Pope John Paul II - Almost Midnight: an American Story of Murder and Redemption

ALMOST MIDNIGHT . Copyright 2004 by Michael W. Cuneo. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cuneo, Michael W.
Almost midnight : an American story of murder and redemption / by Michael W. Cuneo.
p. cm.
1. Mease, Darrell. 2. MurderersMissouriBiography. 3. Death row inmatesMissouriBiography. 4. HomicideMissouriTaney CountyCase studies. 5. John Paul II, Pope, 1920TravelUnited States. I. Title.
HV6533.M8C86 2004
364.152309778797dc21
2003052202

eISBN: 978-0-307-81545-3

v3.1

TO MY SON, RYAN CUNEO

D EPUTY JERRY Dodd of the Stone County Sheriffs Department was headed up Route 13 on a slow Sunday when the call crackled over the two-way. There was trouble near Reeds Spring Junction. A guy named Tom Woodward had phoned the department, saying a frantic woman was at his house screaming that her parents and twenty-year-old nephew had been murdered. Shed found their bodies just a few minutes earlier. Shed found them, at first not realizing they were dead. But then shed lookedand shed seen.

Dodd busted north past the junction and veered to the right off U.S. 160. With the dispatcher barking directions, he tore through a maze of rolling backcountry roads, startling a flock of cranes when he came to a skidding stop on the gravel outside the Woodward place. The woman waiting for him was about thirty, ashen, wearing a jean jacket. Her name was Retha Lawrence. She said shed found the bodies shortly after two, on a piece of property her parents owned over by West Fork Creek. Shed driven up to the property from the family home in Shell Knob intending to spend the rest of the day.

She told Dodd how to get there. He followed a winding gravel road for a mile and passed through a metal gate, two black-and-orange signs attached to it reading NO HUNTINGNO TRESPASSING. A rough dirt road for several hundred yards, a sharp bend, and he was at the creek, clear and shallow, maybe ten yards across. On the far side, close to where the road picked up again, two all-terrain vehicles sat nudged together, black and shiny blue in the shallow water. On the first, the one closest to Dodd, a woman in pale blue shorts lay sprawled out backward. A man in front of her, in blue jeans and a brown belt, sat with his torso bent far over the side, one arm dangling straight down, the other snagged on the handlebar. On the second vehicle, all Dodd could make out from the opposite bank were a pair of sneaker-clad feet, which seemed tangled up somehow in the front cargo rack.

He cut the engine, got out of the car, and took off his sunglasses. Except for the twittering of birds in the black ash trees, the place was filled with a pale and tremulous quiet. Dodd squinted in the light. Focusing on the first vehicle alone, he could almost imagine it as a favorite photograph in some family album. A couple savoring an intimate moment in a sheltered creek bedthe woman stretching back and enjoying the sun, the man reaching down and running his fingers through the water. Adjusting his gaze to take in the second four-wheeler, the spell was broken. Those feet jutting weirdly from the cargo rack, the body connected to them apparently draped over the other sidenothing dreamily warmhearted about this picture.

Dodd swiped absently at a dragonfly and slowly made his way down the bank and across the creek, the water barely up to his ankles. He walked around the back of the second four-wheeler, the one with the jutting feet. He stood there, looking. He shut his eyes. He opened them again. He thought about putting on his sunglasses. He heard himself breathing. He looked away across the creek and saw the sun glinting off the windshield of his patrol car. He thought he heard a faint buzzing. He looked down again.

It was a kid, a teenager maybe, wearing gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt, splotched with blood. His outstretched arms and upper torso were resting on the gravel next to the creek. The laces of his sneakers were tied to the cargo rack, keeping his feet grotesquely propped up while the rest of his body flopped down the side of the four-wheeler and onto the ground. The upper right portion of his face, above the eyeit was gone, obliterated, reduced to a pulpy mess, red and gray.

Dodd turned away and looked down the road, lush and green on either side, a trail of blood stretching out along the dirt and gravel from around a nearby bend.

He turned back and looked at the two bodies on the other four-wheeler. He saw what he hadnt been able to see from across the creek. The woman was wearing a T-shirt decorated with lambs, heart-shaped earrings, and a gold chain around her neck. Her upper torso was caked in a thick reddish-brown. And her head, bent down at a sharp angle toward the rear axle

Dodd put his fist to his mouth. He thought of the woman, the daughter, back at the Woodward place. He hoped she hadnt seen everything he was seeing.

her head, the top and middle of it, was devastated. An angry, flaming V branched out from her brow to the tips of her skull. Inside the V, there was nothing. Inside the V, everything was gone.

The man in front of her, leaning far over the side, was wearing a gray polo shirt, drenched in blood. His brains were leaking out of a gaping hole in his skull, dripping out bit by bit, forming a viscous, red-and-gray puddle on the waters surface.

Dodd took a slow look around, scanning the brush in every direction. He walked back across the creek, noticing curdled bits of gray flecked with red floating in the water. He wondered why he hadnt seen this the first time across. He returned to his car and got on the radio. He was told that help was on the way.

He went back across the creek and followed the dirt road to a scruffy farm property a couple of hundred yards along. A big cabin with a tin roof and wide veranda, pretty recent construction. A white school bus that had seen better days. An old flatbed truck with black cab parked alongside a tractor and a small trailer. A scattering of outbuildings and chicken pens. Nothing out of the ordinaryDodd had seen dozens of properties much like it up and down the Ozarks.

He stood frozen on the edge of the property, looking and listening. Nothing. No sign of life beyond the groaning of a door joint somewhere, the clattering of stiff branches in the spring breeze.

He went back to the creek. A dozen lawmen were on hand, hat brims turned low, mouths drawn tight. Some were still wearing their church-going shoes. There was the sound of somebody off in the nearby woods, retching.

The sheriff asked Dodd to videotape the scene.

He retrieved a camera from the trunk of a police car and started filming. He captured everythingthe three bodies, the gaping wounds, the bloodstained clothing.

He even captured the flies buzzing in and out of the wrecked skulls.