Blade’s mouth pulled back into a knowing smile. “So Eugene isn’t the hardened criminal type?”
“Nah, he said he couldn’t sleep. He said when he went to sleep he could see her eyes open and staring at him and he couldn’t get over her eyes looking at him when he was doin’ it and he probably never would. I told him, ‘What’s done is done. There ain’t nothing I can do for you, all the talking in the world ain’t goin’ to change anything. Either you go tell the police or you gotta live with your conscience. You live with it or you do something and try and make it right.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know how I’m ever gonna live with it.’ And I told him, ‘Then you’ve got to do something about it, don’t you?’ So, I guess he never did nothin’—learned to live with it, I guess. But Eugene ain’t like Clarence. Eugene may have done it but Clarence is the one. He’s the one that made him do it. I don’t think Eugene would ever do that on his own. He was just like me. I mean I break the law sometimes, but I don’t kill people. Guys like Clarence are different.”
“Barbara, is there anything else you can remember right now that we need to know?” Lean asked as he reached for the tape recorder
“Well, you get him. I can’t help you much with testifyin’ and such. I’m an ex-convict, baby. Well, I guess I’m not an ex-convict yet, ’cause I’m still here, right?” She added with a chortle. “Anyway you look at it, somebody’s going to be calling me a liar. I haven’t talked before to buy myself time, so this is the first time with you guys. Make sure you keep me out of it or I’ll have Clarence Ray Allen on me. I know him and you don’t fuck with him. You got to put him in jail for good on this. He shouldn’t have messed with my kid. If he hadn’t of done that, I wouldn’t be talkin’ to you now. Nothin’ personal, you understand, but you guys never did me no good. Hey, maybe you can get me transferred back to Terminal Island in California. I would be closer to my family. Maybe you can do that?”
Blade turned off the tape. “We’ll see what we can do.”
They waited for Carrasco to rise. Lean walked to the door and knocked for the guard. “We’re done.”
Blade stuck out his hand. “Thanks for talking to us, Barbara.”
Barbara Carrasco stood there for a moment and extended her hand. “Just remember, you take Allen down and you leave me out of it. You don’t know him like I do.”
“We understand.” Blade and Tommy waited until the guard walked Barbara Carrasco out the door. She didn’t look back. She had done what she had set out to do. What they had to decide was whether what she said was true or whether she was just trying to bury Allen in a pile of bullshit. Both men had questioned a lot of people, some hard types and some just regular folks. You get a feel for when it’s bullshit and when it’s true and even when it’s somewhere in between. As they walked out the doors of Alderson Federal Penitentiary, they were sure that Clarence Allen was guilty of murder, and that he did it by making someone else do it. They also knew that at least one man was so terrified of Allen that he had been willing to kill a woman for him. There was no question; Clarence Allen wasn’t the kind of man who would crack. They had to take him down. To do that, they had to make others crack.
Blade was one of the old breed. It was time to hunt down Clarence Ray Allen. And Blade knew well that the sometimes it takes a wolf to hunt down a wolf.
7
You Don’t Break a Horse in One Ride
December 17, 1976
Alderson Women’s Prison
Alderson, West Virginia
A murder case takes on a life of its own. People may think that they understand the process, but they really don’t. They think that because they’ve seen some television detective wrap up a murder investigation in an hour, they know how it’s done. But life isn’t like television. Most of the success in solving a murder or in catching a murderer comes as a result of plain sweat and hard work. You know that murder always has a pattern—you just have to find it.
Assuming you have a suspicion, and even some evidence about who the murderer might be, it doesn’t mean that you can prove it. Every detective knows that you can bring a stack of paper to the district attorney and tell him or her that you have a case, but that doesn’t mean you have a case; all it means is you have a big stack of paper. All a detective needs in order to make an arrest is a strong suspicion and an arrest warrant. But a conviction of murder requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And that means evidence, lots of evidence.
Barbara Carrasco was right about her information; it was hearsay and couldn’t be used in court against Allen unless the person testifying had actually heard him say it—and without more, it wasn’t enough to prove murder. First, there was no body. Without a body, it’s very hard to prove a murder has been committed. In most murder cases, the body is the best evidence. Without a body, a pathologist can’t determine, and certainly can’t prove, cause of death. Without a body, you need an eyewitness to prove there ever was a body. Without a body, you can’t find physical evidence at the crime scene because you don’t have a crime scene. So, without a body, only in the rarest of instances can you prove murder.
Blade and Lean knew that without a body, whatever Barbara Carrasco said wouldn’t mean much. They had to have more. In the arcane world of evidence, it also meant that only what Eugene Furrow said about himself could be used against Eugene Furrow and only what Clarence Allen said about himself could be used against him. All Furrow or Allen had to say was that Barbara Carrasco was lying when she testified about what either of them supposedly told her, and then what? After all, who were you going to believe? Certainly, Carrasco had a motive to lie. She hated Clarence Ray Allen for what she believed he had done to her son. And Barbara Carrasco was a proven liar; she admitted that she made her living by lying. She was a proven and admitted criminal, accusing other people of being criminals. She had a slew of felony convictions which would be paraded in front of a jury, whose members would then be asked to accept her word over that of Allen and Furrow. While it wasn’t always true that if you had no body you had no case, there was a reason why after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared without a trace, nobody has ever been successfully charged.
The next day, Blade called Tabler to ask him to check with counties near Fresno to see if they had found any unidentified bodies that might fit the description. Blade didn’t want to talk further over the phone, and he told Tabler that Carrasco had come through and he would explain when he got back.
It was a long plane ride back to California, but the detectives didn’t talk much about the crime. Carrasco had said that the motive had been to remove a woman who talked too much about floating forged money orders. What she didn’t know was where the money orders had come from. If the motive for killing Mary Sue Kitts was to cover up a burglary, there had to be proof that there was a burglary and that it involved stolen money orders. Blade and Lean didn’t even know when or where such a burglary might have taken place. It was simple: no burglary, no apparent motive. Without a motive attributable to him or some physical evidence, all Allen had to say was “Why would I do that?” There wouldn’t be any good answer other than you thought he “had done that.”
Assuming they could prove a burglary, they had another problem. They couldn’t prove Mary Sue Kitts was even dead or that she had ever been involved with Allen. The most obvious thing they knew was that Clarence Allen wasn’t going to help them prove anything. They didn’t even know the names of the people who had been involved with