Trooper Down! Read online

  TROOPER DOWN!

  LIFE AND DEATH ON THE HIGHWAY PATROL

  by Marie Bartlett

  WITH A FOREWORD BY JAMES J. KILPATRICK

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  To Gary, for his enduring support,

  and to Aunt Phyllis, who always said I could do it

  Contents

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  FOREWORD BY JAMES J. KILPATRICK

  PREFACE

  Prologue

  1. “Am I Gonna Die?”

  2. Cadets

  3. War Stories

  4. Working the Wrecks

  5. Strange Encounters

  6. “Call Me Ma’am”

  7. Badgers & Skirt-Chasers

  8. Wives & Widows

  9. “Trooper Is Down”

  10. Passages

  11. When Good Guys Go Bad

  12. The Search for Rambo

  Epilogue

  List of Illustrations

  Trooper Joel K. Reece on patrol

  Louis Rector receives Distinguished Service Award

  Woman heads to work during manhunt

  Fugitive James Clegg returned to Tennessee

  Group of cadets running before dawn

  Cadets assisting one another with pull-ups

  Classroom study by cadets

  Cadet is reprimanded by commanding officer

  Troopers take a coffee break at truck stop

  Trooper directs traffic

  Trooper surveying the scene of an accident

  Calling in an accident report

  Trooper approaches speeder

  Trooper gives female motorist a sobriety test

  Naked woman under arrest

  Woman trooper, Elizabeth “Dee” Parton

  Trooper Giles Harmon

  Harmon investigates an accident, 1985

  Funeral procession for Harmon moves out

  The Harmons leave memorial services

  Troopers lead Charles Barker to patrol car

  Helicopter pinpoints Billy McQueen, Jr.

  McQueen dragged out of gorge

  McQueen after murder conviction

  Timothy Allen charged with murder

  Trooper Raymond Worley

  Trooper Bobby Coggins

  Fall Festival 1985 with Coggins and Sgt. Zeb Phillips

  Patrolmen carry Coggins’s casket from church

  Linda Justice and Frances Coggins at graveside services

  Jimmy Dean Rios, murderer

  William Bray, murderer

  Law enforcement officials plan strategy during Rios-Bray manhunt

  Motorists warned at roadblock, Rios-Bray manhunt

  Patrolman surveys area for fugitive Shornook

  Sheriff and SBI agent in barn where Shornook was killed

  Foreword

  If we drive long enough, and if we are sufficiently unlucky, most of us eventually will make the acquaintance of a state trooper, and most of us will remember the experience with dismay. We are bowling along, not paying much attention to the speedometer, listening to the radio, hurrying a little to reach an appointment, and then we sense an ominous flicker in the rearview mirror. It is a flashing blue light, and if we have been really inattentive, it is accompanied by the snarl of a siren.

  “May I see your operator’s license, sir?”

  The trooper is in his thirties. He is a big guy, solid as a concrete block, and he is all business. He has no discernible sense of humor. We have been frozen in his radar at seventy miles per hour in a fifty-five-mile zone, and he has heard every excuse ever given. (“I’ve got the diarrhea, officer, and I really have to go. . . . My kid is sick, and I was just so damned worried about her. . . . I’ve got to get home before my wife finds out where I’ve been. . . .”) There follows the citation, the instructions on standing trial or sending a check to the clerk of court, and then the impassive dismissal.

  “Drive safely, sir, and obey the law.”

  The only thing that remains is for one’s spouse, who has been sitting stone-silent through the whole affair, to say, “I told you to slow down.” To which one responds, “I wonder where the sumbitch was hiding.” It has not been a day to remember with joy.

  This is about the only image most of us have of the state trooper at work: the trim uniform, the Smokey Bear hat, the coolly watchful eyes. We see his patrol car concealed in a byway, and we slide uncomfortably past his presence; we look in the mirror in guilty apprehension: Has he moved? It is the feeling of the field mouse toward the circling hawk. For most of us, troopers are faceless and nameless. Until I read Marie Bartlett’s book, it never had occurred to me that troopers shed tears, make love, sire children, get in debt, go to church, and know fear as others do. Now I know.

  This is reporting of the old school, nothing fancy, nothing embroidered for effect. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories—I believe it is A Scandal in Bohemia—Holmes is admonishing the long-suffering Dr. Watson. Had Watson seen a flight of stairs? Of course he had seen the stairs. How many steps were there? Dr. Watson had no idea. “That is the trouble,” said Holmes, “you see, but you do not observe.” By the same token, many of us hear, but we do not listen. It is part of Marie Bartlett’s gift to count the stairs—to observe with a camera’s silent eye—to observe, and to listen. Her troopers come alive. They speak in their own voices. She writes of the North Carolina patrol con amore, but her book is much more than a tribute to a fraternity of men (and a few women also) who serve as officers of the law.

  Marie Bartlett covers the training program for cadets and listens to a superior officer talking to the young recruits: “I tell them if they’re just looking for a job, they won’t make it in the highway patrol because there’s something special they’ve got to have. I explain they’ll be gone from home half their lives and their wives will be doing all the grocery shopping and raising the kids. I tell them they can’t go to beer joints and nightclubs because people will watch and judge them by their actions. I tell them they’ll have to move whenever and wherever the patrol commander wants them to go, and they’ll be lucky if they get stationed within a hundred miles of home.”

  Bartlett’s troopers are North Carolina troopers, but they could be troopers anywhere. Typically the entering cadet is about twenty-two years old, a high school graduate, physically fit, with something in his personality that hungers for excitement and action. Those who have the right stuff stay in a state patrol for life—for life, or as the case may be, for death. Few resign; only a tiny handful are booted out for misconduct; the turnover is less than 5 percent a year. The pay compares with pay in the armed services. Considering the hardships, it isn’t much.

  These patrolling knights of the highway know periods of tedium. They serve routine warrants, change an occasional tire, direct traffic for some official function, fill in forms at the end of a shift. They spend hours just watching the cars roll by. What keeps them in the fraternity, and sometimes leads to burnout, is the knowledge that violence, danger, and bloodshed may be only seconds away.

  They work wrecks: “What bothers me most about working wrecks is to see a little kid hurt. If there’s anything left in the world that’s innocent, it’s a child. I’ve stood at the scene of an automobile accident involving kids and cried. Then I went home and couldn’t sleep. Seeing a dead or injured child is something I’ll never get used to, though I know it’s part of the job.”

  Often the wrecks are fatal wrecks. Marie Bartlett listens to a trooper who worked a bad one. The car was utterly demolished: It could have been a Plymouth, a Chrysler, a Dodge. The wreckage had burst into flame. The driver obviously was dead. For a time the vehicle was too hot to approach. A local firefighter spoke to the trooper. His twenty-year-old son wasn’t home, and “those wheels sort of look like the
ones he had on his car.” The youth was wearing his high school class ring and a belt buckle with his initials on it. The trooper remembered that night:

  “By the time we arrived at the scene, the wrecked car had cooled down. Not knowing any other way to get the information I needed, I crawled into the front seat. There was nothing left of the boy except bones, scraps of cloth—and a class ring that I found on the floor. The belt buckle, with the boy’s initials on it, had fallen off, but I found it on the floorboard and wrapped it in a handkerchief. Then I went back to the patrol car.

  “The fireman was waiting for an answer. I knew I had to tell him the truth. There’s no way to sugarcoat that kind of thing, so I just handed him the belt buckle and said, ‘It’s him.’”

  Troopers grow to despise drunk drivers. With reason; “I once investigated a wreck where two cheerleaders—daughters of a doctor and a lawyer—turned their car over and were thrown fifteen feet from the vehicle. One of the girls had been hanging out the window and was decapitated. I found her head in the middle of the road. It reminded me of a mannequin wearing a wig, with every hair in place. There was a question about both girls drinking because they had just come from a party—a party given by one of their parents. Here was a young girl with a promising future whose life ended tragically because of drinking and driving. It was also the twenty-third of December, and I thought of all the unwrapped gifts she’d never see and what her family must be going through. That upset me. They buried her the day after Christmas.”

  Marie Bartlett’s gripping account has its moments of hilarity. There was the trooper who had to grapple with a naked woman, all four hundred pounds of her, who gave him a difficult time. There was another trooper who had his wits badly scared by a chimpanzee riding in the back seat of a car he had stopped. But most of her book deals with danger. For the trooper, danger is always there. In any given year about a hundred law enforcement officers in this country will die in the line of duty. They will be murdered by escaping convicts, or die in accidents while in pursuit of a suspect. They will drown trying to save others. They will know heartache when they must ring a telephone late at night: “It’s your daughter, sir. We’ve taken her to the hospital. No, sir, I can’t tell you the extent of her injuries. . . .” The trooper knows the girl is dying.

  The constant stress takes its toll of men; it takes a toll of wives as well. To be married to a trooper is like being married to a sailor. The wife who has a full-time job is going to work just as her husband returns from a midnight shift. A trooper’s assignment may take him across a state line in hot pursuit. The search for an escaped convict continues without regard to overtime hours. And when a trooper is late getting home, apprehension mounts. Has he been hurt? Is he in danger? Is he working off his tensions with another woman? Is he—dead? Hard lines, as they say, hard lines.

  A. E. Housman, the English classicist, had a certain test for poetry. If a line of poetry were perfect, he would sense hairs rising on the back of his neck. I have my own test for excellence in prose. If a paragraph produces a lump in the throat and a sudden watering of the eyes, that paragraph works. It packs a wallop. Marie Bartlett’s unadorned narrative works. I don’t expect to love the next cop who gives me a ticket, but having read Trooper Down!, I’ll be happy hereafter that these men in gray are out there on the road.

  JAMES J. KILPATRICK

  Preface

  You know the feeling. You’re driving sixty-eight miles per hour in a fifty-five-mile-per-hour zone and suddenly you look up, see a blue light flashing, and realize that at any moment you’ll be pulled over and asked to submit your driver’s license. At best, you’ll be reprimanded for exceeding the speed limit. At worst, your driving history will be thoroughly scrutinized, and you’ll be ticketed, fined, and told when to appear in court.

  You are apprehensive, and perhaps annoyed, as the trooper approaches your car. The ultimate figure of authority on the highway, he has momentarily detained you from reaching your destination and has the power to curtail your freedom even further.

  Calmly, professionally, he requests the information he needs, hands you back your driver’s license, and—if you’re lucky—tells you to slow it down because next time he’ll give you a ticket.

  His last name is imprinted on a silver pin over his right shirt pocket. But unless you’re arrested, treated improperly, or have special reason to find out who he is, you probably won’t notice his nameplate. Moments after he’s gone, you may not even remember what he looks like. For he’s just another cop.

  In North Carolina, which has more patrolled roads than any other state in the union, slightly more than one thousand troopers monitor up to four million drivers each year, on a state highway system that supplies major transportation arteries between north and south, east and west.

  That’s one of the reasons I chose North Carolina to represent state troopers around the country. They are also considered one of the most thoroughly trained, well-equipped, and respected state law enforcement agencies in the nation. In years past, when highway patrols were officially ranked in terms of which had the highest arrest records and the most favorable public image, North Carolina was consistently listed among the top three, along with Texas and California.

  Steve Wollack, a California psychologist who designs attitude tests for a number of state patrols, says North Carolina troopers reflect what is best about the elitist structure of a specialized police agency.

  “I’ve seen cases of such conflict in law enforcement that police were actually shooting at each other,” he said. “But there’s an esprit de corps that exists within the North Carolina highway patrol which is very impressive, and has helped make it a top-notch organization.”

  While the primary role of the North Carolina state trooper is to police the roads and enforce motor vehicle laws, he performs duties that range from assisting stranded motorists to securing major disaster areas. His job can be as mundane as fixing a flat tire or as perilous as chasing an escaped felon.

  In that respect, he shares many of the experiences found among police officers in all types of law enforcement. FBI agents, state investigators, city police officers, and county deputies—whose work often overlaps—can identify with the incidents and attitudes related in this book.

  Since the North Carolina Highway Patrol was established by the state’s General Assembly in 1929, forty-four patrol officers have lost their lives while on duty. Twenty-three were killed in traffic accidents, seventeen by gunfire, and four in plane crashes. In 1985, a particularly violent year for North Carolina troopers, three officers were shot and killed after stopping vehicles on routine traffic checks. The year prior to that, another patrolman was seriously wounded trying to apprehend two escaped convicts. Every year, in fact, a surprising number of highway patrol officers are injured by persons they attempt to arrest.

  According to FBI studies, more law enforcement officers, including troopers, are killed and assaulted annually in the South than in all other regions of the country combined. From 1976 to 1985, for instance, 441 officers were killed in Southern states compared to 154 in the western half of the United States, 160 in the Midwest, and 122 in the Northeast.

  While no definite conclusions were drawn as to why this occurs, FBI officials theorize that Southern law enforcement officers may be more susceptible to violent assaults because of several contributing factors: Many police officers in the South tend to work in isolated regions, with a scarcity of backup support. There is easy accessibility to handguns and a general intolerance for gun control in the South, and policemen—particularly troopers—convey a “nice-guy, Southern-gentleman” image instilled during training that can work against them on the road, especially when they’re faced with dangerous individuals. In fact, some troopers believe that until recently, the North Carolina Highway Patrol was more concerned about maintaining a good public image than it was about promoting safety and self-defense on the job.

  Starting salary for a rookie highway patrolman in North Car
olina was $17,000 a year in 1987. After seven years, state troopers earn up to $30,000, with top pay for a master trooper at about $32,000. That’s a far cry from the early days, when patrolmen typically worked fifteen to twenty hours a day, six days a week, for wages that seldom exceeded $150 per month. Today, officers work forty hours a week, with split shifts, weekend, and holiday duty the norm. When emergencies arise, they are called from across the state, whether they are on duty or off, and are required to respond twenty-four hours a day.

  They are told how to conduct themselves and what’s expected from their personal behavior, even when they are not in uniform. A few troopers argue the highway patrol virtually controls their lives.

  Yet they are among the most dedicated, committed employees found in any profession. Men and women who join the highway patrol don’t see it as a job. It’s more a calling, a way of life.

  Few people really know what a highway patrol officer encounters on the road, how he feels about his job, why his work consumes him, and the ways in which it ultimately affects his life. This book attempts to explore all of those issues.

  “Trooper down” is a term used when an officer is out of commission due to an assault or injury received on the job. This book is the story of North Carolina’s Highway Patrol, but the attitudes, problems, and day-to-day experiences told by the men and women in these pages represent those of patrol officers throughout the nation.

  As much as possible, I have used the troopers’ own words to relate their stories because I felt it would give the reader an inside look at how troopers see themselves and others. In a few cases, certain characteristics or facts have been altered to protect the identity of the people involved.

  I was surprised and fascinated by what these officers had to say, and grateful for their willingness to say it. Without exception, every trooper I interviewed was not only candid, but courteous and cooperative. Many of them took time from their off-duty hours to sit and talk with me at length. Others went out of their way to see that I obtained all the information I needed.