Closing Time: A True Story of Robbery and Double Murder

by Anita Paddock

  Judge David Partain—a tall, lanky man with blond hair that was graying—was known for fairness and a keen legal mind. He was very judicial in his posture, sitting at his desk flanked by two flags representing Arkansas and the United States. The jury listened intently. Eugene Wallace Perry didn’t look up but sat, drawing pictures on a legal pad.

  George Fowler, a man who worked at Hunt’s Department Store next door to the jewelry store, was called first. He described how Elaine Barham and Karen Staton had come to his store to ask if he had seen their dad and sister. He’d gone with them to the jewelry store next door and was able to jiggle open the front door.

  Elaine Barham testified that she had found her father and sister lying on their stomachs with gags in their mouths, and their hands and feet were tied with rope. She had tried to cut the ropes off their hands and tried to take the gags out of their mouths, hoping they were still alive.

  “It was when I was trying to help Daddy get the gag out of his mouth that the police arrived, and they made me leave.”

  Fields excused the witness. The lawyers for the defense had no questions. Seeing that some members of the jury were clearly upset by Elaine’s testimony, Judge Partain announced that everyone would take a thirty-minute recess.

  Judge Partain went back to his chambers. He prayed that his daughter, Paige, would never have to go through anything as horrible as Mr. Staton’s daughters, Suzanne or Elaine, had to endure. He’d already been told in the pretrial hearings that Richard Anderson would testify that Mr. Staton was shot first, and that the medical examiner had theorized that Mr. Staton had gripped his teeth when he was shot, and that was why Elaine had been unable to remove his gag. But Suzanne had probably fainted before she died and, therefore, her gag was easily pulled from her mouth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The next witness called was Don Taylor, the investigator with the Arkansas State Police, who had worked the case with the doggedness every good detective possesses. He had been with the state police for twenty-one years and investigated major crimes in Crawford, Sebastian, and Franklin Counties.

  He described the scene he found at the Staton Jewelry Store and explained that one of his first jobs was to take crime scene photographs, which were entered as exhibits. The attorneys for Perry objected to many of the photos, and Judge Partain ruled that, in order not to inflame the jurors, only a few pictures that were less gory and less bloody would be allowed.

  The trial continued with Taylor’s testimony of finding four .22 caliber bullet casings at the scene, a root beer can, and a Dr. Pepper can left on the counter, which were dusted for prints, but they came out incomplete. He led the jury with him to the Terry Motel, Horseshoe Bend on Beaver Lake, a used car lot, a storage unit that held a pop-up camper and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and the evidence inside the camper that implicated Eugene Wallace Perry with the robberies and murders.

  The residents of Crawford County counted on the editor of their newspaper, The Press Argus, to give them the more personal and human side of the trial. Garrick Feldman, a talented editor of his column, “The Publisher’s Notebook,” told his readers of one woman whom Ron Fields called to testify.

  He wrote: “Fields calls a young girl, and she starts saying how one day last September she was leaving Walmart when she noticed a couple of men, and hardly anybody’s prepared for what she has to tell the court. Her name is Pat Etier, and she is slim and blonde, and if you don’t know why she’s here you might think she’s going to say she remembered seeing Perry walking around Cloverleaf Plaza with his friend Anderson, and that’s about it. But as her tale unfolds, you soon realize she’s the most dramatic witness yet. She’s soft-spoken, and you might think she’s shy, but it’s more than that: she’s afraid because what she has to say could put Perry in the electric chair if the jury believes her.

  “Pat Etier’s story is that she got picked up by Perry and Anderson the day before the murders, and they went to the Terry Motel after they bought a couple of packs of beer. She says the room was in the back, and once inside, they drank the beer, and the younger of the two showed her his tattoo. He said his name was Rick, and the older one said his name was Damon. He said they were passing hot checks. She left a couple of hours later but returned to take Perry home with her where she lives in Graphic with her young son.

  “Although she appears calm as she tells her story, she’s scared because she might be in danger for agreeing to testify in court. Months ago she had come forward and told the authorities what she knew, and you can’t help admiring her for that. There are rumors that Perry has bragged about his Mafia connections, and let’s face it, anyone who says he’s in the Mafia probably wouldn’t be accepted into that elite organization.

  “But still, it’s never easy to give testimony that might send someone to an electric chair. Family and friends may not look too kindly at that, and Mrs. Etier may have thought about that a lot, but she’s spoken out anyway. The young woman may have her weaknesses, but if she’s telling the truth, you have to say she has a conscience.”

  Feldman’s readers nodded their heads, pursed their lips, and uttered an “Ah-hah, so that’s the way they found out who did it. What if she’d never come forward?”

  What Feldman didn’t know, or didn’t report, was that during the earlier months of pretrial discovery, Perry’s lawyers had conducted their depositions of the witnesses against Perry. They told Perry that Pat Etier would be called to testify against him, and once again, he’d set his mind to work and hatched a way to get Pat Etier to change her story.

  Perry requested permission to write Pat Etier a letter. He begged her to come and visit him in jail to see if, up close and personal, she could really say for sure that he was the man who spent the night with her.

  He wrote on Sunday, July 5th, 1981, from the Sebastian county jail:

  Dear Mrs. Etier,

  I’m writing to you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope and pray that you do not misunderstand why I am writing. It is certainly not my intention to frighten you in any way. For several months I have contemplated as to whether I should or I should not write to you. I was afraid that I would upset you, but you will see that is not by any means my purpose or intent of this letter, in fact, it’s quite the contrary. I am writing to ask a favor of you, which would mean everything to me, and I will ask that shortly, but first, maybe you are asking yourself “Why me? Why write to me?” So if you will give me a few minutes of your time, I would be forever grateful to you, and not only me, but I have a family, 2 daughters, one 17 yrs old and one 15, and I’m certain they would appreciate this request also . . . .

  You are the only witness who would be able to give a most accurate description of Damon, and if your description is accurate, as I’m sure it must be, then it would be quite impossible for me, Eugene Wallace Perry, to be Damon Peterson . . . .

  Please come talk to me, look at me, compare me, whatever you need to do, but please, in your own heart and mind, don’t make a mistake that could cost an innocent man his life.

  When Pat Etier got the letter, she read it over and over. Even though he wrote that it was not a threat, she knew that it really was. Pat was anything but naïve, and she firmly believed that, if there had been a gun in her home in Graphic, Perry would have used it to kill her and her little boy.

  Pat had not always been the most virtuous girl around, and she had hung out with some rough characters, but she had a conscience, and she was going to let it be her guide. She, by God, would testify at that trial and tell the truth, and she was not going to be intimidated by a man who told her his name was Damon and that he’d like to teach her little boy how to shoot a gun. And so she didn’t let Perry scare her, even though he had done some really, really scary things.

  Following Pat Etier, Fields called Ruth Staton and then Karen Staton to the stand. Ruth Staton testified that she recognized Perry as the man who came into their jewelry store with his wife looking for a wedding set during the first days of September. />
  She and her daughter Karen also identified jewelry found on Perry, as well as that in his motel room, that was part of their inventory. Even the wedding ring Mrs. Staton had given her husband for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the ring he always wore, was found on Perry’s finger the day he was arrested in Florida.

  When the court recessed for the weekend, Eugene Wallace Perry sat down in his cell room and went over his defense with a calendar in front of him. His defense was that he was never in Arkansas in his life, that he was in Alabama visiting his family and buying school clothes for his daughter during the early days of September, and, most importantly, Damon Peterson was somebody else. Perry said the only connections he had with Peterson and Anderson was that he acted as their fence when they came to him in Atlanta asking him to get rid of the jewelry.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Perry defense team of Ron Harrison and Steve Sharum began their case when Perry’s daughters, Tonya and Dawn, testified that their father took them shopping for school clothes at The Red Hanger Shop at a mall in Oxford, Alabama, on September 9th, 1980. His mother and father, Eulene and Wallace, claimed he arrived at their home in Oxford around ten at night on September 11th and spent the night with them. His ex-wife, Glenda, testified that she visited with him off and on during those days in September.

  Eugene Wallace Perry did not testify in his defense.

  The jury deliberated two hours and returned a guilty verdict. After an additional two hours and fifteen minutes, they read their verdict: Wallace Eugene Perry would die for his crime.

  Perry muttered over and over that he was innocent, and he was obviously shaken by the decision.

  Judge Partain said, “It now becomes my painful duty to sentence you to death by electrocution.” He then set the date for March 22nd, 1982, some eight months away.

  When asked if he wanted to address the court, Perry responded, “Well, I’m not guilty, for one thing, and I’m not Damon Peterson, for another.”

  Those words spoken by Perry were the first the Staton family had heard at the trial. Karen was shocked by his deep Southern accent. Even though she lived in Arkansas, a state considered part of the South, she had never before heard an accent that thickly Southern—with Rs missing and syllables drawn out from two or three to four or five.

  The Staton family sat in the courtroom with their typical stoic demeanor. They amazed their friends by not crying when the verdict was read. Or shouting with joy that Perry would be electrocuted. They took it in stride, just like they had done in everything else prior to the verdict.

  Janet returned to Texas, with a promise that she would be back for Anderson’s trial.

  Karen was back living in her home she had bought prior to the robbery. She worked at nights and on the weekends stripping wallpaper and scraping paint that had been applied to lovely hardwood doors and cornices in the house. Her kitchen now had a new refrigerator and stove, and its floors were recovered with almond-colored linoleum. She once briefly thought she’d have her family over for dinner, but she quickly remembered what had happened the last time she cooked for her family.

  The store was entering its busiest season, and salesmen were calling and Christmas items were arriving daily. Karen told friends who asked how she felt about the verdict: “Right now I’m relieved it’s over. We’ve got Christmas coming up, and that’s all I can think about right now.”

  Elaine didn’t like showing her feelings to the world. She, after all, had a rambunctious toddler who occupied her days. Once Ben was put to bed, she slept on the couch with the light on until her husband came home from work. Only then did she feel safe, and she would turn off the light and climb into bed with her husband. That would not change, no matter what happened to Perry and Anderson.

  Ruth Staton felt more emotion, but she, too, kept it hidden and stored deep in her heart. She had two dear friends she often visited after work. One was Linda Patton, who was also a young widow and was raising two young girls on her own. They often ate their evening meal together in Linda’s kitchen.

  The other was her neighbor, Evelyn Hess. They’d sit in the living room and watch television until Ruth would announce it was her bedtime and time to go home. She had over 200 sympathy cards, mostly still unread, that she kept in a box in her bedroom. Perhaps, one day, she thought, she’d be able to read them. Not now. Not now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  A hint of fall weather ushered in October 6th, 1981, the day that Richard Phillip Anderson was brought to the Sebastian County Courthouse where his trial for capital murder would begin.

  Instead of looking like a man on the run in Canada, as he did when first brought to Van Buren, he was pale from spending almost ten months locked up in a cell.

  Back in the winter, after he was first brought to Van Buren, Anderson had requested an interview with Garrick Feldman, the editor of the newspaper, who he’d figured out was a man of importance. If he could tell his story to the editor, and if the editor wrote a favorable column about him, that might help when he went on trial.

  Instead, Feldman wrote:

  He says sometimes he’s scared and hints he’s afraid of what Perry might do to him. He rubs his scars on his temples and cracks his knuckles. Anderson is good at one thing: he’s eager to evoke sympathy. He wants to be liked. He wants to be seen as a good guy who may have made a mistake or two. He gives you the impression he thinks he’s okay. Only he doesn’t convince everyone of that. Far from it. His family background of upper-middle class—with a father an executive at a big corporation and a stay-at-home mom—makes him seem like a guy who wouldn’t end up in Crawford County charged with capital murder. How did he get to where he was now?

  The article didn’t turn out the way Rick hoped it would, and he realized that this Feldman guy was smart and talented and not a country bumpkin who ran a little local newspaper.

  He deeply regretted the hell he was putting his parents and siblings through, and he felt great sympathy for the Staton family. He would admit he was at the jewelry store and that he carried a gun and that he tied Kenneth and Suzanne up with ropes. But it was Perry who shot them.

  It was a new trial, with a new jury, but much of the preliminary testimonies from witnesses were the same as they had been in the Perry trial. The police from Vancouver testified about arresting a man who claimed to be Ivo Shapox for attempting to rob a bank, then finding out that his real name was Richard Phillip Anderson. Anderson had befriended another inmate in a cell next to him and told him about how he had been hiding out in Canada for the past three months and that he and another man had robbed a jewelry store in a little town in Arkansas, and that the other man had murdered a crippled man and his young daughter so there would be no witnesses. The next-door cellmate turned out to be a detective with the Vancouver police.

  The difference in the Anderson trial from the Perry trial was that the defendant took the stand.

  After Anderson was sworn in, Bill Cromwell, the attorney for the defense, asked Anderson the usual obligatory questions of his early years. He led Anderson through the history of his coming to Beaver Lake, meeting Damon Peterson, as he was known then by Anderson, and leaving their campsite on Anderson’s motorcycle to go to Van Buren to commit a robbery, either a jewelry store or a drug store, in Cloverleaf Plaza. That they decided on the jewelry store because it was easier to fence the stolen goods, and that, from casing the store for several days, it was determined that the robbery would take place on Wednesday, September 10th, at closing time.

  Cromwell: Where did you park?

  Anderson: Across the street at a grocery store parking lot.

  Cromwell: Do you remember the name of the grocery store?

  Anderson: I think it was a Safeway, but I don’t know.

  Cromwell: What did you do after you parked there?

  Anderson: Okay, we walked over to the store.

  Cromwell: Okay, did Mr. Perry, or Peterson, whatever you want to call him, did he have any items of apparel to c
onceal his true identity?

  Anderson: Yes, sir. He was wearing a wig.

  Cromwell: Were you wearing a mask or anything to conceal your identity?

  Anderson: No, sir.

  Cromwell: Who entered the store first?

  Anderson: I did.

  Cromwell: Why did you go in first?

  Anderson: Because Damon instructed me to.

  Cromwell: What were you supposed to do when you got in the store?

  Anderson: Sit down and look at some jewelry.

  Cromwell: Why were you supposed to do that, and if so, who told you to do so?

  Anderson: Okay, would you repeat the question?

  Cromwell: Okay, you told us you went in the store first, you did it because he told you to, and you have told us what you were supposed to do was look at some jewelry. Is that right?

  Anderson: That’s right.

  Cromwell: Who told you to do that, if anyone?

  Anderson: Damon.

  Cromwell: Did he tell you why you were supposed to do that?

  Anderson: Okay, to get the attention of the fellow, you know, out of the back room.

  Cromwell: Did you have a firearm in your possession?

  Anderson: Yes, sir. I had a .38 caliber pistol.

  Cromwell: Where did you get this .38 caliber pistol?

  Anderson: From Damon.

  Cromwell: Was it loaded?

  Anderson: Yes, sir.

  Cromwell: Had you ever fired it prior to entering the store?

  Anderson: No, sir.

  Cromwell: Did you fire it while you were in the jewelry store?

  Anderson: No, sir.

  Cromwell: As I understand it from the state’s testimony, these two people were tied up?

  Anderson: Yes, sir.

  Cromwell: So that means some rope was taken into the jewelry store.