Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [98]
Most of the several dozen people interviewed for this story—cattle breeders, former Ames employees, fellow lawyers, business associates, state and local officials—declined to comment about Ames publicly, saying they feared being sued.
A few associates, however, defended him. “With John Ames, it’s like this,” said Tom Burke, a Midwest cattle auctioneer who is conducting a sale for Ames at Holly Hill Farm next month. “If you do what you say you are going to do, and you don’t take any shortcuts and you don’t make excuses, then everything will be fine. But if you do take those shortcuts, well, then you are going to be in for a long afternoon.”
Farm life, perhaps, offered a respite from those pressures.
“You can’t sue a cow,” said Saphir, the extension agent, who knew both men. “They obey orders, and they don’t challenge you.
“Now a bull, a bull is a different story,” Saphir added. “A bull is untamable. If a bull wants to go somewhere, it’ll go.” That, he speculated, could be part of a deeper, psychological truth behind the shooting death of Perry Brooks. “Here [Ames] is, this hugely respected Angus breeder, and some guy’s mangy old bull comes over and breeds with two or three of your heifers?…It’s like your daughter got raped.”
J. Benjamin Dick, Ames’s co-counsel in the upcoming murder trial, said people underestimate the threat that Perry Brooks posed. Brooks was old, Dick said, but don’t be fooled. He was strong, with forearms “like Popeye.”
“I think Perry Brooks was at the farm that morning to do great harm—there’s no doubt in my mind,” said Dick.
In the aftermath of the shooting, before lawyers and the county prosecutor had been allowed to examine the physical evidence in the case, Dick said that Brooks had gone to Holly Hill Farm on the morning of April 19 armed with an electric cattle prod. But after a preliminary hearing at which the rumored cattle prod turned out to be what Dick described later as a “half-broomstick,” he seemed to backtrack.
“It’s a tough case,” he said. “No doubt about it, it’s a tough case.”
IN ROBERT FROST’S POEM “Mending Wall,” the narrator laments a farmer who wants to build a fence between the narrator’s apple orchard and the farmer’s stand of pine. A fence is hardly necessary, Frost’s narrator thinks. After all:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
But in the poem, the laconic New England farmer seems to know better: “He only says, ‘Good fences make good Neighbors.’”
But fences create conflict, too.
“Fences, it’s always fences,” said Cora Jordan, a lawyer and author of an authoritative guide to the area of jurisprudence known as neighbor law. Complaints about noise are the most common problem between neighbors, she said, but fence conflicts are the most likely to spiral into physical violence. “Judges can’t stand these cases,” Jordan said. “Lawyers don’t want to take them, and law enforcement doesn’t want any part of it.”
“I get lots of phone calls about fences,” agreed Leon Geyer, a law professor specializing in agricultural law and environmental economics at Virginia Tech. “It’s a very hot subject.” Since Brooks’s death, Geyer has been in demand by farmers eager to educate themselves about the intricacies of Virginia’s fence law.
Most states require that cattle owners fence in their livestock. Virginia is one of only three states, with Arkansas and Oregon, where responsibility for fencing changes by county, Geyer said. In some rural counties in the commonwealth, the burden is on farmers to fence the neighbor’s cattle out. Elsewhere, as in Caroline, cattle farmers bear the responsibility to fence their herds in. In both settings, however, the fence law, until recently, dictated that the cost of fencing would be shared. In January, Virginia’s General