Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [103]
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.
Finally, in the fall of 2003, say those who participated in the case, Betty Hydell, then sixty-five, shared her long-held secret. It was a secret that would