Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  For Mark, the first big payoff from developing Susan as an informant came in September. Susan told him that Cat Eyes, still living at her house, had brought home a duffel bag containing two sawed-off shotguns and some ski masks. She had found it in the children’s room, which Kenneth had given to Cat and Sherri, forcing Miranda and Brady to sleep in the living room. Cat was clearly making big plans, Susan reported to Mark.

  “Watch the papers,” Cat had told her with a sly wink. “Easy Street is just up the road.”

  Mark took the information back to his then-partner, Dan Brennan, and the FBI quietly alerted local banks to be on the watch.

  Cat had chosen for his next heist a branch of the First National Bank in Ferrells Creek, in the hills fifteen miles south of Pike­ville, five miles from the northern Virginia border. The bank, which was near a town called Elkhorn City, population fifteen hundred, usually had plenty of cash on hand. It was housed in a one-story building with a parking lot, beside a used-trailer dealer. In Virginia, the roads were good. Cat had arranged for a getaway van and an accomplice to drive it.

  On the morning of September 10, Cat entered the bank and approached the teller’s window, waiting patiently for a few seconds while a woman in front finished tucking money into her wallet. The teller looked up with surprise. Cat was wearing a huge pair of lumberjack’s coveralls that swathed him from neck to foot, and a black knit ski mask turned around backward, with two eye holes clumsily cut out in front so he would not expose too much of his face, especially his distinctive green eyes. He was holding but not brandishing a sawed-off shotgun. Cat was having some difficulty seeing because the eyeholes in the knit mask shifted when his head moved.

  The teller, Rosemary Childers, had been an employee of the bank for eleven years, working her way up to branch administrator. She was filling in at the window that day because the regular teller had called in sick. Cat put a pillowcase down on the counter and said, “Fill it up with money.” The teller noted that the pillowcase had a print of pink flowers on it, but it was grimy, as if it had been used to carry fishing tackle.

  While she took stacks of bills from her cash drawer, Cat Eyes raised the gun and swung around, ordering the half dozen or so other people in the bank: “Freeze, and put your hands up!” Some were confused at the sequence of the command, but tentatively, hands went up.

  Childers took this brief opportunity to drop a dye-pack into the pillowcase along with the money. A dye-pack is a clever security device that looks like a standard bound stack of bank money a hundred bills thick, but with a real ten-dollar bill on top of bill-size newsprint. Once the dye-pack passes through an electronic beam at a bank’s door, a timing switch is triggered. The next time it’s jostled, the device explodes like a firecracker, splattering red dye on the fleeing culprit and his loot.

  “Into the vault!” Cat Eyes shouted to the bewildered employees and customers. There was some commotion while Rosemary Childers went to look for the key. When she found it and opened the vault, Cat ordered her to take the stacks of bills from a shelf and drop them into his pillowcase, which he held open like a trick-or-treater. She managed to drop in a second dye-pack, but this one Cat Eyes spotted. “And no dye-bombs,” he ordered. Sheepishly, the woman removed it. The pillowcase now contained $12,807 in bills, 182 two-dollar bills as well as the real ten-dollar note stuck atop the hidden dye-pack.

  Cat Eyes closed the vault door, thoughtfully not all the way because there were people inside, and ran to the exit with a joyful shout. Just outside, he broke stride to perform a small victory jig like football players do after grabbing a pass in the end zone. At once the dye-pack exploded, initially causing Cat to think he had been shot and was watching his own blood spurt. When he realized what had happened, he dashed for the van, screaming at his accomplice, who had been lying down on the front seat, to get going. As they tore out of the parking lot and turned toward the Virginia border on US 460, a bank employee coming to work sized up the situation, chased after them, got the license number of the van, and stopped at a gas station to phone the state police.

  The number was busy.

  The van was found ditched on a side road at Ferrells Creek, along with a couple of hundred dollars soaked with red dye.

  After this, Cat didn’t return to Susan’s house, which the authorities were now watching. But a week later, in the Tug Valley branch of Pikeville National Bank in South Williamson, another alert bank teller, Debby White, became suspicious when a very polite but highly nervous dark-haired man with amazing green eyes sauntered in to exchange a wad of two-dollar bills, 182 of them in all—all stained at the edges with red dye. “Usually two-dollar bills come in only in deposits,” she told the police. “You never see exchanging of bills like that.”

  As Cat left the bank, she called the state police, who promptly notified the FBI. Mark was out of town to serve a fugitive warrant, and Dan Brennan finally got through to him on the phone and explained the situation. “Talk to Susan,” Mark said. “She’ll fill you in.”

  Brennan went to see Susan, but she refused. “I only talk to Mark,” she told him.

  When Mark found her the next day, she defended her loyalty to him. “It’s your case,” she said patronizingly. “I don’t want you to give away the credit. You worked on this case very hard.”

  She told him where Cat was holed up—at his mother’s house in West Virginia. When Mark and Dan Brennan arrived there with state police to handcuff the suspect, Cat insisted that he walk beside Mark, for the benefit of a Williamson newspaper photographer who had showed up, alerted by the police scanner. The story in the paper the next day credited Dan Brennan as the FBI man who broke the case, however.

  Susan was furious about that. She had her brother Bo drive her to Pikeville the next day where she found Mark at the FBI office. He counted out fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills and gave them to her as payment for informing on Cat Eyes. She tried to hand one back to him, saying, “I want you to have this.”

  He shrank from it. “I can’t take that, Susan!”

  She insisted, “You did all the work and you’re getting screwed out of any credit.”

  “You don’t understand how this organization works. You’re making me a hero. Maybe I didn’t get the big write-up in the paper, but my bosses know who did the work, and I get the credit for you.”

  “I want you to have this. I won’t take it back.”

  She dropped the money on his desk and hurried out. In a panic, he thought, Is she trying to set me up?

  He immediately phoned Hulse, his distant supervisor at the Covington office, who told him not to worry. He should write a covering memo and put the money in the safe toward the next payment, which would come if and when Susan agreed to expose herself and testify against Cat Eyes.

  Later, when Mark broached that subject with her, Susan said she would consider testifying, but that she was afraid for her life. If she testified at the trial, she said, she wanted enough money to move out of the area with her children.

  Mark asked, “How much money do you think you’ll need?”

  “Four thousand dollars.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  3

  Mark knew enough about what he was up against in eastern Kentucky to regard Susan as more than a source of information. To an outsider anxious to assimilate, she offered the invaluable cachet of acceptance. Being seen with a local girl made him look like one of the boys. It never occurred to him that for her, the opposite was true. To the extent that he found camouflage with her, she was flushed into the open. Susan had known instinctively that once she made her pact with Mark, there would be consequences. As if to ensure that she had some kind of at least implied protection in her newfound status, she had made it a point to tell everyone in Freeburn that she was working for the FBI. In fact, she positively trafficked in it, lavishing on the idea that she was something like a partner of Mark’s.

&n
bsp; “Like an executive secretary,” she told some people back in Freeburn.

  Kathy Putnam implicitly understood Susan’s dilemma. From the beginning, Kathy approached Susan with a mixture of empathy and wariness that enabled Susan, a woman acutely alert to opportunity, to discover a rapidly blurring zone between Mark’s professional and personal life, and to quickly step into it.

  In fact, Kathy recognized in Susan a kindred soul. No one else ever really understood that—not her husband, and certainly not Susan herself, who seemed to have drifted into the Putnams’ life as aimlessly as a cloud trailing across a mountain.

  The unlikely alliance between these two women had developed on the telephone during the summer and fall of 1987 as the Putnams settled more steadily into their new life. Susan had taken her role as an informant seriously, regarding it as a full-time job that required her to be on call and to report in frequently. And Kathy, because Mark was out on the road so much, and the FBI office had no secretary, had stepped in to help as an unpaid receptionist, fielding many of his phone calls from their home. Susan had called the house for the first time about a week after her initial meeting with Mark.

  “Kathy? This is Susan Smith,” she had begun in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’m working for the government. I don’t know if your husband told you about me or not. I’m working as his informer on an important case. Is he there? He was supposed to meet up with me at the office, but I don’t know where he is.”

  Kathy said she’d relay the message when Mark got in. Mark had already told her about his introductory discussions with Susan, including the meeting outside the restaurant in West Virginia. He’d also told her something that they both found amusing and somewhat curious. According to Bert Hatfield, right after the introductory meeting at the restaurant, Kenneth had stormed around Freeburn maintaining that the FBI man had actually “screwed” his ex-wife in the backseat of the car, in broad daylight in the restaurant’s parking lot when they went out there to talk.

  This alone was intriguing enough to whet Kathy’s curiosity about what sort of person would be living with an obvious wild man like Kenneth Smith. Kathy—increasingly lonely and unhappy in Pikeville—was pleasantly surprised to find that she liked her. She decided that Susan was friendly, smart, refreshingly self-­deprecating, engagingly ditsy at times, and, she thought, more than a little bit vulnerable when it came to relationships with men. Her first and abiding impulse was to help Susan.

  Kenneth’s fabrications aside, it was nevertheless apparent to Kathy that Susan was enthralled by Mark, a situation that she accepted with the practiced equanimity of a faculty wife toward an eager female graduate student with a crush on the professor. Besides, in close-knit Pikeville, where Kathy didn’t know many people and her neighbors made it clear that they didn’t much welcome outsiders, it was nice to have someone to talk to.

  During these increasingly frequent conversations, Susan began to ask Kathy’s advice on grooming and etiquette, while probing subtly for personal information about Mark. Susan learned that he ran every night—and she told him that she had started running, too. Did he read? Susan began showing up at their meetings with a paperback in her hand. As they got to know each other better, Mark began noticing odd little changes in Susan, as if she were trying to transform herself to become more like the women he knew, and more specifically his wife. Even her manner of speech changed—Susan would correct herself crossly when she said “heered” instead of “heard,” for example.

  “The calls got more personal as we got to know each other,” Kathy would later recall. “I actually enjoyed her calls at first, but you could sense right off that this was someone with an odd fascination for our personal life. Within a couple of weeks or so, she wanted to know things like, ‘What are you making for dinner? What does Mark like to eat? What did Danielle do today?’ The more I got to know about the awful life she had, the more I saw this as her attempt to understand our life. And I thought I could maybe show her that she had options, if she would just identify them and work at them.”

  Before long, Susan was calling at all hours, sometimes several times a day. Every time she picked up the phone, Kathy expected to hear Susan’s hillbilly twang. In time, Kathy decided that Susan’s attitude toward Mark was in fact akin to that of an executive secretary’s toward the boss. “She wanted to know where he was and how he could be reached all the time. She expected him to be available. She always claimed that she had important information for him. It was glamorous for her to be working for the FBI. On the one hand, she seemed to have the idea that it was like a regular job and Mark was her boss; then on the other, I think she saw him and her as Bonnie and Clyde.”

  Susan was persistent. Soon after she started working as an informant, she began showing up at the courthouse nearly every day looking for Mark. Since he was often out, Susan would pass the time bantering with courthouse employees, especially the officers in the probation and marshal’s divisions, where she managed to establish the impression that she and Mark had a close working relationship, and leave behind suspicions that it was a close personal one, too.

  Mark’s take on Susan was less complicated than his wife’s. He had noticed, for example, that Susan tended to boast about sexual relations with men at the courthouse, men he was quite sure had never been involved with her. “She has a big mouth, Kat,” he warned his wife. “Watch out.”

  Susan’s dependence on Kathy grew as the friendship deepened. They sometimes spoke for hours, Susan’s troubles spilling out one after the other to a receptive ear. The dead-end relationships, money problems, despair, abysmal self-esteem, half-baked aspirations, and chronic ineptitude—Kathy readily recognized these afflictions because she had overcome them herself. She believed that in time she might be able to help Susan do the same.

  Patiently, she would say, “Listen, Susan. I have been there. Believe me, I know where you are coming from. You can get yourself together.”

  To look at her then, poised and by all appearances self-­confident,­ ensconced in what seemed to be a solid marriage with a spouse who loved her deeply and a bright-eyed young daughter who would be a delight to any parent, it would have been difficult to imagine what similarities in their lives Kathy was alluding to. But they were there under the surface and they were striking.

  Kathy Ponticelli and her younger sister, Christine, were daughters of an autocratic but devoted second-generation Italian-American father and a mother who offered quiet, unassuming encouragement to her girls. The household had strict rules: no chatter at the dinner table, help out around the house, be home by curfew and not a minute later, get good grades, go to Mass on Sunday, and don’t get in trouble with the nuns.

  A smart and perceptive girl who felt that there was probably more to life than the tedium of Manchester, Connecticut, a small town aspiring mightily to become nothing more ambitious than a suburb, Kathy managed to break all of the rules except the one about good grades. Kathy coasted through St. James parish school and then East Catholic High School, sullen and bored. Unable, she thought, to do anything right other than study, she compensated for her lack of self-confidence with a brashness that some would misconstrue as effrontery. Her high school misdeeds, still painful for her to recall even after she’d grown into a well-adjusted young woman, had begun innocently enough, with hemline-length violations and back talk. If social acceptance meant dating the loutish captain of the football team, opening a purse to brandish a stash of joints, talking street-tough, copping cigarettes in the girls’ bathroom, flouting the rules—in general, courting the fires of hell in the next life, and detention, threats of expulsion, and inclusion on lists of suspected school troublemakers in this one—then so be it. On the other hand, not many of her female classmates pointedly carried, as she did, a well-worn paperback of Catcher in the Rye. At East Catholic High, such an attitude led right down the slippery slope to what her devout parents saw as the worst of all ignominies: public school, to which Kat
hy was banished in her junior year, and from which she dropped out a few months later, days after she turned eighteen.

  She was one of those skinny, fresh-faced girls who would grow up to become a winsome beauty, yet never quite appreciate the fact that the transformation had actually occurred. Nearly two decades later, she continued to see herself through a murky lens as a gawky, self-conscious kid holding back tears of rage as she was mocked for her appearance. “Ponticelli, your ears are sticking out! Look at her ears! Look at her ears!”

  After Kathy dropped out of high school, the similarities to Susan’s life became more pronounced. She had a boyfriend who in retrospect reminded her of Kenneth. She horrified her parents by moving into an apartment in a run-down, crime-ridden part of East Hartford with that boyfriend who drank heavily and had a propensity to punch any man who glanced more than casually at his girlfriend. The young man’s mother tended bar in a club that featured go-go dancers, where Kathy took a job as a waitress and bartender. Keeping her shirt on didn’t make her feel any more virtuous than her friends who danced with their shirts off, some of them young mothers trapped in the gritty economy of divorce on the fringe of postindustrial America.

  “There are ways to get better tips than tending bar,” one of the girls told her. “You know about the massage parlors, right?”

  Things got worse for her. The boyfriend was thrown into jail after a fight with a man who had flirted with Kathy in another bar. Then a man who followed her home and forced his way into the apartment.

  In one of those long late-night phone conversations, she told Susan about this.

  “I’m no blushing maiden, but I really didn’t know what was going on in those massage parlors, and I was too embarrassed to ask questions. I thought you put on makeup and dressed sexy and you go rub these guys’ backs and you get tips for that.”

  Susan inhaled a cigarette loudly and said skeptically, “Really?”