope, Dr. Craig sent bone samples to an F.B.I. laboratory in Quantico, Va., to be processed for a DNA profile that could be uploaded into an unidentified-remains database. After that, the bones sat in the evidence room, among the unidentified, undisturbed, for five years.
But some never forget the unknown dead.
A facial reconstruction
Volunteers for the Doe Network, an organization dedicated to examining cases of the missing and unidentified, were developing their own database. The Justice Department was starting an online repository, available to the public, called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs. And a Texas Ranger, Sgt. Ray Ramon, was trying to find that mother’s missing son.
Four months ago he received information that a body found not far from Dallas might be a match. It wasn’t, but he decided to take a DNA swab from the mother, out of diligence and with faint hope.
Soon a description and photograph of the missing son was posted on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse Web page. About six feet tall; 34 years old; last seen in July 1998; and with these circumstances: “possibly en route to Kentucky.”
In Mount Pleasant, S.C., a mother of two named Daphne Owings spends three hours a day searching websites to match the missing with the unidentified. “I really feel this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” says Ms. Owings, a Doe Network volunteer.
She saw the Texas posting of the lost son “possibly en route to Kentucky” and compared it to a Kentucky posting of the unidentified dead man found in a creek. The man’s photograph resembled Dr. Craig’s facial reconstruction. This could be something.
Prompted by Ms. Owings’s report and a similar one from another Doe Network volunteer, Dr. Craig and Sergeant Ramon worked to prove a match. They compared the missing son’s dental records with the teeth recovered from the creek—including that gold crown—as well as the DNA culled from bone with the DNA taken from the mother.
Ten days ago, in the Texas town of Freer, a frail woman named Zeferina Garcia opened her door to an investigator from the local sheriff’s department who represented, among others, Coroner Jimmy Pollard, Detective Jim Griffin, Doe Network volunteer Daphne Owings, Sgt. Ray Ramon and Dr. Emily Craig.
The investigator had bittersweet news: Ms. Garcia’s playful, intelligent son, who had lived with her, served in the Army and kissed her goodbye 10 years ago, saying he had a job to do but would be back soon, was dead.
It was after hours last week when Dr. Craig closed out the case of Unidentified Male, Case FA-99-09. She removed a tub from the shelf, donned some latex gloves, and, with motherly care, collected the bones and placed them in a cardboard box bound for Texas. Then she opened the same register in which she had logged the case more than nine years ago.
She drew a pen line across John Doe, and, very carefully, printed the name: Miguel Garcia.
Facts Mix With Legend on the Road to Redemption
STARKVILLE, MISS.—OCTOBER 20, 2008
He had said hey to the porter, he had made her cry, cry, cry, he had walked the line. Now, with another worshipful crowd sated and with the rest of the band already on the road back to Memphis, a troubled and restless Johnny Cash stayed to explore the magnolia-scented darkness of a place whose name he could not have made up: Starkville.
Searching for parties, he found them. Then, searching for cigarettes, he got arrested for public drunkenness—or, as he later put it, for “picking flowers.” He kicked his jail cell so hard he broke a toe. Released after six hours, he collected his things in a motel, ate breakfast and left town.
What happened in Starkville stayed in Starkville. Few cared in May 1965 about the antics of a rowdy musician; fewer still connected those antics to a drug addiction. And while Cash later wrote a song about his experience called “Starkville City Jail,” it never rose very high in the canon.
But since that night, and especially since his death in 2003, Johnny Cash has become for some the craggy patron saint of redemption, his rumbling voice imparting freight-train blessings for all of America. Fact swirls with legend, suffering with salvation, shots of cocaine with peace in the valley, defiance of The Man with obedience to The Lord.
Now, if you want to trace Cash’s path to Damascus, you have to pass through Starkville, a town of 22,000 that last weekend celebrated its second annual Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ Festival. It promised the pardoning of sins and featured an amused Rosanne Cash, the gifted and firmly established singer and songwriter whose father happens to be an icon.
“I usually don’t make a habit of making pilgrimages to a place where my father spent one night,” said Ms. Cash, who rarely appears on the Johnny Cash circuit. Although she loved her father, she says, she has no interest in having people looking through her for him.
In 1965, when her father was deep in amphetamine addiction, rarely spending time with his family in California, Ms. Cash was a 10-year-old girl who knew only that something was wrong with Daddy. She did not speak of those days this weekend.
Instead, Ms. Cash said she came at the request of her dear friend Marshall Grant, 80, the last of the Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two band and, for so many years, her father’s keeper, the one who flushed pills down the toilet by the bushel. But she also admitted to being intrigued by the festival’s swirl of fact, myth and redemption.
“There’s something so American about it,” she said.
The flower-picking festival was started by Robbie Ward, 30, a gangly Cash enthusiast who arrived as the Starkville correspondent for a regional Mississippi newspaper. He was struck by how few here appreciated their town’s connection to
Johnny Cash, or knew of the “At San Quentin” album that features “Starkville City Jail”:
They’re bound to get you.
’Cause they got a curfew.
And you go to the Starkville City Jail.
Mr. Ward soon wrote an almost mystical story about that long-ago May night. A man named Smokey Evans claimed that when he was 15 and drunk, he was thrown into the same cell as Cash. After Cash broke his toe but before he left, he recalled, the singer handed him his black shoes and said: “Here’s a souvenir. I’m Johnny Cash.”
The man called Smokey, who supposedly had worn the shoes maybe four times in 40 years, died in a fight in 2005. The shoes are now said to be in the possession of a nephew in Georgia who says the relics were left to him in a will. It is not known whether he wears them.
Mr. Ward left journalism for a public relations job here at Mississippi State University, but his research into Cash’s night in Starkville remains a part-time job. He eventually persuaded the town to begin holding a Cash festival, overcoming grumblings that it celebrates an addict’s carousing by arguing that Starkville has the pedigree to become the host of the essential Cash festival.
“Johnny Cash was arrested in seven places,” Mr. Ward said. “But he only wrote a song about one of those places.”
He recounts Cash’s Starkville wanderings with a zealot’s fervor. How Cash wound up at a fraternity house after the concert in the Animal Husbandry building at Mississippi State. How he tossed his jacket to a student who had expressed admiration for it. How he made his way to a private party in the Longmeadow subdivision. How he got a ride to his room at the University Motel, where June Carter, a performer in his show and his future wife, was staying in another unit. How Cash was clearly not ready for sleep.
He was gaunt, suffering, not at peace. Mr. Grant, who with Cash and Luther Perkins created that signature boom-chicka-boom sound, recalls 1965 as “one of the worst years” of Cash’s lifelong wrestling with addiction. “How dark those years were,” he said.
