You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
A big murder arrest that rocks a small town.
I’ve done this too many times. Small town America shaken by a heinous act.
Small town America sleeps with its doors unlocked. Small town America doesn’t think it can happen there. Small town America knows its neighbors and because it does, thinks that everything is safe.
Hey small town America; your neighbors are crazy.
The latest version of big crime in small town America happens for me in Decatur County Tennessee, some 2 hours outside of Nashville. Another few exits and I’m eating ribs and watching the ducks walk out of the elevator at the Peabody in Memphis.
The crime happened almost 3 years ago. That’s whena a pretty blond nursing student disappears.
The family always hopes she’ll return. The rumors are thick. A brother says he last saw her being walked away by someone wearing camoflauge.
This small town will search dozens of times. They will walk fields and woods and creeks. There will be umpteen prayer meetings and vigils. There will be special reports and TV stations getting in trouble for maybe reporting too much, or perhaps not the truth.
But through it all, grizzled lawmen and cynical reporters always knew that one day, the worst news would rear its ugly head.
That day came Wednesday when authorities arrested a psychotic man charging him with kidnapping and murder.
What lead to the indictment is unknown, but the TBI (Tennessee Bureau of Investigation) spent the better part of a weekend combing through evidence at the suspect’s home prior to a special convening of the Grand Jury.
News crews flood the small town, camping out on the side of the road, shooting from a 1/4 mile away, anything that might be relevant. From the side of a country road, sometimes, it is hard to know.
Then the moment of truth. 4pm Wednesday. The TBI director takes the podium and makes the solemn and stirring announcement. The man who owns that property is charged with aggravated kidnapping and 1st degree murder. Small town citizens inside that small town courtroom wailed out loud.
Decaturville is a small town that makes Mayberry look like urban sprawl.
The town square is a few blocks by a few blocks. If you go past the dog peeing on the fire hydrant you’ve gone too far.
Pink ribbons have been tied to the light poles for the better part of 3 years, a symbol that this small town expects her safe return.
Every store front has a picture of the bright faced young woman with her name and the word: Missing.
People in this town know one another. They know the missing girl. They know the man now charged with kidnapping and killing her.
By 4:30 pm the town is in shock. I walk down the sidewalk outside the local pharmacy. People are teary eyed and emotional. It’s as if they have lost a family member. Perhaps they have.
I walk into the corner pharmacy. The door, like every store front door, is adorned with the young woman’s photo. I walk in and immediately feel uneasy.
“Hi. I’m with the news. Would anyone care to talk about the announcement,” I say.
I am met with icy glares. I am Charles Manson. It’s as if I am the killer. I am the enemy. This small town needs someone to hate. Right now, this feel slike me.
The pharmacist stares at me cooly. She is polite, but straight forward.
“we don’t want to talk. We’d like you to leave.”
“yes mam,”
It feels awkward when small town America throws you out on the street.
This town is postage stamp small. It’s so small the squirrels fight for the one tree in the corner lot.
We watch a handful of people saunter down the side walk. It’s frigid and windy. The sun is setting and this really is begining to suck.
“What do you want to do?” my photog asks.
I have no idea. This seems like the right place to be, but Small Town America is grieving and won’t open up.
I stare at every car, every human walking down the street.
“You wanna talk to the news?” I ask half a dozen folks.
Nothing.
Suddenly, the door to the pharmacy bursts open. Its the pharmacists. She wears a stern look.
I suspect she is going to ask me to leave.
I feel my 1st ammendment juices begin to rage.
“Ok, we’ll talk,” she says.
I’m a little stunned, but that’s how the journalistic angels touch you some days. She says she doesn’t want me to talk to someone who doesn’t truly understand the scope of loss.
She tells me she knows the family, goes to church with them. She says her co worker’s daughter and the dead girl were best friends.
This town is connected on so many levels. They know the victim and the suspect. It’s an emotional interview, it’s a great interview.
But she won’t talk about him. Very few people want to talk about the small town derelict with the big time bad ass reputation. His mug shot makes him look crazy. Maybe he is crazy. He has a demonic facebook photo. His smile looks like that of a man who has just tortured a small animal.
He looks evil, at least crazy.
The authorities are saying nothing about what they find at his home. They will not comment on what lead to the arrest. Do they have a body? Do they have DNA? Did someone confess?
News reporters from across the state have gathered in this tiny town. The population has suddenly almost doubled. I am not sure the IQ has.
My photographer and I move to the interstate to scout live shot locations.
We are using a TVU which is a back pack that attaches to the camera and allows us to send video and sound back via cell phone technology. The video looks ghastly and it is often hard to manage the 7 – 10 second delay inherent in this cutting edge technology. But the TVU’s immediacy and portability make it the new frontier.
We pull into a truck stop and I ask the manager if it will be ok to work at a table in the back.
He is nice as he can be.
“Of course. Nobody will bug you.”
We set up our portable editor and plug into every available socket. News people tend to spread out, take over, completely own a place when they walk in.
We begin ingesting the video from our P2 card.
Soon our 2nd news crew arrives. We are all sitting around the table talking about the day’s events.
We share information and we discuss what story elements we have.
I have the town react piece. The other reporter is nuts and bolts, meaning what happened and how it unfolded.
Within the hour, another woman arrives at our table. She introduces herself as a freelance producer working this story for Good Morning America. She is a Nashville woman and she knows me from years of watching.
She knows this story inside and out. She is on her iphone talking non stop to producers in New York.
How small is this town?
A waitress comes by and asks what we are doing.
We tell her we are working the story of the girl killed by the local man.
“I know him,” she says.
We look at her with big eyes.
Then she bangs the hammer on the glass table smashing our senses.
“My tip to the TBI helped solve the case.”
We look at one another. It’s like a rabbit emerging in a field full of coon dogs. We want to pounce, but we don’t want to spook her, force her to run.
We all remain calm. “Oh really. So you know him?”
“Oh yes. My brother and he were friends growing up. He’s crazy.”
And so it goes. For the next 3 hours we talk to the waitress.
At one point she agrees to talk to us on camera. At one point she decides she is afraid and she won’t. At one point she agrees to do an interview if we protect her identity. The waitress is wearing me out.
I do my 10 pm live shot from the inside of the truck stop breezeway.
Then we interview the waitress on the side of the restaurant.
She won’t tell us what she specifically said to the TBI, but she does feel she was instrumental in helping solve the case.
The woman is nice, but I can’t help but wonder if she is her own grandmother in some back woods incestuous stew of cousin loving.
She thanks us and we head home. A 2 hour drive, from a city that is barely in our viewing market. It’s a wonder we are here at all?
A pretty white girl disappears. I wonder how much coverage this story would get if she was an ugly white girl. How much coverage would it get if she was a missing black girl? Would we show up for a Mexican girl? Would every TV station in Tennessee be here if she had a sketchy crimminal history?
News is perception. Perception is, small town America is hurting.
On the way home, the GMA producer begins assaulting me with texts and phone calls.
She keeps telling me what segments she wants me to send to ABC news.
Around midnight, I’m sick of her.
“Look. I don’t work for abc, i don’t work for you. We’re doing you a solid. You want to control the story, next time bring your own crew. We’ll get New York the footage when our editors come in at 2:30 am.”
I’m polite but stern.
“OK, thanks so much,” she says realizing she is New York overbearing in a southern fried city.
I get home around 1 am. It’s crazy how much driving and talking and reporting I have done today.
I’m tired. I try to sleep. I close my eyes, but brain is a TV screen. Images of blond white girls and missing posters and crying people on a sidewalk jam my thoughts. It’s as if I have crammed 3 years of missing girl into one huge gigantic day.
I wake up at 7 am. I am groggy like a small town drunk. I turn on Good Morning America to see what they did with our interview of the waitress.
It airs, and they use the waitress, but it is not the footage we shot. It appears to be daytime footage from some other time when she was scared to talk to the media then too.
Ridiculous.
Then I check facebook and there is a message that came in early in the morning from this waitress.
She says she doesn’t want us to run her video. “Things have changed,” she says.
Whatever bipolar lady, whatever.
I think how many times I have covered a big murder in a small town.
The answer is too many.
Well tomorrow is another day.
Plenty of time for something big time crazy to happen to someone small town.
Life’s Crazy™