Trooper Down! (23 page)

Five weeks after Giles was killed, that lesson would be painfully reinforced when another North Carolina trooper, 450 miles away, met a similar fate.

II

Halifax County, North Carolina, is rural land, the kind of country where miles of tobacco fields ripple in the breeze, where tin-roofed, weatherboard houses are still the norm, and where 25 percent of the total population, mostly black, live below the poverty line. It is also
the place where the state's first constitution was adopted. That is its only claim to fame.

Nearby, bordering the Virginia line, is Northampton, a sister county that is just as rural and just as poor as Halifax. Yet it is a region that people come to love in a fierce and protective way. Many refuse to leave it, despite the promise of better opportunities elsewhere.

Among those individuals was Ray Worley, a man as contradictory in nature as the land on which he chose to live, and on which he died.

Born in Currituck County, on North Carolina's northeastern shore, Worley first joined the highway patrol as a clerk in Elizabeth City, then became a state trooper in 1962. He was immediately assigned to Northampton and Halifax.

He liked the area right from the start, especially the people.

“One day my youngest daughter and I were coming home,” said Ray's wife, Jackie, “and saw him parked on the side of the road, talking to a fellow.”

“That's why Daddy never gets home on time,” remarked eighteen-year-old Wendy.

“Then he'd come flying past us in his patrol car and a few minutes later, we'd pass him again, stopped on the side of the road talking to somebody else.”

Despite his friendliness, Ray had a look and a manner that intimidated others at first glance.

Part of it was his physical presence.

Six feet tall, he was big-boned and chronically overweight, seldom tipping the scales at less than 250 pounds. In photographs he never smiled, giving rise to the name “Thundercloud,” with which his family tagged him.

“Until you got to know him, he could scare you to death,” admitted Jackie. “All of the boyfriends who came to visit our oldest daughter were afraid of him. But he wasn't anything like he looked.”

In fact, says Jackie, Ray was sensitive and thoughtful, the kind of person who couldn't say no to anyone in need.

Active in the community, he was a leading force in establishing a local law enforcement association, served as president of the Methodist Men's Group, and was often seen cutting the churchyard grass or fixing an elderly neighbor's roof.

For relaxation, he'd plant a garden or cut wood on his 100-acre
farm in Northampton County. Reading was another favorite pastime—mostly inspirational books like Norman Vincent Peale's
The Power of Positive Thinking, 
or Dale Carnegie's guide to public speaking. Though not a college graduate, he was a strong advocate of self-improvement and talked of enrolling in classes once he retired from the patrol, just for the pleasure of learning.

He also liked to cook, whipping up concoctions with no recipe in sight. His weakness was desserts, but he'd try anything once.

“He made a tomato pudding that nobody would touch,” said Jackie. “He claimed it was good.”

A homebody by nature, Ray was proud of the spacious, ranch-style house he helped build (he even picked out the draperies and color schemes) and would fuss and fume about keeping it neat.

“Lots of times, he cleaned up after us instead of the other way around,” Jackie said. “And though he liked animals, he couldn't stand dogs in the house. He said he had worked hard to have a nice place.”

Home and family meant a great deal to Ray. An only child, his parents were divorced and he too had gone through an earlier, failed marriage (Jackie was his second wife). When her elderly mother and aunt were no longer able to care for themselves, it was Ray who insisted they move in.

“He believed that you look out for your folks,” said Jackie. “All the years we were married, he was as good to my family as he was to his own.”

At the same time, he had a quick temper and a short fuse.

“My aunt Bernice, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, grew up on a farm and thinks everyone should get up at the crack of dawn,” Jackie said. “One morning after Ray had worked the night shift, she began slamming doors in an effort to get us awake. I knew it wouldn't be long before Ray would lose his cool and tell her off. Sure enough, after she had slammed the door about a dozen times, Ray hauled out of bed, went stomping down the hallway in his underwear, and told Bernice, ‘Why don't you slam the door five or six
more 
times? Just leave it open and you can walk back and forth as much as you like. But, dammit, I've got to get some sleep!'

“My aunt is almost deaf, but she heard that, and she never did it again.”

Still, he had a good sense of humor, even when the joke was on him.

“One night he stopped this guy,” said Sergeant John Wood, who
worked with Ray for more than twenty years, “and the fella got out and ran. Ray went trotting after him and before long an audience had gathered.”

“Run, Charlie, run!” they yelled. “That fat boy can't catch you!”

“Ray got a big kick out of that.”

What amused him most, however, was aggravating his friends, especially other troopers.

“If you had a week where you didn't feel like doing much or there wasn't much activity, he'd ride your case,” said Ervin Marshmon, a pal and co-worker. “He liked to pick things out of you. He'd call you over to his patrol car and—with a real serious expression—he'd say, ‘Look, you got anything you want to tell me?' Until I learned that was Ray's trademark, I wondered what he had on me. Then I found out he'd do it to everybody. He said he was always surprised at the information people spilled until they realized he was pulling their leg.”

In turn, the officers gave Ray a hard time about his careless habits, like running out of gas or losing his car keys.

He locked his keys up so often that every time he'd walk into a restaurant, the other troopers on break would automatically ask if he needed a coat hanger.

No doubt he was preoccupied, for close friends say he was burdened with financial and family problems.

Yet Smith, one of half a dozen officers Worley trained, called him “sharp and professional.”

“He knew everybody in the area and had a memory like you wouldn't believe. He could recall people he had stopped years before and recount every detail about the case. He was rarely challenged in court because he was always well prepared and could relate the facts in a way that people understood.”

Like other active troopers, he also worked his share of wrecks, car chases, and fights.

“One night Virginia state troopers chased a guy into North Carolina,” said Smith, “and Ray spotted him. He radioed for me to proceed that way so we could set up running roadblocks. Every few minutes, Ray would call and say, ‘He's not slowing down, but we've got to catch him because he's running people off the road.'

“The guy took a curve near Jackson about ninety miles per hour on the wrong side of the road, went into a ditch, came out the other
side, and careened down Jackson's main street. Ray was behind him the whole time, and I was behind Ray. They looked like two race car drivers trying to jockey for position. Finally, the boy's car swerved, hit Ray, bounced off, and left the road. It came to a stop at the top of the trees, threw the driver out, and landed on top of him. He was killed instantly.

“I walked over to Ray, who was standing there looking at the scene, and said, ‘Man, I thought you were going to get it a couple of times.'

“Ray shook his head.

“‘I hate that boy got killed,' he said,‘but he needed to be stopped.'”

In 1971, during another chase, Ray was almost killed himself.

The driver was speeding on a graveled country road with the trooper close behind. Suddenly Ray rounded a curve, slammed on his brakes, skidded off the shoulder, and hit a tree.

He was badly hurt, his left leg broken in twenty-one places, his peripheral vision permanently impaired in one eye. The patrol car was so demolished it had to be towed away on a dolly. Doctors told him the only thing that had saved his life was a seat belt.

At Duke University Hospital in Durham, where he was transferred for treatment, a pair of foreign interns—neither of whom appeared to speak the other's language—placed him in a body cast and forgot to leave an opening that would allow him to go to the bathroom.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Ray said, examining his mummified torso. “I think my doctor better have a word with you two.”

Bad luck seemed to trail him like a midday shadow.

A few months after he returned to the road, he was standing on an icy bridge with two other troopers when a car came sliding into view. All three officers dived over the railing, but it was Ray who looked back, slipped, fell, and dislocated his shoulder.

“When I opened the back door and saw him propped up by his buddies, no shirt on, and someone's jacket slung over him,” recalled Jackie, “I said, ‘What have you done
now
?'”

Ray was well aware of the risks involved in his job and never failed to caution the men he worked with about being careful. After Giles Harmon was killed in western North Carolina, he told Jackie, “You can't tell what's going to happen when you step out of that patrol car.”

“Well, I don't think you should be on the midnight shift alone,”
she said, referring to the patrol's policy of having some officers man long stretches of the interstate alone.

Ray agreed, then dropped the subject. He worried about something happening to other troopers, but not necessarily to himself. After twenty-three years as a trooper, he had fallen prey to complacency, a common but potentially deadly hazard among long-term law enforcement officers.

“More than 95 percent of the people you stop on patrol are not going to give you any trouble,” explained Trooper Ervin Marshmon. “But the rest—that other 5 percent or so—can hurt you bad. Ray had worked here for years without a major incident and knew everyone in the community. These were people who'd greet him with a smile when he'd stop them. They knew when they were in the wrong and would pay their ticket and be done with it. So he got into a routine of trusting people, of assuming each stop was just another nice one. That's how we all become complacent.”

Others believe that Ray's apparently lackadaisical attitude toward his own personal safety may have masked a deepening depression, accentuated by the suicide of his fourteen-year-old son, Ray, Jr., in the summer of 1984.

Though devastasted by the loss, Ray kept his grief to himself, returning to work as soon as possible.

“He didn't let it interfere with his job,” said Sergeant John Wood, “but to me, he didn't seem as cautious as he had been before.”

The following April, Ray decided to accept a promotion, though it meant moving to another county. Rather than uproot his family he would commute, then transfer back to Northampton. Jackie would stay behind, caring for her aunt and two daughters.

Everyone agreed that maybe a change—however temporary—might prove therapeutic.

But no one was prepared for what happened next.

Monday, May 13, 1985. Ray had worked the midnight shift on Interstate 95 and returned home about 7:00
A.M. 
He went to bed, slept till noon, then got up and told Jackie he was going to a Methodist Men's Group meeting to help prepare food for an upcoming fund-raising event.

About nine o'clock, he came home, tired, but in reasonably good spirits. He was scheduled to work from 11:00
P.M. 
to 7:00
A.M.

“I wish I could just curl up and go to sleep,” he told Jackie as he was preparing to leave. “I don't know why, but I really don't want to go to work tonight.”

Nonetheless, he proceeded to Interstate 95 in Halifax County and began patrolling.

About 5:00
A.M.,
four men driving two vans got off the interstate and pulled into a service station, looking for gas to siphon. They had stolen the vans, then robbed a Fender County grocery store. Now they were headed north en route to Washington, D.C.

The station was closed but the owner had a German Shepherd dog on the premises. When the animal carne running towards the men, one of them shot at it with a .22 handgun, scaring it away. Then they took off in the early morning darkness.

Ray was coming north on Interstate 95 when he saw a white late-model Chevrolet van followed by a burgundy Dodge van, both speeding, no headlights burning on either. Accelerating hard to overtake them, he chased the vehicles for two and a half miles, blue light spinning and siren blaring.

Just before the 163-mile marker, thirteen miles south of Roanoke Rapids, Ray pulled ahead of the burgundy van. The white one slowed and came to a halt on the right shoulder of the road. What Ray couldn't see in the darkness was that the passenger inside the front van had tossed the .22 pistol out the window. It bounced against the pavement and came to rest near the guardrail.

As Ray moved in behind the white van, the burgundy van pulled up behind, sandwiching the cruiser between them.

Ray reached for the radio. It was 5:11
A.M., 
Tuesday, May 14.

“A-147 to Williamston.”

“A-147, go ahead.”

“I'm stopping two vans, northbound, just north of 561 right near 163. Both got Maryland plates, one temporary, one permanent. Can't give you the [license] number just now.”

“Ten-four.”

Ray got out of his patrol car, walked to the front of the van, greeted the two young black men inside, and told the driver to come with him to his patrol car. The man's name was Antonio Worrell; he was twenty-eight years old, from Washington, D.C. His passenger was twenty-seven-year-old Mack Eugene Green. It was Green who had thrown the gun out before Worley pulled them over.