Chapter 29
EACH DAY WHEN I ARRIVED IN THE NEWSROOM, I’D COLLECT MY portable radio and the keys to the staff car I always drove. It was equipped with a two-way radio and a scanner, making it look a lot like a detective’s car.
This would be fortuitous when I was turning around at a dead end one night and two rednecks in a pickup truck roared up behind me out of nowhere, blocking me in. I was trapped and had to think fast. Grabbing the radio mic, I held it up so they could see, rolling down my window.
“LEAVE RIGHT NOW UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE ARRESTED!” I yelled at them in the most threatening voice I could muster, and they squealed away.
I didn’t know how he died but most likely it wasn’t from natural causes.
The body was being held in an area hospital, and late that night I started making calls from my desk.
I managed to get a nurse on the phone and asked about the dead escapee.
She said the body was downstairs in the hospital’s morgue.
I could tell she was young, na?ve, and curious.
“I’m wondering if he has any obvious injuries,” I suggested to her.
“I haven’t seen the body,” she replied.
“Well, maybe you could go down to the morgue and take a peek at him? Tell me what you see?” I was certain she wouldn’t.
But she agreed, and I waited for long minutes on the phone, not daring to hang up.
When she was back on the line, she said that the body showed obvious signs of trauma.
Swelling. Bruising. Lacerations. As it would turn out, his jaw was broken in two places, his Adam’s apple crushed after getting into a fight at the Old Yellow Tavern in western Mecklenburg County.
The next day when I arrived at the police department, a lieutenant walked past in the corridor, slipping a note in my hand as he kept on going. I waited until I was in a private space to see what it said.
“Death row escapees are here,” the note informed me.
It was a huge tip, and I spent the next few days working around the clock as the police searched high and low.
After dark, I’d cruise the city in the staff car as if I might figure out where the escapees were holed up.
Then I wondered what I was doing. How crazy to be looking for three ruthless murderers, and suddenly I got scared.
What did I think I was going to do if I found them?
I knew they’d committed brutal crimes such as torturing a young woman to death with razor blades.
I realized maybe it was best if I stopped looking.
Once again, my impulse was to work with the police instead of merely writing about them.
I felt it was more important to solve a crime than anything else. I still feel that way.
On another occasion when the report of a rooftop sniper sounded over the police scanner, I raced there, emergency lights flashing everywhere.
Without a thought, I climbed a fire escape ladder to the roof.
Fortunately, the police had apprehended the suspect, and I again wondered what I was doing. I wasn’t a cop.
Late on the night of December 8, 1980, I was in the newsroom when the information came over the wire about John Lennon being shot to death in front of the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan.
The next day I began calling every police precinct in midtown and bizarrely one of the officers who answered the phone was Jimmy Moran. He’d responded to the call.
He told me about placing John Lennon in the back of the cruiser and speeding to the nearest E.R.
as the former Beatle moaned and bled profusely.
When Yoko Ono arrived at Roosevelt Hospital, Jimmy Moran sat with her.
He was with her when she learned that her husband was dead.
My information went out over the wire, and that was a big deal for a rookie reporter.
But it wasn’t about the story. I felt compelled to investigate the crime itself.
I had to know what happened. Area journalists nicknamed me The Scoop.
My relentlessness and the trust I built with police were garnering me favored treatment, including by the top city officials.
They were generous about giving me quotes, saying they appreciated my fair portrayal of law enforcement.
One of these officials shall remain nameless for legal reasons.
I’ll call him Mitch. But if he’s reading this, he knows I remember exactly who he is and what he did.
Mitch was new to the Charlotte area and the media was excited about him.
When he visited the newsroom the first time, the editors were unusually impressed. I was flattered that he winked at me.
Considered a wunderkind, he was charming, forceful, polished, nice-looking, only in his forties.
No one I talked to had anything bad to say about him.
It would be a coup to do a day in the life of story about him before my competition did.
I was pleased and surprised that he said yes without hesitation.
In the spring of 1981, we met in his office early morning as he was snapping open his briefcase, a .
38 revolver on top of The Wall Street Journal.
On a bookshelf were photographs of his family.
He told me they hadn’t moved to Charlotte yet.
That day I watched him do everything from conducting meetings with police and other city officials to picking up his dry cleaning.
Late afternoon, I thanked him for spending so much time with me and asked if the newspaper could buy him dinner.
Even as I was saying it, I knew better. A voice in my head whispered it was a bad idea.
He stopped by his office to collect his briefcase and “a few other things” while I waited in the corridor.
From there we drove in his car to Victoria Station, a restaurant in a retired train caboose.
All was fine until I got up from the table to visit the ladies’ room.
When I returned, I finished my glass of wine and soon after began seeing double.
I didn’t understand how I could have gotten so drunk so suddenly.
It didn’t make sense. I’d not had much wine, knowing I would have to drive home to Davidson after dinner.
I’d left my BMW in the police department’s parking garage.
I don’t remember getting up from the table or much else, having only shards of images to this day.
Riding in his car. Him holding my hand and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with that.
” Climbing the stairs to his apartment. Waking up the next morning naked in his bed and remembering everything after that.
Rolling over, he had his way with me again, and no doubt would claim it was consensual.
It wasn’t. As I lay there, my head pounded, and I felt dead inside.
Charlie was the only person I’d had sex with, and now I’d killed everything.
I’d never felt so hungover in my life, and as I cleaned up in the bathroom, I was puzzled to see my makeup on a towel.
I had zero recall of washing my face the night before.
It was maybe half past 5 a.m. when Mitch ordered me to get dressed, his demeanor dramatically different now. The early morning was cold and pitch dark as he drove off with me, neither of us talking. His energy was cold and contemptuous, as if what happened was my fault. It wasn’t.
“Is this the first time you’ve done this?” I finally asked him.
“No,” he answered, not sounding like himself anymore.
He was aggressive and threatening. He was flaunting what he’d done.
“And you’re not going to tell anybody about it,” he warned as I thought about his power and the gun he carried.
He told me to get down on the floor so no one would see me. Then he ordered me out of the car. I walked the rest of the way to the police department’s parking garage. As I drove off in my BMW, I wondered if anyone questioned why it was parked there all night.
Back in the newsroom, I was in a stupor, wondering what Charlie was thinking about my not coming home or trying him on the phone.
But that had happened before when I was caught up in a big story.
He’d later tell me that as I was leaving Victoria Station, I called him on a pay phone. All I said was, “I’m here.”
Charlie told me I was almost incoherent. I suspect I was drugged. As I sat at my desk, I tried to write the story about a day in the life of Mitch. It was almost impossible, but somehow I managed. My brain was so sluggish I could barely string words together. I felt sick, my head pounding.
Midmorning the paper’s much-loved columnist Dot Jackson stopped by, asking if I wanted coffee.
A delightful eccentric, she was old enough to be my mother.
We were good friends, and on many occasions before I was married, I’d spent the night at her home in Charlotte instead of driving back to my godawful place on the lake.
“Are you okay?” She gave me one of her sideways appraisals, touching a finger to her lips.
“No. Something happened,” I said under my breath.
“I had a feeling. You look like death.”
“I feel like it.”
“Let’s get some fresh air.”
She took me on a walk around the building where nobody could hear us, and I told her everything that I remembered.
“You must NEVER tell a soul.” She was emphatic. “As powerful as he is, do you understand what could happen?”
“Yes. Besides, nobody would believe me.”
“Worse than that, do you want to end up dead?”
I agreed that reporting him to the police was out of the question.
Even showing up at an E.R. for a blood test would accomplish nothing except put myself at risk.
To this day, I believe that something terrible would have happened had I dared to accuse Mitch of sexual assault.
He was an expert at it, based on what I gathered before he ordered me out of his car onto downtown Charlotte’s dark mean streets.