Deadly Goals

by Wilt Browning

  Being rejected at the last minute by Tito now seemed nothing more than a bad memory. Jeannie’s romance with Tony was more intense than ever. As Tony began his final year of studies, Jeannie quit her job in Virginia Beach with the temporary service and joined him in New Mexico. She found a job as a hostess in the same Albuquerque restaurant in which Tony worked as a waiter in the evenings.

  And once again Jeannie began to plan her wedding. She and Tony designed and ordered the engagement ring she would wear. The one-of-a-kind ring contained three small round diamonds and one large oval diamond that was its focal point. The large diamond was the brilliant solitaire from the ring Tito had given her.

  Jeannie and Tony were married on a visit back to Virginia on January 3, 1983, at Indian River Baptist Church where Jeannie was a member. Jeannie wore the $600 dress her parents had bought for the aborted wedding two years earlier with Tito. Soon after the simple ceremony, which was attended only by family and close friends, the newlyweds returned to New Mexico, but they planned to stay only the five months Tony needed to finish his degree. That done, they returned to Virginia Beach and moved in with Jeannie’s parents. Jeannie soon went to work in the office of the clerk of court in Norfolk, where her childhood friend, Kim, who had recommended her for the job, was employed. There she also became close friends with another court employee, Christine White, the wife of a Norfolk police officer. Tony found work in the accounting department of a bank, moved on to another bank, and later entered management training that led to a position with Lowe’s, a giant builders supply company. He spent most of his leisure time sharpening his bowling skills, hoping to fullfill a longtime dream of becoming a professional.

  Jeannie had continued her friendship with Denise, who in 1979 had married her high-school sweetheart, Perry Edwards Jr., and settled into a career as a photo lab color technician. Now Jeannie and Tony became mixed doubles bowling partners with Denise and Perry.

  Jeannie and Tony remained in her parents’ home for three years, and as time went on, the Pricketts noticed that Tony was not showing the interest in Jeannie that he had at the beginning. Jeannie felt shunned at first, then became suspicious, but instead of confronting her husband, she tried harder to please him, carefully watching her weight, trying to remain the slim, trim beauty he had married, but that didn’t prove to be enough.

  “Tony, you’re a wonderful person,” Carrie said to her son-in-law on a quiet evening in 1985. “But you want people to always be perfect. In all the history of the world, there has been only one perfect person, and they crucified Him.”

  In an effort to save her marriage, Jeannie and Tony considered moving out of her parents’ home and into a townhouse they hoped to purchase, but the move never came. Tony got a new job with Nabisco that frequently took him away from home for a week at a time. In the fall of 1985, he was transferred to Pennsylvania and he went without Jeannie. Within weeks, he filed for divorce.

  Jeannie was devastated. She still loved Tony and didn’t want the marriage to end, but she didn’t contest the divorce. She even remained close with Tony’s family, who continued to be friends with her parents. To keep her equilibrium, she began seeing a psychiatrist and spent many hours talking with her friend Denise, whose marriage she envied. Denise was now a mother. Her first child, Dawn, was born in November, 1985, and the baby was a delight to both. Jeannie began spending more and more of her evenings with Denise and her family. In the summer of 1986, Denise and Perry moved into a rented four-bedroom house at the corner of McCosh and Hibben in Chesapeake. Two days later, Perry left. This time, it was Denise who was devastated. The divorce proceedings would drag on for two years.

  Now it was Jeannie’s turn to console Denise.

  “Jeannie was still getting over the divorce from Tony,” Denise remembered years later. “And when it happened to me, she tried to help. She’d go to visit her psychiatrist and she’d tell me what the doctor had said and what had seemed to help her. We spent a lot of time crying on each other’s shoulders.”

  Denise was having a difficult time financially as well as personally, and she asked Jeannie, who still lived with her parents, to move in with her.

  “I needed a roommate to help me share expenses,” she recalled. “What better roommate could I have had than Jeannie? She loved my daughter and Dawn already was calling her Aunt Jeannie. Everybody thought we were sisters anyway. It made sense to me.”

  But Jeannie decided it would be better to remain with her parents, although she and Denise continued to be like sisters. Gradually, both began to pull their lives back together. Jeannie attempted to give herself a flashier look early in 1988 by buying a sports car, a mint-condition 1985 Nissan 300 ZX, for which she purchased a personalized license plate, TIGRE Z. She tried to keep busy, joining a bowling league (she averaged 165), a softball league, and learning to master the billiard table. Although she was a non-smoker, she was one of 17 young women chosen by a tobacco company to entertain at nightclubs with skits, audience-participation events and giveaways in the spring of 1988. She had inherited her mother’s outgoing personality but not her shyness, and she was a natural on stage.

  That summer, Jeannie took her vacation to serve as a traveling hostess at ports of call on a yacht race from Florida to Newport News, and she hoped to do it again the following year.

  Although she picked up a little extra money with her outside activities, there was little extravagance in her budget. “Jeannie was always the kind who was very careful with money,” Denise said. “She never wanted to get into a situation where she’d be overextended.”

  Denise faced similar challenges. Still, the two old friends were able to set aside enough money to have fun. They reserved Friday nights for going to clubs, and these outings were carefully figured into their weekly plans $10 at a time. On one Friday night, Jeannie would get to spend the $10 on mixed drinks, which would have to last through the long evening, while Denise sipped soft drinks. The next weekend, Denise would get the $10 and Jeannie would be the driver.

  Occasionally, they would meet guys who appealed to them, but Jeannie devoted most of her attentions to Mike Reardon, a handsome Norfolk policeman. Reardon had seen Jeannie on visits to the courthouse on police business. He knew Jeannie’s friend and co-worker Christine White and her husband David, who also was a police officer. Through the Whites, he had learned that Jeannie was divorced. He had stopped by her desk several times for what Jeannie thought was idle conversation before he had asked her out the first time. For Jeannie, it was a relationship that had seemed to click from the beginning. Denise could tell that Mike was important to Jeannie, because she paid even more attention than usual to her hair, makeup and clothes when she knew that she would be seeing Mike.

  “Jeannie was so particular that if I went to the street to get the mail from my mailbox with rollers in my hair, she would lecture me about how I looked. And she would practically order me not to go out of the house again looking like that,” Denise remembered.

  Mike seemed perfect for Jeannie. He was tall, broad-shouldered, well-built with a deep tan and dark hair. Denise thought that he looked enough like Tony to be his brother. At 26, Mike was a former football player at Guilford College in North Carolina, and he still looked the part. He was dedicated to physical training, and he talked Jeannie into joining him in his regular workout sessions at a health spa in Norfolk, which Jeannie took as a sign that he might be developing a serious interest in her.

  Jeannie took to weightlifting immediately and wanted to learn more about it. Although Mike tried to advise her, he realized that his knowledge and training were limited. But he had a friend who worked at the spa who knew all about weightlifting. They’d once played football together at Guilford College, he said, and he was sure that his friend would be able to help her.

  A gold chain glistened on Pernell Jefferson’s powerful chest as Mike introduced him a short time later.

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Pernell said, smiling and offering his hand.


  3.

  The Crossroads

  THE TOWN OF BENSON lies in the heart of North Carolina at the western edge of the state’s coastal plain, just north of the southeastern United States sand belt that extends from nearby Fayetteville southwest through South Carolina and into Georgia.

  U.S. Highway 301 still makes its way through the heart of town, but it no longer carries the heavy burden of north–south traffic that it once did. In its place, Interstate 95, the major traffic artery linking East Coast cities with the warmth of the Florida sun, carries motorists east of Benson’s downtown area and few ever stop. Just north of town, the final segment of transcontinental Interstate 40 has become the favored route for North Carolinians bound for their favorite beaches between the Outer Banks and South Carolina’s Grand Strand, but most of those bypass Benson, too.

  Long ago, passenger trains regularly made stops in the town, but now Amtrak limiteds barely slow as they rumble through the heart of Benson on daily runs north and south between Miami and New York.

  Though light industry has in the last 20 years become an important part of Benson’s economy, Johnston County remains mostly devoted to agriculture. Indeed, it is a town known in North Carolina for its Mule Days, a summer celebration of parades and other attractions that brings in visitors not only from surrounding counties but from neighboring states as well.

  Like most Southern towns its size, Benson is a blue-collar town with a taste for blue-collar religion. Its preference is mostly Protestant and primarily Baptist and it is in Benson that one of the nation’s oldest and biggest gospel singing conventions is still held each year.

  It was to Benson, her hometown, that Joann Richardson Jefferson returned from Stuart, Florida, with her two sons after her marriage fell apart in 1966. Her elder child, Pernell, was just three years old, her younger, Willie, only 11 months.

  For a time, they moved in with her parents, William and Priscilla Richardson, but Joann soon found a place of her own, a small, white, wood-frame home a short walk from a Missionary Baptist church and only a few blocks from Benson’s old, affluent neighborhood. There, Pernell and Willie would grow up, and it was to that house that they would return again and again throughout their lives.

  Finding work to support her two sons was difficult for Joann. From late spring through the oppressively hot summer months, she often labored in the vast fields near Benson, helping harvest crops of vegetables and sweet potatoes. Occasionally, she worked in a downtown candy kitchen, but in hard times, she had to resort to welfare to feed her growing sons.

  No support came from her children’s father, Willie Thomas Jefferson, a construction worker who once had scratched his nickname, Hook, in the wet cement he had helped pour for a railroad bridge near Benson. The boys almost never heard from him and for most of their young lives had no memories of him.

  Life became less difficult for Joann and her boys when she finally was hired as a custodian at Benson Elementary School, where her sons were students. Still, she had to continue to work nights caring for bedridden people in Benson to make ends meet.

  Pernell and Willie regularly attended Sunday school and preaching at the Missionary Baptist church less than a block from their house. For a time, both sang in the choir in which most of the members were relatives. They sang so sweetly that churches throughout the county sought them for special programs.

  “There were Sundays we’d be in church almost all day,” Willie recalled. “We’d sing in our church on Sunday morning, another church would want us to come sing in the afternoon, and maybe we’d go to another one Sunday night.

  “But Mom always had Sunday dinner waiting for us. Fried chicken. Green beans. Homemade biscuits.”

  For Willie, these were happy times. Years later, Pernell also would find contentment in remembering them.

  “I came from a good family,” he said. “People in my family made something of themselves. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had a lot of care and love. And the strong people in our family were the women—my mother and my aunt.”

  If anything, Joann Jefferson was a disciplinarian. When she got word on one occasion that Willie had been disrespectful to a teacher, she marched into the classroom, asked the teacher to excuse her for a moment and spanked her son while 32 startled fellow students watched.

  In the absence of their father, Pernell and Willie found other men to fill some of that void. For a time, William Richardson, an older cousin who worked at the Jesse Jones Sausage Company, took the boys under his wing. Later, they would find companionship from W.C. Swain, a construction worker who had become Joann’s friend.

  “For a time, he was like a stepfather to us,” Willie recalled.

  Other relatives, too, took an interest in Joann’s sons. “My Aunt Katie and Uncle Smitty took us to the beach every summer until I was in senior high school,” Pernell later remembered. “They were like a second set of parents to us.

  “And Aunt Mable and Uncle Willie. We stayed in their house a lot in the summertime. And Willie and I would go fishing with Uncle Leslie and his two daughters, Linda and Shirley. Their mother made the best homemade biscuits in Benson.”

  Almost from the time he entered first grade, it was clear that Pernell was exceptional. Though he was a capable student, his mother thought Pernell’s future lay in his athletic ability. He played all sports, but he especially loved baseball, football and basketball and played them with an ease and intensity that held out the promise of a bright future. As soon as classes ended each school day, Pernell headed straight for the gym or the playing field, and he usually stayed until supper was on the table at home. But one night at supper, when he was only eight, he made a surprise announcement. He wanted to quit sports. He was tired of it, he said, and other kids had better shoes than his.

  “You must not quit,” his mother told him sternly. “My sons aren’t quitters.”

  Shortly afterward, she paid $30 for a new pair of athletic shoes, an act her son would still recall fondly many years later.

  “Me and my kid brother, we grew up poor,” Pernell said, “but whatever we needed we got. If we needed something, Mother would go lacking herself until next month to get it for us.”

  “Mother didn’t have thirty dollars to spare,” Willie later recalled. “Thirty dollars was an awful lot of money to us back then. My mother was willing to sacrifice for Pernell.

  “Mom knew Pernell was a very good athlete. And she knew he was a very good student. Pernell’d do his homework in thirty minutes and it’d take me two hours. When Pernell helped me, I always made A’s and B’s.

  “Mom understood this. She knew that athletics and education might make a great difference in Pernell’s life some day. And she was right.”

  Sports also kept Pernell out of the trouble in which so many of the other boys from his section of town often found themselves.

  “Actually, I was scared of trouble,” he remembered. “I was scared to fight. I can only remember two fights when I was growing up. We just didn’t grow up with that in our house and in our family.”

  Once, though, Pernell got a taste of what could happen to him. It came shortly after one of his youth league baseball games had ended near 10:30 on a summer night when he was 13.

  The lights at the cozy playing field still illuminated the surrounding neighborhood as Pernell began walking the six blocks home along Church Street. The money his mother had given him to buy a soft drink still jingled in his pocket.

  Just as he approached the convenience store directly behind the Benson Police Department, the store’s outside lights suddenly were switched off. Assuming the store was closing, Pernell continued on toward home. Within an hour, Benson police officers knocked at his door and asked Pernell to accompany them to the police station for questioning about a robbery at the convenience store.

  “We know you were there,” an officer told Pernell after he was escorted into the police station. “Somebody saw you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pernell said, “but I was j
ust walking home from the baseball game. I was going to stop at the store and buy a soda. That’s what I always do after a game. But they turned the lights off and I thought they were closing.”

  Pernell was frightened and he began crying as the officer continued his questioning. Soon, his mother and his aunt, Kate Smith, arrived and phoned Pernell’s uncle, Norman (Phil) Richardson, a magistrate in nearby Smithfield.

  Twenty minutes later, Richardson was at the Benson police station and pulled his nephew aside for a private talk.

  “Okay, Sonny Boy,” he said, using the only name by which he ever addressed Pernell. “Tell me about it.”

  “Uncle Phil, I didn’t do it. I thought the store was closing, so I didn’t even stop like I usually do.”

  “You’d better be telling me the truth, Sonny Boy,” his uncle said.

  “I am telling you the truth.” And the tears came again.

  Moments later, an officer asked to speak to Richardson. He told him that Pernell was being released, that another suspect had been arrested. Within minutes, Pernell was passing the new suspect in a narrow hallway. He was startled. He felt as though he were looking at his double.

  “The guy’s still around town,” Willie said years later, “and if he walked in here right now, you’d do a doubletake because he still looks just like Pernell.”

  By the time Pernell entered South Johnston High School, sports had become the foundation upon which he would build his popularity. With a close, older friend named Tol Avery to idolize, Pernell became a three-sport star at South Johnston. During his sophomore year, he was the running back on the football team, for which Avery was the quarterback. Pernell continued to carry the ball through his junior season and then was shifted to quarterback for his final season (his friend Tol had gone on to college). He also was a star on the school’s track team, but his first love was another spring sport, baseball.