by Akart, Bobby
Sheriff Randall Clark, the oldest of the Clark siblings, was never interested in following in his father’s footsteps in the banking business. His younger brother Billy showed an aptitude for that at an early age when he would dupe other kids out of their allowance or lunch money. Sheriff Clark didn’t even care about arresting people like his brother when they pushed the envelope of criminal activity. He simply wanted to control them.
Power can be vested in someone in many ways. Those with political influence, wealth, and status tend to exert their will over others more than those who don’t have these social benefits. As a young man, Sheriff Clark learned people in a position of authority can also control others, thereby feeding his need to elevate his importance in society.
He was not political by nature, although his job as sheriff required him to run for office. The wealth and stature of the Clark family in this small county ensured his election. He didn’t need to play games with the Harrison County Council or its three commissioners, who made up the executive body. They were all bought and paid for through years of dealing with the Clarks’ bank.
He was autonomous and operated the sheriff’s department largely unchecked except for the occasional inquiry from the Indiana Office of Inspector General or being required to respond to an inmate complaint made to the Indiana State Police. These matters were usually disposed of by a toothy grin and a slap on the back or a bulging, plain white envelope.
The motto of the Clark family of Harrison County, Indiana, was there ain’t nothin’ that time and money can’t solve. Sheriff Clark lived by that, and he was a patient man.
If the actor who portrayed Roscoe P. Coltrane was the pride and joy of Harrison County, as evidence by his life-size poster standing at the local feed and seed, Sheriff Clark was a tall, potbellied version of Boss Hogg.
When he exited his Ford Raptor pickup, a newly constituted version of the 2014 model that sported over four hundred horses under the hood, the superduty truck rocked back and forth, adjusting itself to the weight shift. Sheriff Clark had a habit of hitching up his pants in a never-ending battle to keep them around his waist. Within the first few steps, as they were prone to do, they dropped down below his considerable belly.
“Well, what do we have here?” he bellowed before sarcastically answering his own question. “If it ain’t Bonnie and Clyde.”
Squire and Sarah remained stoic as the sheriff got close enough for them to smell the onion on his breath from a burger he probably ate at Bill’s on the Hill, a local steak and chop house overlooking the Old Capitol Golf Club, the known hangout of the Clark family. Even after the restaurant closed to regular patrons, the sheriff, his prosecutor sister, and Bully Billy could gather with friends for free food and drink. They didn’t even have to run a tab. The accommodation was simply a perk earned by financing the renovations to Old Capitol’s clubhouse and allowing a late payment or two.
This was how business was done in Harrison County, and everyone understood that, willfully playing the game that began during the Great Depression and carried forward over a hundred years. Everyone, that is, but the Boone family.
Sheriff Clark circled the Boones like a rancher might walk around a horse at an auction. If Squire didn’t know better, he could’ve sworn that the man was sniffing them, trying to ferret out any sign of weakness. Squire wasn’t going to make the anticipated harassment easy on him.
“Evenin’.”
“Boone. Mrs. Boone.”
Sarah didn’t respond.
Sheriff Clark nodded at his deputy and pointed toward Squire’s weapon. The deputy holstered his own gun and quickly moved to take Squire’s and Sarah’s.
Sheriff Clark continued his stroll around the Boones, stopping to dig through their Walmart grocery bags. He found the two hundred rounds of bullets and hoisted them out of the cart. He held them high in the air and walked in front of Squire. “You folks pay for these separately?”
“We did.”
“Got a receipt?”
Squire gulped. He couldn’t remember if he put it in the bag or crumpled it up and dropped it in the bottom of the shopping cart. “It’s either in the bags or the bottom of the cart, Randall. I’m sure if you’ll—”
“Boone! This is an official matter and a bona fide investigation of a possible crime. You’ll address me as sheriff when you answer my questions.”
Squire bristled. “Come on, Randall, I’ve known you since you were a roly-poly kid on the church playground. We were attacked by these men and were defending ourselves. There’s no need for—”
“He pulled his gun on us!” yelled the assailant.
“What men?” asked Sheriff Clark. “I only see this one fella here, and he’s unarmed.”
“Yeah! I ain’t got no gun. These two drew on me and knocked me down. See, look at my skinned-up hands.”
“Randall, he’s lyin’!” countered Squire. “He had two friends who ran off. They were lurking around in the dark and planned on robbin’ us.”
“With what, Boone? His good looks? This boy’s a hundred forty pounds soakin’ wet. He doesn’t have a gun, and he sure has a different story. Plus, I don’t see anybody else around here, do you, boys?” The sheriff turned to his deputies, who all shrugged or shook their heads.
“See! I’m innocent. I wanna file a complaint against these two!”
Sarah tried to stay out of the fray, but grew frustrated. She tried to take the high road with Sheriff Clark. “He had a knife, I swear. So did his pals. When I pulled my gun, I made him drop the knife. Then I kicked it under the truck over there.”
“She’s lyin’!” the man screamed. “Ain’t nobody dumb enough to take a knife to a gunfight. They drew on us!”
Squire immediately picked up on the man’s mistake. “See, Randall? He said us.”
“I meant me!”
The sheriff was over it. “Enough! Everybody shut the hell up!”
“But—” began Squire before Sarah reached over her head for his hand and squeezed it.
“Shhh, Squire.”
Sheriff Clark pounced on the exchange. “That’s good advice, Mrs. Boone.” Then he turned to his deputies. “Okay, take them over to the jail and separate them all in different holding cells. Don’t allow any of them to talk to one another.”
“Randall, this is ridiculous! Why would we pull our guns on some punk kid unless we had a reason?”
“I don’t know, Squire Boone, but your attitude toward law enforcement sure makes me wonder if you are mentally stable,” replied Sheriff Clark. He puffed out his chest and tried for the thirty-ninth time that day to pull his pants above his belly button, only to achieve the same result.
“Come on, that’s a load of crap and you know it!” Squire was incredulous.
Sheriff Clark walked closer to Squire and hissed into his ear, “You may think it’s a load of crap, but Indiana’s red flag laws state otherwise. You give me some time to talk to our astute circuit court judge of this fine community, and we’ll see if we can’t fill your pants with crap.”
Chapter 42
Gallia County Jail
Gallipolis, Ohio
Jenna and her sister, Carolyn, waited outside the Gallia County Jail for their boyfriends to walk out the jail’s door. The two women didn’t look any different from any other friends or family members awaiting their loved ones to be released from jail. The only difference was that the two men—Troy Martin and his co-defendant, Lawrence Clemente—were being held without bond for assault with a deadly weapon and armed robbery charges.
This was the third felony offense for each of the men, and both were now facing the probability of twenty years in an Ohio prison if convicted. The men, lifelong partners in crime since high school, were in their mid-forties and too young to cut their lives short by a jail sentence that would end when they were old men.
In their opinion, anyway. So from the moment they arrived at the new Gallia County Correctional Facility near Gallipolis, Ohio, they plotted their escape. The
y’d been held in a detention center in Cincinnati, where they were arrested while on the run following the liquor store robbery. As their trial approached, they were transferred from more secure facilities to the older jail in Gallipolis in order to make their initial court appearances. They were later transferred to the rural facility as they awaited their trial.
The guys prided themselves on their ability to sweet-talk the ladies, as they liked to call it. During their two-month-long stay in the small county jail, they’d befriended two female guards, who frequented their cell for friendly chats while bringing extra trays of food for the guys.
As a result of the fast-developing friendship with the two female guards, Martin and Clemente enjoyed extra recreation time and longer, unmonitored visits with their families.
But not with their girlfriends. From day one, Martin and Clemente had a plan. Their girls would stay away from the jail and therefore remain off the list of visitors who were allowed in the facility. This would allow them plausible deniability if, and when, the men attempted their escape.
The girlfriends were not in the dark, however. Clemente provided his brother all the details of their planned escape, who in turn advised the two women. Martin and Clemente had studied the guards’ schedules, their break habits, and their mannerisms. It was their job to escape, and they devoted every waking moment to studying the operations of the jail, even going to the extent to sleep in shifts so they didn’t miss any activity.
The day had come. It was a Sunday and the jail’s administrative staff was off-duty. The guards were not at full strength, and the only matters to attend to involved allowing the inmates out of their cells to attend a church service.
Make no mistake, these two career criminals couldn’t care less about God, the Bible, or Christianity. They attended the Sunday morning service to look for a way out of their predicament.
Every other Sunday, the two female guards oversaw the worship services only. Other guards delivered the inmates to the small meeting room that was used as a chapel on Sundays. The female guards, armed with pepper spray, were responsible for keeping the inmates in line and sounding the alarm in the event of trouble.
Martin and Clemente knew this because they watched, listened, and learned.
The meeting room was located at the corner of a building near the rear recreation yard. The outdoor space was surrounded by a chain-link fence with razor wire strung across the top to prevent anyone from climbing over it. There was a concrete-filled drainage ditch surrounding the rear perimeter, used to control flooding of the Ohio River and its tributaries. It was seen as a physical barrier preventing the use of any vehicle to aid in an escape if an inmate tried to scale the razor wire.
The drainage culvert was no match, however, for Martin’s Ford F-150, which was jacked up like a monster truck on a Friday night at the fairgrounds. And his sweetheart, Jenna, could drive it like a champ.
Church began and moved along smoothly. The guys sat in the back row, nearest to the steel exit door leading to the recreation yard, which remained locked at all times. As the preacher gave his sermon, Martin and Clemente studied the female guards, who took up a position to their left along a wall. One checked her Facebook notifications and the other lazily picked at a hangnail. Their lackadaisical approach to monitoring violent criminals was something the two men had picked up on within days of their arrival at the jail.
Martin reached into his pocket and pulled out his shank, a plastic toothbrush he’d ground down to a sharp point. Clemente had two of the homemade knives tucked into his socks. He casually crossed his legs to retrieve one, and then crossed the other over his knee to slide the other into his sleeve.
On Clemente’s signal, the men acted with catlike reflexes, jumping out of their seats, catching everyone in the room by surprise. Before the guards could react, the men buried the shanks in the women’s throats, expertly severing the carotid artery, just as they’d practiced on each other for days.
Martin grabbed the guard’s keys as she bled out on the floor. Clemente threatened the preacher if he moved an inch. And in less than a minute, the rear security door was flung open and the two convicts formerly on trial for aggravated felonies ran out of the Gallia County Jail as murderers with nothing to lose.
Jenna fired up the big four-by-four pickup that was jacked up high enough that a child could walk under it. She drove down one side of the drainage ditch and up the other, mashing the gas pedal to send the grille guard of the front bumper crashing through the chain-link fence.
The escaped convicts jumped into the pickup bed, slapped the top of the cab’s roof, and Jenna took off toward the bridge that would immediately carry them into West Virginia, hootin’ and hollerin’ as if they were on the old Dukes of Hazzard show.
Chapter 43
Harrison County Sheriff’s Department
Corydon, Indiana
Squire, Sarah, and the man who planned on attacking them were all taken into the Harrison County Jail and placed in separate holding cells where they couldn’t communicate with one another. As promised, Sheriff Clark summoned the county’s circuit court judge out of bed and insisted she immediately come to his office to discuss the situation.
His baby sister, the youngest of the three Clark children, was Joella Clark Kincaid, one of two circuit judges in Harrison County. She’d begun practicing law in Corydon following her graduation from the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University.
Thirteen years prior, she longed for a judgeship but doubted her ability to defeat the sitting circuit court judge, Johnson Carlson. Judge Carlson had been a mainstay in Corydon for decades and was considered an honorable man.
However, he was accused by a new staff secretary of inappropriate touching and unsolicited sexual innuendo in the workplace, and despite his protestations, he was forced to resign. The secretary, inserted onto the judge’s staff and paid for by the Clark family, had been a former stripper in Fort Wayne who took advantage of the #MeToo movement to ruin Judge Carlson’s career. After his resignation, she quickly disappeared into obscurity, ten thousand dollars richer for her trouble.
A special election was held, and the county was ripe for a change in gender on the bench. With the financial support of her family, together with an intriguing vote-suppression scheme orchestrated by her brother Randall, attorney Joella Clark Kincaid became Judge Kincaid, whose primary responsibility was hearing criminal cases.
Judge Carlson, like many other politicians in Indiana, fully embraced the red flag laws adopted by the Indiana legislature. Indiana was one of the first states to adopt the measure, designed to allow law enforcement to seize guns from people who were deemed a danger to themselves or others.
In theory, the red flag laws were designed to balance two competing concerns. This method of gun control allowed law enforcement the ability to limit a potentially dangerous person’s access to firearms while establishing a method to protect that person’s Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights.
In practice, without a warrant or a judge’s signature, police could confiscate firearms from a person alleged to be dangerous. After the warrantless seizure, the officer submitted a written statement to the local judge describing why the person was considered dangerous. Within fourteen days thereafter, the gun owner was given the opportunity to prove they weren’t dangerous and therefore should have their weapons returned.
The laws arose after a series of mass shootings in the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The highly emotional issue created a public outcry for lawmakers to act, and the red flag laws were seen as a reasonable means to protect the public from unstable people.
However, it was only a matter of time for the well-intended law to have unintended consequences. Some gun rights advocates compared what happened next to swatting, which found its origins around 2008. Similar to the prank calls made to emergency services in the 1970s claiming a bomb threat, callers used increasingly sophisticated techniques to direct law enforcement
SWAT teams to a location alleging an active shooter or armed hostage situation.
The goal of the caller was to trick emergency authorities into responding with a heavily armed SWAT team to a fabricated emergency that might, with a little luck from the caller’s perspective, result in the unintended shooting of the unsuspecting target.
This concept was further expanded around 2014 by an action known as doxing, which was the obtaining and broadcasting, usually via the internet and social media, of the personal details or documents of an individual with the intention of inciting others to harass or endanger them. Doxing was most often used to attack people whom a group disagreed with politically.
This progression of personal harassment—bomb threats, to swatting, to doxing—led to a new tactic utilized by those who demanded extreme gun control and weapons confiscation. It became known in the United States as flagging.
Sophisticated measures had been undertaken by the people behind the flagging of Second Amendment rights supporters. Using caller ID spoofing, TTY devices for the deaf, virtual private networks on the internet, and phone phreaking techniques designed to avoid law enforcement traces, the caller would notify law enforcement that an individual was a danger to himself or others. Through trial and error, and by studying law enforcement reaction to these allegations, a script was created that virtually ensured law enforcement would conduct a warrantless search of the target’s home, office, or vehicle in search of weapons to confiscate.
Most times, the confiscations resulted in the gun owner spending many thousands of dollars in attorney fees and lost wages to obtain his weapons back. On some occasions, there were deadly consequences.
Recently, a flagging scenario had unfolded in the Berry Hill neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee. A vocal proponent on social media of Second Amendment rights had drawn the ire of a local group, who undertook a sophisticated flagging operation. They gathered evidence in the form of social media posts, photographs of the target purchasing ammunition at a local gun shop, and capped off the dossier with a seven-second video of the man berating an umpire at his kid’s Little League game.
