-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Boys On The Tracks
Mara Leveritt©1999
St. Martin’s Press
ISBN 0-312-19841-8
370pps -- First Edition – In-print
-----
Everyone must go right out and buy this book. It is well written, documented
and from a quick scan seems to touch many interesting bases. Highly
recommended. Great job, Mara!
Here is a taste.
Om
K
-----
ONE
THE TRACKS
AUGUST 23, 1987
By all accounts, the engineer did a masterful job of bringing his train to a
stop. It had taken a screaming, screeching half mile. By the time the engine
shuddered to a standstill, Conductor Jerry Tomlin was on the radio notifying
an approaching train on a parallel track to stop because some boys had been
run over. He also called the dispatcher. "Have you got injuries?" the
dispatcher asked. "No," Tomlin said. "We've got death. I'm sure we've got
death. They passed under us. It has to be death."[1]
THE BODIES
The three men in the Union Pacific locomotive, all railroad veterans, were
holding themselves together, trying to cope with a sudden nightmare at the
end of a routine run. It was a little after 4:00 A.M. on Sunday morning,
August 23, 1987. They were coming north from Texarkana, pulling a rattling
mile of freight and empty cars. The trip toward Little Rock was uneventful,
the weather mild, the temperature about eighty degrees. Later, each would
remember the night as having been particularly dark.
For miles they'd felt the landscape rise beneath them as the engines hauled
the train up from south Arkansas's tree-farm flatness into the rolling
countryside surrounding the capital. At the slumbering town of Alexander,
about twenty-five miles south of Little Rock, the train topped a moderate
hill known locally as Bryant Hill, then descended quickly into bottomland, a
lowlying stretch of topography prone to flooding in heavy rains. But high
water was no problem tonight. All that Engineer Stephen Shroyer had to worry
about on his descent from Bryant Hill was keeping his train in check and
making sure it stayed within the federal speed limit of fifty-five miles per
hour.
He was still braking the train hard as it approached the Shobe Road crossing.
Shroyer sounded his horn as required. There was not a car, not a person, in
his sight.
>From his place in the lead engine's right-hand seat, Shroyer concentrated on
controlling his speed. Beside him on the left, Danny DeLamar, the brakeman,
helped. Behind DeLamar, Conductor Jerry Tomlin completed paperwork for the
trip. By now their train had traveled about a half mile past the crossing at
Shobe Road. They were approaching a small trestle over a trickle called
Crooked Creek. It was not even a trickle on this dry August night.
"Our headlight was on the 'bright' position," DeLamar later recalled, "and I
noticed down the rail in front of me, some ten or fifteen cars away, there
was a dark spot on the rail. I looked hard at it, and towards the last, I
stood up to see what it was." Shroyer also stood up. So did Conductor Tomlin.
The men knew from experience that when a bush or other debris is picked up by
the light, the spot on the rail will often appear dark. Any obstruction is a
concern. The men peered intently ahead. In the same, heart-stopping instant,
they realized what they were seeing.
"When we were approximately one hundred feet away from this dark spot,
Engineer Shroyer yelled out, 'Oh, my God!' He hit the whistle and the
emergency brakes at the same time," DeLamar recalled. "We could tell there
were two young men lying between the rails just north of the bridge, and we
also saw there was a gun beyond the boy who was lying to the north. There was
something covering these boys from their waist to just below their knees, and
I'm not sure what this object was. They were both in between the rails, heads
up against the west rail, and their feet were over the east rail. Both were
right beside each other and their arms and hands were to their sides, heads
facing straight up. I never noticed any movement at all."[2]
At fifty-five miles per hour the crew had fewer than five seconds to respond.
Reflexively Shroyer shoved the brake forward to its emergency position. The
move is a desperate one, producing such sudden jerking and slacking that the
engineer risks losing control. Steel wheels scream on steel tracks. If the
braking continues long enough, the wheels will be ground flat on the bottom.
For at least four seconds the train resisted Shroyer's efforts, banging and
screeching, wailing its violent approach to the motionless figures ahead. The
brakes exhaled a gasping whoosh of air. The cars vibrated. The tracks
vibrated. The horn never went silent. And still, to the crewmen's mounting
horror, the boys did not jerk, did not open an eye, did not move a muscle.
Tomlin dropped his paperwork and lurched forward between Shroyer and DeLamar
to get a better look. "When we recognized that it was two people," he
recalled, "I hollered, 'Big hole!' which means for the engineer to set the
brake in emergency. I saw two boys lying side by side, like soldiers at
attention.
There was a dark-headed boy to the south—that was the one we were going to
hit first—and the second boy had lighter hair. They were covered up to around
the waistline with a pale green tarp, something like a boat cover. They
looked like they had laid down there and pulled this cover up on them like a
blanket, but part of it was off. I noticed they never moved. Here we were,
bearing down on them, and there was no movement of their heads. They made no
attempt to rise.
"And there was that rifle. It was lying flat on the ground, the barrel part
near the boy's head, the stock under the cover."
That was all there was to see. Then the sight was gone, vanished beneath the
train. "We could hear them hit," Tomlin continued. "You can hear it even when
you hit a dog. It's mostly a thud and then you hear some rocks flying
because, if what you hit is still under the train, you're scooting it
along."[3]
With his hands on the controls, Shroyer felt the impact like a body blow,
one from which he'd never quite recover. "I was standing and continued to
blow the horn until we had impact," Shroyer recalled. "There were the two
boys and then the weapon, all very one-two-three. And there was a piece of
green material, very light, very faded. It looked well worn, laying out on
the boys, and it looked like it had been blown back, partly exposing them.
The first boy had on a shirt, blue in color. The second boy did not have a
shirt on. From my observation, they were both in a totally relaxed position.
There was never any movement. There was no flinching, even with the whistle,
and the train bearing down on them. Their feet were on my side of the engine,
extending across the rail, and I remember noticing their feet were in a
totally relaxed position. That's the thing that caught my thoughts, was how
completely relaxed they were. And the thing that caused me so much problem
afterward was the fact that they didn't flinch, didn't jerk, didn't move at
all-either one of them-with all of it happening, all that noise, all of it
coming down on them."
Shroyer's attention was riveted on the boys. "I never took my eyes off them,"
he said. "What had caught my attention at first was a big brilliant flash.
Apparently that was my headlight striking the barrel of the gun. The next
thing I was totally aware of was the chest and the head of that second boy,
the one without the shirt. And from then on, I never took my thoughts off of
him. What I focused on were his chest and his head-and how relaxed he looked.
To me he looked as relaxed as a boy sunbathing on a beach."
The image of two boys appearing so calm as death was about to roll over them
was almost more than the men could absorb. Yet the one thing more certain
than the boys' immobility was the impossibility of stopping the train.
Shroyer recognized the onrushing inevitability in a nauseating wave of
despair.
"Your immediate thought is, My God, please get out of the way! And you can't
stop," he said. "You can't stop a train that fast, and it's a hopeless
feeling."
Shroyer was enough of a veteran to realize that he, like his train, was
verging out of control. "When we hit them, they rolled with us," he said.
"They stayed with the engines for a while. My immediate reaction was that I
was traumatized. My thoughts, and everything else, you know-my God, you
know—I was holding on. I was thinking, Please, this is not really happening.
"I allowed my engines to lock up and felt my train operation just going to
hell. When that happened, I immediately realized I had to get back to the
business at hand. I had to get my train under control again. And I did. But
when it happened, there was nothing we could do. I just know that, without a
doubt, if willpower could have had anything to do with it, that train would
have stopped. We would not have run over those boys."
When a train hits an object on the tracks, one of two things usually happens.
Either the scoop on the front of the engine, commonly called the cowcatcher,
will toss the object violently aside, or the object will be sucked up under
the engines, tumbled a while, and tossed out. By the time it's ejected, the
struck object has picked up the speed of the train.
As their train slowed to a stop, the crew could imagine the destruction their
locomotives had wrought on the human flesh beneath them. The boys' legs,
which had been draped across the rail, would have been severed immediately,
sliced off by the first right wheel, somewhere between the knees and the
ankles. Because the heads and torsos were between the rails, the train had
most likely cleared them, resulting in the bodies being rolled, which fit
with what the men had heard-and felt. After that, pieces of bodies would have
been spit out from beneath the engines, probably in all directions.
Once the train had stopped, the crewmen wasted no time. Shroyer would stay
with the radio to keep in touch with railroad officials. Tomlin and DeLamar
would walk back to confront the mayhem. "If you start to get sick, go right
ahead," Tomlin told DeLamar as the two picked up their flashlights and
climbed out of the engine.
About thirty-five cars back they located the first pieces of body, a trio of
dismembered toes. Over the course of the next hour or so, they found evidence
of the carnage scattered along a quarter mile of track. The single biggest
body part they found was the chest and head of the second boy, the one
without a shirt. The body of the first boy was considerably more chopped up.
In those eerie first few minutes before the police arrived, while the crewmen
struggled to control their emotions, a disturbing half thought lurked at the
edge of their minds. It was a barely formed thought, one almost too
troublesome to admit. But here it was: the boys had not moved or flinched.
And now, though neither man spoke of it, they noticed something else. The
scene was a bloody mess, but there was something wrong with the blood.
Like many Arkansans, Tomlin had hunted since childhood. He'd seen many a
fresh-killed deer, field-dressed dozens of them. He knew how animals bleed,
especially when they've just been killed; he knew how fresh blood flows.
But this blood wasn't like that. As a matter of fact, "There was very little
blood," Tomlin later recalled. "Even with all those wounds, with everything
cut up. We had reached the bodies within ten minutes after impact. You would
think that if the heart had been pumping when we ran over the boys, then the
blood would have naturally flowed out. But it wasn't flowing. There was
hardly any blood spilled at all. And the color of it bothered me, too. It was
night, and we couldn't tell for sure, but the blood we saw was not red-not as
red as you would think blood would be on a fresh kill like that. It was dark,
more of a purplish color."
For Tomlin, the blood suggested something odd. "Out there that night:' he
said, "I kind of smelled a rat."[4]
IMMEDIATE DENIAL
The site in Saline County where the train had stopped and where police and
railroad officials converged lies at the geographical center of Arkansas.
Benton, the county seat, was named after Thomas Hart Benton, a Missouri
politician, newspaper editor, and lawyer who had had extensive dealings in
Arkansas during the nineteenth century and who was the grand uncle of the
painter who later bore his name. During World War II and through most of the
years that followed, the county made most of its income from the strip-mining
of bauxite or aluminum ore. In 1987 the county was still mostly rural, though
for several years the population on its northern edge had been growing
rapidly as bedroom communities sprung up, housing workers who commuted to
Little Rock. Castle Grande Estates, the development that would later prove
troublesome to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as an offshoot of the
Whitewater minvestigation, was but one of several subdivisions created to
accommodate the population spurt brought on by families fearing crime and
uncertainties about desegregation in the state's capital city.
But this burst in settlement was recent. Throughout its history Saline
County's most important feature had been its positioning in the center of the
state, on the south edge of Little Rock, and smack on the Southwest Trail. In
the early 1800s thousands of frontier folk plodded the trail from the East,
toward the snaky Red River, which they crossed into the wilds of Texas. When
the railroad came, it, too, followed the Southwest Trail, grateful for the
easy terrain, cutting across Arkansas diagonally, skirting the Ouachita
Mountains to the west. In this century the designers of Interstate 30 also
appreciated the route's advantages. For most of the 315 miles connecting
Little Rock with Dallas, the highway traces the old Southwest Trail. A little
farther down Interstate 30, southwest of where it passes through Saline
County and thirty miles from the Arkansas-Texas border, is the famous "place
called Hope," the birthplace of President Bill Clinton.
While Clinton was governor of Arkansas and for many years before, this
particular route across the state had been recognized by police as important.
For decades they had been aware that some of their biggest concerns-first
bootleg whiskey and later drugs-were flowing along the trail. By the mid1980s
cocaine was their biggest problem. It was taking the state by storm, having
blown into the country from Central America and into Arkansas via the
freeways that connected to Miami, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Police knew that
tons of the drug traveled along Interstate 30 and that from there it was
dispersed to cities as big as Little Rock-and to communities as small as the
ones that dotted Saline County.
What police were only beginning to suspect, however, by that summer of 1987,
was that all forms of transportation were suspect. Just a few months earlier
police in Benton had received word from local informants that cocaine was
being dropped from trains at locations along the tracks. Officers had contacte
d the railroad, asking train crews to watch. So far, nothing unusual had been
reported.
There were also reports that airplanes might be using Saline County as a drop
site, a convenient unloading area on the outskirts of Little Rock, the urban
center of Arkansas. Half the state's population resides within sixty miles of
the capital-an hour by car in any direction. In the past few months, Benton
police had staked out the local airport, where residents had reported unusual
activity-planes landing briefly without shutting off their engines, then
taking off again, frequently at night and often without benefit of lights.
After patrol cars had begun parking at the airport and after a few planes had
aborted their approach upon spotting the cars, the unusual activity had
ceased. Detectives were aware that, however it was getting in, cocaine was
flowing through the county at a rate disproportionate to its population of
fewer than sixty thousand.[5]
The site where the bodies lay scattered that exceptionally dark August
morning was in a rural, unincorporated area under the jurisdiction of the
Saline County Sheriff's Office. Deputies responded to the dispatcher's call.
By 4:40 A.M., thirteen minutes after the crew reported the collision, Deputy
Chuck Tallent and Lt. Ray Richmond, head of the department's criminal
investigation division, arrived at the span of tracks just past the trestle
alongside some woods. Tallent set to work diagramming the scene,. mapping out
the locations of various body parts and other pieces of evidence as they were
discovered. Soon an Arkansas State Police trooper arrived, then officials
from the railroad, then an ambulance.
The investigators' arrival did little to calm the crew. The train men had
hoped to make their reports, then leave the matter to the authorities.
Instead, as they spoke to the police they found their misgivings heightened.
The crew did not realize it at first—no one did—but hope for an accurate
reconstruction of the scene ended within minutes of the deputies' arrival. In
diagramming the site, Tallent made an immediate and crucial mistake. He chose
as his reference point the corner of one of the train cars and mapped
everything in relation to that. Hours later, when the train was allowed to
move forward after most of the evidence had been bagged and removed, that
reference point was lost forever. The diagram of where each piece of evidence
was found became instantly worthless. It was a costly mistake, one that, when
it came to light several months later, undercut public confidence in the
deputies' investigation and exposed the sheriff's office to ridicule. So did
the decision, made soon after the deaths, to let the train that had been
waiting pass, further disturbing the scene.
To the even greater astonishment of the crew, Tallent and Richmond appeared
to be treating the deaths as an accident despite the railroad men's urgent
accounts of having seen the boys lying side by side, unmoving, as the train
approached. The deaths did not look like an accident to the crew. As Tomlin
blandly observed, "One boy not moving—maybe. But two? I have some trouble
with that."
Still, the crew had to acknowledge that accidents involving trains did
happen, and so did suicides. They all knew there had been at least two
suicides by train in Saline County within the past eight years.[6] Such
things happened. The crew let the police do their job.
But the treatment of the deaths as suicides, or an accident, was unsettling
to others as well. Hours earlier, Trooper Wayne Lainhart of the Arkansas
State Police had investigated a report of two shots having been fired in the
area. His look-around had turned up nothing. Now, though the deputies had
jurisdiction, he also responded to the scene and heard the train crew's
statements. (Ordinarily, sheriffs have jurisdiction in unincorporated areas
of their counties, while local police operate in the cities. State police
officers like Lainhart usually patrol the highways and assist in local
investigations when their help is requested by either sheriffs or local
chiefs of police.)
Lainhart's assessment, as he later recalled, was that aspects of the
situation didn't seem quite "kosher." Part of what bothered him was the
deputies' apparent disinterest in the possibility of murder. According to
Lainhart's training, any unnatural death should be investigated first as a
possible homicide so that evidence can be preserved and the most serious
possibilities eliminated before less serious ones are considered. The
practice is standard police procedure. But not all police, especially in
small, rural sheriffs' offices, receive the training offered state troopers.
Lainhart let the deputies handle their investigation. Still, it disturbed him
to see such a basic rule so quickly abandoned, and in such a strange case.
Lainhart mentioned his misgivings to the deputies, noting that he doubted the
deaths were an accident, but he did not press the issue. Nor did the two
emergency medical technicians who arrived on the scene a couple of minutes
later and who immediately found causes of their own for alarm. One of those
EMTs was Billy Heath, who later talked to a state police detective. "Mr.
Heath stated the bodies looked more like mannequins, that there was very
little blood at the scene, and that the blood at the impact site was very
dark:' the investigator noted. "Mr. Heath stated the blood was just too dark
for him to consider normal. Mr. Heath stated he did not see any bright blood
and that, in his opinion, there should have been some fresh blood at the
scene."[7]
The other attendant, Shirley Raper, reached the same conclusion. "We grabbed
our paramedics' equipment and took off down the tracks," she later told the
state police. "Billy reached the first body, and he told me to stop and not
to come any closer. I just observed the one body and it occurred to me right
off that it was strange, because of the lack of blood and the color of the
body parts and the color of the blood. The body parts had a pale color to
them, like someone that had been dead for some time."
In an unusual move, and one they knew could be controversial, the two
paramedics attached what they titled a "note of interest" to their official
report on the incident, a report prepared within hours after leaving the
scene. The note read, "Blood from the bodies and on the body parts we
observed was a dark color in nature. Due to our training, this would indicate
a lack of oxygen present in the blood and could pose a question as to how
long the victims had been dead."
While the train crew, the state police trooper, and the two paramedics all
expressed misgivings, Tallent and Richmond proceeded to treat the deaths as a
probable accident or a double suicide. Only one officer vigorously objected.
Deputy Cathy Carty surveyed the scene, listened to the train crew's account,
and heard the paramedics' misgivings. She then confronted her superior
officers, protesting their disregard of the possibility that the boys had
been murdered. She was infuriated when Richmond ordered her and other
deputies to treat the case "like a traffic fatality." Later Carty recalled,
"I told the coroner, 'We either have two of the damnedest suicides I've ever
seen here or we have a double homicide.'"[8] But Carty's objections were to
no avail. The scene was investigated in the manner of a traffic accident, and
the bodies were sent to a funeral home, since traffic accidents did not
require an autopsy in Arkansas.
Within hours, however, Tallent changed his mind and redirected the bodies to
the state crime lab where they would undergo autopsies.
That came as good news to the train crew. But their long night was not over.
By the time the sun was rising and the investigation, such as it was, was
winding down, they were to be unsettled by yet another peculiar aspect of
this sickening morning. A disagreement arose over the piece of faded green
tarp that Shroyer, Tomlin, and DeLamar had seen on top of the boys. For
reasons that none of the crew could fathom, the police appeared reluctant, if
not actively resistant, to accept their unanimous reports that such a
covering had existed. The crew could not imagine why their statements on such
a neutral piece of information would be met with disbelief.
Tomlin was especially unnerved by the reaction. He had walked the tracks with
his flashlight, looking for that tarp, and had found it. Having apparently
blown off the boys upon impact, it had landed at the base of the trestle.
Shining his flashlight on the tarp, he had pointed it out to Deputy Tallent.
"He denied that later," Tomlin recalled. "He said I didn't tell him about
finding the tarp, but I did. And I told him where part of it was, at the
bridge bulkhead, I remember it as well as I remember him. I'm pretty
observant. I catch most stuff. I remember seeing that tarp as well as I
remember how Tallent was dressed that morning. He had on a navy blue or a
black ball cap that said SALINE COUNTY DEPUTY. He was wearing cowboy boots
and blue jeans. He had on a belt buckle that also said SALINE COUNTY
SHERIFF'S OFFICE. He had a package of cigarettes rolled up in his
shirtsleeves, like a sailor going on leave. And he had his pistol, an
automatic, stuck in the back of his pants, like Magnum, P. I."
Inexplicably, Tomlin felt that much of what the train crew had reported was
being dismissed. The reaction perplexed and angered him. "We all saw the
tarp," he said." They were definitely covered up from their waist down to
their feet with it. But he told us it must have been an optical illusion.
just like the gun. When he first arrived and we told him there'd been a gun,
he acted like he didn't know what we were talking about. Then when we were
walking along the tracks the deputies asked me where this 'alleged gun' was.
We had to take them and show them where it was. We'd already found that,
too."[9]
DeLamar later testified that he remembered Tomlin having said that he had
located the tarp.[10] Shroyer reported the same thing. As the engineer told
an investigator, "I was standing with DeLamar and the special agent for the
railroad down there in front of the engine. Lieutenant Richmond was there,
and Chuck Tallent was there with his T-shirt and a stainless steel pistol
stuck in the back of his pants. And I never said anything, but I remember
Chuck Tallent asking Jerry Tomlin about that piece of material. And I
remember Jerry telling Chuck, 'The last time I saw it was right back off the
bridge abutment, right back there at the scene.'" However, no tarp was ever
recovered.
A shattered .22-caliber rifle, without bullets, was collected as evidence
along with a long-handled flashlight. For years the trainmen would bridle at
the deputies' position that night that what they had seen was "an optical
illusion." They felt the assessment contradicted their experience and
insulted them as professionals.
Residents of Alexander and the slightly larger community of Bryant, unaware
of the nightmare that had occurred while they slept, were preparing for early
church services by the time the police, the coroner, and the train crew
finally left the scene. Throughout the nearly four hours of the initial
investigation, Saline County Sheriff James Steed never came to the tracks,
even though by sunup dozens of people had gathered at the Shobe Road
crossing, attracted by the cluster of police cars. As word of the deaths and
the circumstances surrounding them spread, many in the county found Steed's
absence from the scene of such a double fatality peculiar. The son of a
longtime sheriff, Steed, now in his fifth two-year term, was a prominent law
officer himself-, the youngest sheriff ever elected in the county, he had
already served as president of the Arkansas Sheriffs Association. He had
built his reputation as an active, hands-on sheriff. But where was he now? As
the Sunday morning wore on, the sheriffs whereabouts became one more oddity
in a situation that was already shaping up as bizarre.
The cool and minimalistic police approach contrasted sharply with the
out-of-control and gruesome quality of the scene, and that sense of
dissonance that had left so many unsettled on Sunday returned with a
vengeance the following day. On Monday, after an account of the deaths made
the television news and the papers, relatives and curiosity seekers flocked
to the tracks. There one of them discovered a severed foot lying in the
gravel. To the train crew, still stung by the attack on their
professionalism, such carelessness by the deputies seemed unconscionably
unprofessional.
"I'm just an old country boy," Jerry Tomlin later complained. "I was born
at night, but I wasn't born last night. And I can tell you, I didn't think
too much of the investigation. The deputies' attitude was more like 'Let's
get this cleaned up and get back to the coffee shop.' I don't know. People
don't realize what a mess it was. Maybe they were in shock. Maybe they had
weak stom-achs. Maybe they just didn't want to face it., Whatever it was, I
sensed all along that they were not out there looking for clues."
For Shroyer the night would leave a permanent scar. "I was rattled," the
engineer later told an investigator. "There's no question, I was rattled. I
was sick of everything that there was about the whole situation. But I
maintained my professional stance. When my superintendent arrived, I
halfheartedly apologized for being shaken. I told him I didn't understand why
it was affecting me so deeply, except for the fact that it was kids. And the
situation was just not right. And it disturbs me to this day. It really does.
The thought of it, of what happened to those kids, why they were there, what
was going on ... I've lived with it. I've looked at it. And it does not add
up.""
The deputies admitted to being somewhat bewildered by the events. Two days
after the deaths, Chief Deputy Rick Elmendorf told the local newspaper, "We
are trying to come up with any feasible reason for something like this to
happen." And he added, "We haven't ruled out anything except foul play."
Shroyer's dark sense that explanations did not "add up" would afflict him and
others for many years. The train crew's suspicion that something ugly and
unspoken had hovered in the air in the early hours of the investigation—that
their observations had been ignored and common sense assaulted—would come to
be widely shared. Instead of leaving the scene confident that the grotesque
discovery at the tracks would be properly investigated, the men walked away
feeling insulted as well as emotionally injured. Why had no one taken
seriously Tomlin's and the medics' concerns about the condition of the blood?
Why had deputies been so quick to doubt the crew-referring to the weapon they
had reported seeing as "the alleged gun" until it was pointed out to them?
And most disturbing of all, why had police dismissed the crew's unanimous
reports of the tarp, insisting instead that they must have seen "an optical il
lusion"? Why, the men began to wonder, were they encountering such doubt?
pps. 1-11
--[notes]—
CHAPTER 1. THE TRACKS
1. Statement by Stephen Shroyer to Arkansas State Police, May 1988.
2. Statement taken by R. 0. Monroe, claims manager for Union Pacific Railroad
Co., Sept. 1987.
3. Statements by Tomlin to Arkansas State Police, May 3, 1988, and to author
in Aug. 1996.
4. Author interview, Aug. 1996.
5. Interview with Det. Sgt. Charles Carty, Benton P.D., Aug. 1996.
6. In one of the suicides, a woman in downtown Benton had waited until a
train was almost in front of her before stepping nonchalantly onto the
tracks. In another case, also in Benton, a man sat down beside the rail as
the train approached. As its horn blared, he laid his head on the track.
7. Interview by Don Birdsong, Arkansas State Police, June 1988.
8. Author interview, Dec. 199 1.
9. Author interview, Aug. 1996.
10. Birdsong interview, June 1988.
11. Ibid.
p.347
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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