Before He Wakes (11 page)

As the deputies were preparing to leave, somebody mentioned that the bedroom should be cleaned. Brenda and Mae volunteered to do it and checked with the deputies to make sure that it was okay. The sergeant told them to go ahead.

They were surprised that there was so little blood and disarray. They stripped the bedding, turned over the mattress and remade the bed. Mae took the soiled sheets home to wash them.

As Brenda and Mae cleaned the bedroom, Brenda noticed the packed suitcases in the corner. Curious, she asked Barbara about them later. Barbara said that she and Larry had been planning a trip to her parents’ cottage at Long Beach on the coming weekend. Brenda found nothing unusual about Barbara being packed so far in advance. She knew how meticulous and well organized Barbara was.

Henry Ford’s week had gotten off to a bad start. Demand was up for dairy products, and he’d been working long hours. On Tuesday, he’d had to make an extra two thousand gallons of cottage cheese and sour cream. It was something you had to stay with once you started it, and he’d worked nineteen hours that day. He was worried about Larry. When he and Doris had last visited him and his family, Barbara had mentioned that she hadn’t had a paycheck in months. Larry had spoken to him about their debts. Clearly, he was worried. Henry wanted to help but didn’t want to embarrass his son. But as he worked that day, he decided that he would ask Larry if he wanted him to go to the credit union and get a loan to help relieve his financial bind.

Henry didn’t get home until well after midnight. Exhausted, he had eaten a sandwich and fallen into bed. He had just gone to sleep when the phone woke him. He reached blindly for the receiver and muttered a groggy hello.

“This is Reverend Barnie Pierce,” said a voice he didn’t recognize. “It’s about Larry.”

“What is it?” Henry said, quickly coming awake.

“He’s had an accident.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s at the funeral home.”

Later, Henry wouldn’t remember what was said after that. He only remembered being dumbstruck. He stood by the bed after hanging up the phone, silent, dreading telling Doris, who had stirred from sleep and was looking at him anxiously.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

He couldn’t help himself. He broke into tears as he blurted the words. “Larry’s dead.”

The preacher had not told Henry what had happened, telling him only to come to Larry’s house. Henry woke his youngest son, Scott, who was seventeen, and after dressing as quickly as possible, the three of them set out, riding in dazed silence.

“It’s like you’re numb,” Doris explained later. “It’s like it’s not real.”

At a little after three o’clock, Henry turned into the steep drive at Larry’s house. As the Fords were getting out of the car, Barbara’s parents pulled in behind them, arriving from Durham, seventy-five miles away. Barbara came out and rushed past the Fords to her parents, huddling with them, it seemed to the Fords, and ignoring them.

“Her parents took her over,” Doris recalled later. “They surrounded Barbara. It’s been a strange thing, evidently, all through Barbara’s life, a need to protect her. Her mother did not look at us and say, ‘I’m sorry your son’s dead.’ I don’t think she ever spoke a word to us.”

Barnie Pierce told the Fords that Larry apparently had shot himself accidentally, but Barbara offered no details and barely acknowledged their presence.

The deputies were gone. Larry’s body had been taken to the hospital morgue in Asheboro. The room in which Larry had died had been cleaned, the bed stripped and remade. Only Brenda Monroe and the minister remained at the house.

The Fords got the impression that everything had been done without any consideration of them. In their anguish they didn’t know what to do. Later, they would recall walking back and forth from kitchen to living room, seeking comfort and finding none, thinking only one thing during those agonizingly long hours until dawn: “He’s gone. He’s gone, and he’ll never be back.”

Near dawn, the Fords began to call their children to tell them what had happened. Their son Ronnie lived not far away and he soon arrived at the house.

Brenda Monroe later would recall that he came in and went straight to the bedroom where Larry had been shot. She followed.

Ronnie was filled with questions. Where was the gun? The police had taken it, Brenda said. What about pajamas? Larry was still wearing them. Where were the sheets? The neighbors had taken them to wash. Were there holes in the sheets? None. Was there much blood? Some, not much. Was there blood on the mattress? A little, and the mattress had been turned over. Ronnie raised the mattress to look at it. Why had the bed been made?

Soon Ronnie went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table talking with his parents. Doris called Barbara to come into the kitchen, but Brenda couldn’t hear what was said.

An air of suspicion and accusation suddenly had invaded the house, Brenda thought, but Barbara wasn’t sensing it. “I thought that something was going on and Barbara was not catching on,” she recalled later. But she didn’t bring it up to Barbara; she didn’t think it her business.

Before leaving the house that morning to attend to her own family’s needs, Brenda recommended Cumby Mortuary in Archdale, and two representatives of the funeral home came to the house Wednesday morning to talk with family members.

Barbara wanted to have the funeral the following day. “Bryan and I have decided that we don’t want Larry open,” she said.

Larry’s mother was quick to object. “Barbara, Larry’s not deformed. We want to see him. People will want to see.” She also thought that the funeral should be put off until Friday, at least, so that people with great distances to travel could arrange to come. Barbara insisted on having the funeral the following day, but finally relented on allowing the coffin to be open.

Both families had to go to the funeral home to help Barbara pick out a casket and to take the clothes Larry would be buried in—Barbara had allowed Bryan to choose the clothing and he had picked out a three-piece white leisure suit with a bright multicolored sport shirt. Doris and Henry Ford rode to the funeral home in the same car with Barbara’s parents. The two families had had very little to do with each other during the ten years that their children had been married, having visited only once.

On the way to the funeral home, Barbara’s mother said the only words that the Fords would recall her speaking to them in the days immediately following Larry’s death.

“Our family is closer than yours,” she observed.

The Fords did not respond.

“I thought, How cruel,” Doris recalled later.

John Buheller, a dapper detective who favored expensive suits, had been getting ready to go to work at the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department in Asheboro early that Wednesday morning when he got a call from Sheriff Carl Moore.

“John, we had a shooting last night,” the sheriff told him. “The body’s at the morgue. You’d better get over there.”

“Good way to start an investigation,” Buheller muttered after hanging up.

Standard procedure required that a detective be called to any shooting, but that hadn’t happened, and Buheller was angry about it. The sheriff’s department was rife with friction between patrol deputies and the three-man detective squad that Buheller headed, and he was especially ticked off when he discovered the name of the deputy who had investigated the shooting.

“There was no love lost between me and Larry Allen,” Buheller said years later. “Larry Allen was a report-taker. He wasn’t an investigator at all. An investigator should have been called to the crime scene before anything was moved, especially the body.”

He suspected that Allen had deliberately failed to call him. That wasn’t true, Allen said years later. He had asked the dispatcher for a detective, he said, but was told none was available, and he then asked for his supervisor.

Buheller, a Vietnam veteran who had worked for the Asheboro Police Department and the North Carolina Highway Patrol before joining the sheriff’s department six and a half years earlier, went to the hospital and took a look at the body.

He found a tall, thin man with dark hair and a full beard, obviously young. All Buheller knew was that the man’s name was Larry Ford and that he had a small bullet wound in the center of his chest. He couldn’t tell much from looking at the body. The man supposedly had shot himself accidentally, Buheller knew, but just to be safe, he decided to run a basic investigative test.

He removed the plastic bags that had been tied around the man’s hands the night before, opened a standard forensics kit and, using acid and swabs, he took wipings from several areas on both hands. Carefully labeling each one, he enclosed them in plastic bags, which he would send to the State Bureau of Investigation lab in Raleigh. The wipings would tell one simple fact: whether or not the dead man had fired a gun.

The two families had returned from the funeral home when an unmarked sheriff’s department car arrived and a short detective in a suit got out and walked to the house. He apologized for intruding at such a time and asked to speak with Mrs. Ford. Barbara took him into the kitchen to talk. Afterward, the detective went to his car to get a Polaroid camera and returned. Barbara showed him to the bedroom, where he took several snapshots. He left after spending only twenty minutes at the house.

After the detective had left, Barbara asked her father-in-law if he would mind doing her a favor. She produced two plastic garbage sacks filled with what appeared to be paper trash, old bills, junk mail and personal papers, and asked if he would take them out back and burn the contents. It was too windy to bum anything, so Henry put the bags in his car and disposed of them later at a trash dump. Afterward, he would regret that he didn’t check to see what was in them. Bills and financial records, he suspected.

Another suspicious note was sounded when the two families returned to the funeral home for the first viewing. Barbara and her mother were standing by the coffin when Larry’s brother Ronnie and his sister Janice walked into the room. Barbara was crying.

“What have I done?” Ronnie and Janice heard her saying. “What have I done?”

But her mother quickly hushed her, they said, and led her away.

Larry’s family was not alone in wondering whether Barbara was actually grieving for Larry after seeing her at the funeral home as the families received visitors Wednesday night.

“Barbara acted like it was a social gathering,” recalled an acquaintance who was a close friend of Kay Pugh. “She was just flitting around greeting everybody. It was unreal.”

Leaving the funeral home, Larry’s tae kwon do instructor, Lou Wagner, remarked to his wife, “She’s not taking it hard at all.”

Barbara’s behavior would raise questions the following day, too, after the funeral, which was held at Cedarcrest Friends Meeting at four o’clock with burial in the cemetery beside the church.

After the ceremony, both families returned to Larry’s house, where some neighbors and friends also gathered. Larry’s family got upset at the way Barbara was acting. She was laughing and talking, playing the role of hostess, showing no grief at all, they thought.

Before dark, everybody returned to the cemetery to see the flowers displayed on the grave. When the Fords came back to Larry’s house afterward, they saw Barbara’s brother Alton walking out with Larry’s leather jacket. Barbara called in Larry’s brother Ronnie and gave him some of Larry’s shirts, pants and sweaters.

“She gave away everything of Larry’s right there on the spot,” Henry recalled.

As the Fords started to leave, James Terry, Barbara’s father, hurried to their car.

“I hope there won’t be any hard feelings,” he told them.

9

Barbara could not shake Larry from her life as neatly as she had shed his belongings. Although his death would solve her financial problems temporarily, opening new opportunities for grander spending and sexual exploration, it also would create new problems and worries that would weigh heavily before she could overcome them.

After Larry’s funeral on Thursday, Brenda Monroe suggested that Barbara go on to her parents’ cottage at the beach as she had planned to do with Larry that weekend. Brenda would go with her, and they could take the kids. Diane Hamblin, the fourteen-year-old neighbor who baby-sat for the children, could go along. All the children loved her. It might take their minds off the sorrowful events of the week. Barbara agreed, and they left on Friday afternoon in Barbara’s LTD.

The idea turned out to be not so good. No one talked about what had happened, but nobody could forget it, either, and the somber aura of death engulfed everything they tried to do. Brenda and Barbara took the children to buy Easter baskets on Saturday, but there was no joy in it.

Everybody was so glum and unhappy that Barbara and Brenda decided to leave for home Sunday afternoon. Barbara wanted to go back through Durham to be with her parents, and she suggested that Brenda drop her and the boys off there and drive her car back to Randolph County. She would get somebody to bring her home later.

Alton’s wife, Mary, an accountant, drove her back two days later and stayed to help with insurance and business matters involving Larry’s estate.

On Wednesday, March 29, one week after Larry’s death, Barbara walked into the Randolph County Courthouse in Asheboro and filed his will with the clerk of superior court. It was handwritten on the back of a Marine Reserves form used to request permission to miss regular drill. “I hereby bequeath my house and all its furnishings to my wife Barbara Terry Ford,” the will said. “Said house located at Rt. 2, Box 226T, Windemere Heights, Trinity, N.C. This statement is noted to be my last will and testament and the above is to be executed upon my death.”