The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (29 page)

(In most of Virginia 's suburban counties, the "pay half" provision is superseded by local regulations, Geyer said. But in other parts of the country, according to Jordan, even suburban neighbors often are liable for the construction and maintenance costs of their shared fence lines.) Some state legislatures have tried to head off problems by writing laws that dictate fence wire gauges and post diameters.Virginia's law does not do this.

Every neighbor dispute is different, Jordan said, but often the two principals in a long-running feud are "two extremely stubborn people," neither of whom is willing to take a first step that professional mediators call "unilateral deescalation."

Translation? "Choosing to do nothing when it is your turn to do something extremely nasty," Jordan said.

It was embryo-flushing day at Holly Hill Farm, and John Ames had agreed to let me on the property for a visit. Ames had declined all media contact since the shooting, but in a brief conversation about cattle breeding outside the courtroom before his preliminary hearing, his lead attorney, Richmond defense lawyer Craig S. Cooley, by his side, Ames had volunteered that he thought the cattle business was on the eve of a revolutionary leap forward, a day when cattle breeders might produce enough cattle, at a low enough price, to end world hunger. If there was one thing that bothered him, Ames added, it was the thought of children starving in a world of abundance.

He also had an unusual, wired energy that day. John Ames is small-boned, of medium height-five feet ten inches, according to court records-but he has the lean build of a marathon runner and appears younger than his sixty years. His skin that day was ruddy from outdoor work, and his salt-and-pepper hair was shorn close to the scalp. His bright blue eyes blazed with an expression both inquiring and imperious, and his voice had the mild twang of his native Tidewater.

With Cooley's blessing, Ames was willing to allow the visit, on one condition: There were to be no questions about the shooting, the feud, or Perry Brooks.

Holly Hill Farm is a big piece of real estate. Its rolling hills run alongside Route 207, just outside the town limits of Bowling Green, for a good mile and a half, until the property ends at the low-lying highway bridge that spans the Mattaponi River. The farm's main entrance is flanked by two formal brick pillars, and the long driveway-a half-mile or so-is paved in rough-cut gray gravel. The drive cuts through a sweeping bowl of open pasture. In the fields, large, ink-black rectangles of cattle stand motionless except for an occasional shake of a massive, ear-tagged head. Up at the house, the only sign of life is one red horse in a paddock and the sound of barking dogs coming from behind the house's tall front windows and thick white columns.

On the first of two visits, Ames appeared in a long-sleeved dress shirt and suit trousers, having come straight from his office in Richmond. He led a tour of the barn area, and talked about his love of farming. "Once it gets in your blood, it never leaves you. And you have to do it for love," he added, chuckling, "because there's no money in it." He opened a gate and called to four of his prize-winning cows. "Come on, girls," he said, and stopped to scratch one on the back.

Ames 's specialty is bankruptcy law, which tends to attract people who enjoy crunching numbers. During my visits, he displayed a keen command of the statistical side of his cattle operation, explaining the intricate spreadsheets by which serious breeders track data such as intramuscular fat ratios and weight gain. He rattled off his top cows' eight-digit identification numbers with the ease of a man reciting his phone number, and in a small workroom, he unscrewed liquid nitrogen tanks where bull semen was stored in plastic straws as narrow as swizzle sticks, each painted with tiny numbers.

On the table there was a DNA sample kit that would take tissue scrapings from the ears of two of Ames 's best females and be mailed to a lab in Iowa for storage until the price of cloning comes down. Artificial insemination is commonplace in the cattle business. DNA sampling for future cloning, however, is not, and the kit identifies Ames as a serious player in the breeding game, as does the practice of treating genetically desirable cows with fertility drugs so they produce multiple, rather than single, embryos.

On the morning of my second visit, dozens of such embryos were to be "flushed" from four cows with the help of saline solution, plastic tubes, and a fertility specialist vet who was driving down from Pennsylvania.The embryos were to be stored briefly, until they could be implanted into recipient cows that would ges-tate them to birth. As he waited for the vet, Ames, his hair unbrushed, looked cheerful and relaxed. He was dressed in worn bluejeans, scuffed boots, and an old red sweater. Once the vet arrived, the two men, with the help of a farmhand, began herding the cows, one by one, into a metal squeeze chute. For the next several hours, as the vet worked, Ames kept up a stream of cheerful conversation about his visits with some of the cattle industry's top scientists and his contacts with senior executives at the country's largest meat-packing plants.

At one point, with the vet's right arm buried up to the shoulder in a cow's reproductive canal, and Ames 's own arms draped with plastic tubes attached to sacs of saline solution, Ames explained the packing industry's plans for "vertical integration," for expanding its business from the slaughter and packing to include cattle breeding. "We want to take 'em from squeal to meal!" Ames said approvingly, quoting an executive from Smithfield Foods.

Throughout the morning, he told stories about successful cattle shows, mentioning a man who, when I telephoned him later, painted a bleaker picture. "John had a couple of [cattle] sales in the past where nobody showed up," said John Hausner, a herd manager who has worked for Ames in the past."Obviously, he's made somebody mad. I felt sorry for the man."

As Ames and the vet worked, I looked across a green field and saw a large silo, a small ranch house, and some paddock fence. Is that where Brooks and Ames faced off? Or was it there, on the gravel drive outside this barn? Standing there, trying to get my bearings, I felt the full force of what had happened. It was everywhere and nowhere-the idea that right there on that ground, where a white cat perched on a stall post, where the cows shifted and clanked in their chutes with hypodermic needles planted in their backs, as the vet remarked on the unexpected difficulty of the morning's work, Perry Brooks was shot dead at close range by his neighbor.

Paul Orlett believes his friend was aiming to avoid confrontation on the morning he died."[Ames] told Perry's people to come over there before 9:00 a.m., with five hundred dollars to bail out the bull, but Perry said: 'Hell no, we'll wait 'til ten. He'll be gone to Richmond by then.' "

This echoed an earlier episode, when Brooks, learning that his bull was over at Holly Hill Farm, called the farm manager in the middle of the night and suggested the two of them free the bull. "No need to tell the boss," Brooks advised. When the manager refused the offer, Brooks hung up.

Brooks did not appear to regard this new expedition as risky, Orlett recalled."Perry said he was going to go get the bull and then come back and work in his greenhouse."

But the farmhand, Michael Beasley, had misgivings. "I didn't want to go," Beasley testified later. "But I didn't try to talk him out of it, because it wasn't any use."

Ames 's wife may have been more vocal.The weekend before the shooting, when Matthew Coleman phoned Holly Hill Farm to arrange the bull's pickup, Jeanne Ames said, "Don't let [Brooks] come up here with you," according to Ames attorney Benjamin

Dick.

Brooks waited for Orlett under the old farm bell that once belonged to his father. At Holly Hill Farm, meanwhile, Jeanne Ames left for Richmond, but John Ames waited. He went to retrieve his mail, Dick said. And he waited some more. Dick said Ames, seeing an unfamiliar vehicle, went down to the barn area to investigate, and that Brooks, when told to put the bull back,"shook his stick" at Ames.

Frances Hurt was sitting in her small ranch house a few fields over at the time. It was spring; the forsythia bushes were blooming, and the air was so sweet that she'd flung open all the windows and doors. She was puzzled when she heard the shots. Hunting season had been over for months. She counted six shots in all, in a distinct pattern: one shot-pop-followed by a pause, and then five more, in quick succession-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

"I thought:What in the world? Who is shooting a gun at 10:15 in the morning?"

Beasley testified later that Ames 's first shot had knocked Brooks to the ground. Ames fired five more times.

Orlett was sitting at the wheel of Brooks's truck, his grandson beside him. At the shots, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw Brooks curled in a fetal position on the gravel. "I could tell by the way Perry was laying that he was dead," Orlett said later. "Two tours in the infantry in Vietnam, I've seen a lot of dead people."

When Orlett looked back again, he saw Ames with his gun up beside his ear. "It looked like he was reloading," Orlett testified. Then he saw Ames using a cell phone.

Beasley was walking slowly back toward the truck, his head in his hands, "moaning and groaning something awful," Orlett said. Beasley climbed in and asked, "What are we going to do?" Orlett said.

"We're going to get the hell out of here," Orlett replied.

Beasley later told police that Ames had shot Brooks once in the face, and then, after Brooks was on the ground, stood, firing down "four or five" more times into Brooks's right side.

Within minutes, the Rev. Kevin James, minister at Brooks's church and a volunteer firefighter, got a call from the firehouse about the shooting. He heard the address-Holly Hill Farm, Route 207-and felt only dread. "I just knew. I said, 'One of those two guys is dead.' "

Kim Brooks, who lives in Oakland, California, would get a call from her sister, Jacqueline. Kim had stayed home from work that day, feeling ill and unsettled. "My sister told me John Ames had shot my father and he hadn't made it back," she said.

At Brooks's wake, the crowd of mourners was larger than expected, and the service, scheduled to end at 9:00 p.m., stretched on until well after ten.

Ames was charged with first-degree murder, which carries a maximum life sentence, and a second felony count of using a firearm in commission of a felony. He hired Cooley, whose recent accomplishments include delivering Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger defendant in the Washington sniper case, from the death penalty.

Ames 's lawyers have called the shooting a case of simple self-defense. Ames, said co-counsel Dick, was in mortal fear for his life. After all, Brooks was trespassing in violation of a court order and had once fired a shotgun in Ames 's direction.

The trial date is set for September 12, in Bowling Green. But Cooley has asked the court for a change of venue, saying he believes it will be hard to find an impartial jury in Caroline County, where most people "have taken sides on this one." The court has put off a decision until after jury selection begins.

Dick said his client has not had an easy time of it since the shooting. "John is not going around gloating. He has nightmares and sleepless nights," Dick said, adding that Ames fired reflexively at Brooks when he saw the farmer raise his stick. "All John saw was the anger in [Brooks's] eyes. John was in the Army for four years, you know, and the Army trains you to shoot if you're being attacked."

Evelyn Brooks has been selling off her husband's farm equipment and remaining livestock, in part to help stave off legal action from one of the lawyers who represented Brooks in the fence lawsuits. Ames has a cattle sale scheduled for next month, and he recently told one associate that he is shopping for a calf for his young granddaughter, to get her started in the cattle business.

Matthew and Wick Coleman retrieved the bull a few days after the shooting. A rumor flew around Bowling Green that the bull had been found with a broken penis, that someone at Holly Hill Farm had swung a hammer at it. With its elements of cruelty and violence, the grisly report seemed to resonate in a community stunned that a disagreement over a fence had ended in death. But Wick Coleman said there was no evidence of any such assault. Rather, the bull's penis sheath, which runs under more than half of its belly, was badly bruised, consistent, perhaps, with a leap over a partially downed fence. In any case, the bull was taken directly from Holly Hill Farm to the slaughterhouse in Fredericksburg, where it was sold for meat.

Mary Battiata is a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. She was a Pulitzer finalist for her coverage of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and also has reported from Poland, Romania, and East Africa for the Post. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.

I did not cover the criminal trial ofJohn Ames. I had moved on to another assignment by then, and in any case still felt too close to the story and too drained by it to attend as a spectator. For reasons I still can't quite understand, this story was as grinding, emotionally and physically, as any I've written in my twenty-four years as a reporter at the Washington Post, including years as a war correspondent in East Africa and the former Yugoslavia.

Part of it was simply the usual reporter's lament: none of the parties wanted to have anything to do with me for months on end, well past my first and then second deadline. Part of it was simple sadness at the sorry details of the feud and the pain it had caused all parties. And another giant stressor was my interviews with a long line of John Ames's former business associates, who told me they'd been sued by him and warned that he was likely to do the same to me. That never happened, as it turned out. But the case continues to reverberate in my head, and I still get calls about it from all over the country, from people who've read the story and want to know how it all turned out. Not surprising, really. Nearly everyone has had problems with a neighbor at one time or another, and this story of tragedy in a corner of rural paradise, a landscape where we like to think an older, more courteous way of life survives, seemed to strike a particular chord.