Joe Dillard - 03 - Injustice for All

by Scott Pratt

  I’m only twenty-one, and despite having been through Ranger school and feeling bulletproof, as soon as the sound of machine gun fire below reaches my ears, I feel fear welling in my stomach. Ten seconds later I hit the tarmac, roll, shed my chute, unstrap my weapon from my ruck, and make for a rally point just east of the airstrip.

  I dive behind a berm as small arms and machine gun fire whizzes by overhead and kicks up sand near my feet. The steady thump of antiaircraft fire echoes off the hills beyond the airstrip. I belly crawl to the edge of the berm and shoulder my weapon. Other Rangers are running and yelling around me. I look for a target and am just about to fire when something falls on my back, nearly knocking the wind out of me. It’s a fellow Ranger. I push him off me, and when he rolls, I see that his face has been blown off. I scream, stand up, start firing, and run straight toward the enemy.

  “Joe! Joe! Wake up! Joe!”

  I open my eyes. Caroline is sitting up, shaking my shoulder.

  “You’re screaming. Are you all right?”

  I shake my head in disbelief. It seemed so real. “Yeah, baby, I’m fine. I guess it was just a nightmare.”

  “Just a nightmare? You’re soaking wet.”

  I sit up on the edge of the bed as Caroline rubs my back.

  “Why don’t you go dry off and come back to bed?” she says.

  I look at the clock. Almost four in the morning. I stand up and walk around the bed to Caroline’s side. I tuck the comforter in around her and kiss her on the forehead.

  “Go on back to sleep,” I say. “I think I’ll just stay awake.”

  I walk out to the couch, turn on the television, and try not to think about the dream. But it won’t go away. A year after I jumped into Grenada, I learned that the U.S. State Department had issued a warning to the Grenadian government that we were coming. They, in turn, told the Russians and the North Koreans, who immediately left the island. All that was left were a few Cuban engineers and the People’s Defense Force, but they were armed to the teeth, and they were waiting for us.

  That was the day I knew I would leave the army, and that was the day I knew I’d never trust my own government again.

  45

  Anita White believed Tommy Miller would show up at his mother’s house before long. He was a kid, after all. His father had just been buried. He’d want to be near his mother, and he’d need money. Anita formulated a simple but effective plan for finding out if Tommy came around. She gave her cell number to the nosy neighbor, Trudy Goodin, and told her to keep a close eye out.

  Mrs. Goodin called late on a Tuesday night.

  “I saw him through the window,” she said. “I’m sure it’s him.”

  Anita and three other agents took Tommy down at six the next morning when he and his mother backed out of their garage. Toni Miller was driving, with Tommy in the passenger seat. The agents made the usual show of force on a felony arrest—the guns drawn, the yelling, the threats. When Special Agent in Charge Ralph Harmon discovered that Tommy had an airline ticket to San Francisco and five thousand dollars in cash in his backpack, he became infuriated and arrested Toni for obstructing justice. Both Tommy and his mother were handcuffed, taken to the TBI office, and placed in separate interrogation rooms. Agent Harmon tried to interview Toni Miller first, but she immediately demanded to speak to an attorney.

  “What are we going to do with her?” Anita asked as Harmon walked out of the room.

  “Let her sit. We can hold her for up to seventy-two hours before we have to get her in front of a magistrate. There’s no way I’m letting her anywhere near a phone. The first thing she’ll do is start calling lawyers.”

  Anita watched on the monitor as Harmon walked in and read Tommy his Miranda rights. To her surprise, Tommy didn’t mention anything about an attorney. Harmon then left Tommy alone for three hours. Toni Miller was still in the other interrogation room down the hall. During the entire three hours, the only peep the agents heard from Tommy was when he asked to go to the bathroom. Other than that, he simply sat with his head down on the table.

  Just before Anita, Norcross, and Harmon entered the interrogation room to interview Tommy, Harmon called them into his office.

  “I’ll handle the questioning,” Harmon said. “The two of you just watch and learn. The only satisfactory conclusion to this interview will be a signed confession and an arrest for first-degree murder, and I intend to make sure it happens.”

  When they walked into the room, Harmon took a seat directly across the table from Tommy. Anita sat down to Tommy’s right, Norcross to his left. Anita looked at Tommy closely. What she saw was a frightened boy who looked very much like his father. Anita had seen pictures of Ray Miller in the newspaper, and she immediately noticed the similarities. He had a young handsomeness about him, with dark hair and eyes, a slight lump in the bridge of his nose, high cheekbones, and well-defined facial lines.

  “Where have you been, son?” Harmon said in a friendly tone. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “I was on the road for a little while,” Tommy replied.

  “I want you to understand something from the beginning, Tommy,” Harmon said. “It’s okay if I call you Tommy, right? I want you to know that we’re here to help you. We’re willing to do anything we can to help you help yourself. You believe that, don’t you, Tommy? You believe we’re here to help? We’re your friends, son. We don’t want to see anything bad happen to you.”

  Tommy nodded his head silently. Anita thought she saw a look of relief cross his face. She wanted to tell him that Harmon wasn’t his friend. She wanted to tell him he should ask for a lawyer, but she sat there silently, just as Harmon had ordered.

  “I read your Miranda rights to you earlier, correct?” Harmon continued. “I know your dad was a lawyer, so you should be familiar with your rights, but there’s been a change in the law recently. The United States Supreme Court says you no longer have a constitutional right to have an attorney present during questioning. You still have a right to an attorney, and you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand,” Tommy said.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer present during this interview?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that ever since you picked me up,” Tommy said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I just want to get this behind me.”

  “Of course you do. Besides, only a person who’s done something wrong needs a lawyer, am I right? Only guilty people need lawyers.”

  “Where is my mother?”

  “She’s just down the hall. She’s fine.”

  “Is she going to go to jail?”

  “A lot will depend on how our conversation goes,” Harmon said. “Can we get you anything? Something to drink? Eat? A cigarette?”

  “Some water would be good,” Tommy said.

  Harmon nodded at Anita. “Get the boy some water.”

  Anita returned quickly with a bottle of water, stung by the cavalier manner in which Harmon had ordered her out of the room. She watched as Tommy lifted the bottle to his lips. His hands were trembling slightly, which was understandable, given the circumstances.

  “I guess you know why you’re here,” Harmon said to Tommy.

  “Yes, sir, I think so. I think you want to talk to me about Judge Green’s murder.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Tommy gave Harmon the same answers he’d given Jack Dillard a couple of weeks earlier. He recounted the evening as best he could but was unable to answer any specific questions about his actions after he left the cemetery that night. He told Harmon about waking up outside the convenience store and driving to the Dillards’. He told him about how his clothing smelled like gasoline and that Mrs. Dillard had offered to wash the clothes for him. He said he ran from his home because his mother told him the police suspected him of being involved in the judge’s murder. No, he didn’t know how she found out about it. As soon as he returned home that morning, his mother told him
he should leave. He ran from the police in Durham for the same reason he left Johnson City—fear. He didn’t think the police would believe his story about not being able to remember. He explained how he gave his car to a stranger in North Carolina, knowing the police would be looking for the car, and how he hitchhiked and rode buses around the Southeast for two weeks, staying in cheap hotels and flophouses along the way. When he was finished, Harmon sat back and folded his arms.

  “Say your clothing smelled like gasoline?” he said.

  “I must have spilled some on me when I was pumping gas. I don’t remember it, though.”

  “Where is this convenience store where you say you woke up?”

  Tommy gave him the location, and Harmon and Norcross went into the hall for a few minutes.

  “Agent Norcross is going over to the convenience store right now to see whether anyone remembers you,” Harmon said when he returned. “In the meantime, tell me how you felt when you heard about what Judge Green had done to your father.”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “Confused, surprised.”

  “Were you angry?”

  “Not really. When Dad first told me about it, he said he’d fix it. He said everything would be fine and for me just to go about my business at school and not worry about it. So that’s what I did.”

  “But then things got worse, didn’t they? How did you feel then?”

  “My dad didn’t tell me much about it. I didn’t know how bad things really were until my mom called me and told me my car was going to be repossessed. That’s when they bought me the Honda.”

  “What were you driving before?”

  “A Jeep.”

  “A new one?”

  “It was a couple of years old. My dad got it for me when I graduated from high school.”

  “So you go from driving a new Jeep to an old Honda,” Harmon said. “That must have bothered you, at least a little.”

  “I got used to it.”

  “Tommy,” Harmon said, “if I’m going to help you, you have to be honest with me. Please don’t try to tell me you felt absolutely no anger toward Judge Green.”

  “I can’t honestly tell you I felt no anger toward him, especially after Dad killed himself,” Tommy said.

  “And that’s only natural,” Harmon said. “Anyone in your situation would feel the same way. On a scale of one to ten, how angry would you say you were?”

  “On a scale of one to ten? Twelve.”

  Anita cringed. Tommy obviously didn’t know it, but by being honest, he was hanging himself.

  “So you were angry enough to kill him.”

  “I didn’t say that. I didn’t kill him.”

  “Really? How do you know? You say you don’t remember what happened. You say you were angry. I know if some jerk had caused my father to kill himself, I’d want him dead. Maybe you drank yourself a bunch of liquid courage and went over and got a little revenge.”

  “I didn’t. I couldn’t. I could never do something like that.”

  “We have two witnesses who saw your car in the judge’s neighborhood right after the murder. One of the witnesses got a good look at the driver, and the description the witness gave matches you.”

  Anita shifted uneasily in her chair. Harmon was lying. It was perfectly legal for a police officer to lie to a suspect, but the tactic sometimes backfired.

  “Really?” Tommy said. “You have people who say they saw me?”

  “Tell you what I’m going to do, Tommy,” Harmon said. “Agent White and I are going to take a little break so we can check on Agent Norcross. You take the time to think about things. Think hard, Tommy. You seem like a good kid to me, and I don’t want to see you go down the wrong path. If you tell us what happened that night, we’ll talk to the district attorney for you. We’ll tell him you were cooperative and remorseful. It could be the difference between a long sentence and the death penalty. And who knows? After everything you’ve been through, you probably have some kind of mental defense. Diminished capacity, that kind of thing. So you just think things through carefully, and we’ll be back in a bit.”

  It went on like that all night. Anita knew what Harmon was doing. He was wearing the boy down, trying to get him to agree that he must have been the killer. Norcross’s trip to the convenience store revealed that no one who worked at the store remembered seeing Tommy. Norcross had even made a side trip to visit the employee who had worked the graveyard shift. He showed the employee Tommy’s photo and described his car, but the employee said he didn’t recall anyone who looked like Tommy in or around the store that night. There was no record of any credit card transaction with Tommy’s name on it.

  Harmon would leave Tommy sitting for hours at a time, then go back into the room and question him again. With each visit, he’d reveal another detail about exactly how the judge had been killed, how someone had lain in wait, cut down a tree across the driveway, ambushed the judge with a blunt instrument, dragged him across the yard, doused him with kerosene, and hanged him from a maple tree. The intensity of the conversation increased with each visit. Anita noticed the physical and mental changes in Tommy as the grueling hours passed and the questioning became more confrontational, more accusatory. The boy was exhausted. Dark circles had formed under his eyes, which had taken on a forlorn, empty look. His speech had grown slow and deliberate, as though he had to search for every word. He was easier to confuse.

  Finally, at ten minutes past three in the morning, after nearly twenty hours of questioning, Harmon leaned across the table to within a foot of Tommy’s nose.

  “I just talked to your mother,” Harmon said. “She says she thinks you did it.”

  Tommy burst into tears, and Anita knew that Harmon had broken him.

  “My mother thinks I did it?” Tommy said slowly.

  “Your own mother,” Harmon said, shaking his head.

  Tommy’s head dropped to the table. His shoulders shuddered as he sobbed loudly, uncontrollably.

  “Oh my God!” Tommy cried. “Oh my God! I’m a murderer!”

  46

  Roscoe Stinnett pulled into the gravel driveway of a small bar outside Morristown. He’d been here before, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable. The place was a dump. It was in the middle of nowhere. But Rafael Ramirez owned it and refused to meet anyplace else. Since Stinnett’s relationship with Ramirez had been so profitable, he ignored his misgivings, got out of his Jaguar, and walked through the gravel. He’d brought his briefcase along, just in case. He didn’t know what Ramirez wanted, but he hoped it was something that would involve another fat fee. Perhaps he needed help moving his cash around. Stinnett had some experience in that regard, but he’d never dealt with a drug dealer as wealthy as Ramirez.

  Stinnett pushed through the heavy front door and stepped into the bar. Ramirez was waiting in the corner booth, the same seat where Stinnett had met with the person he knew only as the Mexican. It was there, in that very same booth, where Stinnett had set in motion the murder of Hannah Mills. He immediately put his hands on the table of the first booth inside the door and waited for the two men to frisk him and check him for recording devices. When they were finished, he walked back to Ramirez’s booth.

  “How about a scotch on the rocks?” Stinnett said as he sat down.

  “No scotch here,” Ramirez said.

  “Beer then. Whatever’s on tap.”

  Ramirez motioned to a white man behind the bar and told him to bring Stinnett a draft beer. The man brought the beer around the bar and put it down in front of Stinnett.

  “So how’s life on the outside?” Stinnett said.

  “I want my money back,” Ramirez growled.

  Stinnett nearly choked on the beer. He put the glass back down on the table.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “The money I paid you for the murder case. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You didn’t earn it. I want it back.”

  “But I fulfilled my obligation under the contract,” Stin
nett said. “The case against you was dismissed. I earned the fee.”

  “I’m willing to let you keep twenty thousand,” Ramirez said. “But I want the rest of it.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Stinnett said. “It’s unheard of. You signed a contract. The fee is nonrefundable. Nearly all fees in criminal cases are nonrefundable. I couldn’t run my business otherwise. I have to pay my bills, plan my budget—”

  “Live like royalty?” Ramirez interrupted. “I saw the Jaguar when you pulled up.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “I think I’m being generous,” Ramirez said. “More than fair.”

  “I don’t see how you can call giving you a hundred and thirty thousand dollars of my money—money to which I have a contractual, legal right—fair,” Stinnett said. “The contract called for me to represent you to the disposition of the case, whether it be trial, plea bargain, dismissal, whatever. I got the case dismissed.”

  “I was responsible for the case being dismissed,” Ramirez said. “Not you.”

  Stinnett heard the door open and looked around. Another Mexican had walked into the bar. He looked at Ramirez and shook his head.

  “But I was the one who brought you the proposal in the first place!” Stinnett said.

  “And for that, you’re being paid twenty thousand dollars.”