Swamp Victim

  Chapter 25

  Caley proceeded on the main highway toward the river. She saw a small dirt road leading off to the south about two miles from Lonnie’s Landing. She turned off and about a quarter of a mile down the small lane, she came to a small shanty. A black man that appeared to be in his 70’s or 80’s sat in a well-worn homemade rocker on the small front porch. Smoke curled upward from a well-worn homemade reed pipe in his mouth. She got out of the car clearly emblazoned as Caldwell County Sheriff on the front door and walked over to the porch.

  “Good morning,” said Caley.

  “Mornin. What you doing hereabouts? I ain’t made no moonshine in ney on 20 years now,” the man replied in a friendly manner accompanied by a jovial laugh.

  “Not looking for moonshine today. My name is Caley Givens, and I was just riding around in this are talking to people about the killings that have been going on down the river.”

  “I’m Peter Dull. I been living here since I was a ‘yunon and ain’t seen nutin goin on that would help you.”

  “Nice to meet you Mr. Dull. Lonnie Sharp found a skull and some bones in a hole a ways down the Saltketcher. You know Lonnie?”

  “Oh yea, he runs the boat place”

  “The FBI tells us that the remains were probably put there maybe 40 years ago. That would have been around the time of all the civil unrest in the south. You remember much about that time?”

  “Shor do. Wuz a lot of hate and turmile being spread round here by dem folks from up north. After things settled down, I guess the country was better off eventually,” Peter said taking another pull on his pipe.

  “Peter, do you remember two boys coming down here from Orangeburg and trying to organize a sit-in over at Warrenton?”

  “I shor do. They got the reverent at the church here to let them speak to the people one Sunday,” Peter said with a very loud laugh.

  Continuing he said, “well the KKK heard about it and it wern’t long fore dey was a big cross burning in front of the church. I guess that pretty much took care of any protests in and around here, cuz dem boys licky-da-split. Everybody says they went over to Alabama or Mississippi and joined Martin Luther King’s bunch.”

  “That could be Peter, but after finding these bones, we suspect that they may have been killed and dumped in the river. If that is so, how do you think it might have happened?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. Taking another pull on his pipe, he became very pensive and continued to rock back and forth. Caley had been standing on the open wooden steps conducting the conversation. Finally, Peter’s demeanor became very serious as he pointed to the second rocking chair and said, “Come on up here and have a seat.”

  “You know, everybody didn’t agree dat dem boys left town. Some folks suspected dat dey may been done away with by da KKK, but since everbody was scart ta git involved, the whole thing petered out. The reverent wuz the scartest after da cross burning, so he told people don’t cause no mo trouble. I s’pose dey listened to him, cuz everybody went on about their business and no mo ever happened.”

  “Can you remember if there were rumors of who beside the Klan could have harmed the boys?”

  “Well, dat’s what I was gonna to say. You know about Lonnie’s Landing down there. Well back then, dat was no mor’nt a slope to the water. Any time during the summer, you could see half dozen people sitting on the bank fishing. Nobody here-abouts had a boat or needed one neither. Except one person! That was Mr. Oats. Mr. Oats was about my age at dat time. He had a wooden flat bottom boat he tied up to a gum tree down der. He had a good business catching fish and taking ‘em to Warrenton to sell at da fish market ober der. He strung catfish lines all up and down da river. Caught ever kind a fish in the swamp: bass, mud fish, eels, and carp, but mostly catfish. He’d come back to the landing with 50, 75 pounds a meat. During the shad season he’d string out nets and get oodles of dem too. Now I ain’t saying he hurt dem boys. But back then, he was the onlyest one that went up or down da whole river. He always told people, it was his river and he acted like he owned it too. Course it wren’t so, but if he caught some body fishing any further ent around the landing, he’d give em hell. He was a mean man, and dey wern’t nobody that messed with him.”

  Caley thanked Peter for his hospitality and said she would be getting back with him.

  When she got back to the office J.D. was clearly encouraged by the additional information that had been received from the FBI. They had sent complete reports of all persons reported missing between 1955-1970 in South Carolina and Georgia. These, along with the information on file already made 13 different reports they had on missing persons. But the ones that stood out prominently were those of Melvin Abernathy and Sammy Benis. They were the only ones that had been reported missing from the area around the time the skull and bones were dumped into the swamp. It was also a strange coincidence that their civil rights campaign suddenly and mysteriously stopped after the KKK burned a cross in front of the local black church.

  Something else had been found that had been overlooked in the analysis of the skull and bones. A .38 caliber slug was found still lodged inside the skull. A thorough search of records in the FBI database didn’t show any matches to the bullet. The circumstantial evidence was beginning to grow against Oats Schoenfeld, but there was still nothing physically connecting him to the deaths. Both J.D. and Caley knew that because the crimes were over 40 years old physical evidence would be hard to come by.

  “Let’s talk about bubba’s attacker for a minute. Big Al said it was Oats that shot him, and I tend to believe him even though he was out of his head. What if we got a warrant to search Oats’ entire property including his boat down at the river? We still haven’t found the gun that shot Bubba, and that will give us the basis for getting a warrant to search.” Caley said.

  “I agree. And while we are at it, I want to go over that clubhouse again. I have a feeling there may be something we missed there.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just my imagination from too many cases like this. If you look hard enough, it is rare that something won’t be found at the scene of a crime. So far we haven’t found anything but blood in that house.”

  “OK, I will move on the warrant right away.”

  Caley had no problem getting the search warrant she needed to perform a complete search of Oats’ property. The team included five people, and the plan was for J.D. and one SLED forensic specialist to take the clubhouse while Caley and another one searched the store and living space above it. The boat would be searched by whoever finished first.

  The team arrived at Flood’s Place early in the morning. Caley served the warrant to Oats, and he was escorted outside by a uniformed deputy. The living space above the store had one bathroom, three bedrooms, kitchen and a living room. The sparsely furnished space was cluttered with worn and ragged furniture. Dirty clothes and other junk one might expect of a non-meticulous bachelor was scattered around the room. The living room was equipped with a small TV set. All the other furniture was covered with a layer of thick dust, indicative of the fact that house cleaning was not one of Oats’ strong suites. The kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes. His dining habits were obvious by the several partially opened cans beans and chili as well as used TV dinner trays decorating the kitchen counter. Wearing thin disposable Nitrile gloves, Caley carefully opened every cabinet and dresser drawer searching for evidence. She was looking for a gun but was alert for anything else that might tie into the case. Exactly what? She didn’t know, but she would recognize it when she saw it. In the bottom of one of the dresser drawers was a photo album. She picked it up, laid it on top of the dresser, and paged through it. Most of the pictures appeared to be very old. Caley thought she vaguely recognized Oats as one of the men in one picture. The much younger Oats had a broad smile that showed gleaming white teeth. The second man in the picture was an
older man wearing a police officer's uniform. Caley could make out the writing on the silver badge on the older man’s shirt. It said Warrenton, SC Police Department. The number 47 was in the center of the badge. She took it out of the slot and turned it over. On the back was written, “Otis Senior and Otis Junior- 1968.” She put everything back as she had found it, except the photograph of the Otis and his father, which she decided to keep.

  Downstairs in the bar, J.D. had combed every inch of the place. On a shelf beneath the cash register, he had located a .38 Police Special revolver, and a 12 gauge sawed off the double-barreled shotgun. No doubt, these were weapons Oats used to protect himself in the case of robberies. This was a very common practice in remote locations where law enforcement was sometimes at least an hour away. J.D. had already bagged the guns and planned to take them back for forensic examination. The search turned up nothing else worth taking as evidence.

  After completing their search at Flood’s Place, they went back to the clubhouse and began going over it again. Caley had a large light that she was using to comb the entire area, including the walls and ceiling. She was looking for another bullet that may have come from the pistol that shot Bubba. They had already recovered a slug from his chest. The second bullet went through his arm and had not been located. This is what she was looking for, even though several searches had previously been made. After searching for at least an hour, suddenly she saw a knothole missing from the wall. Examining it closer, she realized that the force of a bullet had knocked it out. When she looked into the hole, she could see where the bullet had gone through the insulation in the wall. After going outside, she saw no evidence of an exit hole. She and J.D. took a tire iron from one of the cars and pried the boards off the wall. After carefully removing the insulation, there it was. About half of the bullet was sticking out of the inside board used as siding for the building. It took little effort to extract it.

  After Caley and J.D. had found the bullet, Caley remembered a trick she was taught at NCIS. Having the impact location of the bullet found in the wall plus the location of the one that lodged into Bubba’s arm, she knew she could triangulate the point from where the gun was fired. She was able to find a ball of twine in the closet in the back of the house. She stretched out the strings attached to the point of impact of each of the bullets. They crossed at various places throughout the room, producing an intersection point that revealed with a high degree of confidence that the person was on or near the couch behind the door when they fired. She wasn’t sure if this new information was significance or not, but she filed it away in here mind for future reference. Just one more detail, in a growing collection of evidence.