By 1993, four years into the feud, Brooks's stance had hardened. "Dear Sir," he wrote his neighbor. "I wish to inform you that nobody from holly hill farm [sic] is allowed on my property.This includes you, your wife, your sons or daughters, your farm hands. Anybody associated with you is forbidden." He signed the letter "O. Perry Brooks, owner."
Brooks's friends-Bobby Lakin,Wick Coleman-and others say that at its core, the feud was not so much about money or class differences (though those played a role), but something more intangible and fundamental. It was about respect.
"He didn't treat my father as a human being, as an equal, as someone you would talk to," said Kim Brooks.
During the trial over the disputed boundary line, Perry Brooks was asked if it was true that he had once fired a shotgun in the general direction of John Ames.Yes, Brooks testified. And was it true that he had done so in part to "needle" John Ames? Yes, Brooks said again.And why did he want to do that, Ames 's attorney asked him.
"I think he needed it," Brooks replied. "Let him know somebody else was around besides hisself!"
Perry Brooks and John Ames met, according to Brooks family accounts and court testimony, at a public auction for Holly Hill Farm in June 1985. Holly Hill, a former plantation turned dairy farm, had fallen onto hard times.The auction was not a bankruptcy sale, but the widow of the owner was selling by agreement with the farm's creditors. Farmers around the county were in attendance that day. Ames, visiting from Richmond, approached Brooks to ask if there were any problems with the property. Brooks, Ames testified later, said no.The property was sold to Ames for about $442,000. Ames added the word "Corporation" to the farm name. Farm stationery listed Ames as vice president and his wife as president and treasurer.
According to testimony by both Ames and Brooks, they met again in January 1989 near their shared property line. Brooks had received the registered letter from Ames but had not yet formally replied. They talked about the cost of the fence, fencing materials, and the need to keep their herds separated. At some point, Ames reportedly remarked on the beauty of Brooks's land and said that his own cattle "sure would look pretty on it." The two men dickered. Ames offered to swap the fence bill in exchange for some of Brooks's land. Brooks said no. Brooks suggested Ames just tie in this new fence to the one hundred yards of Brooks's existing fence. Ames said he would agree, but only if they put the deal on paper and filed it at the courthouse. Brooks said no.
Brooks also told his neighbor that Ames 's proposed fence line was in error. It included a 1.87-acre triangle of land that actually belonged to him, Brooks said, by virtue of an old plat drawn up after the Civil War.That map, which used landmarks such as old sycamore stumps and white pine trees, gave him clear possession of that triangle of land, he asserted. In addition, he and the previous owner of Holly Hill Farm had made a handshake deal about the triangle years ago.
No, Ames replied, he had more recent legal surveys showing the land was his.The meeting ended with Brooks storming off, according to testimony.
At least three times in the months that followed, Brooks drove his tractor down to the disputed boundary line and nudged the new fence down, Ames alleged. He picked up posts and even a gate and carted them back to his barn, saying the materials and the new fence were over his property line and so belonged to him. On one of those occasions, Ames called out to him and demanded that he stop. Ames later testified that he had reminded Brooks then that they had talked about fencing the disputed section. Brooks replied, in so many words, that he didn't care.
On another occasion, Brooks showed up at the offending fence line with a single-barrel shotgun.
"What you got there?" Orlett said Ames shouted over to Brooks that day, a query that Brooks heard as a taunt.
"I'll show you," Brooks reportedly called back, and he discharged the shotgun in the air, according to court and other accounts. No one was hit, but Ames was frightened enough to take cover behind a tree, and later contended in a lawsuit that he believed Brooks had been aiming at him and that the incident caused him "severe emotional distress."
The feud reached a new intensity in March 1989, when Brooks drove down to the fence and found himself face-to-face with a six-foot-three security guard. The guard, a former Army Ranger, was carrying a.357 magnum.The two men scuffled, and Brooks's face was bruised.The guard testified later that his gun had hit Brooks while the guard was trying to kick Brooks's shotgun out of reach. Brooks said the guard had pistol-whipped him. The guard handcuffed Brooks and took him up to the main house, where Ames was in view. On seeing him, according to Ames 's subsequent complaint, Brooks began to bellow, shouting that he was going to come back and "kill everyone on the place."
(Both Brooks's widow, Evelyn, and John Ames declined to comment on any aspect of the feud. Evelyn Brooks has filed a $10.3 million wrongful death suit against Ames, which is scheduled to be heard in civil court after the murder trial in September. In turn, Ames filed an $11.3 million countersuit, accusing Evelyn Brooks, her daughter Jacqueline Coleman, son-in-law Matthew Coleman, and three John Does of a series of crimes including trespass, infliction of emotional distress, assault and battery, conspiracy, fraud, obstruction ofjustice, breaking court orders, and "terrorism." Ames later dropped the terrorism count after questioning by a judge and then dropped Evelyn Brooks from the suit entirely.)
Brooks was detained for a while, then uncuffed when he complained of chest pains, according to court records and Kim Brooks. He was arrested by sheriff's deputies and charged with trespassing. At the county jail, he was taken to the medical ward, then transferred to a hospital in Richmond, where he stayed for a week.
After that, Brooks told daughter Kim and others that he "wanted the war to be over." Kim Brooks, a nurse, remembers talking with her father at the time.
"I scolded him," she said. "I told him: 'What's this I'm hearing about shotguns? I don't ever want to hear about you murdering someone.You made us go to church all our lives, and then you act like this?' " Kim Brooks remembers that her father was contrite and made no further assaults on the fence.
The ground war at the fence line was subsiding, but the bull's wanderlust was not.
The fence that separates Holly Hill Farm from the Brooks farm is a door through time. On one side is John Ames's Farm Corporation, with its spreadsheets and cold-storage tanks for bull semen and calf embryos. On the other is Perry Brooks's 246 acres, which, by choice and temperament, he husbanded with methods and tools that in some cases harked back to Colonial times.
Like many farmers in Caroline County, Brooks was cash poor and land rich. Caroline is the last truly rural redoubt on the booming Interstate 95 corridor between Washington and Richmond, but, in recent years, housing subdivisions have begun to appear.The paper value of Brooks's land soared, but he rarely had more than $1,000 cash to his name. He lived on $400 a month in Social Security income, rent from a small second house on the property, and what he raised selling his vegetables at the farmers' markets in Northern Virginia. Most of his farm equipment was rattletrap and bore the marks of his welder's torch. He spruced up for church on Sunday but otherwise often dressed in tattered clothes.
"Perry was a little rough around the edges, but he had a heart of gold. He'd do anything for you," said McGann Saphir, a Virginia farm extension agent for Caroline County.
Brooks may have been a character, but he was nobody's fool. He could be fierce, and he was notably stubborn."With Perry, it was,'I may not always be right, but I'm never wrong,' " said friend Orlett.
Except for two years in Korea during that war, Brooks had lived in Caroline his whole life, as had his father before him. He was the youngest of several children. His mother suffered bouts of severe depression and was hospitalized for it several times. She once tried to drown herself in a creek, according to family members. Perry was cared for by his oldest sister, Ellen.When Ellen married and moved away, responsibility for his mother's care fell to him.