Dark and Bloody Ground Read online

  Lester thought for a minute. He knew the Eppersons. They were from around Hazard. Roger had always been a strange young man, in and out of trouble. What was particularly odd about Roger, especially given this phone call, was that from about the age of fourteen or fifteen, he had been a fan of Lester’s. That had been ten, twenty years ago. Roger would follow Lester around like a groupie, showing up at all the big-time murder trials, rushing to congratulate him if he won and asking to buy him a sandwich or a cup of coffee. In another boy such an interest might have signalled an aspiring lawyer. As a young man Lester himself had studied and become enthralled by the courtroom performances of great attorneys. Roger Epperson’s fascination appeared to have sprung from different motives.

  The idea settled quickly like a cloud on Lester’s mind that the three men who had been arrested were guilty. He knew they were, that was all there was to it. And he had another flash of insight. In following him around all those years ago, observing how he was able to instill doubts in a jury’s mind and win technical points from a judge and drive a prosecutor to distraction, Roger Epperson had come to the conclusion that if you had Lester Burns as your lawyer, you could get away with just about anything. Now Roger had done something horrendous and, the second he was arrested, was trying to contact the great Lester Burns.

  It was unnerving. An old man robbed, brutalized, his daughter murdered—Lester felt like an accomplice. He could feel Epperson’s eyes on him. Epperson had stalked him; now he beckoned. Lester was already so rich that he had begun to cut down on his practice. There would be other cases. His instincts told him to pass this one up.

  Yet four hundred thousand dollars, maybe more than that ... Lester ruminated. He was a man who rarely saw things in black and white, nor in gray, either, but most often in all the colors of the rainbow. Whoever did the killing would face the death penalty; they all might. And Roger’s family had money, too, although how much of it they would be willing to part with to defend a scumbag like Roger was another matter.

  Every man, even the lowest wretch on earth, even the rottenest son of a bitch who ever drew breath, deserves a fair trial, Lester reminded himself, and, as he always added, deserves to believe that he has had a fair trial and the best legal counsel that money can buy.

  “Well, what do you say, Lester?” the caller asked. “Can I give Roger your number?”

  “I will consider the matter,” Lester said. “Yes, give him my number.”

  Years later, trying to account for the errors that had caused his fall, Lester recalled that moment, that fateful instant of acquiescence, and said, “I felt the darkness closing in.”

  2

  DOWN IN THE BASEMENT DEN of Lester Burns’s house, a long room panelled with weathered wood from barns, lies a violin case. It rests in a corner next to the Xerox machine, Lester’s name spelled out on one side in pasted-on silver block letters.

  “An old man gave that to me,” Lester says. “He was the best fiddle maker in the mountains. I did some legal work for him, helped him with his Social Security. He could never pay me, so he gave me this fiddle.”

  Lester opens the case to reveal an unfinished instrument, a violin still in-the-white, as musicians say, the strings in place and waiting for a bow but the wood unvarnished.

  “He gave it to me for Christmas. He wanted me to have it on the day, even though he had more work to do on it. I was supposed to give it back so he could put the varnish on. But by New Year’s Eve, he was dead.”

  Lester conjures up the image of an old man dead in his cabin among the violins, bloodsoaked shavings on the floor, the smells of varnish and glue and gunpowder.

  “His son killed him. The little son of a bitch. I prosecuted the bastard, nailed him for ten years. Maybe he should’ve got the chair. I believe in the death penalty, as deterrent and as retribution.

  “Sometimes when I’m feeling low I take out that fiddle and pluck on those strings and think about that old man.”

  The story of the unfinished violin illuminates Lester Burns from several angles. Whenever Christmas came and Lester sat down at the head of the table with his family, he silently asked a special blessing for the holiday season because family quarrels would soon be erupting all over Eastern Kentucky, somebody would kill somebody, and Daddy would have new clients. The story of the violin also illustrates why Lester sometimes worked for free: “The fellow you help today for nothing may become a killer or a victim tomorrow, and that family will call you.” Someone would come up with the money, or a farm. Under a Kentucky law since repealed, Lester for many years was employed by the families of victims to assist the Commonwealth’s Attorney in prosecuting. The legislature repealed the law, it is Lester’s opinion, because he annoyed the state’s lawyers by outshining them and taking over the case. Defending a client, he would go to almost any length, but as a prosecutor he was hard-nosed. His unsentimental, law-and-order, conservative attitudes and politics were those of a self-made man who had fought himself out of a hole in the ground to become as dramatic as Tom Mix and as solvent as the Toyota Motor Company.

  Born on Bullskin Creek on October 7, 1931, Lester H. Burns, Jr., was the first baby in Clay County delivered by the Mary C. Breckinridge Frontier Nursing Service, one of several mountain projects established by women of the prominent Breckinridge family of the Bluegrass. The “H” in the name had been added by Lester Sr., to make life easier for the postman, and stood for nothing. The nurse arrived on horseback to bring Lester into a world of mule-drawn ploughs, oil lamps, and dawn-to-dusk physical labor, of anvils and haystacks, of steam locomotives and gob piles.

  Never destitute, Lester’s family did struggle like everyone else during the Depression, without going on relief or taking WPA jobs, an independence that shaped Lester’s character. His father farmed and, after the repeal of Prohibition, operated a small mill that manufactured white-oak staves for whiskey barrels. There was always enough to eat. After moving the family briefly to Ohio, his father managed to expand the Clay County farm and to acquire minor interests in coal mines here and there. Like all the other boys he knew, Lester by the age of twelve was laboring in the underground mines after school, on Saturdays, and throughout the summers. He soon concluded that this was not the life for him.

  Whenever he had the chance, he hung around the courthouse, entranced by the dramatic spectacles enacted by country lawyers and by the excitement of the entire scene, which he enjoyed as much as his other youthful passion, Western movies. In the fifth grade, when his brother, James, was in the sixth, both boys wrote essays proclaiming that one day they would become soldiers, policemen, and lawyers. They both became all three.

  Up Bullskin Creek Lester discovered a hollow with a natural echo. There he climbed atop a pine stump and delivered orations to the mountains, flailing the air, mesmerized by reverberations of himself, training his voice to scale peaks and plummet into valleys in a style derived in equal parts from the courtroom, the political rally, and the evangelist’s tent. The subject was always some wretched innocent who had only Lester Burns standing between himself and the rope.

  “The copperheads crawled out to listen,” he says. “The birds stopped singing when I spoke.”

  He attended high school at the Oneida Baptist Institute, which had been founded by a cousin, and graduated at fifteen as valedictorian of his class. To escape the mines and to save money for college, he drove a Pepsi-Cola truck, learning the twists of mountain roads through twelve counties, stopping to chat with each delivery. Folks hung around to visit with him, this emissary from the wider world. He gathered stories from miners, farmers, shopkeepers, gas station attendants, and moonshiners, storing up intimacies of the highlanders’ ways and figuring that one day when he was successful, maybe as a lawyer come back to defend them, they would remember him as the boy who drove the Pepsi truck.

  After two years at Eastern Kentucky State College, in Richmond, Lester grew bored with his studies and joined the Air Force in search of adventure. He found plenty of it
flying combat missions in Korea. The war over, he returned to finish college with the intention of going on to law school. By the time he graduated, however, he was married; his wife, Asonia, was soon pregnant with their first child. Lester became a state trooper, at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month.

  One of his fellow troopers, later the Lexington police chief, remembers him as “a character, that’s the best way I can describe him. Very ambitious. And he was a hard-nosed officer, a hustler. He’d lock you up or give you a ticket in a minute.” There was no question that Lester would rise rapidly in the police bureaucracy, but that was not what he wanted. He took advantage of the considerable amount of time a trooper has to spend testifying in court to absorb the law and to study lawyers. His favorite, who became something of a mentor to him, was the celebrated John Y. Brown, Sr., whose son, John Y. Jr., would later buy up Kentucky Fried Chicken, become governor, and marry Miss America. From the start, Lester had a knack for making the right contacts.

  The most important of these was the governor at that time, A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the most popular figure in modern Kentucky history. First elected in 1935, Happy Chandler was appointed commissioner of baseball after World War II and by 1956 was into his second term as governor. In that year Lester managed to land frequent assignments as the official chauffeur of the governor and Mrs. Chandler.

  As commissioner, Chandler left mixed impressions. He helped to integrate the sport by assisting Branch Rickey in bringing Jackie Robinson up to the Brooklyn Dodgers; but in the eighties Chandler compromised that distinction by uttering the word “nigger” at a meeting of the University of Kentucky Board of Regents, a slip that prompted demands for his resignation from the board. In 1947 he suspended Leo Durocher for the season for allegedly having consorted with gamblers; but many people, including Leo the Lip, believed that Durocher’s crucial mistake was in complaining to reporters about the commissioner’s hypocrisy in not suspending a Yankee owner for entertaining the same gamblers, Memphis Engle-berg and Connie Immerman, in a private box at a ball game in Havana. “Baseball typifies the great American dream,” Chandler wrote in his preface to the Encyclopedia of Baseball (1949), “where a boy may rise from direct poverty to become a national hero. No pull—no inside track is necessary. The only requirements are the development of a skill and the willingness to work hard in the development of that skill.” In anointing Lester Burns as a protégé, however, Chandler must have believed that some pull and the inside track would do the boy no harm. In Lester, Governor Chandler spotted a fellow with political instincts, down-home charm, and shrewdness not unlike his own. The two developed a father-and-son closeness.

  Lester was by then a handsome stripling, as he might have phrased it, just under six feet tall, his physique toughened by work in the mines and lifting those Pepsi crates. High cheekbones, a tanned, coppery complexion, and a regal carriage exuding confidence suggested a Shawnee chief, maybe Tecumseh himself somewhere in the background ennobling the tough Scottish strains. His hair was sandy; his eyes gleamed turquoise.

  “Momma and I just about raised him,” Governor Chandler recalled twenty-five years later in speaking to a reporter who was preparing a front-page feature story on Lester. “He just had that Clay County determination about him. Under other circumstances, he might have had an average life. But he had that spark.”

  One October afternoon Lester drove Mrs. Chandler to the Keeneland races, a journey of more than an hour, plenty of time for him to spin a few mountain yarns. He also gave her a tip on the big race.

  “Lester, honey,” Momma said on the return trip, “do you want to be a trooper all your life?”

  “No, Momma,” Lester said, “I have always dreamed of becoming a lawyer.”

  “Then why don’t you do it?”.

  “I can’t afford it. I’ve got a wife and a baby daughter, and besides, I can’t choose my hours. They don’t have classes at night, and half the time I’m working days.”

  “Lester, honey, didn’t you finish first in your class at the Police Academy?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did.”

  “Well, Lester, I want you to call your supervisor first thing Monday morning, you hear? You tell him the governor told you to call. From now on, you’re working nights, and you can attend law school during the day.”

  “I don’t think the supervisor will agree to that,” Lester said. “Everybody has to work different shifts.”

  “Honey, the head of the State Police works for my husband. If he doesn’t like it, Happy will fire him.”

  Lester enrolled at the University of Kentucky School of Law that week, his books and tuition taken care of by a special scholarship granted by the governor’s office. He gave out very few tickets during the next few years. Usually he parked his cruiser on some lonely road to study. Another trooper gave him a book rack with a light attached that hooked onto the steering wheel. When he received his degree, other graduates urged him to sign up for special courses to cram for the bar examination.

  “Why would I need to do that?” Lester asked. “I’ve been going without sleep for three years. If I don’t know the law by now, I must be some kind of an idiot.”

  Lester passed the bar on his first try in September 1959, argued his first case the same day, and won. He borrowed five hundred dollars to move his family—Asonia had given birth to a second daughter by then—back to Manchester, the Clay County seat, where he knew he had enough contacts and understood the people well enough to give himself a running start. He opened a twenty-dollar-a-month office and began immediately to establish the theatrical style that would mark his career.

  The nearest Cadillac dealer was over in Corbin. Lester walked into the showroom wearing a new suit he had just purchased on credit, pointed to a white 1959 Coupe de Ville, and announced that he did not have a dime to his name but was the best lawyer in Kentucky and would never miss a payment. When the salesman laughed at him, Lester demanded to see the owner and drove off in the Cadillac with no money down. In his first four months of practice, he made twenty-five thousand dollars and paid off the car.

  Lester knew he had brains and was willing to work harder than anyone else; he also knew that that was not enough. To be the kind of success he was determined to be, he knew he had to appear it and act it, and he understood which symbols meant success to mountain folk. There was the Cadillac, that was a prerequisite, and there had to be clothes to match and the panache to wear them as if he belonged in them—the mountain boy who had made it and with whom everyone could identify, or nearly everyone. Lester was so meticulous and imaginative about his clothes that if he had been born a Parisian, he might have outstyled Christian Dior. He often wore a touch of bright blue, in a tie or a silk handkerchief billowing from his breast pocket, to call attention to his eyes. To complement the white Caddy with its red leather upholstery he chose several pastel suits, added diamond rings, and made sure his shoes never showed a speck of dust. When he descended on a dingy mining town he looked as if he had flown in from a holiday in Florida or maybe Las Vegas, tan, sparkling, rich, exuding bravado.

  “I can’t understand these small-town lawyers with their Sears Roebuck suits and shop rags for ties,” Lester said. “You know what a shop rag is? That’s what a grease monkey uses to change your oil. All those lawyers wear them. No wonder they’re broke.”

  When Lester began handing out business cards with his name engraved in gold on a black background, the state bar association came after him. Lawyers in those days were forbidden to advertise. He was not advertising, Lester insisted. His only advertisement was himself. The cards displayed only his name, not a word about his being an attorney-at-law. Surely the Constitution protected the right of every American citizen to print his name on a little-bitty card! The association backed off.

  In court, Lester adjusted his wardrobe to fit the circumstances, gearing sartorial selections to appeal to the jury. He often visited a territory two or three days beforehand incognito, wearing bib overalls
if necessary to mingle for coffee or a few beers with the locals, to gauge the temper of a place. He found out what color suit the prosecutor was wearing on any given day and, dressing in his motor home, chose something that contrasted with his adversary. When jurors began showing up wearing Lester’s colors, he knew he had the case won. Nosing around before one trial in 1983, he learned that the whole town had gone mad for a certain brand of imported Taiwanese clothing that a local merchant had on sale under the Frenchified label “Etienne Augére.” He bought two suits and a leather jacket and began carrying a briefcase bearing that label, which he left open for the jury to see.

  “I Augered ‘em to death,” Lester crowed, pronouncing the name as if it were something used to bore holes. It took the jury twenty minutes to reach a verdict of acquittal.

  The premise of his courtroom tactics was that anyone who believed that twelve randomly selected human beings were capable of reaching a unanimous decision on the basis of a cool disinterested weighing of the evidence was an idiot. You had to play psychological games, you had to distract and entertain a jury to persuade them and make them grateful to you for giving them something better than anything on TV. And you had to be able to anticipate their gut reactions. Supposing, for instance, that one of your key defense witnesses had something ghastly in his background that, if unskillfully elicited, would undermine his credibility. The key was to bring that skeleton out of the closet right off the bat, so that by the time the jury was ready to deliberate, they had forgotten about it or at least had relegated it to the backs of their minds. Thus he might begin examining a witness by saying, “Mr. Smith, it’s true that several years ago you had the misfortune of getting into an argument with your cousin and shooting him, isn’t it? And you were convicted of manslaughter and spent time in prison satisfying your debt to society, isn’t that also true?” That out of the way, Lester could get down to business. If he left damaging information to be brought out by the prosecutor, a mere distraction could turn into a bombshell.