Favorite Sons (16 page)

“I understand,” Vukovich said.

“Good. You should also know this. It is my fervent hope that you never again take a single breath of free air and if there's anything I can do to make that happen within the next twenty-two to thirty-eight years, you can rest assured, sir, that I will do it. Mr. Vukovich, I am sentencing you to a term of not less than twenty-two years and not more than thirty-eight years in the state penitentiary.” He stood and pointed to a deputy standing behind the defense table and said, “Get him out of my courtroom.”

Jack Vukovich never totally disappeared from my memory, but he didn't linger on the fringes either. Once he was in the state penitentiary, my memory of him was like an image on an old photograph exposed to the sun, slowly fading, lighter and lighter. My confidence that we would never be caught grew with the passing weeks and months.

A lot of people might think that such an event would have traumatized me to the point where the remainder of my teenage years were fraught with despair and nightmares, but that wasn't so. The smaller Petey Sanchez and Jack Vukovich got in my rearview mirror, the more I slid back into the routine of being a teenager. I worried about girls, acne, geometry, and the next big game. Maybe that says something not very flattering about my psyche. I don't know, but that's the way it was.

As for Adrian, Deak, Pepper, and me, we didn't talk much about Petey or One-Eyed Jack. Adrian wanted to pretend it had never happened. Deak believed God's work had been done. Pepper was Pepper. He believed that Petey Sanchez had gotten what he deserved for messing with Adrian, and that Jack Vukovich got what he deserved for messing with Petey. As far as he was concerned, the world was spinning on its axis and all was well.

One of the reasons we didn't discuss that day was that the tight friendship we had enjoyed began to slowly erode after Vukovich went to prison. Adrian was never social to begin with, and he became even less so in the waning days of that summer. He grew more distant and difficult to talk to. My friendship with Adrian was like a loose strand on a wool sweater that began to unravel. Clipping it or tying it off just delayed the inevitable. It was only a matter of time until there was a gap in the material that could never be mended. We were still
classmates and teammates, still hunted arrowheads together, and were still pals, but there wasn't that closeness, that tight-knit feeling that we once had, confident that nothing in the world could disrupt our bond. Obviously, that wasn't so. Petey Sanchez had done it. Things change. Sometimes that's all you can say.

As the last of the evening's rays spread over the Ohio River, I left Hobo Camp, crossed the railroad tracks, and followed the gravel path past the old Redhead offices and back to Market Street. I had a very keen sense of who I was in Crystalton, and I felt very much part of the community. When I left the following morning, I knew that would change forever. Some freshman would be wearing my number fourteen on the football team and my accomplishments would be relegated to yellowing pages in a scrapbook. I would come home between semesters and for vacations, but in time those visits would become fewer and fewer. Like the images of Petey and Jack, the friendships that were so dear to me were about to fade and fall into distant memory.

I wouldn't admit it to myself, not at the time, as I was eighteen and full of testosterone and false bravado, but the truth was I had been running away from Petey Sanchez since the day he died. I projected years down the road—the black cat clock on the kitchen wall clicking off the seconds of my life—awaiting the day when I could put years and miles between myself, Petey, and Crystalton, Ohio.

F
or those who decry the death penalty and believe that all human life is sacred, allow me to introduce you to Richard Terrance Buchanan Junior, who for two decades was arguably the most feared man in Akron, Ohio. He was more commonly known by his street name, Ricky Blood, and was suspected in at least six homicides that to this day remain unsolved in Summit County. But let's not deal with conjecture. I'll give Ricky the benefit of the doubt on the six unsolved murders and just stick to his official criminal record.

At age ten, Ricky was sent to a state juvenile detention center for mental evaluation after he was caught burying neighborhood cats to their necks in his backyard and decapitating them with a lawn mower. He was expelled from the eighth grade after presenting a classmate with a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift exchange package containing a dead sewer rat. At fifteen, Ricky was convicted on a juvenile count for the felonious assault of his court-appointed mental health counselor. He was released from the juvenile detention center on his twenty-first birthday. At age twenty-one and twelve days, he was arrested for aggravated assault and attempted rape of a woman he met in a bar, lured into an alley with promises of cocaine, then head-butted into unconsciousness. Only a chance encounter by a passing Akron police car saved her from being raped and murdered. Some might consider that conjecture on my part, but he was standing over her naked body with a full erection, his pants around his ankles and a switchblade in his right hand. You do the math. Over the next
seventeen years Ricky Blood was in and out of prison three times for assault, selling crack cocaine, and violating his parole. A prison psychologist wrote of him, “This is one of the most profoundly disturbed human beings I have encountered in my forty years as a prison psychologist. He is wholly without conscience.”

Early in my career as a Summit County assistant prosecutor, I stood behind a two-way mirror and watched police interrogate a career drug dealer and local badass named Tyrone Whittaker, who had tattooed biceps the size of whole hams and was himself a feared man on the streets. As police questioned Tyrone about a drug-related shooting to which he had purportedly been a witness, he was flip and smug and cocky until the investigator said, “Word is Ricky Blood did the deed and you were there.” The instant Ricky Blood's name came up, Tyrone's attitude suddenly improved, as did his memory. He said, “It weren't Ricky. I'll tell you who it was, but it weren't Ricky. I don't want nothin' to do with that boy. He'll kill you, he'll take his time, and he'll enjoy every minute of it.”

Thus, I was aware of Ricky Blood long before our lives became intimately connected. Some might find the word “intimate” a little unusual in this context, but when you send a man to his death, there is no other way to describe the relationship.

After dinner on Monday, November 15, 1999, Tina Westmoreland, a twenty-year-old single mother and the daughter of Nick Westmoreland, a detective for the Akron Police Department, dropped off her eighteen-month-old son with her father en route to the local junior college where she was taking an accounting class. Tina was a beautiful girl with a wide smile and hair the color of a garnet. She never returned.

Late that night police found her car parked on a side street near the school, locked, her books on the passenger seat. She had attended her class and a security video captured her walking across the parking lot at seven fifty-five. It was the last time anyone ever saw her alive. Nineteen days later, a charred corpse was found in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It took the coroner another day to make official what everyone already knew—the body was that of Tina Westmoreland.

Nick Westmoreland was a personal friend and I was heartsick for his loss. A memorial service was held and as stories in the paper
about the abduction and murder waned, I remembered that day long past during my freshman year in high school when the detective from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation spoke at career day. Twenty-four hours, he said. You better have a break in the case within twenty-four hours or you're in trouble. After a week—kiss it goodbye. I feared that we would never find Tina's Westmoreland's killer.

Thanksgiving passed; so did Christmas and New Year's, and detectives were still without the first solid clue in the case. As Valentine's Day neared, on a day when the snow swirled and the sky had been gray and sunless for a month, a telephone call came in to the detective bureau from an antique dealer in Cuyahoga Falls.

He said, “I don't know if this is anything important, and in the holy name of Christ I can't explain why it's taken me so long to think of it, but sometime in early or mid-November, I'm not really sure of the date but it was a piece before Thanksgiving, I remember that much, this fella with wide-set eyes stopped by my antique store and asked to borrow a five-gallon gas can to get some gas for a friend who had run out down the road somewheres. I had this Sohio gas can for sale for thirty dollars, which was a very good price because they're hard to find, particularly in good condition, which this one is. Anyways, I tell this fella with the wide-set eyes that I'd sell it to him. He just stared at me with those eyes, and I swear to Jesus they were looking right through me. He said, just like this, he said, ‘I just want to
borrow
it, not
buy
it,' like he thought I was retarded or something, and then he pulled it off the shelf. Well, let me tell you, I'm not as young as I used to be, and I didn't want no trouble, and I figured he was going to take it anyway and better that he just leave than beat me with it first, so I told him it was okay to borrow it, but bring it back when he was done. He said much obliged and left. I figured that was the last I was ever going to see that can, but, sure enough, he showed up a couple of hours later and put the can on the shelf and said much obliged again. I figured he might at least give me a couple of bucks for using it, but he didn't and I was just glad to get the can back anyway. So, like I said, I don't know why it took me so long to think about this, but I'll bet that was right about the time that little girl from Akron got burned up,
the one whose body they found in the national park. That's only about five or six miles from here, and maybe he borrowed that gas can to start the fire.”

A homicide detective named Homer Malesky asked the antique dealer if he would mind coming down and looking through some books of mug shots. The dealer said his business was really slow and he could certainly take the time to do that the following morning. Homer called me over to the detective bureau about ten-thirty after the antique dealer picked Ricky Blood's mug shot out of books containing more than a thousand photographs. “Are you sure that's the guy?” Malesky asked.

The antique dealer tapped the mug shot with a yellowed fingernail. “I remember those wide-set eyes. I'm positive.”

“Really positive?” I asked.

“That's him. No doubt about it.”

We booked the antique dealer and his wife into a Pittsburgh hotel for safekeeping and went looking for Ricky Blood. The physical evidence was overwhelming. Police searched Ricky Blood's Chrysler and found Tina Westmoreland's student identification card wedged into the passenger seat. They found hair samples in the trunk of the car, and bloodstains and more hair in the basement of his house. The Sohio gas can was still on the shelf at the antique store and Ricky Blood's fingerprints were all over it.

Ricky was picked up on suspicion of kidnapping and murder and brought to police headquarters. Detectives interrogated a belligerent Ricky Blood for four hours without success. When the police were ready to give up, I went into the interrogation room, a small, rectangular space not much larger than the rectangular table that occupied its center. I pulled out a chair in front of the two-way mirror and sat down across the wooden table from Ricky Blood. He had pale blue eyes, a strong, pronounced chin, and the straightest, most perfect set of teeth I had ever seen on a career criminal. He sneered, “Well, well, well. Look who's here—the Button Man. What happened? The fucksticks with the clip-on ties weren't getting the information they wanted so they called in the big gun, huh, Mr. Prosecutor?”

They said you're not being particularly talkative, Ricky.”

He looked around the room. “You fucks ever feed anyone around here?”

“Once in a while. It depends on how cooperative they're being.”

He blew air from his mouth, then made an obvious point of looking over my suit. I never appeared in public without a suit, starched white shirt, the tie snug under my chin, and cuff links that showed below the cuffs of my jacket. When he finished eyeing me over he said, “I eat prissy little pricks like you for breakfast.”

“Is that a fact?”

“You don't know who I am?”

I leaned in closer, my forearms resting on the table, my fingers interlocked. “Of course I know who you are; I'm just not impressed. This will probably strike you as unusual, Ricky, but I'm not afraid of you, not even a little bit.”

There was a tightening of his jaws that made his ears twitch. “Well, you're stupid then, because you ought to be.”

“Why is that?”

He lifted his wrists for my inspection. “If you were out on the street and I wasn't wearing these handcuffs and shackles, you'd be afraid.”

I sat up straight and nodded, tapped twice on the rough table with an index finger, then pointed it at Ricky Blood. “You make a very good point, Ricky. If we were out on the street, in some dark alley, and you weren't wearing handcuffs and shackles, I probably would be afraid.” I leaned in toward the table and in a calm, slow voice said, “But, here's the rub, Ricky; we're not on the street. We're in an interrogation room at police headquarters, you're in deep shit, and you
are
wearing handcuffs and shackles. And, here's another factor in my favor, there are some extremely angry police officers standing behind that two-way mirror with some very big guns who would like nothing better than the opportunity to unload them on you. So, you see, I have no reason to be afraid.”

Ricky Blood looked at me for a long moment, as though processing my words, before he tilted his head and laughed and shook both index fingers at me. “You . . . you son of a bitch . . . I
like you. You get it. You're dealing from a position of power and you understand that. You understand power.” He laughed and put both arms on the table. “Those other sons of bitches, they come in here pretending to be my friend, telling me I need to confess to get things off my conscience.” He looked up at the mirror. “Fuck you, you cocksuckers.” He leveled his head to me. “So, tell me, how can I help you, Mr. Van Buren? What is it that you want to talk about?”