Before He Wakes (24 page)

Clements Funeral Home rarely had seen such a crush of people or such a mingling of black and white as it did that night. Family, friends from past and present, teachers, school officials, students and former students, players and former players, church members, neighbors, hundreds of people filed by the coffin where Russ lay in the dress-blue army uniform his parents had given him for Christmas just six weeks earlier.

Several people took note that Barbara did not stay in the room with Russ’s body, where his bereaved parents and sister stood vigil, greeting the throng who had come to pay their respects. She remained in a separate room, with her family seemingly forming a protective circle around her. At one point when she became dizzy and went outside for fresh air, her family followed her even there.

While Barbara was in the separate room, Oma Smith and her husband, Everette, a Baptist minister, went to speak with her. Oma had worked with both Barbara and her mother at Duke. Barbara chatted lightly, telling her that she and Jason were planning to go to Wilmington Friday so that Jason could see Bryan’s dorm room. And she couldn’t wait to get back to work on Monday, she said. The sooner she got back, the better off she would be. And she was awfully worried about her boss, Tim.

After the Smiths had gone to Barbara’s parents’ house to see her on the evening of Russ’s death, Oma had asked her husband a question. “Did you notice anything unusual?”

Barbara didn’t appear to be all that grieved, he had said. The gathering had seemed like a social occasion instead of a wake.

“I was just wondering if I was the only one who had that feeling,” Oma had said.

Now that feeling was even stronger.

18

Rick Buchanan was on the phone before he left for work Wednesday morning, closely questioning the two deputies who had investigated the shooting on Fox Drive two days earlier. He wanted to know the condition of the bed, where the pistol and shell casing had been found. Had there been powder bums on the sheets or covers? He was pleased that the memories of the two officers were at least consistent.

As soon as he got to his office, Buchanan picked up a copy of Raleigh’s morning newspaper,
The News and Observer
. A reporter from the paper had interviewed him the previous afternoon, and he wanted to see the story. It quoted him accurately. Barbara’s version of the shooting was “consistent with everything we’ve seen at the scene,” he had said.

Buchanan did not want Barbara to know that anybody suspected her. He had told the reporter that the pistol with which Russ had been shot had a “light trigger.” Not much pressure was required to drop the hammer, he said. “I’ve seen accidental discharges of guns, but I’ve never seen one similar to this,” the story quoted him. In fact, the trigger was not light.

Buchanan put the paper aside and took the elevator to the district attorney’s office on the fifth floor. He called snappy greetings to secretaries and assistant DAs as he passed.

Ron Stephens was forty-three, tall and blue-eyed, with graying temples and a distinguished bearing. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, the father of two, he had been a decorated combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam. For the past seven years he had been Durham County’s District Attorney.

Buchanan had come to alert Stephens that Russ Stager’s shooting might be more than it appeared. He filled him in on what he had learned so far and told him the immediate steps he intended to take. It all sounded highly suspicious, Stephens agreed, and he told Buchanan to keep him informed of developments.

Eric Evenson had been talking to an assistant in his office when he saw Buchanan stroll past his open door on the way to talk with Stephens. Buchanan usually didn’t come calling unless something big was up, and Evenson couldn’t help wondering what.

Evenson was thirty-three, short and freckled with thinning red hair. He wore glasses and a narrow mustache. The son of a hardware store owner in Charlotte, he had been attracted to drama and journalism before gravitating to law school. He had worked as an assistant district attorney in Greensboro before coming to work for Ron Stephens seven years earlier. Since that time he had tried more than a hundred cases every year, and he had become one of Stephens’s top assistants. Noted for his thoroughness and tenacity, he went at the big cases that came his way with a singlemindedness that bordered on ferocity.

Soon after Evenson saw Buchanan leaving, Stephens wandered into his office. “You know that Durham High coach who was shot a couple of days ago?” Stephens asked.

Evenson did. He had been in juvenile court when he first heard about it Monday morning. A teenager had been charged with carrying a gun, and Judge Orlando Hudson admonished him about how dangerous handguns could be. “Just this morning,” the judge had said, “a woman accidentally shot her husband in bed.”

That had stuck in Evenson’s mind, and afterward he bought an afternoon newspaper for more details. Something just bothered him about it, he said later. A gun going off accidentally in a bed could hit a person anywhere, an arm, a leg, the torso. How had it hit such a relatively small target as the head? Evenson even had made a mental note to check with the sheriff’s department about it when he got a chance.

“Well, it may not have been an accident,” Stephens was now telling him.

Stephens went on to fill him in on all that Buchanan knew about it. Buchanan was pursuing it, he said, and if the case developed, it would be a big one. He wanted Evenson to take it.

Buchanan called Russ’s sister that morning to find out if anybody in the family knew Russ’s normal morning routine. Barbara was always up first, Cindy told him, an early riser. She left Russ asleep while she showered and began getting ready for work. Russ, on the contrary, was awfully hard to get up. It was a joke in the family about how he would sleep away half the day if nobody nudged him out of bed. Once when a dogfight on his family’s front porch had awakened everybody else in the house, he had slept right on. On another occasion, not only had he slept through the insistent bleatings of a smoke alarm, he had slept through a fire at a house he shared with a roommate. He hadn’t even been awakened by the screams of his roommate, whose feet had been burned as he tried to escape over the malfunctioning floor furnace.

While Buchanan was talking with Cindy, Barbara was at the funeral home. She’d arrived carrying a rose, which she wanted to place in Russ’s coffin, she said. She was surprised to find his body missing, taken earlier that morning, she soon learned, to North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill for an autopsy. One of Doris’s sisters was there at the time, and she overheard the funeral home director asking Barbara if she would tell Russ’s parents about the body being taken for autopsy.

Barbara arrived at Doris and Al’s house shortly before noon with Bryan and Jason. The boys were hungry, and Doris went into the refrigerator to fix something for them from the vast amounts of food that people had brought to the house. Doris hadn’t been able to eat a bite since Russ had died, but she noticed that Barbara joined the boys in eating heartily. Barbara left to get ready for the funeral without ever mentioning that Russ’s body had been taken from the funeral home. The Stagers figured that she had been waiting to see if they would mention it, hoping to learn whether they’d had something to do with it.

Simultaneous services for Russ began at two. A memorial service was being held in the auditorium at Durham High under the direction of Principal Charles Warren. He had gone to Barbara’s parents’ house on the day Russ was shot to seek her permission for the service. Barbara had set two conditions: no music and keep it short. She didn’t want to evoke emotion, she said.

Russ’s players, all the coaching staff and his closest friends among the teachers were among the overflow crowd at the funeral in the chapel at Clements Funeral Home. The service was conducted by Larry Harper, his pastor at Homestead Heights Baptist Church, the church to which Russ and Barbara had moved less than a year earlier. He was assisted by Malbert Smith.

Following the service, a long procession of cars followed the hearse to a grassy hillside in sprawling Maplewood Cemetery, only a short distance from downtown Durham. Russ’s fellow coaches carried his coffin to the tent that covered the open grave. A whitegloved National Guard honor squad wearing dress blues fired a final salute, and taps wafted forlornly over the somber gathering.

Sergeant 1st Class Joe Powell and Master Sergeant Robert Parker removed the flag from the coffin, folded it into a neat triangle and presented it to Barbara, causing her to break into sobs.

All the while, Rick Buchanan had been busy. After talking with Cindy that morning, he drove to Barbara’s parents’ house and talked with her father. He would need the bedding to help clear up the case, Buchanan said, and James Terry fetched the bloodied pillow from a trash can. The sheets had been washed, James explained, and were at Barbara’s house. He would get them. When Buchanan learned that the bedcovers had been taken to a laundry for dry cleaning, he asked for the laundry slip. He picked up the bedcovers on his way back to the office and dropped them off before driving to the state medical examiner’s office to read the autopsy report on Larry Ford and find out what Russ’s autopsy had shown.

The autopsy had been completed by the time he got there. Dr. Thomas Clark had retrieved the bullet from the front of Russ’s skull and had it waiting for him. He also had some interesting information. The trajectory of the bullet had been downward. That removed any doubt Buchanan still harbored that Russ’s death had been an accident. The trajectory simply didn’t jibe with Barbara’s account.

Returning to his office, Buchanan next tried to find out how much life insurance Russ had. He had no luck, and after the funeral he called the Stager home and talked with Cindy. The Stagers didn’t know anything about it. She gave Buchanan a list of names and addresses of family members and friends to question. Ten minutes later, she called back to say that Al had asked Barbara about life insurance. Barbara had told him that she didn’t know anything about it. Russ took care of that kind of thing.

Cindy also remembered something she hadn’t told Buchanan earlier. Her father had approached Barbara at the funeral home to talk about Russ having a loaded and cocked gun under his pillow. It just didn’t sound like Russ, Al had said.

“I don’t know where the information came from about the gun being cocked,” Barbara told him.

“If he had a gun under his pillow, whether it was cocked or not, it was a stupid thing to do,” Al said.

Doris and Henry Ford had just sat down to supper at the mobile home where they now lived near Colfax. Their son Ronnie had stopped by and agreed to stay for supper. They had just begun passing the dishes when Doris heard something that attracted her attention.

“Hush,” she said. “Listen.”

The six o’clock news was on the TV that was playing in the next room. The newscast was almost over, and the announcer was talking about the funeral that day for a popular high school coach in Durham who had been accidentally shot by his wife.

“My goodness,” Doris Ford said, breaking the family’s stunned silence. “She’s killed Russ.”

Before she knew what had happened, Ronnie left the table and grabbed the telephone. He got the number for the Durham County Sheriff’s Department and began to dial.

19

Rick Buchanan’s phone was ringing when he arrived at work Thursday morning, the day after Russ’s funeral. Ronnie Ford was calling. He had left messages the night before, but he didn’t intend to wait for somebody to call him back. He and his family had been trying for years to get justice for his brother. Now, they thought, somebody would have to listen.

And Buchanan did, interrupting only now and then with a clarifying question as Ronnie poured out everything he had found out in his own investigation of Larry’s death, all of his and his family’s suspicions about Barbara. Buchanan had been a law enforcement officer too long to be surprised at anything he heard about human nature, but his twenty-minute conversation with Ronnie made him realize that in Barbara he might be dealing with a person unlike any other he ever had encountered.

After hearing the general outline of the circumstances surrounding Larry’s death, Buchanan arranged to meet with the Ford family the next week to get more specific details. Then he called Larry Allen, the deputy who had investigated the shooting nearly ten years earlier. Allen, as Buchanan knew from his conversation with Ronnie, was now the police chief in Archdale, where Barbara once had worked for Kay-Lou Realty.

Allen said that he had only bare remembrances of the shooting. It was an accident, he recalled. He could check his files to see if he had kept anything about the case that might jog his memory or be helpful to Buchanan.

Did he know what had happened to the gun that killed Larry? Buchanan asked, wondering if the same gun had killed Russ.

He had turned it in to the sheriff’s department, Allen said, and as far as he knew, it was still there.

After talking with Allen, Buchanan dispatched another detective to Barbara’s parents’ house to pick up the laundered sheets from Russ’s and Barbara’s bed. He took the pistol that had been the instrument of Russ’s death to the sheriff’s department’s firearms expert and range officer and asked him to test it to see if jostling it could cause it to fire and to determine in which direction it ejected empty shells and at what distance. The empty shell lying so close to the weapon had seemed unnatural and inconsistent with Barbara’s version of the shooting.