Deadly Goals

by Wilt Browning

  To further stress the character of one of the principal witnesses, Benjamin dramatically tore open four containers of sweetener, emptying three of them and half of the fourth onto a paper and holding it for the jury to see.

  “He said, ‘I had me my eightball,’” Benjamin said of Savin’s testimony, “an eightball of cocaine. I suspected that there may have been some of you who hadn’t heard that term before so I asked him, ‘What is an eightball? That would have been three and a half grams, wouldn’t it there, sir?’

  “He said, ‘Yeah, that’s right. Paid two-hundred and fifty dollars for it.’ Old Mike, he fortifies himself before this field trip with three and a half grams.

  “How does he take it? Well, he either smokes it or he puts it up his nose. You can do this at lunch. It’s kind of interesting. One of the people upon whose word you have to make a decision took this substance, cocaine, and put it up their nose before they made the trip. Then halfway down—it’s a two-hour trip, after all—the lad gets restless. Time to stop, take my oral hit of acid, LSD for this trip.”

  Moving on to St. Augustine, Benjamin called him “the Hannibal Lecter type.”

  “Scratch beneath his surface,” he said, “roll the log over, and you see what’s inside of Joey. He’s the dangerous one because he is so smooth.”

  It was on Wednesday when St. Augustine first talked to the police, Benjamin noted. “Tells them the body is off Belmont. He then goes and tells Wayne, ‘The police are questioning me,’ and Wayne says, ‘What did you tell them?’ ‘I told them the body was off Belmont.’

  “Okay, they agree then that if they’re ever questioned, that it was Wednesday night that the body got moved to Amelia. See, that’s when they’re saying it happened, it happened Wednesday night, the same day Joey was questioned. They have to say Wednesday night because that’s when Joey was questioned. He’s not planning on getting caught in a lie. He’s told the police the body is on Belmont. That’s on Wednesday. And so they have to agree that if they’re ever questioned, it was Wednesday night when they moved it to Amelia.

  “How do you know they didn’t move it that night? Because they didn’t.

  “Wayne had testified before and he knew what he was going to say. Wayne said, ‘Yeah, when I went out there that Wednesday night to move the body, I helped Pernell, the body was stiff and when we put it in the rank, why, I heard it crack.’ He says it happened Wednesday night.

  “Well, that’s why we called Dr. Fierro and she told you about rigor mortis and she told you, ‘Yes, a body will be stiff twelve hours after death. It might be sooner if there’s extreme stress. And at thirty-six hours post mortem, after death, the body will be soft.’

  “You know bodies decompose. Rigor mortis, you see, is a temporary state. That body was stiff on Saturday night. Wayne didn’t know that. Now, he knows when he moved that body out to Amelia, it was stiff, so he stuck with that but we caught him. It didn’t happen Wednesday. It couldn’t have because he says it was stiff and he heard it crack. That body was moved Saturday night. It was moved to Amelia Saturday night. We know that because it was stiff and we know that because Joey lies about what he was doing Saturday night.

  “We know that because the police went out on Wednesday after they talked with Joey and everyone agrees the body was supposed to be behind this church under construction on Belmont. The police went out there after they talked to Joey on Wednesday and they didn’t just go out and say, ‘No body,’ for heaven’s sake. They went out and searched behind that church and they didn’t find it. Why? It had already been moved on Saturday night when it was still stiff.

  “Now, that still doesn’t tell you who killed Miss Butkowski. It still doesn’t. It’s a question you can never answer. But I will submit to you it was not Pernell. There is no proof that it was Pernell.”

  When Benjamin had finished his closing statement, Stark once more stood at the low railing surrounding the jury box. He swept into his hands the sweetner Benjamin had left there and offered it back to the defense attorney.

  “Mr. Benjamin ought to be a mystery writer,” Stark said, as though only to himself. “I have never heard such a vivid imagination in all my life.”

  The evidence was in, the arguments over, and by 11 Saturday morning, Judge Warren had completed his charge, instructing the jury that they could find Pernell guilty either of capital murder with a sentence of life imprisonment or first degree murder, or they could acquit him. The jurors filed out of the courtroom to begin deliberations.

  The Pricketts and their friends went to the witness room to wait. Women from Amelia arrived with sandwiches, pizza and homemade pies, as they had done on the previous two days. No one talked about the trial.

  For Denise, time dragged by. Since she had discovered the tape in her telephone answering machine, she felt that the case against Pernell was open and shut and nothing that had happened in two days of testimony had changed her mind. She just wanted it to be over and for Pernell to be sent to prison where he belonged.

  Near noon, almost an hour into jury deliberations, Jimmy Weaver began to wonder what was taking so long. Irene Demos sat near Carrie as the wait stretched beyond an hour. Carrie only picked at her food. Ben also ate little. He did not feel well but he kept that to himself as he paced nervously, unable to relax.

  Near one, a deputy appeared at the witness room door. Ben stopped pacing and looked at him expectantly.

  “They’ve got a verdict,” the deputy said.

  Now Ben turned to Carrie. They stood looking at one another, saying nothing until Carrie took his arm to follow the deputy back to the courtroom.

  Pernell watched intently as the jury entered. After the last juror was seated, the foreman passed a folded slip of paper to the bailiff, who handed it to the judge.

  Judge Warren opened the paper, read the verdict silently and addressed the jury.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen, according to your foreman, you have reached a verdict. Your verdict is that you find the defendant guilty of capital murder as charged in the indictment and fix his punishment at life imprisonment. As I told you, your verdict must be unanimous and I’m going to ask each of you individually that question.”

  As the judge began querying the jurors, Ben turned to look into his wife’s eyes. “It’s over,” he whispered, and she began to cry. Ben took a deep breath. Reporters later wrote that Pernell appeared stoic when the verdict was announced.

  “What type of response can you have?” he asked later. “You’ve just gone through an ordeal. It has lasted for months and you get to the point that you want it to be over with. It’s not that I didn’t care. It’s just that I was in such a state of shock, my mind just went blank.”

  Pernell would claim that he did not even hear the rest of Judge Warren’s remarks or the polling of the jury.

  The judge set sentencing for June 4 at 2 p.m. That would be only a formality for the punishment already had been determined.

  After court was adjourned, Pernell whispered to his lawyer, turned and waved to Willie and Blondie, and was led away in handcuffs.

  Ben and Carrie rose to leave, but now Ben was feeling so weak that he had to rely on Carrie for support. As they started out of the courthouse, his legs began to fold and he nearly collapsed. His friend Jim Irvin and his son Sam caught him and helped him back into the courthouse. They took him to the witness room while others called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived quickly and began to examine him as his worried family looked on.

  “I felt like I was about to die,” Ben later recalled. “I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t talk. That was tough.”

  Ben’s problem was diagnosed as an anxiety attack brought on by the pressures of the trial and his long history of bronchial and asthma problems. He was treated without having to be taken to a hospital.

  “The thing is,” Ben said, “you can keep things bottled up inside you for so long, but then it comes out, and when it did it came out in me as an anxiety attack.”

  When he felt
strong enough to leave, he and Carrie went out to face the reporters. This time Carrie smiled at them.

  “Yes, we’re satisfied,” she said. “No matter what they did to him, they could never bring Jeannie back to us.”

  Ben told reporters that the family was happy with the decision but would have preferred a stronger sentence.

  “He took a life that was dear to us. He should have paid with his life. We knew what the sentence was going to be, but we hoped it would be without parole. We would have liked to see him be executed, but we have to go along with what the jury decided. The trial was conducted in a very proper manner, as was the investigation.”

  A reporter told Ben that Benjamin probably would appeal on the basis of the tape recording.

  “Anything he wants to do,” Ben said. If Pernell came again before a judge, he said, “We’ll be there. I think he should be put in a dungeon with the door locked and they should throw away the key.”

  As townspeople accompanied the Pricketts and Denise to their cars, Pernell’s brother, Willie, and his half-sister, Blondie, exited the courthouse. They had lingered to talk to Pernell before he was taken back to jail. Willie, who was carrying a Bible, was overcome with emotion, and at the top of the courthouse steps, he stopped and began shouting, “My brother got railroaded!”

  Sheriff Weaver left the Pricketts and hurried to Willie, urging him to move on. Willie and Blondie walked slowly to their car, talking to reporter Overton McGehee of Richmond’s Times-Dispatch.

  “I don’t think he got a fair trial in this little town,” Willie said. “They didn’t do anything to the other four guys.” Later, Willie said that he thought race played a role in his brother’s conviction. “There were three blacks on the jury. They were not going to vote opposite to what the white people voted. That’s just the way it was.”

  Within thirty minutes, Pernell was back in his cell at Farmville. He lay down across his cot and fell asleep. He slept for three hours. The next day, he placed a collect telephone call to Susan Demos in Florida.

  Susan had gotten daily reports of the trial from her mother. From the time in 1990 that she had learned that Pernell was being sought in Florida on a murder warrant, Susan had had more than a casual interest in the case.

  “When I heard about Jeannie, I said to myself, ‘Well, now, they’ll see I was right,’” Susan remembered. “I had been telling people that Pernell was capable of terrible things. Jeannie had walked into something she couldn’t even see coming. It was like walking into a lion’s den, and that appalls me.”

  Still, she accepted Pernell’s call.

  “I lost,” he told her.

  “I know you did it,” Susan told him calmly, “because Jeannie probably was trying to leave you and you couldn’t let her do that. But it doesn’t matter, Pernell, whether you did it or not because even if you didn’t kill Jeannie, you’ve done enough in the past that you need to be in jail.”

  Later, recalling her reaction to Pernell’s conviction, Susan remarked that she thought he would do fine in prison.

  “He doesn’t have to work,” she said. “He’s with the boys and he can kick back and talk about football and when he was with the Browns. The way Pernell looks at it is that he’s there and it wasn’t his fault. He’s going to do great in prison. So let him stay there forever.”

  28.

  Where the Wildflowers Grow

  AFTER JEANNIE’S BODY HAD BEEN DISCOVERED, her brother Sam had felt drawn to the spot where she had been found. Sheriff Weaver had taken him there at the end of January 1990, less than four weeks after the discovery, but the experience had been so disturbing that he had stayed only a few minutes.

  At the time, Jeannie’s remains were still at the state medical examiner’s office and would not be released until late in February. Just a few days before the remains were to be released, Sam’s phone had rung in Richmond. His mother was calling.

  “I need for you to do something for me,” she said. “I want you to go to the place where Jeannie was and I want you to fill a shoe box full of dirt from there because I want to sprinkle that over her grave when she gets home.”

  Sam had not wanted to return to that place, but his bond with his mother had been special for all of his life, and he couldn’t say no.

  “It was probably the toughest thing I ever had to do,” he said later. “I was surprised I was able to do it and the only reason I could do it is because Mother wanted me to.”

  He went on the day before Jeannie’s body was released to the funeral home. He went alone, carrying a shoe box and a small garden trowel. He found the crooked tree that marked the place where the wet-weather stream made its way to Nibbs Creek. There he knelt in the creek bed, pushed the trowel into the soft earth and deposited the first scoop of dirt into the box. With the next scoop, something caught his eye. He sifted through the dirt and felt a piece of cloth. He pulled it out and realized that he held the label from the blouse Jeannie had been wearing the night she died.

  And he began to sob. “This is exactly where she lay,” he told himself. “And I’m taking a little of her home. This is what Mama wanted. She wanted me to bring Jeannie home.”

  He finished filling the box and began to make his way back through the brush to his waiting car. Perhaps ten yards from the spot where he had been digging, Sam stopped and looked back at the lonely place. He knew that he would never see it again.

  Yet only a few months later, when he was in Amelia on business, Sam had felt himself drawn irresistibly toward Nibbs Creek. He parked his car and made his way again to the dry creek. Only then did he realize why he had been drawn back.

  “I just wanted to make my peace,” he later recalled. “Jeannie was dead. That was a fact of life. And I was going to have to deal with it, and I thought the best place for me to deal with it was where she had been found.”

  He found himself remembering when she had been young and happy, and he began talking to her, speaking softly, telling her how much he missed her, how much he and their parents were hurting, how all of them were struggling to find some resolution to the madness that had taken her life and overwhelmed theirs.

  Suddenly, he had a strong feeling that he was being watched. He let his eyes search quickly along the edge of the nearby woods. At the tree line no more than 40 yards away was a huge deer. Both stood looking at each other, neither moving.

  “As we stood there, the deer and me, a calm came over me,” Sam remembered. “I just had this feeling that Jeannie was helping me get things together, that everything was going to be all right and that I didn’t have to come back any more.”

  But that would not be the case.

  Pernell’s sentencing was delayed twice, but it finally was held on August 6, 1991, the day after Jeannie would have turned 32. Sam and his parents were there, occupying the same row of benches on which they had sat through the trial.

  Pernell’s attorney, Steven Benjamin, rose to be heard before sentence was pronounced.

  “Your Honor, I think that there is little to be decided today. The law imposes upon you but one sentence. I must say that the time that’s passed since our trial in this courtroom has tempered not at all my shock that the jury accepted the word of these scoundrels, the witnesses who testified against Mr. Jefferson. The testimony and the evidence that we heard in this case, sir, raised many more questions than it answered. I have urged you in motions made at the time to set aside the verdict of the jury as being contrary to the law and the evidence. Obviously, I do not abandon that motion and wish you would take that action.

  “Just as obviously, I wish that you would not impose the sentence returned by the jury. But the only reasons I can proffer to you for such action is that justice demands no other action. It is unfortunate that these scoundrels who, by their own admission, were so intimately involved with the disappearance and the murder of this young lady were able to avail themselves of the opportunity to testify against Mr. Jefferson to save their own hides and that the word of these people wa
s accepted. I submit to you that the result in this case is not justice but we do understand the position of the court, given the jury’s verdict, and I say to you now only that I am saddened. That’s all.”

  Thomas Stark, the prosecuting attorney, was offended by Benjamin’s remarks.

  “Well, those comments can’t go unaddressed, if Your Honor please, while I don’t believe it has the slightest effect on the outcome. We’re dealing here with a cold-blooded killer. We do not represent to the court nor did we ever represent to the court that the witnesses against him were Sunday school teachers; they were likewise criminals. But the evidence is clear and the jury found guilty.”

  Judge Warren asked Pernell if he had anything to say in his behalf. He declined, and the judge asked him to stand.

  “The court enters the finding of guilty of murder in the commission of a robbery, capital murder, and imposes the sentence fixed by the jury, that of life imprisonment,” Judge Warren said.

  Under Virginia law, Pernell was facing a minimum of 25 years with time off for good behavior. He stood stoically. Since his arrest in Florida, Pernell already had spent more than 17 months behind bars in two states. Benjamin now asked to be named as a state-appointed attorney for Pernell’s appeals, and the judge granted his request. For as long as he would represent Pernell, he would draw his fee from taxpayers. Pernell was led away as he had come, in handcuffs.

  Now it truly was done.

  The Pricketts lingered for a time talking with Sheriff Weaver and Chief Deputy Terry, with whom they had become close friends. Carrie hugged the two men; Ben and Sam exchanged warm handshakes with them. As they were leaving for home, Carrie suddenly turned to Ben.

  “Let’s go out there,” she said.

  “Out where?” Ben asked.

  “I need to be where she was.”