Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Later, testifying to a grand jury in Pikeville, Maynard described the frustration he and Ray felt as they tried to find out where Susan Smith had gone, or what had happened to her. He testified, “We had investigated and pursued leads during the entire year to no avail; we could not get a line on where she might be or anything like that. We had information that she had been in different parts of the country and we had contacted different police agencies and requested assistance from those people and tried to locate her, but all the leads turned up to be dead-ends. We couldn’t locate her.”

  Mark Putnam’s name kept turning up in gossip and speculation, but Maynard and others felt that a highly regarded young FBI agent like him was initially above suspicion criminally, even if he was sleeping with the girl. “From the beginning of the investigation, of course, the information we were getting was that she may have been having an affair with FBI agent Mark Putnam. Initially we accepted this due primarily to the person’s position of being an FBI agent, it was very hard for us to believe that he could be capable of being involved in her disappearance or death,” Maynard said.

  By January, though, the state police were more willing to accept the idea that an FBI agent could be involved in causing harm to Susan. Wasn’t it time to at least sit Putnam down to answer some questions? The state police were unaware that in Miami, Mark Putnam, wracked with guilt, was already suggesting to his aghast superiors that perhaps an interior investigation might be launched to put the questions at rest. Meanwhile, supervisors in the FBI’s main regional office in Louisville once again responded civilly but firmly to the entreaties from Pikeville. They were not prepared to produce a federal agent for questioning by Kentucky cops just because the state police were unable to find Susan Smith.

  The reasoning behind their attitude was logical enough. First, there was no evidence that a crime had even been committed. Furthermore, there was plenty to suggest that the missing woman, a reputed small-time drug dealer with an abusive ex-husband and a passel of enemies, had simply gone off somewhere. Yes, there was speculation, but there was always speculation in places like the Tug Valley. The agent whose name was being bandied around, Mark Putnam, had compiled a distinguished record fighting crime in eastern Kentucky, gossip about his personal relationship with the missing girl aside.

  Shelby also kept pressing for answers and was furious about the rebuff she got from Terry Hulse when she’d phoned to demand that the FBI question Mark. “He acted like she didn’t need to be found,” Shelby would later say. She claimed that Hulse told her that Susan would undoubtedly turn up alive, at which time “we’ll do a pregnancy test to determine if it was Putnam’s baby or not. But from what I’ve heard, your sister fooled around with everything in Pikeville.” Shelby was bristling. “They just talked to me like I was dirt under their feet,” she said. “It is impossible for me to understand why they would feel that this was a problem for the Kentucky State Police when we all knew Susan was a paid informant for the FBI and had testified and given information about several potentially dangerous people.”

  Of course, part of the difficulty was that although Shelby never wavered in her insistence that Mark Putnam had been personally involved with her sister, she herself had given investigators various theories about her sister’s disappearance, with no evidence for any of them. All she really knew was what she said Susan had told her. She had never even laid eyes on Putnam.

  But Ray had sorted through the various accounts and come back down the blind alleys increasingly certain that Mark Putnam knew more than he said about what had happened to Susan Smith. Convinced now that the woman was dead, stymied by bureaucratic lethargy within a state police hierarchy that was reluctant to incur the ire of the FBI, he decided to go through outside channels. He stopped by the downtown office of the county prosecutor, commonwealth’s attorney John Paul Runyon, to ask for advice.

  Ray told the prosecutor that he thought the FBI’s refusal to take any role in the investigation was inexcusable. The woman had worked for them, after all. She had put herself in danger for them. “They don’t seem to understand that they have a special responsibility to this girl,” he said.

  Once he had heard the detective’s full description of the dilemma, Runyon readily agreed that the FBI needed to pay attention and step up. He himself had long been troubled by what he regarded as the cavalier way the FBI used its money to buy informants. He thought it was basically a cynical system that encouraged a kind of outlaw welfare state, with little genuine long-term law enforcement benefit.

  This seemed to be a perfect example, he decided. A poor mountain girl disappears; the federal agent who has put her in danger pulls up stakes and goes off to Florida. Didn’t the FBI owe her family at least the courtesy of an active investigation? Missing persons’ cases were not under FBI jurisdiction, but tampering with a federal witness sure as hell was. Besides, as Ray brusquely pointed out, the FBI had always managed in the past to find a way to insert itself into a local investigation when it felt like it, especially if the case looked as if it might yield some glory. Where was the bureau now?

  Runyon told the detective he was making it his business to find out.

  Kentucky’s county-based commonwealth attorneys perform the function of district attorneys, prosecuting felonies. But in the state’s unusual political structure, where power is concentrated intensely within the county courthouses, a commonwealth attorney wields significant influence over a wide swath of civic life, especially in poor rural areas such as Pike County. Now in his sixties, approaching the end of his fifth term in office, John Paul Runyon was the dean of Kentucky commonwealth attorneys, a man both widely admired and feared in Pike County.

  He also happened to be an occasional hunting buddy of Richard Ray’s, and he respected the veteran detective’s levelheaded comprehension of the societal currents in isolated regions such as Peter Creek. An athletic man, six feet four, with thick white hair and chiseled features, Runyon prided himself on his accessibility. His storefront office on a side street in downtown Pikeville was the kind of place where a man with a grievance could come in, stroll back to the prosecutor himself, sit down at his desk, and say, “John Paul, you sent my cousin to the penitentiary five years ago, and he always told me you was fair . . .”

  Runyon was also acutely aware of his public image. His predecessor as commonwealth attorney, a blustery coal tycoon named Thomas B. Ratliff, had attracted the ridicule of the national news media in 1967 by leading a posse in a midnight raid on the farmhouse of a couple who were active with Vista, the federal antipoverty group then calling attention to the destitution of southern Appalachia. Ratliff announced the discovery of a cache of “communist propaganda” in the house—actually, he’d found a handful of newspaper clippings about civil rights marches in Alabama—and successfully prosecuted the bewildered couple for sedition. By 1972, when the case was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, Pikeville had more important things on its mind, such as the giant mountain Cut-Through, one of the largest earth moving projects in US history. It allowed Route 23 to be rerouted and the flood-prone Levisa Fork to be diverted, freeing Pikeville’s downtown for new development.

  Runyon, a county official previously credited with bringing new state roads through the mountains, personified the desire of Pikeville to present itself as a progressive and vibrant commercial center, not a backwater hillbilly hamlet. He was first elected commonwealth attorney in 1972 and had been reelected, with increasingly wide margins ever since, resisting blandishments to run for statewide office. He liked to tell the story of a man he knew who had once run hard in a Democratic primary for governor and had unexpectedly gone down to decisive defeat. “You got beat because you didn’t want to be governor badly enough,” Runyon had told him. “Unless you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat screaming, ‘If I don’t get elected governor, I’ll die! I’ll die!’ you are simply not going to be governor. I could see you didn’t have that.�
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  His own aspirations were clear. In 1990, he was planning to round out his career with election to one last term as commonwealth attorney the following year. He wanted to win it without opposition—hell, by acclamation, if possible. And his acute small-town political instincts told him that the Putnam case, with its undertones of exploitation, cover-up, and official betrayal, was a booby trap. He did not intend to stumble into it blindly.

  While Ray sat in his office, Runyon picked up the phone and called Lou DeFalaise in Lexington. The US Attorney told the prosecutor that he happened to be on his way to the Justice Department in Washington.

  “Well, kick somebody there and get them working on this, will you, Louie?” Runyon said.

  Runyon also got together with Captain Rose, who recounted his own frustration in dealing with the FBI. He was especially unhappy since the state police had now heard, from Poole and other sources, that Mark Putnam had already said in Florida that he would agree to take a polygraph test. Yet every time the state police tried to take Putnam up on the supposed offer, the bureau stalled and finally, in early February, said flatly no.

  Rose said that Putnam was now the “main suspect” in Susan Smith’s disappearance and strongly suggested that Runyon meet with Shelby Jean Ward, who, he warned, was threatening to call a press conference to charge that law enforcement authorities were engaged in a cover-up of the murder of her sister, a federal informant.

  On February 9, a very unhappy Shelby Ward met with Runyon and state police officials in the prosecutor’s office.

  Shelby was quite serious about her threat, and it had some weight. National tabloid television programs would quite probably be interested in the story, which had all the right ingredients: the poor coal miner’s daughter; the dashing prep-school FBI man; treachery, cover-up, intrigue, and, of course, illicit sex.

  While he figured only a federal investigation would get to the truth, Runyon knew that putting Mark Putnam on a polygraph machine, even if he could get Putnam to agree, was not building a criminal case. Polygraphs are inadmissible as evidence in court. Essentially, there was no case without evidence that a crime had been committed. And there was a conspicuous absence of evidence in the one at hand.

  Shelby, as the state police had found, could offer the prosecutor little more than anger and speculation. “Is your sister the type of person who would just up and leave like that, maybe go off and stay in an apartment or something with Mark Putnam?” Runyon asked her.

  “It’s possible,” she said

  “Or leave with somebody else?”

  “That’s possible, too,” Shelby allowed.

  Explaining that he had no significant involvement in the investigation yet, and that no solid information had been developed, Runyon asked Shelby to consider that if the FBI man was in fact involved in her sister’s disappearance, premature publicity could “run Putnam to ground” and let him escape. They knew where Putnam was, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Runyon asked Shelby to stay quiet for “two or three weeks to see if I can build a fire and get this thing moving.”

  Reluctantly, Shelby agreed.

  When she left, the prosecutor, now believing that a full scale federal investigation was the only way to “shake this thing loose,” called Terry Hulse and suggested strongly that the FBI should get involved in the case, if only to clear their own man’s name, which was being dragged through the mud in Pike County.

  Hulse prudently made some calls. In Washington, the bureaucracy stirred. There was a request from the Justice Department for Richard Ray’s case file.

  A month passed. The case was reported “under review.” In April, two federal officials visited Pikeville for a briefing on the case. They were Sarah Pickard, a supervisory special agent with the FBI, and David P. Bobzien, an assistant counsel with the Justice Department. Hulse drove down from Covington to participate in the meeting.

  The federal agents confirmed to Runyon and the state police that there was no current investigation, either professional or criminal, into the allegations against Mark Putnam. If Poole had been investigating, he was working on his own, as usual.

  “I can’t believe that you people don’t have any kind of investigation going on into Mark Putnam,” Runyon snapped.

  Ray would later recall, “After talking to them, I had a little hope. They read my report. They weren’t really aware of what we had here; they seemed pretty concerned. They assured us that once they got back to Washington, this case would take a little higher priority than what it had been before, which was apparently none. I think some of the FBI people had heard about it, and they didn’t think it was very serious or something. They figured that probably this woman would show up somewhere. Which I knew she wouldn’t.”

  A few weeks later, Captain Rose called Runyon. He had heard back from the Justice Department. The message, he said, essentially was, “We’re not interested. You handle it.”

  Runyon sighed impatiently and told Rose, “That’s a serious mistake. To start with, you don’t have the resources. You don’t have the jurisdiction—the boy you need to talk to is in Florida. And you can’t talk to him without permission from the Justice Department. Let me see what I can do.”

  This time he was less delicate in his approach to the FBI. “Listen,” he warned Bobzien, “you people have got a problem. You people are in this up to your eyeballs. You threw this young girl to the wolves, and if you don’t get off your ass, I’m going to have Geraldo Rivera breaking down your office door sticking a camera in your face, and saying, ‘Where is your missing informant?’”

  13

  The FBI investigation began. With twenty-three years in the bureau, supervisory special agent Jim Huggins had seen his share of hotshot rookie agents roar out of the academy in a blaze of energy, thinking they were the greatest thing to happen to federal law enforcement since Eliot Ness, and then burn out before they qualified for their second week’s vacation.

  Not so, he thought, with this Putnam fellow. Huggins had run into him only a few times when Mark came up to Lexington for gun training, but he knew enough about his reputation down in Pikeville, where the kid was practically a one-man band, to regard him as one of the best young agents he had ever encountered. Huggins believed fervently that the future of his beloved FBI depended on a steady supply of sharp, hard-working young agents just like Mark Putnam.

  On May 1, Huggins met with Terry O’Connor, the special agent in charge of the Lexington office. The discussion was about some talk of trouble in the Pikeville office. The commonwealth attorney down there was “bouncing off the wall” and threatening a media circus if the FBI didn’t deal with questions that “needed to be resolved” about the relationship between a young agent and a female informant who had gone missing.

  Resolving them would turn out to be the most emotionally wrenching experience of Huggins’s career.

  At the start, Huggins and the other agents who were sent down to Pikeville—there would ultimately be ten of them in all—believed that they would be looking into a simple missing person case that had been mishandled by the state cops. Not that the bureau was totally without fault; it was clear that Putnam had some explaining to do about the missing informant. And there was the delicate underlying problem, “the Pikeville horror story,” as one agent put it, of an office out of control, with a rookie agent doing the work of four people in partnership with an agent as disreputable as Poole, who’d been moved out of the mainstream and sent down to Pike­ville because supervisors didn’t want to deal with him. Clearly, the Pikeville office had been trouble waiting to happen. The bureau’s vaunted public image, which every agent was trained to protect at all costs, was in peril.

  Huggins met first with Captain Rose, who, he said, “made available all of the resources of the post.” These resources consisted primarily of Det. Richard Ray, a burly and taciturn cop who was somewhat resentful at being assigned to escort the newly
arrived FBI agents as they essentially duplicated his own investigation, at least as he saw it. It was clear to him that the FBI’s elite squad thought they had been sent down to straighten out the mess that the hillbilly cops had made. Their attitude, he thought, was, “Let’s do a thorough job, clear our guy, and find the guy that really did it”—assuming “it” had been done at all. He felt he was supposed to play tour guide, driving the agents—most of whom, he said, knew nothing about mountain people and had never seen Pikeville before—on their rounds as they checked off likely suspects.

  Years later, Huggins took strong issue with Ray’s characterizations.

  “I had no idea what was going on in Pikeville, which was under Covington,” he said of the way the FBI offices in Kentucky were organized, with Covington and its agent in charge, Terry Hulse, having the supervision of the small Pikeville office.

  He said the first he heard of the Mark Putnam problem was when Sam Smith, the agent who had been in the Pikeville office when Mark Putnam was first assigned there, came into Huggins’s office in Lexington one morning at the end of April.

  “Jim, can I talk to you for a minute?” Smith said.

  Huggins shut the door and Smith explained, “I was just out in Pikeville talking to a couple of my buddies, and there’s a missing informant down there, and they think Mark Putnam might know more about it than he is saying.”

  Huggins, aware of Mark’s reputation as a first-rate young agent, was incredulous at first. So were the supervisors in the main regional office in Louisville when he called to ask if they had heard the rumors. They had not, and asked him to find out what he could.

  He immediately phoned Capt. Gary Rose, the commander of the Kentucky State Police post in Pikeville, to find out what was going on. Why hadn’t the FBI been informed that there were questions involving an agent and his missing informant?