Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [102]
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.
Coda
I did not cover the criminal trial of John 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