Dark and Bloody Ground (2 page)

While both the FBI and the Kentucky State Police maintain vigorous presences—in one week alone in 1991, the sheriffs of Lee, Wolfe, and Owsley counties were convicted in drug and extortion cases—they confront a rich and romantic outlaw tradition in the region, where the belief is widespread that no one ever made a pile of money without being at least a little crooked. Scant shame or disgrace attaches to singing those lonesome jailhouse blues: if you haven’t done some time yourself, your uncle or your cousin probably has. Being clever enough to get away with something is as likely to inspire an admiring wink as disdain; in this, as in other traits, Eastern Kentuckians resemble the Irish from whom so many of them are descended.

As for violence, mountaineers, or highlanders as they often call themselves with a bow toward Scottish roots, make a distinction
between killing and murder. Killing is what you may have to do to defend your property or honor. Murder implies something vicious, gratuitously brutal; killing occurs spontaneously, as between husbands and wives, wives and husbands. And, in an oft-heard phrase, “Some people just needs killing.” It is the mountain philosophy.

In 1980 a mountain jury hung nine to three for acquittal of a preacher who had gunned down a fellow preacher and distant cousin in a dispute over a driveway. When the retrial was moved out of the mountains to Lexington, in Fayette County, the killer received ten years. “My feeling is that in Fayette County they don’t believe in self-defense as we do in Eastern Kentucky,” the defendant’s lawyer said. “They don’t understand the mountain philosophy.”

Lester H. Burns understands the mountain philosophy and everything else about his native grounds. Until 1987, when he was sentenced to eight years in the federal penitentiary, Lester Burns was the most famous, probably the most prosperous, and certainly the most colorful lawyer in the Commonwealth. Like the economy, his income fluctuated, but it was rarely much under a million dollars a year. If his client had money, Lester’s fees were enormous, the highest in Kentucky, he liked to boast. Occasionally he took a case for a dollar “to help the needy—and for the publicity,” he openly admitted. He owned property in several counties, along with cattle, interests in coal mines and shopping centers, and various glamorous and antique automobiles. He sometimes wore diamond rings on eight fingers, two or three rings on one, and toured the back roads in a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar customized Blue Bird motor home—or bus, as he preferred to call it, beaming with false modesty—with “Lester H. Burns, Jr.” emblazoned across the front in golden script. He was a member of the bars of and practiced in seven states. When Lester pulled into some county seat to defend a killer or to argue a civil action, he always drew a crowd. Sometimes he contrived to arrive a day or two early, just to stir things up. Spectators filled the courtroom to hear him ring the rafters with rhetoric and watch him fall to his knees and weep before the jury. Only prosecutors were glad when he left town.

But on May 14, 1987, Lester’s world collapsed. He had already resigned his license to practice law. Gone were the diamonds and fancy suits. One newspaper compared him to a dethroned heavy-weight. He was fifty-five.

Stooped and abject, he stood before a federal judge, having waived his right to a trial, and wept not for a client, but for himself. His family and friends, admirers and hangers-on averted their eyes as he clasped hands and pleaded guilty and said:

“Your Honor, I am begging for mercy. I did what I am accused of. I have a good past record. I could wear out a miner’s kneepads until the day of my death and I couldn’t apologize enough to make me feel like a human being. I am humiliated. As long as I live, I’ll apologize to my family and my friends and the whole world.”

The two counts to which he had pleaded guilty carried a maximum penalty of five years each. When Judge Eugene E. Siler, Jr. sentenced him to four years on each count, with the terms to run consecutively, Lester Burns looked as if he had been stabbed in the back. His life was destroyed, everyone said. A legend was finished.

How had it happened? How could Lester Burns have gone, as his own lawyer described it, from the pinnacle of his profession to total degradation? It had happened in scarcely more than a year. How could a man so intelligent, so clever, so experienced, and so rich have behaved, as Lester himself phrased it, like a nitwit?

He had made several crucial mistakes. One of them had been not hanging up when a call reached his unlisted number on the evening of August 15, 1985. The caller, a former client, asked Lester if he had heard about the robbery and attempted murder of Dr. Roscoe Acker and the murder of Dr. Acker’s daughter in Letcher County a week before. Of course he had heard about it, Lester said. It was all over the papers and on television. A terrible thing. How much money had been taken? Four hundred thousand in cash, wasn’t it? That was an awful lot of money for anyone to be keeping around the house. That poor old man. That poor girl.

It might have been more money than that, the caller said, a lot more. Three men had been arrested down in Florida. One of them was Roger Epperson, who wanted Lester Burns for his lawyer.

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

D
OWN 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.