Matthew and Wick Coleman retrieved the bull a few days after the shooting. A rumor flew around Bowling Green that the bull had been found with a broken penis, that someone at Holly Hill Farm had swung a hammer at it. With its elements of cruelty and violence, the grisly report seemed to resonate in a community stunned that a disagreement over a fence had ended in death. But Wick Coleman said there was no evidence of any such assault. Rather, the bull's penis sheath, which runs under more than half of its belly, was badly bruised, consistent, perhaps, with a leap over a partially downed fence. In any case, the bull was taken directly from Holly Hill Farm to the slaughterhouse in Fredericksburg, where it was sold for meat.
Mary Battiata is a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. She was a Pulitzer finalist for her coverage of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and also has reported from Poland, Romania, and East Africa for the Post. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
I did not cover the criminal trial ofJohn Ames. I had moved on to another assignment by then, and in any case still felt too close to the story and too drained by it to attend as a spectator. For reasons I still can't quite understand, this story was as grinding, emotionally and physically, as any I've written in my twenty-four years as a reporter at the Washington Post, including years as a war correspondent in East Africa and the former Yugoslavia.
Part of it was simply the usual reporter's lament: none of the parties wanted to have anything to do with me for months on end, well past my first and then second deadline. Part of it was simple sadness at the sorry details of the feud and the pain it had caused all parties. And another giant stressor was my interviews with a long line of John Ames's former business associates, who told me they'd been sued by him and warned that he was likely to do the same to me. That never happened, as it turned out. But the case continues to reverberate in my head, and I still get calls about it from all over the country, from people who've read the story and want to know how it all turned out. Not surprising, really. Nearly everyone has had problems with a neighbor at one time or another, and this story of tragedy in a corner of rural paradise, a landscape where we like to think an older, more courteous way of life survives, seemed to strike a particular chord.
The trial lasted a week, and at the outset, the judge turned down Ames 's lawyer's request to move the proceedings to another county. On Friday, September 16, 2005, almost a year and a half to the day after the feud's bloody conclusion, a jury in Caroline County, Virginia, found John Ames not guilty in the shooting death of his neighbor, Perry Brooks.After the verdict was read, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ames closed his eyes, then hugged his wife and cried. Some in the courtroom and in the surrounding town of Bowling Green expressed surprise at the verdict, not least Brooks's oldest daughter, Kim, who said it was as if her father had been unable to see the danger that continuing the feud posed to him, despite warnings from family and friends.
One juror said the jury had been evenly divided between acquittal and a charge of involuntary manslaughter at the start of the trial. But over the next three days, they were persuaded by evidence that undercut the eyewitness account of the Brooks's family farmhand. The scattered pattern of bullet casings found around Brooks's body after the shooting seemed to show that Brooks had been moving forward, toward Ames, with his stick raised, when
Ames fired."I started backing away," Ames said. "He took a swing at me with the stick…I ducked, and as I ducked, I cocked the 9mm [pistol], and I fired and kept firing-there were no conscious thoughts."
Ames testified that Brooks dropped his stick after being struck by the second or third bullet, but continued to lurch forward in a tackling position. "I wanted to be left in peace," Ames told the prosecutor on the stand. "I wanted this to stop…I think I saved my own life. He left me with no options." Ames 's wife, Jeanne, testified that she had been so frightened by Perry Brooks's occasional verbal threats against her family during the fifteen-year feud that she kept a pistol on her nightstand, and the window blinds drawn. Other farm employees told of being threatened by Brooks as well. The jury evidently was less moved by the prosecutor's argument that Perry Brooks had not threatened the Ames family directly in many years.
Ames defense attorney, Craig Cooley, argued that Ames 's reaction, when confronted with a three-foot stick about the thickness of a shovel handle, had not been excessive."People have been killed with billy clubs," he said.The first sheriff's deputy to reach Holly Hill Farm on the morning of the shooting testified that Ames declined to make a statement, then pointed to Brooks's body and said:"He's over there if you want to try to help him."
Three months after the verdict, in December 2005, Perry Brooks's widow, Evelyn, accepted a settlement in her $10 million wrongful death suit against John Ames. The settlement was sealed by the court and the amount was not disclosed. Kim Brooks said afterward that her mother had struggled with the decision of whether to settle or let the case go to trial, where the family had hoped additional facts, more favorable to their father, might emerge.
At the time of the settlement, the $45,001.12 lien that Ames had placed on Brooks's farm back in 1989, in an attempt to force
Brooks to pay for his fence, remained unpaid.With interest, it was estimated to have grown to about $150,000.
I have not been back to Caroline County since the story. But one memory of the reporting has stuck with me. It is from my second visit to Holly Hill Farm, in the fall of 2004. I turned up on the day when a visiting vet was on hand to suction multiple embryos from four cows that had been super-fertilized with hormone treatments and then artificially inseminated. The removal of embryos is an exacting task in the best of circumstances. But this day, nothing seemed to go right-one cow was difficult to suction, another seemed to have no embryos, and a third became restless in the holding chute, jumped, and knocked loose the hypodermic needle that had been planted in her back."John, it's been a long time since I've had a morning like this," the vet said.
As they worked, I scanned the fields outside the barn. In the distance, just beyond a row of trees, lay Brooks's farm, and the dirt track that Perry Brooks had traveled on the morning of his death. Then I turned back to Ames, the vet, and the cows.That's when I noticed a pure white cat sitting like a sentry on top of a stall post. It was watching us coolly, in the way cats do. And for just a moment, it looked to me like the ghost of Perry Brooks, prowling among us, and watching the difficulties in the barn that day with a certain bleak satisfaction.
Howard Blum and John Connolly : Hit Men in Blue?
from Vanity Fair
If Betty Hydell had not turned on the television that afternoon in 1992, she might never have learned the stranger's name. But there on the Sally Jessy Raphael show was the bruiser who had knocked on her door six years earlier looking for her son. He had come asking for twenty-eight-year-old Jimmy on the day he disappeared-and, she had no doubt, was murdered. Only, now that she knew the man's name, justice, she was convinced, was impossible. He was beyond the law.
Six years later, she lost another son. Frank, thirty-one, the younger brother, was found lying between two parked cars in front of a Staten Island strip club with three bullets pumped into his head and chest. Now she needed to talk; and slowly, despite her anxieties, she was growing ready.