Bloodsworth (7 page)

Then there was Richard Gray. After Detective Bacon had discovered Dawn's body, and the forensic and homicide detectives had assumed control of the crime scene, Bacon had gone back to investigate the man who had coincidentally come upon Dawn's clothes high in a tree. Bacon was assigned to the Child Abuse Division of Baltimore County and had extensive experience with child abuse cases. He found Gray near where his car was parked. Gray was five feet ten inches tall, of slim build, and had dark hair down to his shoulders. He was dressed in a dirty white T-shirt that gave off a
strong odor, camouflage military pants, tennis shoes, and carried a nightstick. Bacon noticed a small red spot on Gray's shirt but couldn't be sure if it was blood. Bacon started asking Gray questions and quickly sensed that Gray was nervous. Gray kept insisting that Dawn's clothes were
placed
in the tree rather than
thrown
in the tree. When Bacon looked into Gray's car, which was locked, Gray became even more agitated. Then he vomited. There appeared to be a pair of child's panties balled up on the front console. Also there were about thirty rolled-up newspapers on the passenger seat. Realizing that Detective Bacon had seen the underpants, Gray quickly explained that he had found them two days before in the woods. Gray then agreed to have his car searched. It was also photographed. Bacon asked Gray to accompany him back to the Youth Services station to give a statement and Gray nodded his assent.

At the station, Bacon read Gray his
Miranda
warnings, then began his questioning. Gray told Bacon he'd been riding in his car delivering papers and listening to his scanner when he heard a child was missing and that police had set up a search. He went to the command center to offer his assistance, as he knew the area well. He decided to ride over to the apartments and look around a bit and while doing this just happened on the clothes hanging from a tree. He said that he then went back to his car when a woman pulled up, described Dawn to him, and asked if he'd seen her. He told the woman to go back to the staging area and send out a police officer. He said he waited twenty minutes and when no one came, he started walking through the woods toward the command center. That's when he met Mr. Hamilton. During his statement, Gray constantly referred to children as “little people.” Bacon thought Gray was squirrelly, not telling the truth, and a real suspect. Bacon noticed that Gray's hands were clean and wondered how that could be so if he had been rolling and delivering newspapers. Bacon was also suspicious because Gray somehow knew that Dawn
had a purse with her. Gray claimed that the woman had told him this earlier. Gray kept motioning that the purse was on a strap across her chest. Bacon was curious how Gray knew to look exactly where the clothes and body were found when at that time the focus of the police search was far away in an entirely different area of the woods. He didn't think Gray adequately answered his questions.

Bacon ran a check to see if Gray had a record and found that he had a prior conviction for indecent exposure in a situation involving a minor. The car Gray was using was an AMC Eagle station wagon rented from Mark's Rentals. Why a rental car, Bacon wondered. And there was that small red spot on Gray's shirt that continued to bother Bacon. He'd been glancing at it since he first met Gray but couldn't be sure. He wanted the shirt taken and tested. He asked Detective McQuinn of homicide to have this done, as homicide now had control of the investigation and the final say over everything. McQuinn checked with his supervisors concerning taking Gray's shirt. McQuinn was informed that Richard Gray was well known to the officers at the Fullerton Police Station; he often dropped by to chat—a sort of police groupie—and that Gray had actually shown up at the station just as the original call came in that morning reporting the child missing, though this was inconsistent with what Gray had said. McQuinn was instructed not to take Gray's shirt.

Detective Bacon was astonished. He knew of the Chris Shipley and Jackie Poling descriptions, but with extensive experience in child abuse cases, questioned whether it made sense to place so much emphasis on descriptions given by seven- and ten-year-old boys. And no one knew for sure whether the man seen walking with Dawn into the woods was, in fact, her murderer. Bacon believed there was probable cause to arrest Richard Gray. The fact that Gray was at the Fullerton station when the call came in didn't rule him out as suspect. The call, he knew, didn't come in until nearly noon,
and the girl may have been killed as early as eleven. Bacon wanted hair samples taken and fingernail scrapings secured from Richard Gray. Bacon wondered why his newspapers were undelivered. Why had there been a pair of child's underpants in Gray's car? Why were his hands clean? Why was there blood on his shirt? Why the agitation, the vomiting? He pressed McQuinn to detain Gray. Again, Detective McQuinn contacted his supervisors and discussed whether to arrest Richard Gray. Again, he was told not to do so. Richard Gray was released. Neither his person nor his automobile was ever subjected to a forensic search.

Detective Bacon left the station that night upset. Afterward, he was ordered back to the Child Abuse Division and told to have nothing more to do with the Dawn Hamilton murder investigation. Within a few months he started staying home from work. He sought counseling, took psychiatric leave, and later retired on medical disability. The murder of Dawn Hamilton had affected him deeply.

Two weeks or so after the crime, Richard Gray was given a lie detector test by Detective Darden of the county police department and failed it. By then, however, Detectives Ramsey and Capel had honed in on another suspect, one who fit the FBI psychological profile to a tee, and they believed they had their man. They were on to their prey, like hounds with the scent of the fox in their nostrils, building their case, closing the net. Richard Gray was forgotten. His file was marked cleared. W. F. Johnson was forgotten as well. The Fells Point rapist lead was dropped. Other leads were abandoned. This new suspect had many characteristics similar to the description given by the two boys and looked very much like the composite sketch. Chris Shipley had picked him out of a photo spread. And he had blood in his very name.

T
HE BOOK
O
UTLAW
G
UNNER
, by Harry M. Walsh, tells the story of wildfowl hunters, guides, market shooters, and hunting outlaws from earlier days in and around the Chesapeake region. Kirk Bloodsworth keeps a copy in his home and is proud to display the page depicting a photograph of his great-grandfather, John Bloodsworth, standing on a sunken river blind with a large pump gun resting in the crook of his arm. Kirk has a romantic fancy for the old days. In addition to being some of the earliest settlers of Maryland's Eastern Shore, his ancestors, he believes, had also been sailors, pirates, rum runners, as well as fisherman—for the most part seafaring people who'd stayed close to and lived off the water. As his father, Noble Curtis Bloodsworth, would say, “Kirk was born and bred with salt in his veins.”

Family history has the Bloodsworths first emigrating from Scotland, Ireland, and England in the mid-1600s. They landed on a small island off the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay, low-lying, marshy, but teeming with life—ducks, geese, oysters, crabs, clams for the scooping. They built houses on stilts and laid claim to what became Bloodsworth Island in Dorchester County, Maryland. As
Kirk remembers from visiting as a boy, “The tide goes up there and you go with it . . . Water comes right up across the road, sometimes four foot high. You could dip up soft crabs and buckrams right there in your own backyard, and have ‘em fried up for breakfast.”

Kirk's great-aunt Agnes lived to be 110, and he grew up listening to her tell stories of the old days. The extended Bloodsworth family gradually moved off the island in the 1930s to get to electricity, she told him, to find higher ground and a dryer way of life. The U.S. Navy bought the island from the family for fifty cents an acre in 1955 and used it for target practice. After they stopped shelling it, it became an egret sanctuary. Not many people venture onto it because it's supposed to be full of unexploded bombs.

For two hundred years the male descendants of Kirk's family have been watermen—an Eastern Shore term for people who make a living off the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. His grandfather, John Noble Bloodsworth, was an oysterman, fisherman, crab scraper, and trapper. Kirk's father, Curtis, was as well. Folks say Curtis was one of the best hand-tongers ever. He had a knack for finding the fattest oyster beds, and he could rake the shells up from the bottom, filling bushel after bushel, as fast as anyone. When the oysters got scarce, though, Curtis regretfully went into the seafood business, buying a refrigerator truck and driving the local produce up to New Jersey to sell. This happened when Kirk was about ten. But by then Kirk was a waterman in his own right.

Since age five, he'd been hunting with his father in the duck blinds that dot the creeks and cuts around the Choptank River. When he was just six, he started helping his father tong for oysters. Kirk would serve as his father's culler, knocking the spat off the shells. One November, during low tide, after a northeast wind sucked the water right out of the river, his father sailed their boat right up on an oyster bar and Curtis and Kirk just picked up the oysters by hand. They filled a whole flatbed pickup with oyster bushels that
day, and the family celebrated by inviting the relatives over for an oyster feast that night—oyster stew, oysters on the half shell, oysters Rockefeller, fried oysters, you name it.

For Christmas, Curtis always gave Kirk muskrat traps. From January to March Kirk would get up every morning at four thirty, ride his bicycle out to the marsh to where he'd laid his traps, harvest his muskrats, reset his traps, and ride home. He used Connabear traps, named for Fred Connabear, the mountain man, and would mark their locations with red flags tied to gum poles cut from the gum thickets. The black pelts sold for ten dollars apiece back in the 1970s, and the browns would fetch seven or eight. Riding home on his bicycle, he looked like a miniature woolly mammoth, the musk-rats hanging all over him on strings. Several years running, Kirk won the Dorchester County junior trap-setting contest at the outdoor show. He won the oyster-shucking contest a couple of times, too.

When the weather turned warm, Kirk and his friends would start fishing, crabbing, and frog-gigging. Kirk fished with a gum pole for a rod and half a spark plug for a sinker, and despite his primitive gear, as his father tells it, “He could really smoke ‘em.” He'd often come home with stringers of perch so long that he wasn't tall enough to lift them off the ground, and they'd drag behind him. His grandma, Miss Vinnie B., was very fond of the perch roe, and when Kirk was fishing there was always plenty of roe for breakfast. Kirk used a four-prong spear on the nights he went bullfrogging in the marsh, and sometimes would fill several gander sacks full with the frogs. Pritchett's General Store bought all the frogs he could catch. It bought his muskrat pelts too. Pritchett's was real country in the country with creaky, old wooden floors, and selling turtle meat and cow's tongue, tripe and marinated duck eggs. After being paid, Kirk liked to sit on the rocker out front, sip a cool lemon freeze, and talk to the customers. He never thought
about it much because it was all he knew. But the open country, the wind on the water, the changing landscapes of the marsh—this natural beauty and freedom was stamped inside him and was what he cherished.

The Bloodsworths lived on Atlantic Avenue in the town of Cambridge, Maryland. Kirk was eight when, as he remembers it, Rap Brown and the Black Panthers blew the corner of the courthouse right off its foundation and set half the town on fire. His aunt lived across the street from the courthouse, and the explosion knocked the windows in her house out. The Cambridge riots of ‘68 put the town on the map for a while, brought to light the injustice of inchoate segregation and the poverty of country existence. Kirk's mother, Jeanette, was one of the few who stood up for their local black friends at the time. She was an angelic woman, a devout Christian, who always had a smile and was ready to play. She ran a clean, scrubbed house, though, and allowed no nonsense when it came to chores, manners, or religion. When things got tight she'd help out at Netty Brown's, the local beauty parlor, but mostly she kept the house and looked after Kirk and his older sister, Vickie. Jeanette insisted that the fire was the work of a few bad apples who'd come to stir up trouble, and that none of the townsfolk she knew could be involved. “It's what a man's heart says,” she'd drum in to Kirk. “That's all that counts. It doesn't matter what the color of the skin is. And you must stand up for this in life. Stand up for your principles.” Kirk believed what she told him. Later, when he was in prison, these teachings probably saved him.

After middle school, Kirk attended Cambridge High for a while, then transferred to the Open Bible Academy, a small, church-run vocational program. He had a girlfriend named Cathy Wheatley and occasionally they talked about getting married, but Kirk knew he wasn't ready. At around age sixteen he started drinking beer, and he first smoked marijuana when he was seventeen. Kirk's mother
hoped the Christian school would keep him on the straight path. But pot was prevalent in Cambridge in the late 1970s, and it seemed that at every party he attended, it was there for the taking. It was at the Open Bible Academy, though, that Kirk first started throwing the discus.

He had always been naturally strong and developed an interest in strength as he grew up. He'd played softball in junior high but was clumsy and not well coordinated. But even as a boy, he'd been muscular. Before his head reached above the tailgate of his father's refrigerator truck, Kirk was heaving hundred-pound crates of seafood and ice up into the truck bed. He enjoyed anything requiring strength and read the biography of Paul Anderson, the world's strongest man. By age fourteen, Kirk could dead-lift five hundred pounds. At the Open Bible Academy he met Richard Drescher, who'd been a Pan American Games discus champion in 1971. Drescher taught him the techniques of throwing the discus, and Kirk couldn't get enough. He practiced in his yard at home, and according to his father, “Kirk busted many a shingle off the house and broke quite a few windows. He'd try to throw from the front driveway to the backyard and sometimes his aim was just off.” But the practice paid off. Kirk won the national championship for Christian schools and then won the state championship in Elkridge, Maryland, by more than thirty feet.